![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() he was called Amnon ” kee heemeen b’el hai “, because he believed in the living God.ģ. The name, in any case, sounds like an etiological name derived from the narrative i.e. Rabbi Amnon, who is described as “the great one of his generation and wealthy and of good lineage”, is not mentioned in any other source in all of medieval Jewish literature.Ģ. Subsequent notes refer back to this note).ġ. 23-42 Ivan Marcus in: Zvia Ben-Yosef Ginor, ed., Essays on Hebrew Literature in Honor of Avraham Holtz, New York, 2003, pp. 125-138 and all of the literature cited there in note 1 Ya’akov Spiegel, Netu’im 8 (Marheshvan 5762), pp. 199-200 Shelomo Eidelberg, Bintivei Ashkenaz, Brooklyn, 2001, pp. 525-526 Israel Davidson, Otzar Hashirah V’hapiyyut, Vol. However, as many scholars have pointed out, the Rabbi Amnon narrative is fiction, not history, for the following reasons: (Gotthard Deutsch, The Jewish Encyclopedia, Vol. 63b). The story is a very moving, written in a beautiful Hebrew with many allusions to biblical verses. Rabbi Efrayim in turn says that the ultimate source of the story was Rabbi Kalonymos of Mainz who died for the sanctification of God’s name in 1096 or 1100 Rabbi Amnon came to him in a dream after his death, taught him the poem Unetane Tokef and ordered him to send it out to the entire Diaspora (Sefer Or Zarua, Zhitomir, 1862, end of Hilkhot Rosh Hashanah, Part 2, parag. 1180-1250) in his halakhic work Or Zarua who says that he copied it from a manuscript written by Rabbi Efrayim of Bonn (1132-1197). The source of this attribution is a story quoted by Rabbi Isaac ben Moses of Vienna (ca. 167 Hayyim Herman Kieval, The High Holy Days, second edition, Jerusalem, 2004, p. 355 Max Arzt, Justice and Mercy, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, 1963, p. ![]() Man’s origin is but dust and his end is dust, but God is the ever-living King.Īccording to most Mahzorim and reference works, Unetane Tokef was written by Rabbi Amnon of Mainz in the tenth or eleventh century (See, for example, the Silverman mahzor, p.but repentance, prayer and tzedakah “avert the severe decree”.on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed who shall live and who shall die, who by fire and who by water, who by earthquake and who by plague.one by one kol ba’ey olam, all who enter the world, pass before God kivinumeron, like a cohort of soldiers being counted, or like a shepherd counting his sheep and He decrees their destiny.God and the heavenly court judge all living creatures on Yom Hadin, the day of judgment.For a new translation, see Raymond Scheindlin, Conservative Judaism 50/4 (Summer 1998), pp. This year, I would like to tackle a much tougher topic: the theology of Unetane Tokef (This article is based on a lecture which I gave to the Rabbinical Assembly of Israel, Septemand to 450 rabbis via the United Jewish Community’s “Torah from Jerusalem” video conference on September 8, 2005).ġ) A Summary of the Piyyut (Translations of Unetane Tokef can be found in any mahzor such as Silverman (pp. Last September, I explained one difficult word – kivinumeron – in the High Holiday poem Unetane Tokef (Insight Israel, Volume 5, Number 1 (September 2004)). ![]()
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