The Jewish world is dynamic and diverse, and prayers, ceremonies, foods, and other traditions often diverge radically between different Jewish groups. In his feature essay this month, Rabbi Meir Soloveichik explores how these differences influence him, when, as a Jew of Ashkenazi descent, he was charged with overseeing High High Holy Day prayers at the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue where he serves as rabbi, which maintained traditions radically different from those with which he grew up.

In a live conversation on September 26, Soloveichik and Joseph Dweck, the senior rabbi of London’s Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, spoke with Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver about the divergences in Jewish traditions—Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Yemenite, Mizrahi, and others—and why they matter. They examined how each tradition provides a unique lens through which to view Judaism, and how the relationship between these traditions is changing. Subscribers can watch a recording or read a transcript of the discussion below.

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Jonathan Silver:

Beginning tomorrow night, the Jewish people will commemorate and consecrate something awesome, the creation of the universe, and we will inaugurate a period of Days of Awe, during which they will take account of their souls and do their best to restore moral order to themselves, their families, their communities, and to Jewry as a whole.

This period is traditionally understood as one of divine judgment. The liturgical poem that for centuries has epitomized that religious tone and mood, and that has helped us articulate this moral reality, is Un’taneh Tokef, a religious poem of uncertain origin, that’s been the mainstay of the Jewish imagination in roughly half the Jewish world.

Rabbi Soloveichik is the rabbi of Congregation Shearith Israel, the director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University, and the author of the Jewish Commentary column at Commentary magazine. He’s the host of many podcasts and courses.

All of his work can be found at his website, meirsoloveichik.com, including a limited-series podcast that we’re just in the middle of now, which is a commentary on the prayer books of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, called “Journey through the Mahzor.” Rabbi Soloveichik has just published a new book, Sacred Time, which, aptly, is about the Jewish holidays and the role the organization of time itself plays in maintaining the solidarity and religious vitality of the Jewish people

Rabbi Soloveichik hails from a distinguished rabbinic family that has made major contributions to the study and understanding of rabbinic texts and Jewish thought and has, from the time he was a child, been very deeply formed by the customs and religious sensibilities of the Ashkenazi world. Just over ten years ago, he became leader of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in New York.

We’re honored to have as our guest Rabbi Joseph Dweck, the senior rabbi of the Lauderdale Road Synagogue, the home of the Spanish-Portuguese community in London, the sister synagogue of Shearith Israel New York.

Unlike Rabbi Soloveichik, Rabbi Dweck has, from his youth, been formed in the synagogues, schools, and yeshivot of the Sephardi world. We thought that we’d learn even more about Rabbi Soloveichik’s theological insights by putting him directly into conversation with Rabbi Dweck.

In publishing this essay, Mosaic is continuing actually a theme that we’ve paid a lot of attention to since the 2014 publication of my Israeli friend Matti Friedman’s essay, “Mizrahi Nation,” to more recent studies of the rabbi and novelist Haim Sabato that we commissioned from the literary scholar, Ruth Wisse, and now to you, Rabbi Soloveichik.

Rabbi Soloveichik, before we get into the deepest themes that emerge out of your textual analysis, I thought we could just begin with the culture clash that you described at the beginning of the essay.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

I’m grateful to you for shepherding this essay into publication, and I’m also delighted to be engaging my friend and my colleague, Rabbi Dweck, in this discussion today.

Those who have experienced the Yamim Nora’im, the High Holy Days, from childhood know how elementally those memories are formed, and that even to think of Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur is immediately to recall your experiences as a child.

What that means for me—someone, as you described, who grew up with one set of customs and now for the past ten years has been experiencing something else entirely—is that I no longer think of a singular High Holy Day experience. Rightly understood that means I am almost living in dual time during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

Some of the incredible prayers and tunes of the Spanish-Portuguese tradition are those that I actually lead myself now and yet even as I’m doing it, I’ll recall moments as a child standing next to my father experiencing those same moments in the service in a very different way.

For instance, if I’m standing at the tebah—what Ashkenazim such as yourself, Jon, might call the bimah—and I am leading Kol Nidrei, on the one hand, I need to focus because this is a tune that I learned not that long ago. I actually have to think as I’m singing, “Ha- Ha- Ha- Nidrei,” etc., and yet at the same time, I’m remembering standing next to my father as you hear the [Ashkenazi version]. And of course, it’s totally different.

That’s especially true for a moment like Ne’ilah [the concluding service], which as a child I experienced by standing next to my father as he actually led that part of the service, and you can imagine how emotional a moment that is for a son. And now I’m leading that service but in a very different way where the entire mood that the tunes and the piyyutim [liturgical poems] evoke are utterly different.

If you’re standing next to your father, as he’s praying for you and for the community, and he’s saying the Kaddish of the opening of Ne’ilah, you can feel the central mood that even the tunes evoke, which is fear. Quite literally, oy is one of the central phrases of the Ashkenazi experience of the opening of Ne’ilah.

Whereas now I will speak to the congregation before Ne’ilah, open the hekhal, the ark, and then begin the Sephardi song, El Nora Alilah, which is sung with joy:

El nora alilah, el nora alilah, ham’tsi lanu m’ḥilah, bi-sh’at ha-n’ilah.

What you’re basically doing is joyously expecting the forgiveness that is guaranteed by God to His beloved people.

As I’m doing that, I simultaneously remember the Ne’ilah of my childhood while focusing on the Ne’ilah that I’m leading.

