Selichot Has Morphed and Not For The Better
Anyone who knows me, knows I’m not a real scholar. At best I’m what I’ll term an “armchair intellectual,” who consumes scholarship rather than produces any. But even from my armchair, and more distressingly from what I’ve seen transpire in the schuls to which I belong, and from the videos I’ve watched, I can hear that something has gone quiet in the small hours before Rosh Hashana, and that its silence is being filled with the wrong sound. The rise of the “musical Selichot,” the packed halls with dancing and swaying crowds, the guitar-and-keyboard sets, the choreographed crescendos — the “frum mosh pit” has silenced, expelled actually, the soulful lament and sobs of Teshuva. I do not doubt the sincerity of anyone in those “frum mosh pits.” I just don’t think that what they are doing is Selichot. And I fear that in loudly gaining an experience, we have negated a purpose.
To see what has been lost, one has to remember what the Selichot (by which I refer to the Ashkenazic concept of Selichot) were designed to accomplish. The whole enterprise rests on an astonishing image in the Gemara (Rosh Hashana 17b): the Holy One wraps Himself in a Tallit like a chazan and teaches Moshe the order of prayer, promising that whenever Israel recites the Thirteen Middot of mercy in their proper order, they will not be turned away empty. Read the scene closely and notice what it presumes. It presumes that Israel is in trouble. It presumes the golden calf still smoulders behind Moshe’s back, that judgment is real and near, that mercy has to be pleaded for precisely because it is not the default. The Thirteen Middot are not a love song we sing to a God who already adores us; they are the desperate argument of a defendant who knows the verdict could go either way. To put it plainly: the forgiveness inherent in the Thirteen Middot is born out of desperation, not in ease. G-d forgives us, not because He loves us, but because we earnestly, desperately beg Him and He is kind.
The poetry the paytanim built on that foundation — the daily Selichot of the week before Rosh Hashana and of the Aseret Yemei Teshuva — is, therefore, deliberately unsettling. It is meant to be. Read what these piyutim actually put in our mouths in the darkness before dawn. The season opens, on the Motza’ei Shabbat before Rosh Hashana, with a people creeping back to schul: במוצאי מנוחה קידמנוך תחילה — “As the day of rest departs, we have come before You first of all,” begging G-d to bend His ear to a cry rising in the dark. And almost at once the mood turns to desolation: we are left, one of that first night’s selichot pleads, “like a single tree on a mountain in our solitude” — a people stripped of every protection, exposed before the Judge. So we are made to say the hardest sentences a proud person can say. We are allowed no cover of dignity: לך ה’ הצדקה ולנו בושת הפנים— “To You, G-d belongs righteousness, and to us the shame of our faces” (Daniel 9:7). And we are stripped of the one defense we most want to mount, our own worth: כי לא על צדקותינו אנחנו מפילים תחנוננו לפניך כי על רחמיך הרבים — “for it is not on the strength of our righteousness that we cast our pleas before You, but on Your great mercy” (Daniel 9:18).
This is not the vocabulary of mutual love or ecstatic clinging to an adored G-d. It is the vocabulary of a soul made small on purpose so it will importune He who decides our fate for mercy. Each day, before we dare pronounce the Thirteen Middot, we first announce who is listening and on what terms in the ancient prelude א-ל מלך יושב על כסא רחמים — “God, King, seated upon a throne of mercy, conducting Himself with lovingkindness, pardoning the sins of His people.” And we confess, flatly, that we come with nothing in hand:אבינו מלכנו אין בנו מעשים עשה עימנו צדקה וחסד” – Our father our king and we have no deeds to our name; deal with us in charity and kindness.” The Selichot are engineered to strip the penitent of every comfort and self-aggrandizing artifice he has spent the year manufacturing — his self-importance, his busyness, his careful performance of outward directed demonstrations of piety — and to make him stand at the lip of his own grave and look in. They force him to confront the two dreads he spends all his waking hours avoiding: that he will die, and that he has not lived as he should.
This confrontation is not cruelty. It is the precondition of the only thing the season is actually about. The Rambam is explicit that the shofar itself is a summons to exactly this reckoning: “Wake up, sleepers, from your sleep; search your deeds and return in teshuva” (here) — the same alarm that drags us from our beds into the dark to say Selichot in the first place. And teshuva, as he lays it out (here), is not a mood. It has parts, and the first of them is the bitter, particular recognition of what one has done wrong — the charata, the regret that has teeth. Without that, the confession is mere playacting and the expression of resolve is vacuous. The mussar masters gave this labor a name: cheshbon ha-nefesh, the accounting of the soul. But here’s the thing. You cannot do a forensic exam on a character you refuse to confront. And you cannot confront it while dancing.
The paytanim of Ashkenaz understood this all too well, because they wrote from a place of existential crisis. The Ashkenazi Selichot are not abstractions composed in tranquility; many were forged in the wreckage of the Rhineland — the massacres of 1096, the burnings, the forced conversions, the long litany of travesties perpetrated on Jews, the stuff of “Kiddush Hashem.” The Akeda piyutim fuse the binding of Yitzchak with the memory of Jewish children slaughtered for the Name, until the two become almost the same poem; one of them, the First Crusade dirge אלוהים על דומי לדמי — “God, be not silent at my blood” — makes the fusion unbearable and explicit. Men who had buried their communities did not sit down to write ditties to hora to. They expressed grief and dread that had been given religious shape.
