After fasting, the following prayer is said:
Ribon Kol-HaOlamim (Owner of All the Worlds), When a man sinned, he used to bring a victim to the Temple and you took its blood and fat and in your greatness, you pardoned the sinner. But we have no Temple and we have no priests who could present the expiation to you. Therefore please count the little blood and the little fat that I lost today as my expiation and be forgiving towards me.
The scan shows the page from my late Mother's Hungarian-Hebrew prayer book.
9 comments:
An offering, not a victim, though the calf probably thought of itself that way.
This prayer must have been a Hungarian Jewish custom - I don't recall hearing it, not that I am an expert on liturgy.
K
Hungarian Jews were into fasting: My own grandfather fasted twice a week.
The idea of קורבן korban is an offering, yet in Hebrew it means victim. The translation into German-Hungarian of a hundred years ago sound very bizarre, different words and different morals. Whole concepts are uncomprehensible for today's reader.
They say the past is a different country. But you are keeping up old traditions. A lot of modern behavior - dieting, environmentalism, etc. is just religious behavior in a new dress.
When Ben Yehuda was reviving spoken Hebrew the language was very short on vocabulary so a lot of old words were given new or expanded meanings. Korban meant offering before it meant victim and it means sacrifice in this context.
K
Worlds? Plural?
Yes. In the original Hebrew it is Owner of the Worlds, in plural. You'll have to ask someone more learned than me why it is so, probably it sounds better. And this is not the Bible, it is a prayer someone composed, probably in Hungary or Germany a few generations ago.
Instead of "Owner" the right word may be "Sovereign".
I'd say "Master of the Universe". A literal translation is not always the best, but you don't want to be so poetic that you lose the original meaning either. It's harder to do a good translation than it looks.
K
"Master of the Universe" has lost its cachet since Tom Wolfe's "The Bonfire of the Vanities" and the latest financial collapse.
It's true that Wolfe and others have corrupted that term with irony but unironically (the Jews are masters of irony but our prayer books are completely lacking in irony and full of earnestness - when we talk to God we can drop our cynical man of the world act) Adonay is the one true Master of the Universe.
Much more common is the singular possessive formulation - Rebboynu Shel'oylam - our Master of the world. In Yiddish this is a common exclamation, the way people in English exclaim - Oh my God!
Because the name of God must never be uttered directly, Hebrew abounds in euphemisms for his name.
K
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