I live in dual time as it were, and a dual mood. And that is what provoked the essay really, because the essay is a reflection of how the two moods of the Yamim Nora’im—of Sepharad and Ashkenaz—can be taken in tandem.

Jonathan Silver:

Let’s step into the centerpiece, the most dramatic piyyut of the Ashkenazi liturgy, Un’taneh Tokef, because you offer a theological interpretation of what it means and the philosophical anthropology it assumes and reinforces. Tell us about what you take from that.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

As I mentioned in the opening of the essay, my reflections about Un’taneh Tokef were provoked by a moment at my installation at Shearith Israel when a visiting guest jokingly said something like, “How can you embrace a tradition that doesn’t have Un’taneh Tokef?” When he said that, I actually recall the surprise that some Ashkenazim have when they learn that Sephardim don’t have Un’taneh Tokef, because for them it is so synonymous with the Yamim Nora’im experience.

It was only then that I began to look at Un’taneh Tokef not as an insider but as an outsider.

We know from the social sciences that at times we can better understand ourselves when we look at ourselves through an outsider’s eyes.

There’s a reason why Tocqueville’s Democracy in America is the best book about America, or why Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s reflections about America are so insightful and interesting. In a strange way, for me, I was suddenly able to look at Ashkenaz, I guess, as both insider and outsider, and it was only from within the traditions of Sepharad that I was able to, I think, note something striking to me about Un’taneh Tokef that had never struck me before.

For those who have experienced Un’taneh Tokef, we understand its themes. First and foremost, the emphasis is cosmic. We experience God as the judge of the universe; every single creature in earthly existence comes before Him; they come before him like sheep and God judges each one.

That brings us to the second part, which is that the judgment itself is terrifying. Mi yiḥyeh? Mi yamut? Who will live? Who will die? Who by fire? Who by water?

And then finally, of course there is the aspect of freedom, that we can actually shape the judgment. But it was only after entering the world of Sepharad that I realized what themes are not there, and now that I realize that, the lacuna is striking. Here are the themes that never appear: God as father who loves His people; God as one who wishes to forgive us.

Indeed, even the concept of forgiveness so central to Yom Kippur doesn’t really appear in Un’taneh Tokef. It’s more that God will judge us, and if you engage in t’shuvah, t’fillah, ts’dakah, in repentance and in prayer and in charity, you could be [forgiven], you can remove the terrible nature of the decree.

Jonathan Silver:

Is it right therefore to say that the emphasis in Un’taneh Tokef is in a way a human one—though you say it is cosmic in perspective—precisely because of its message of individual freedom. It puts some onus on us and puts an accent on human agency.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

Well, that of course is absolutely true.

But the question is what that leads to. Which theme of Yom Kippur is most central to our humanity? Because of course, as human beings, we are not only individuals with freedom to change, though of course that is central. We are also fathers and mothers and sons and daughters, and we experience therefore love and we experience forgiveness from those who love us.

These two are aspects of the human experience that we apply to God’s feelings for us. Those are themes that are utterly absent in Un’taneh Tokef. Not absent from every part of Ashkenazi liturgy during the High Holy Days, of course. We speak of God as Avinu Malkeinu, “our Father, our King,” for instance. But it suddenly became striking to me because the most famous theme of Un’taneh Tokef is absent [from the Sephardi liturgy].

Perhaps I can emphasize this even more strongly by pointing to another aspect of Yom Kippur and the Yom Kippur experience in Ashkenaz, which does not exist in Sepharad and shocks Ashkenazim when they hear that it’s not part of Yom Kippur, which is Yizkor, [the prayer for departed relatives]. Of course, Yizkor is elemental for Ashkenazim as part of the Yom Kippur experience. There are that come into the synagogue primarily to remember the parents they have lost.

If you think about it in the Ashkenazi experience, a lot of people show up right before Musaf because that is when Yizkor is said. There’s a reason why it’s become so elemental to the Yom Kippur experience because as human beings, our bond to our parents is so central to who we are.

That’s what brings them into the sanctuary. They come as sons and as daughters, and then they go straight from there into Musaf and to the most famous prayer of Musaf where suddenly the concept of being a son or a daughter is utterly absent.

What’s emphasized in Un’taneh Tokef is that we are subjects, not sons or daughters, whereas the theme as I argued in the piece, the theme that is constant in Sephardi liturgy is God’s familial relationship with us and how even the most terrifying of stories about parents and children—like the Akeidah, [the binding of Isaac]—are ultimately about the sources of God’s love for us and willingness to forgive us.

Jonathan Silver:

Why don’t you just illustrate that by giving us a tour of some of the liturgical features, some of the piyyutim, that draw out this self-conception, that help us imagine ourselves in the family relationship as parents and children?

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

My favorite in Sephardi liturgy, linked to my bias toward its composer, is Yah Sh’ma Evyonekha, written by Judah Halevi, whom I love.

As I said to you offline, most striking about it is that it is perhaps the most stirring of all the piyyutim of Sepharad in the Yom Kippur experience, but it’s actually featured in Minḥah, in the afternoon service; whereas in Ashkenaz tradition, at least in my experiences, that tends to be the most low-key part of the service.

If you look around in the sanctuary as the haftarah is read during the afternoon service, you’ll see a lot of people in this posture, like this [slouches]. That’s basically the time to catch a little nap, take a brief break.

Whereas it is then that suddenly you are jolted into re-engagement in Sepharad, as you sing Yah Sh’ma Evyonekha [sings in Hebrew]: God, hear the poor person that comes before You, who seeks Your presence.

