Neilah

Sat 18 Sep 2010
Yom Kippur service
Congregation Adat Reyim
Dr Maurice M. Mizrahi

 -The Neilah is the concluding service on Yom Kippur. It was not always part of the liturgy.  It was introduced in Talmudic times (Jerusalem Talmud, Berachot 45a).
-Some 2000 years ago a certain Rabbi Levi said: God said in Isaiah 1:15:

Even if you pray profusely I will not answer, [because] your hands are full of blood.
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-He concluded that if your hands are not full of blood AND you pray profusely you WILL be answered!  It’s a promise.  He turned the negative-sounding biblical verse into something positive.  So the Sages added Neilah to increase the chance that our prayers will be answered on Yom Kippur.

-50 years ago this minute, I was standing in Shaar HaShamayim synagogue in downtown Cairo, Egypt, where I grew up.  The people were tired, sleepy, hungry.  The prayers were down to a low monotone.  They did not want to hear about the origin of the Neilah service.  They wanted the Neilah itself.  Then came the Neilah song.  The transformation was something to behold.  All of a sudden, everybody woke up and started singing at the top of their voices, with great enthusiasm, with abandon and a feeling of liberation!

-What they sang was "El nora 3alilah", by Moses Ibn Ezra.  It’s on page 775b of the Enhanced Edition of the machzor.  If you don’t have that, it’s in the High Holy Day Supplement.  If you don’t have either, your response is to sing, every two verses:
El nora 3alilah, el nora 3alilah
Hamtsi lanu mechillah, besha3at hanne3ilah
which means:
God of Awe, God of Awe,
Grant us pardon at this hour when the gates are closing.
The first letters of the verses form an acrostic, "Moshe Hazzak".

El nora 3alilah

El nora 3alilah, el nora 3alilah
Hamtsi lanu mechillah, besha3at   hanne3ilah

M'tei mispar kru-im, lecha  3ayin  nose-im
Umsaldim bechillah, besha3at  hanne3ilah

Shofchim lecha nafsham, m'cheh  fish-3am  v'kha-chasham
Hamtsi em mechillah,  besha3at  hanne3ilah

Heye lahem lesitra, v'chal-tsem   mim-era
Vechat-mem  lehod ulgillah, besha3at  hanne3ilah

Chon otam verachem, vechol  lochets  v’lochem
3asseh vahem  p'lillah, besha3at  hanne3ilah

Zechot  tsidkat  avihem, v'chadesh  et  yemehem
Kekedem ut-chillah, besha3at  hanne3ilah

Kra na shanat ratson, vehashev sh'erit hatson
L'ahaliva  v'ahalah, besha3at  hanne3ilah

Tizku  l'shanim rabbot, habbanim  veha-avot
Beditsa  uv-tsahala, besha3at  hanne3ilah

Michael sar Yisrael, Eliyahu v'Gavriel
Basru  na  ha-geula, besha3at  hanne3ilah


 The Sephardic greeting for the season is not “L’shanah tovah” but a line from the song we just sang:

Tizku l’shanim rabbot
May you merit many years

The response is:
Tizkeh v’tichyeh
May you merit and live

Makeshift bomb thrown at Cairo synagogue, no dead

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/21/AR2010022100831.html

The Associated Press
Sunday, February 21, 2010; 5:20 AM

CAIRO -- A man hurled a suitcase containing a makeshift bomb at Cairo's main downtown synagogue in the early hours Sunday morning, but there were no injuries or damage, police said.

According to the police report, a man entered a hotel located on the fourth floor of a building across from the synagogue at around 3 a.m. and as he was checking in, abruptly threw his suitcase out the window.

The case contained four containers of gasoline each attached to a glass bottle of sulfuric acid meant to shatter on impact and ignite the makeshift bomb, said police, who speculated the man may have panicked.

The bag, which also contained clothes, cotton strips, matches and a lighter, fell onto the sidewalk in front of the hotel and briefly caught fire before being extinguished. There were no injuries and no damage to the historic synagogue.

The suspect fled the scene and is now being sought by police.

Egypt's once thriving Jewish community largely left the country 50 years ago during hostilities between Egypt and Israel, but a number of heavily guarded synagogues, open only to Jews, remain.

The downtown synagogue, Egypt's largest, is the only one still conducting services for the Jewish high holidays, which are sometimes attended by Israeli diplomats.

The temple, known as Shaar Hashamayim, or the Gate of Heaven, was built in 1899 in a style evoking ancient Egyptian temples and was once the largest building on the wide downtown boulevard.

Egypt's Jewish community, which dates back millennia and in the 1940s numbered around 80,000, is down to several dozen, almost all of them elderly.

Egypt and Israel fought a war every decade from the 1940s to the 1970s until the 1979 peace treaty was signed.

Despite that treaty, Egyptian sentiment remains unfriendly to Israel, and anti-Semitic stereotypes still occasionally appear in the Egyptian media.

Since an Islamist insurgency based in southern Egypt was quashed in the 1990s, there have been few organized terrorist attacks in Egypt's Nile valley and the capital Cairo. There have, however, in a number of amateurish attempts to target foreigners over the years.

In February 2009 a crude explosive device planted in a bazaar popular with tourists killed a French teenager.