Eighteen Gates of Jewish Holidays and Festivals by Issachar Miron

Foreword by Elie Wiesel

Make prayers out of my tales, said Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav. His followers obeyed and went even further: they made tales out of his prayers. As for his distant disciple, Franz Kafka, he simply stated: to write is to pray.

Literature and prayer have much in common. Both take everyday words and give them meaning. Both appeal to what is most personal and most transcendent in man. Both are rooted in the most obscure and mysterious zone of our being. Nourished by anguish and fervor, both negate detachment and imitation — and are negated by them.

The writer and the worshiper both draw from one source — the source where sound becomes melody, and melody turns into language which becomes offering. What inspiration is to the writer, kavvanah is to the beseecher. Both are as open as an open wound — both live tense and privileged moments.

If one may assume that man could not live without literature, one may equally affirm that neither could he survive without prayer. Except that in our society it is becoming increasingly difficult for modern man to pray: He has conquered space but forgotten his prayer.

This is particularly true of our young people. Some of us remember their outburst of emotion when they reached the Western Wall in 1967. Many did not know what to do, what to say. I remember the Simhat Torah celebration in Moscow. Many students sang and danced since they knew nothing else — and no other way — to affirm their Jewishness. Their religious thirst was greater, and more genuine, than that of their parents. What they yearned for is not knowledge but devotion; they sought fervor more than erudition.

More and more youngsters, especially of secular background, want to be taught how to pray, in what to believe — and in whom as well. I hope they will read Issachar Miron's book. His modern prayers are prayers for modern men and women who wish to express their joy and fear in contemporary terms.

To write a Jewish prayer, one has to have a musical ear and a poetic soul. Issachar Miron has both. He is a sensitive composer. His evocative and beautiful niggunim have the tone and weight of a moving Jewish testimony. There are poetic alliterations in his music, and musical resonances in his poetry, brightening his personal voyage of discovery into Jewish holy days with passion, warmth, and wit.

Religious holidays and secular celebrations or commemorations, historic events and individual responses to them: Miron relates to them with tact and art. But then, why shouldn't he? His songs from and for Israel earned him a wide reputation. With this book, it will be enhanced.