And then of course the familiar theme, [sings in Hebrew], “Our Father, to your sons, to your children, do not turn your ear away.” It’s this beautiful tight rhyme. The tune both in the Spanish-Portuguese tradition and in the Middle Eastern Sephardi tradition is incredibly exciting. As I noted in the piece, it’s featured in a political ad for [the Israeli Orthodox Sephardi Shas party]. You can’t really imagine Un’taneh Tokef featured in a political ad.

The excitement of it lies in the fact that undergirding the entire experience is confidence: confidence in forgiveness yet to come. That for me is my favorite.

As I also note in the piece, one of the great revelations of the traditions of Sepharad is the introduction to the blowing of the shofar, and that contains really the only piyyut in my experience that truly is fearful, which is “Et Sha’arei Ratson,” a description of the Akeidah. But even that piyyut, after describing terrifyingly the whole story of the Akeidah with interpolations that make the story even more terrifying, the final concluding part of the biblical story is interrupted. It’s not only that Abraham has a son restored to him, but now it is announced that this day is a day for the children of Jerusalem. For this, we say in “Et Sha’arei Ratson,” your sins will be forgiven.

The story of a father and a son almost guarantees forgiveness yet to come. Obviously, we still have to do repentance, but that’s the premise that’s there from the very beginning. That’s a theme throughout.

Jonathan Silver:

There is a mixture of emotional registers that emerges out of that combination that I want to focus on.

On the one hand, there is something, as you say, jolting, exciting, something which invites us out of ourselves. On the other hand, it produces an outlook of serenity, because it invites us to take repose in the fact that our covenant with God is eternal and that the love that God has for us is understandable, like the love that a parent has for a child. It’s those two things—

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

Exactly. There was a recent news piece in Israel about a new trend that has begun. Sephardi S’lihot [pre-Rosh Hashanah penitential prayers have been going on all month] at the Kotel, [the Western Wall]. As I noted in the piece, because we included a video clip from one, Sephardi S’lihot looks like the part that you think should be said with the most weeping, the portion known as Adon ha-S’liḥot, “Lord of Forgiveness,” when Jews say, Ḥatanu l’fanekha, raḥem aleinu, “We have sinned before You, have mercy on us.” That’s actually said in jubilation: Ḥatanu l’fanekha, raḥem aleinu!

The news piece was about a new trend, which is that high-school kids from around the country come for that, and it shows clips of them hanging out in Jerusalem before attending S’lihot, just in city squares, and they’re singing, “Ḥatanu l’fanekha.”

On the one hand, if you’re actually thinking about the words, it seems funny. They’re just excitedly singing, “Yes, God, we’ve sinned before You. I hope You have mercy on us.”

And then they interview them and you’ll have high-school kids saying things like, “Yes, I’m coming to pray for my Bagrut (for my post high school test), to help me do well on my tests.”

For a second, you think, “The Jewish people have such troubles, this is what you’re coming to pray for?” But then you realize that what that tells you, that there is this deep sense that God is actually close to them and involved in their lives and they want to come to these S’lihot because they, A, enjoy it and B, it actually furthers their sense of a providential relationship with God, even in the simpler details of their own lives.

That I think is very central to the experience of Sephardi piyuttim.

Jonathan Silver:

Rabbi Soloveichik, there’s one very poignant set of remarks that you make in the essay that I want to ask you to restate and elaborate on. And then I’m going to invite Rabbi Dweck into our conversation in just a moment.

First of all, one can see the familial content of Et Sha’arei Ratson, and then you describe the author of that piyyut as a father and the experience of him as a father with his own son, and that renders a different color and a different poignancy to the whole thing. I want you to just describe it for us.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

We don’t know whether this occurred before the composition of the piece or after. I don’t think we know that. But we do know that the composer of the piece, Samuel ibn Abbas, had a son who not only converted to Islam but became one of the prominent polemicists on behalf of Islam against Judaism.

And so if you know that and you are reading a poem by this father and the poem or the piyyut is about a father who comes very close to losing his son, but then has his son miraculously restored to him, the entire color of the piece changes.

Interestingly, for so many Sephardim, Et Sha’arei Ratson is a childhood memory like saying Un’taneh Tokef with my father was for me. But they’re shocked when I tell them this. They had no idea. They know the poem, but they don’t know anything about the author.

Of course, that changes your whole experience and it renders it much more poignant. But of course, the poignancy, again, is about the relationship between parents and children and the love and the worry that is involved in being a parent that goes hand in hand with every fatherhood and every motherhood.

None of this, of course, is to take away from the power of Un’taneh Tokef and of its relevance this year. Of course, as I wrote in the piece, it has been an Un’taneh Tokef year. Those saying Un’taneh Tokef will not be able to read “Who by fire? Who by water? Who by strangulation?” and not think of the past year.

None of this is to take away from the frailty and the vulnerability of human experience and of the Jewish experience to which Un’taneh Tokef refers and the feelings that it evokes.

Jonathan Silver:

And in so doing it connects us to previous generations of Jewish experience, and suffering.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

The sufferings of generations. Exactly.

But as we also see in the essay, Jews in Sepharad dealt with challenges of their own, like Samuel ibn Abbas. The apostasy of children is something that’s experienced by another Spanish sage, Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra (ca. 1089–1164), by ibn Abbas, and then in Ashkenaz by Rabbeinu Gershom ben Judah of Mainz (ca. 960–1040) as well. This is something that cuts across communities.

But the element of the bond between parent and child and therefore divine Father and human children, that theme in Sepharad, remains ever-prominent and can speak to us this year strongly as well. That too has to remain.

