Shockeling During Davening
According to the holy Baal Shem Tov all good Jews shockel their bodies when enthusiastically they daven,
thus imitating how unshamefully they shockel shmockels
like hallah that their kallah places in a heated oven.
Those people laughing at them are like those who laugh
at someone who gesticulates quite wildly while
he drowns. Just as we wouldn’t try to choreograph
his movements, we should never scorn a prayer’s style, or words—unlike my own not like Caesar’s wife above suspicion—such as suggestions of words’ roots, like one once suggested for daven, that Hillel Halkin suggested may well be davav, “gliding,” which, although contested, I believe has not been bested.
Song 7:10 states:
וְחִכֵּ֕ךְ כְּיֵ֥ין הַטּ֛וֹב הוֹלֵ֥ךְ לְדוֹדִ֖י לְמֵישָׁרִ֑ים דּוֹבֵ֖ב שִׂפְתֵ֥י יְשֵׁנִֽים׃
And your mouth like choicest wine. “Let it flow to my beloved as new wine, dovev.
gliding over, the lips of sleepers.”
Rashi explains:
“דּוֹבֵב” [means] causing to move, fromier in O.F. and its root, is an expression of speech.
Rashi’s Old French translation of dovev as “fromier” serendipitously links it to the Yiddish word “frum, which means “religious.”
On 12/1/25 Hillel Halkin, Philologos, recalled that he had suggested that davav might be the root of the word for Jewish prayer in Tikvah.org/mosaic, December 2025, “The Confessions of Philologos: The author of the great Jewish language column examines his alter ego:
You can’t track down every source, double- and triple-check the ones you’ve found, rule out the possibility of contradictory sources, wait to get the opinion of someone more knowledgeable than yourself. You have to make snap judgments. When, for instance, a Forward reader wanted to know the provenance of the Yiddish word davenen, to pray, a question that had stumped decades of etymologists and elicited some improbable guesses, Philologos read up on their theories, thought for a while, wrote (the first to do so, as far as I could tell) that the word must come from the Hebrew verb davav, to mouth words silently, and went on to his next column. For what it’s worth, I think he was probably right, but that isn’t the point. The point is that he felt he could get away with it. I myself would never have dared try.
Regarding the origins of the word daven, Max Weinreich writes in “Yiddish, Knaanic, Slavic: The Basic Relationships” (For Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, compiled by Morris Halle, Horace G. Lunt, Hugh McLean, Cornelius H. Van Schooneveld, The Hague, 1956), that the word is first attested in the writings of Rivke Tiktiner, a preacher and teacher for women, who was the first woman author of a Yiddish book, the moral homiletic Meineket Rivkah (Meinekes Rivke, Rebekah’s Nurse, 1609). Tiktin is about 15 miles southeast of Bialystok. Goldziher suggested in 1865 that daven has a Persian origin, and that Yiddish in the east inherited it from Persia.
The first verse of this poem was inspired by Gen. 39:6, where Rashi interprets “bread” as a euphemistic metaphor:
ו וַיַּעֲזֹב כָּל-אֲשֶׁר-לוֹ, בְּיַד-יוֹסֵף, וְלֹא-יָדַע אִתּוֹ מְאוּמָה, כִּי אִם-הַלֶּחֶם אֲשֶׁר-הוּא אוֹכֵל; וַיְהִי יוֹסֵף, יְפֵה-תֹאַר וִיפֵה מַרְאֶה. 6 And he left all that he had in Joseph’s hand; and, having him, he knew not aught save the bread which he did eat. And Joseph was of beautiful form, and fair to look upon.