The little sister says her prayers
And performs all her devotions.
May’st Thou, Lord, her ailments mend.
Let the year and its ills end.

אחות קטנה תפילותיה
.עורכה ועונה תהילותיה
,אל נא רפא למחלותיה
.תכלה שנה וקללותיה

So—no doubt puzzlingly to many—starts the well-known piyyut or liturgical poem that is commonly sung or recited in synagogues before the evening prayer that ushers in Rosh Hashanah. The piyyut has nine stanzas, the first eight of which have the identical refrain while the ninth contrasts with them, thus:

Take heart and rejoice, for past plunder has passed.
Look to our God who honors His pact
With you. Ascend all to Zion and say,
“Pave the way, pave the way, pave the way we will walk in!”
Let the year and its blessings begin.

My English versions of these lines do little justice to the grace and musicality of the Hebrew, the initial letters of whose stanzas spell the name of its author, the 13th-century rabbi and cantor Avraham Hazzan of Gerona, who can also be assumed to have composed its original melody. (Today it is sung to different tunes in different parts of the Jewish world.) But who is its aḥot k’tanah or “little sister?” And what is she doing in a hymn to the onset of the new year?

It’s a good rule of thumb, when encountering a puzzling word or phrase in a piyyut, first to consult the Bible, the foundational text of Judaism that every paytan or composer of piyyutim knew practically by heart—and in fact, it’s from the Bible that Avraham Hazzan took the phrase “little sister.” It occurs in Song of Songs 8:8, which reads: “We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts. What shall we do for our sister on that day when she shall be spoken for?”

The speaker of these words is the female figure in the book’s duet of lover-and-beloved, and “on that day when she shall be spoken for” presumably refers to the day on which her younger sister will come of age and entertain proposal of marriage. Until then, exhilaratingly in love but aware of the risks she is running, the speaker intends to guard her sister’s chastity as she has not guarded her own. “If she be a wall,” she says of her, “we will build upon her a palace of silver. If she be a door, we will enclose her with boards of cedar.”

This is a literal reading of the text, what the rabbis called its p’shat. If anything, however, it makes Avraham Hazzan’s use of the phrase “little sister” even more puzzling. To make it less so we have to turn to what the rabbis called d’rash and remez, the hermeneutical and allegorical interpretations of the biblical text that comprise the bulk of the Midrash, the vast corpus of early rabbinic commentary on the Bible composed in the course of the first millennium of the Common Era. For the paytanim, the Midrash was as inexhaustible a source for citation and allusion as was the Bible itself, one that played a role not unlike that of classical mythology in the literature of ancient Greece and Rome. Just as one cannot always intelligibly read a Latin poet like Horace or a Greek prose writer like Lucian without a familiarity with this mythology, so it is impossible to understand fully the piyyutim of Jewish liturgy without some knowledge of the Midrash.

Indeed, alone of all the books in the Bible, the Songs of Songs was considered by the rabbis to have no p’shat at all. That a poem so sublimely beautiful could be about human sexual love was inadmissible to them (luckily for us, we might say, because otherwise they would never have bothered to preserve it), and they read all of it allegorically as a poem about the love between God and Israel. Nearly all of these allegorical readings can be found in the volume known as Shir ha-Shirim Rabbah, “The Great [midrashic compilation of the] Song of Songs,” where we encounter, among different interpretations of the eighth verse of Chapter 8, the following one:

“Little sister” refers to Israel. Rabbi Azariah said in the name of Rabbi Judah bar Simon: One day the Gentiles will accuse Israel before God. “Master of the Universe,” they will say, “the peoples of the world have been guilty of idolatry but so has Israel. They have been guilty of incest but it has been, too. They have been guilty of shedding innocent blood but it also has been. Why, then, are they condemned to Gehenna while it is not?” And God will answer: “We have a little sister! Just as a child is not held responsible for its acts until it grows up, so Israel is not permanently stained by its sins until the Day of Atonement, which comes and atones for them. As is written [in the book of Leviticus]: ‘For on that day shall he [the high priest] make an atonement for you to cleanse you, that you may be clean from all your sins before the Lord.’”

The operative word here is ba-yom, “on that day,” which links, in Rabbi Judah bar Simon’s mind, the verse in Leviticus to the verse in the Song of Songs and establishes that both are talking about the same thing. To our own minds, which are the minds of p’shat, such a linkage is purely fanciful, the occurrence of the same word in two biblical verses written at different times by different authors being obviously coincidental. But as far as the Midrash is concerned, there is no such thing in the Bible as coincidence. The biblical text is the work of the infinite mind of God, and in it are an infinite number of meanings, connections, and associations that it is man’s task to uncover. This task is infinite, too, and the baring of a connection between Leviticus 16:30 and Song of Songs 8:8 is but an infinitesimal part of it.

Hence, Avraham Hazzan’s little sister, an allusion to an unusual midrash that states that while Jews may be no better than non-Jews, they are fortunate to have what non-Jews do not: a special day of the year on which to ask for and be granted forgiveness. Although Hazzan’s piyyut was written for Rosh Hashanah, not Yom Kippur, the two days are intertwined and frame a single period that terminates the old year and launches the new one.

Always a stirring poem, this year Aḥot K’tanah is especially so. There hasn’t been a year since the Holocaust that has been as grim for the Jewish people as the one now departing. One can only hope that the new one will be better.

Let the year and its ills end!
Let the year and its blessings begin!