Jonathan Silver:

I just want to draw out and underscore the theological point that I think we should derive from that kind of analysis.

The theological point is that understanding the sort of love that we feel for our children and that as children we feel for our parents, is the closest approximation that we can have to try to penetrate an understanding of God’s covenantal love for the Jewish people.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

Absolutely. And of course, that’s very central to the thought of Michael Wyschogrod, which has so deeply influenced me, and which I had the privilege of discussing with Rabbi Dweck in a different conversation in his own magnificent sanctuary.

And to further connect the points, if it has been an Un’taneh Tokef year, it’s also been a year in which those other themes have been made manifest as well.

To me, one of the most memorable moments of the past year, and one I will certainly be talking about in my sermon, was a clip that we saw almost right after after October 7th, which was of a soldier who had been mobilized right after that terrible day and therefore would miss the b’rit milah, the circumcision, of his son.

You actually see him holding two phones in full combat gear, watching his son be named, watching his son enter the covenant of Abraham. And then he is saying the two blessings that he can say from where he is, “Blessed are You Who has commanded me to ensure that my son enters the covenant of Abraham, our father,” and then, “Bless You, God, Who has allowed me to live to reach this moment.”

Why did that speak to us so profoundly? Because it highlighted what this soldier was fighting for, but also because b’rit milah is a ceremony that we read about on Rosh Hashanah. In one of the earliest verses we read in the day’s Torah reading, Abraham circumcised his son, Isaac, at eight days as God had commanded.

For us, there are few ceremonies that draw so elementally together the themes of covenant and family as b’rit milah does and therefore, ties a theme of familial love to our own b’rit, our own covenant with God Himself, the covenant that God made with Abraham because, in my belief, He loved Abraham as the father that Abraham was to be. That’s the thing that we remember now as well.

Jonathan Silver:

Rabbi Dweck, I want to invite you to join us and ask Rabbi Soloveichik your questions and share with us your own reaction to Rabbi Soloveichik’s becoming a Sephardi rabbi and how he’s understood all of it.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

Just no musical criticism. I don’t think my confidence can take it.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

I have to say, we’re thrilled to have him on the team, as a Sephardi rabbi.

I don’t really have many questions. I am thrilled that Rabbi Soloveichik wrote this piece because I really do think that you captured the heart of these issues. As a Sephardi rabbi, I feel like I’ve been on the other end of this for quite some time.

For certain people, I think there’s almost an inadequacy that they feel, the Sephardim. Everybody’s like, “Un’taneh Tokef,” and Sephardim, we don’t  even know what you’re talking about, we’re not even sure what that’s about.

And I was smiling when you spoke about Yizkor because that’s another thing. You know, it’s those two things, [Un’taneh Tokef and Yizkor]: when Ashkenazim hear that we don’t even do them, that it’s not something that’s even part of our liturgy, there’s something akin to profound shock. How could that possibly be?

You know, I always say that you can spend decades in yeshiva and then you go to a synagogue that doesn’t follow your minhag [ancestral customs] and you’re like a complete ignoramus. You have no idea. “Should I stand here? Do I turn around here?” It is very hard.

And I think what it highlights is how much of our practice, how much of the nature of our religious engagement, is cultural. It is embedded, as Rabbi Soloveichik points out in the article, in our past experiences, in the trials and triumphs that we’ve gone through as a people, and that very deeply paint who we are.

Of course, the basic structure of the [Rosh Hashanah prayer service] is there in both liturgies. Everybody knows there’s a Musaf, but what happens in that Musaf is very different.

And I’ll say, what you were saying at the beginning also about the duality, because although I’ve been Sephardi as you mentioned, Jonathan, my whole life, I wasn’t a western Sephardi my whole life.

So being the senior rabbi of the S&P community here in the UK was also a learning curve, because my tunes and my approach, first of all, are very Middle Eastern; that was the way I was brought up, and there’s a good element of Kabbalah in it as well. Whereas when you come into the S&P, the tunes are very Western and there’s almost no Kabbalistic influence in it. So there’s that difference. So I’m also thinking about the tunes when I’m saying them, leading the services.

But there are a few things I want to add.

I was thinking about this idea about Un’taneh Tokef. I was giving [a class] to an Ashkenazi congregation here last week, and I was teaching [the chapter of Maimondes’ Mishneh Torah that addresses repentance], which deals with the judgment of Rosh Hashanah.

I think that some of the Sephardi approach to the poetry and liturgy is certainly coming from their historic and cultural experiences, but it’s also halachically based. In other words, what are they reading? What are they learning? And if you’re looking at the Mishneh Torah, if you’re looking at the Maiomonides, astonishingly,  when he talks about the judgment of Rosh Hashanah he makes no mention whatsoever about the things that most people are preoccupied with, especially coming from Un’taneh Tokef: sickness, health, wealth, poverty—the kinds of things that are qualities of life.

And all Maimonides says is: “What happens on Rosh Hashanah is you are judged a tzaddik [righteous], a rasha [wicked], or a beinoni [intermediate].” And that’s it. That’s Rosh Hashanah.

Those other things that may happen at other times. Maybe they’re extensions of the judgment of Rosh Hashanah, but that’s not necessarily what happens on the day.

And Maimonides, in his commentary on the Mishnah, raises that and says, “Look, it’s not at all straightforward. None of this straightforward.” What’s straightforward is: righteous, wicked, intermediate. This essentially is a question of: “Who am I? What is the quality of my existence? Why do I get up in the morning and what ultimately is the direction of my life?”

