Kedushta’ot for the Weekly Torah Portion

Yannai, who lived in sixth-century CE Palestine, may have been the first paytan to sign his name in acrostic form and to use rhyme. Yannai was prolific, producing complex poetic compositions for every Sabbath in the lectionary cycle, in addition to ones for other holy days. The Yannaian kedushta, recited as part of the morning Tefillah on Sabbaths and festivals, is a nine-part cycle of poems dealing with the themes of the week’s (or festival’s) Torah reading. The first two poems relate the Torah reading to the first two blessings of the Tefillah, and the third relates to the first verse of the haftarah, the weekly reading from the Prophets. The final poems in the series lead, with increasing speed and intensity, into the recitation of the Kedushah (see “Rabbinic Kedushah”). Yannai turned the fixed liturgy into a participatory event in the synagogue, uniting the heroes of the biblical past with the congregants before him. In his corpus of poetry, the increasing significance and popularity of the angelic praise from Isaiah 6:3 is evident.

Because Yannai’s poems were composed for the triennial Torah-reading cycle used in the land of Israel, they fell into disuse in medieval Europe, which followed the annual Torah-reading cycle of Babylonia. Only the kedushta to Exodus 12:29, “‘Oni pitrei raḥamatayim” (The Father’s Firstborn Vigor), was preserved in the Ashkenazic tradition, where it was recited on the Sabbath before Passover; its seventh poem was also included in the Ashkenazic Haggadah for the first night of Passover. Yannai’s other works were recovered from the Cairo Geniza, including his kedushta to Genesis 16:1, “’Em ka-yonah” (A Mother like a Dove), which dwells on the matriarch Sarah’s experience with barrenness and her enduring commitment to God. The final two poems of this piece are, unfortunately, missing. For a sense of how this composition would end, the final poems from another kedushta, to Genesis 30:22 (on the matriarch Rachel), are included.