That is the genius the medieval paytanim bequeathed us: they did not deny the terror, they liturgized it. The Selichot combine the shrieks of mothers who sacrificed their babies with man’s inevitable moral failings and give release to the worst of what a soul feels and place those feelings which haunt the dark recesses of our souls before God. They are plaintive, desperate and cathartic all at the same time. Religion, if it will feed our souls completely must make space for people to confront and process even the most horrible feelings and fears they have. G-d, after all, created the world which evokes them. Where else, if not before the source of the terror, shall we bring the fear and the dread?
And the words never travelled alone; they came clothed in a specific musical grammar. The Ashkenazi tradition chants its prayers in a small family of modes, or shteygers — melodic worlds that tell the ear, before the mind has caught up, what kind of hour it is. Selichot and the penitential season have their own sui generis modes and sacred melodies, which when rendered in the mouth of a master cantor become the musical equivalent of boshet ha-panim: shame and distress over what we have allowed ourselves to become. Heschel once said of Kol Nidre, “It’s not the words which matter, but the melody.” Sometimes the music itself is the prayer. When the chazan lingers on Zochalim v’roadim “we are trembling and quaking,” and perhaps chants in the traditional mode used at Ochila la’El, and the congregation answers the pizmon in the same minor coloring, the mode is not decorating the words. It becomes synonymous with the words, carried in sound — the music itself doing the work of contrition that the sentence describes.
The now ubiquitous musical Selichot negate all of that. The swaying and the soaring niggun lift a man out of himself, into the warm anonymity of a crowd, into the pleasant vibration of a shared high — the precise emotional maneuver the Selichot were built to prevent. That feeling is real, and good, and it belongs to other nights: to Simchat Torah for example, or on Yom Haatzmaut, which is the ultimate celebration of Jewish peoplehood a day that almost demands group celebration. It does not belong in Selichot, where the whole point of the devotion in the pre-dawn hour is to lower a man into himself, to make the room small and ultimately the soul large.
Selichot is ultimately about who the individual is, his failings, his fear of his own foibles. Only at the end of the journey, when he proclaims “אתה הבדלת אנוש מראש” that G-d, from the very beginning made man different from all the rest of creation so that he will recognize his Creator, and that G-d never sought his creation’s demise, might the ashamed and stooped-over penitent dare consider what he strives to become. Because only then can he have the temerity to hope for G-d’s help with his self redemption. Selichot is ultimately about us pulling ourselves out of the pit we dug; not about G-d joyously pulling us out.
The musical Selichot cacophonously smuggle in a doctrine — that the bond between a Jew and his Creator is essentially and always warm, mutual, affirming, a romance in which we need only show up and feel it.
But the tradition never taught that. It taught that we stand before a King as well as a Father, that the King is a judge, and that we frequently, genuinely, disappoint Him. The appropriate response to having disappointed the Divine is not a warm glow; it is shame, and grief, and fear, and a sober resolve — the whole dark half of the emotional spectrum our narcissistic age has taught us to medicate away. The prophet Yoel gives the season its truest instruction: “ וְקִרְע֤וּ לְבַבְכֶם֙ וְאַל־בִּגְדֵיכֶ֔ם וְשׁ֖וּבוּ אֶל־יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֵיכֶ֑ם” — “Rend your hearts and not your garments and return to the Lord your God” (Yoel 2:13) — tear something inside, don’t jump around in the mosh pit for the crowd to see. And the Psalmist tells us what the sacrifice of the season actually is: “לֵב־נִשְׁבָּ֥ר וְנִדְכֶּ֑ה אֱ֝לֹהִ֗ים לֹ֣א תִבְזֶֽה” — “a broken and contrite heart, O God, You will not despise” (Tehillim 51:19). A broken heart. Not an elevated one. There is no verse that reads, “the sacrifices of God are a great vibe.”
There is no spiritual growth — none, not personal and not religious — that comes from expressing only the pleasant half of oneself. A person who can perform joy and gratitude but cannot sit inside shame and fear is not spiritually whole; he is merely spiritually managed. The mature religious adult, like the mature adult in any domain, is precisely the one who can bear the full range of his own emotions without collapsing — who can let himself be genuinely disappointed in himself, and not rush to soothe the feeling before it has done its work. The Selichot, in their old and difficult form, are THE place in Jewish life that demands this maturity of us. To trade them for an hour of curated uplift in the “frum mosh pit” is a disservice to our religious personae.
We justify this emotional jettisoning and tell ourselves we are making the Selichot “accessible,” “meaningful,” “moving.” I suspect the truer verb is avoiding. We have found a way to attend Selichot without ever having to meet ourselves there. We sway and dance so that we will not have to sit still with ourselves; we sing so that we will not have to silently reflect on who we have become; we feel together so that we will not have to solitarily confront who we are. We refuse to be spiritually alone with ourselves in prayer, we flee from the true judgment that only we can render onto ourselves. And so we sell ourselves short — running, as we always run, from the real source of redemption. We flee from ourselves.
“שובה אלי כי גאלתיך”- “Return to Me for I have redeemed you” (Isaiah 44:22) tells us the prophet. But not before we redeem ourselves.