That very much is the basis for how Sephardim have across centuries thought of the day. It’s much more about you and the Holy One, Blessed is He, our relationship with God, and how that manifests itself.

I think certainly Rabbi Soloveichik recognizes the father-child element of it, which is absolutely central and I would say, the foundational element of how the Sephardim have for centuries come to the table on these Yamim Nora’im.

That’s not to say that there isn’t reverence involved. There’s absolutely reverence involved. But the base of it, the bedrock of it is, “You’re our father; we’re Your children. You’re not throwing us out. We’ve got this relationship that we’re banking on and we’re coming onto that.”

I guess the last thing that I’ll say with regards to that, and I’ll close, is we bank on that in our prayers. It’s not just that we come in and say, “Please, Father.” We have a piyyut that we say on Rosh Hashanah, we have it in our s’lihot too, which means, “For Your sake, God.” In other words, “It’s not even for us. Forget about what our issues are. You need to do this for You,” which is an astonishing thing to come to God to say. Those are some of the initial thoughts that came to me.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

Rabbi Dweck is picking up on something I’d like to comment on too. It’s such an audacious thing to say, [that it’s for God’s sake]. And of course, it recalls what Moses originally says [to God] after the sin of the golden calf: “You need to do this because these are the people You’ve chosen.”

It’s interesting because when you look at the different strands, to pick up on what Rabbi Dweck said, that influenced Sepharad, you have someone like Maimonides, and he will describe your status before God, and that will become a huge theme.

Interestingly, even there, when Maimonides describes the judgment, what he mentions there is this actually unbelievably empowering thing. You can make it scary or empowering. It’s not really voiced in Un’taneh Tokef. [Maimonides] says that you yourself—the decisions you make—your own repentance can tip the scales for all humanity. Everything can come with you. You could be the one who tips the scales.

But then you’ll see someone like Judah Halevi, who is writing not just in the context of Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur, writing these audacious poems.

I’m teaching Kuzari, [Judah Halevi’s great theological work], now. When I first taught Kuzari at Yeshiva University some time ago and I asked students, “What do you think Judah Halevi was doing in his spare time?,” some people said, “Oh, he was probably studying Torah.” I said, “Well, it’s pretty clear that he really wanted to spend a lot of time writing poetry.” He didn’t do that for a living because you don’t get paid a lot of cash.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

It’s a hobby.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

This time in teaching it, I was trying to show the difference between what he would write in a work of Jewish thought like Kuzari and what he’d write in his poems.

People when they first see [his poetry[ can be sometimes shocked when he’ll use these graphic images of familial love in the context of repentance. He uses parent and child, but just in the context of love for God, he uses the context of marital embrace.

This is imagery that is so audacious in a certain sense and yet rightly understood, not audacious at all, because that’s exactly how God chooses to speak about himself.

Michael Wyschogrod would say, “We don’t need to care more about God’s dignity than God cares about God’s dignity.” This is how God speaks about Himself. God uses marital language. God describes himself as father and God is compared to a mother as well in the prophets. These themes have become openly stated at times in Sephardi liturgy.

And to add, I’m curious whether Rabbi Dweck’s children had any other parallel experience, but for me, I get questions like, “Well, what is the experience like for your children?” What you discover is actually, just as children have an enormous facility for languages, if they experience [both traditions] as children, they can go back and forth.

My children move seamlessly between the world of Ashkenaz and Sepharad. They’ll be with me on a Shabbat. They’ll be in a yeshiva during the week. They’ll be with me on Rosh Hashanah. Often, they can pray with their grandparents on Yom Kippur. They’re experiencing Et Sha’arei Ratson and then they experience Un’taneh Tokef. It’s striking to me because instead of it being a dichotomy of memory versus the present, for them, it’s just a lived, synthesized experience of Judaism.

I’m hoping, not just on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur—maybe Rabbi Dweck is going to say more about this—maybe we’re moving toward a Judaism where we’ll be experiencing that synthesis more and more.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

Absolutely.

I think, certainly for my children, they’ve experienced that because they’ve also grown up with, like I say, very different customs although maybe not as stark as Ashkenazi vs. Sephardi. But I sent my sons to Ashkenazi yeshivot and I very much wanted them to be able to find the well-roundedness in that and to be able to experience the broadness of that. I do think, I don’t know how you feel, Rabbi Soloveichik, I think that there’s no question about the fact that the Jewish world is moving that way.

We are coming out of a [situation], from the 20th century and before, where for so long Jewish people were in individualized silos. Syrian Jews didn’t even relate to Iraqi Jews. Polish Jews and German Jews. That’s why we have two entirely different institutions in the United Kingdom, because of that [divide].

But what we are experiencing today, both around the world, certainly in the United States and without question in Israel, is the mixing of these cultures. What for the grandparents and maybe even the parents was a stark line that wasn’t crossed, I’m certainly witnessing that the children and grandchildren, those lines are much more, I guess for lack of a better term, negligible than they used to be. And [the different communities] are bonding.

I heard you speak about the Adon ha-S’lihot. Every Israeli knows that song. They can sing the entire [thing]. And they feel it and it resonates. It’s no longer the quaint Sephardi tune. It is an Israeli tune. It has become part of the culture of Israel. I completely agree with that, and it’s inspiring to me, frankly.

