Shavuot Reading

With the holiday of Matan Torah at the door we revisit two recent essays by Aton Holzer. The first examines enigmatic aspects of pre-Crusade Ashkenaz through the lens of the Shavuot anthem Akdamut Milin, the poetic introduction to the Targum of the Torah reading of the first day of Shavuot, is so beloved that it has survived in the Mahzor for almost a thousand years, and its tune has become the anthem of Jewish festivals — despite that it is written in Aramaic, and that nearly all other such poems, and even the Targum itself, have all but disappeared from the liturgy. Yet we know precious little about the author and his era, the Ashkenazic Rishonim of the generation immediately preceding the First Crusade; these lesser-known giants taught and laid the groundwork for Rashi and the Tosafists, whose monumental commentarial work definitively established the center of Jewish life and scholarship in the European continent for a millennium. Holzer argues that a careful reading of Akdamut itself reveals a great deal about the intellectual life, thought, influences, polemics, spoken language, and even the writing implements of the Jews of this period.
Read “Akdamut: An Alphabet of Eleventh-Century Ashkenaz”

More recently, Holzer turned his attention to Rabbeinu Jacob Tam and the French Tosafists, through the former’s Piyyut for the second day of Shavuot, Yatziv Pitgam, along the way illuminating the text of the liturgy, neglected and hidden themes, and polemical and political commentary—some with continued relevance in our own day.
Read “Three Reading Frames for Rabbeinu Tam’s Yatziv Pitgam”