I’m an optimist at heart and I’m certainly hopeful about it. And when people say, “Oh, no, what to do with Israel and the split and the divide?,” I hear what they’re saying. But I also have a tremendous amount of hope that the nation will be and is becoming a cohesive whole.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

There’s a reason why a source of great hope for me lies in people like Ishay Ribo. As I mentioned in the piece, when I was my children’s age, the notion that a French-Moroccan and Algerian [Jew] would be the star of the Jewish music world in the diaspora is unthinkable. I was doing an event just for my students at the Straus Center at YU, and then we scheduled it and they said, “No, no, we have to move it up,” because so many of them are going down to Madison Square Garden to see Ishay Ribo. Of course, who am I to interfere with the experience of Ishay Ribo? But it would have been unthinkable when I was growing up in the Ashkenazi frum [Orthodox] world of Chicago and New York.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

Absolutely.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

It’s not just that he’s singing his own music. He’s literally taking, all the time, the Sephardi prayer experience and mixing it into his own music. That’s part and parcel of who he is.

To me, the fascinating question as this emerges is this: one of my students asked me a wonderful question during the Kuzari class. I showed them that some of the things that Halevi writes are things that people would actually insert into the Amidah, into the silent prayer or into the blessings of Sh’ma [in the morning prayer service].

He wrote a poem where he describes the marital embrace to God. He describes something like a hug, written as what was called an Ahavah, a love poem, to be inserted in the blessings of Sh’ma before the blessing of ohev amo Yisroel [He Who loves His people Israel].

Can you imagine if you were leading the service and all of a sudden, at this very sacred time, you just insert a poem? But people were doing that, clearly.

A student of mine asked me, “Can we do this today?” Which I thought was an interesting question. I said, “Look, I have a friend, . . . ” My wife and I have a friend, Avi Shmidman, who’s a professor of piyyut at Bar-Ilan University. Among many other things that he’s gifted at, he writes his own piyyutim, and he actually wrote a piyyut in honor of our wedding.

And the question is whether we’ll see not just a merger, but something new, new piyyutim, that will be an expression of the synthesis of these two experiences. That to me is something.

If one of us was a time traveler and went into a synagogue, into a Beit Knesset in Tel Aviv a hundred years from now, would we experience our own culture shock, whether we came from Ashkenaz or Sepharad, because what we produced was not just a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but maybe something that combines both into something all its own. That’s something I think about a lot.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

I think the idea of poetry, especially here, is so powerful. I think that certainly was something that was so central in Sepharad, like you say.

To think about Judah Halevi, as a pastime, as a hobby, just writing poetry about seemingly mundane things! But this, to someone like him, was his craft. It was a mode of expressing the deepest of emotion and feeling, and that was channeled into the prayer service, and channeled into devotion to God.

I remember sitting with Rabbi Sacks, alav ha-shalom, some years ago. I was giving [a class] on poetry, the place of poetry in Torah and so on, and he said to me, “Rabbi Dweck, a major thing I envy about the Sephardim is you had these most unbelievable poets.” I laughed and I said to him, “Yes, and every single last one of them got their work published in our High Holy Day prayers where it goes on and on.” He says, “I’m so jealous of all that.” He adds, “We have these crossword puzzles.”

But that’s a major part of it. It was very passionate and the love I think oozes through. It reminded me: the way that we open up Rosh Hashanah is with the piyyut Aḥot K’tanah.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

You should describe it for our listeners, Rabbi Dweck, because some might not be familiar with it.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

It was written by Rabbi Avraham Hazzan, who was from Gerondi in Spain in the 13th century. It talks about the people of Israel as a little sister. God is the big brother here, and He’s the protector and He’s the one Who’s going to lift her up. She’s been taken captive—and we certainly could relate to that today.

And it ends with these beautiful words. It ends with, ḥizku v’gilu, “Be strong, rejoice.” This is literally the opening of Rosh Hashanah before we even enter the difficulty, the pain. [The pain of the previous year] is over. Turn your hearts to the Rock, to God. His covenant has been kept. That’s what we bank on. Taḥel shanah u-virkhoteha, “Let the year begin with its blessings.”

Like the rabbi was saying, the previous stanza ends with, Tikhleh shanah v’kil’loteha, “Let the year and its curses end.” Taḥel shanah u-virkhoteha, “Let the year begin with its blessings.” That’s how the entire liturgy opens. Begin the year with its blessings.

I’ll just say, I’m so thrilled that you’re speaking about Wyschogrod—and I know how dear he is to your heart. He is to me as well. He writes this one beautiful point; of course I’m paraphrasing. We’re talking about love here and we’re talking about the place where love happens and Wyschogrod brings that out in the context of the suffering of Israel and the difficulty that the people and the nation has been through throughout the generations, that there is this perhaps subconscious underlying recognition by the people of Israel, by the Jewish people, of the love throughout all of it. We choose, and God chooses, to remain in this covenant from an underlying love.

If I’m not mistaken, that’s something very significant that he points out in his book The Body of Faith.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

As Wyschogrod would say, I’m paraphrasing too—I think I heard this from Dr. David Berger—it’s true that Judaism doesn’t believe in original sin, but that doesn’t mean that we walk into shul on Yom Kippur and say, “God, give me exactly what I deserve.”

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

Yes, exactly.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

We need to rely on His love for us if He’s going to forgive us.

Jonathan Silver:

Gentlemen, our time is growing short, and with two rabbis warming up for the holidays and with two professional talkers over here, I want to put to you some of the questions that have come in from our audience.

This first one touches on this eternal tension between the serenity, the love, the faith in God’s covenantal relationship with the Jewish people, on the one hand, and the sort of person who’s formed by that sentiment, versus the sort of person that is formed by Un’taneh Tokef, which  generates a quality of striving and the need to try to redeem oneself with one’s own actions through repentance and charity and prayer. It has a different activist quality to it. These are both obviously present in the Jewish experience, but there are different emphases here.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

Obviously a balance between them is what should be sought. It’s a point Rabbi Soloveitchik used to always make in the context of Purim. He would emphasize that, whereas most people see Purim as just this great happy day of salvation, there’s actually a reason why we prepare for Purim with a fast: because actually the message of the story of Purim is terrifying. A maniac comes out of nowhere and threatens the entire Jewish people just because he’s mad at one Jew. He hates the Jewish people in general; his reaction to Mordechai leads him to seek to destroy the entire Jewish people.

So Rabbi Soloveitchik says, “On the one hand, we need to rejoice and celebrate the salvation, the courage and so forth, but we also need to be terrified.” We literally split it, the two moods, to have one day devoted to one and one day devoted to the other.

And so rightly understood, as he said, Purim is not just celebration. It is, as he put it, a story of the vulnerability of the human being and the vulnerability of the Jew.

You have to balance joy and confidence and God’s love with the feeling of vulnerability, I think, and seek to strike a balance between them.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

I definitely concur with that.

One of the great miracles of the state of Israel, like we were touching on before, is the coming together of so many of these elements of the Jewish people that went through a speciation. We found ourselves very, very separate and divided. We developed our own things and now we’re coming together in a way that we have to listen to each other in some way or another, to feel each other in some way.

To me, these are essential elements of the wholeness of the people. If we only had the Spanish poets and whatever it is that they bringing to the table, which is a significant perspective, we would be missing the reverence, the fear, the reality that there is dread. We can choose not to pay attention to that, but there are some deep existential realities that are harrowing and difficult and frightening, frankly.

Those are part of life too, and they’re also part of the relationship [between man and God]. The left brain and right brain. There’s something about connecting the two, synergizing the two, and finding something that emerges in terms of the wholeness of the people.

Our goal, I think—and I have no question that ultimately we’ll get there, hopefully sooner than later—is the harmony between them, the synergistic balance between these things that we both need.

Jonathan Silver:

Of course, one has to acknowledge that it is an abstraction to pull out Un’taneh Tokef and Et Sha’arei Ratzon as two poles and say, “Of course, the liturgical experience of the day as a whole brings out many of these points.” That has to be said.

One of our audience members, Rabbi Dweck, asks if you’ve ever experienced Un’taneh Tokef liturgically.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

Great question. I have never. And it is not that I’m closed to it, but I just haven’t found myself in a situation where I have. It’s a wonderful question. No, I have not.

It’s interesting; people are much more prepared during the year to veer away from their minhag [ancestral custom]. They’ll find themselves in Chabad, or they’ll find a Sephardi shul, but come the High Holy Days, everybody comes home to roost. There’s this very strong need for that.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

In other words, that means you’ve never presided as a rabbi over a Yizkor service either.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

That is absolutely true. Guilty as charged.

But I’ll tell you one thing, and I don’t know how you felt, Rabbi Soloveichik, but when I came to the Spanish and Portuguese and I had all of the music, for all intents and purposes, stripped away, it forced me to get down to the core of what this day is about, because otherwise we float on top of the custom or culture. And when you don’t have that, you’re forced to come down to what is the core of this day.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

I agree, 1,000 percent.

Even my Shabbat Shuvah [the Sabbath between Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah] sermons, things I speak about in this season, are a product of my being thrown into this whole new situation has forced me to focus on the words.

Why do we begin Kol Nidrei with “the assembly above and the assembly below”? What are we even saying that for? What does that even mean? Nobody even focuses on it because really Kol Nidre, for most people, is the music.

But then when I had to be there and actually because it was so hard originally, and focused on going, “[sings the words in the Sephardi tune].” Only then did I start thinking, “What does this actually mean? Why am I saying this? What am I talking about?”

Jonathan Silver:

Rabbi Dweck, I want to ask you this question precisely because of your long experience in this world. Rabbi Soloveichik is a newcomer but precisely because of your long experience in this world—

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

The word you’re looking for is neophyte.

Jonathan Silver:

Because of your training in hazanut, can you recommend for people who are just learning about this for the first time some of the most interesting recordings we can listen to?

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

Great question.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

Yes. I think that it’s probably best to do it with YouTube because there’s a ton of stuff on YouTube.

Where do you start? People think that the Sephardi minhag is just this homogeneous kind of thing. There are literally four different version El Nora Alilah, this pre-Ne’ilah prayer, that I have in my head: Iraqi, Syrian, Jerusalemite. They’re very similar, but there are permutations.

I would suggest having a look at Moshe Habusha on YouTube. Look for Yamim Nora’im, and with him you’ll find the classic, what we call the Sephardi Yerushalmi s’lihot liturgy in that.

That’s what most Sephardim will be familiar with.

Otherwise, I’m happy to put a link here to the S&P recordings that are beautiful, especially to the Et Sha’arei Ratzon. We do it with a choir. I’m very grateful to be able to have a choir on Yamim Nora’im, and I know Rabbi Soloveichik, they have a sublime choir at She’arith Israel. It’s just second to none. So if you’re open to hearing the Western Sephardi stuff, you can go to our shul website.

If were to name just one tune it would be Yah Sh’ma Evyonekha, which Rabbi Soloveichik was referring to. You can see clearly the similar roots of it, but if you hear that piyyut among the Middle Eastern Sephardim, it goes something like this [sings]. In the Spanish-Portuguese, it’s the same song, it’s just Westernized. The quarter notes are taken out and replaced with regular ones, so you can play it on a piano. [Sings.]

It’s the same source, but it finds its variations.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

I’ll add that Ishay Ribo has an album called Elul Taf Shin Ayin Tet, where he does Yamim Nora’im songs and he has a rendering of the Sephardi opening to the s’lihah of Ben Adam Mah L’khha Nirdam (“Son of man, why do you slumber?”), which is really, really beautiful.

Jonathan Silver:

This is the last question that I have for each of you.

Rabbi Dweck, I’ll ask you to go first and then Rabbi Soloveichik to bring us to a close. You touched on this before already, Rabbi Soloveichik: we are experiencing the Yamim Nora’im for the first time after October 7th this year. I suppose given the nature of our conversation up to now, I want to ask what you would have us draw out of the Sephardi experience and what you’d have us draw out of the Ashkenazi experience to try not only to console and commemorate but also to strengthen us as we turn into the next year.

Rabbi Joseph Dweck:

From the Sephardi experience, there’s an expectation, almost a given. I think it comes from a passage in the Talmud. We come in almost with a confidence that we are going to come out of this judgment on the side of merit and right. That banks on a recognition of this pact, this commitment, this covenant that we have with God.

That, from the Sephardi side, I think, is very central, and it’s something that we need to come back to as a people, to recognize that when things are challenging and painful, and we get very stuck in the difficulties that I know all of us are feeling right now, that this is 4,000 years on from our father Abraham, and this will continue, and that we have this covenant and connection with the Holy One, Blessed is He that is ours, and that we can bank on it, that we can rely on and hold onto. There’s no question about that. And that to me certainly is something that has been very strong with me from my youth and my community, and something that I think is important for us to hold onto.

From the Ashkenazi side, I think for me anyway, there is a scrutiny. There’s an intellectual rigor that comes from that side. I think that part of the poetry on the Ashkenazi side is really looking deep to get into the intricacies of what’s happening here existentially, what’s happening here morally, and there’s a wrestling with it, and that’s needed too. We need to be able not just to adhere to our emunah p’shutah, our simple faith; we need to ask the very difficult questions. We need to be able to wrestle with our faith, with our own identity, with who we are, and what it is that we’re going to become, and that requires rolling up our sleeves.

I’ll point out one small liturgical difference that is a daily liturgical difference between the Ashkenazim and the Sephardim that I think signifies what I’m talking. There are the birkhot ha-Torah, the blessings of the Torah that we say in the morning. The Ashkenazi blessing for the Torah is la’asok b’divrei Torah, commanding us to toil, engage, work in the words of the Torah, which implies that you have to roll your sleeves up and get into this stuff.

The Sephardim simply say, al divrei Torah, “regarding the words of the Torah.” We could sit and read Zohar, and we’re happy. Not to take away from the deep scholarship of either side, but there’s just a different approach to it.

We need to be able to grapple with the major issues and questions. That has to do with this current time as well. We have to think about what direction our nation  is taking, what direction do we want to take, what are our responsibilities that we need to be able to hold onto in order to be able to move forward.

If I were to look at either camp with regards to that, I would certainly be learning from the Ashkenazi side in terms of that, because that is a very strong tradition among Ashkenazim. I want to be clear, for my Sephardi constituents, I’m not saying that there isn’t depth of thought among the Sephardim, but there’s something foundational among the Ashkenazim in this regard, which I certainly recognize and see has influenced and inspired me.

Rabbi Meir Soloveichik:

I’ll just turn again in answering the question to the person I consider the great bridge of our time, Ishay Ribo, and to the great modern Yamim Nora’im song, which is his Seder Ha-Avodah [“the order of the Yom Kippur service],” in which he takes a seemingly technical holiday piece about the high priest [in the Holy  Temple] sprinkling the blood of the offering, and as he did so he would count, aḥat, aḥat v’aḥat, aḥat u-shtayim, aḥat v’shalosh, “one, one and one, one and two, one and three.” What Ribo does is he takes that and he uses that as a metaphor for how we approach life.

Personally, it’s very meaningful to me because I’ve written about this elsewhere: my grandfather, after he suffered a debilitating stroke and it was very painful to walk up the stairs, he would count the steps excruciatingly and he would count it with the language of the high priest: “aḥat, aḥat v’aḥat, aḥat u-shtayim.”

But what he describes there is that the high priest will use that way of counting, first, to count the things that he’s sad about in the year before. But then he turns the song on its head and says something to the effect of: if you would remember all the goodnesses that you experienced, you would count them: “aḥat, aḥat v’aḥat, aḥat u-shtayim.” And then he adds the many, many countless myriads of miracles that You, God, have done for us.

I think in facing this year, it’s been a year in which there have been so many things to be sad about, seemingly countless things to be sad about, and yet many things to be inspired by. We still live in a miraculous age, an age of a reconstituted Jewish state, in which we saw Jewish heroism and courage and resiliency made manifest, and surely that counts as “myriads of myriads of miracles and wonders.” These are still miracles.

If the union that I’m striving for in my essay is of vulnerability and reasons for celebration, here, we certainly have myriad reasons to focus on vulnerability, but we also have so many reasons for inspiration as well.

Jonathan Silver:

Gentlemen, thank you. Rabbi Dweck, Rabbi Soloveichik, shanah tovah u-m’tukah. Thank you for being with us.