What is special about the moment when the speaker stops talking about himself and mentions "Your servants", "the merit of the fathers" and "Your congregation", and what does that teach about the relation between personal repentance and national identity?

Performed by Meir Banai, of blessed memory.

This is one of the decisive moments in the piyut, because here the prayer changes size.

Up to that point the speaker is occupied mainly with himself: with his sins, the wilfulness of his heart, his desires, his transgressions, his distress and his request to be saved. Even when he turns to the Holy One, the starting point is “I”.

But in the final stanza something opens.

Suddenly there appear:

“Your servants”

“the merit of the fathers”

“Your congregation”

“Jacob”

That is, the speaker stops being only a single person standing before the Holy One, and discovers that he is part of a story larger than himself.

And here lies a very deep idea about repentance.

One might think that repentance is an entirely private matter: a person sinned, a person regrets, a person asks forgiveness.

But the piyut offers a different reading: personal repentance reaches its peak precisely when a person stops seeing himself as an isolated unit.

He says, in the literary sense:

I am not only “I”.

I am one of “Your servants”.

I am a son of the fathers.

I am part of “Your congregation”.

I belong to Jacob and to the story of the people of Israel.

This changes the entire stance of the worshipper.

At the beginning of the piyut he stands almost alone before the book of his life.

At the end he stands inside a people.

And this transition is especially important because of what preceded it.

The man has already admitted that he has little to be proud of. He asked what he could say and how he could justify himself. He acknowledged his fragility.

And then a hard question arises:

If I do not have sufficient merits of my own, what can I stand on?

And the answer of the final stanza is: perhaps you are not standing on your own strength alone.

You stand inside a covenant of generations.

This is not an erasure of personal responsibility. On the contrary.

The piyut does not say: the fathers were righteous, therefore what I did does not matter.

It has already forced the man to pass through confession and the acknowledgment of guilt.

Only after the man has taken responsibility does he allow himself to mention the fathers and the congregation.

And that is an enormous difference.

If a person uses the merit of the fathers in order to escape his responsibility, that is evasion.

But if he first truly admits his deeds, and then says: despite what I am, I am still part of a story holier and longer than myself, that is already hope.

So one can see here two forces working together:

• Personal repentance says: I am responsible for my deeds.
• National identity says: I am not starting from zero.

I carry a past with me.

I carry memory.

I carry belonging.

I also carry responsibility for what comes next.

And there is another very beautiful point here.

The word “Your congregation” does not only bring the community into the prayer. It changes the relationship between the speaker and the Holy One.

As long as the speaker says “I”, he may fear that his bond with the Holy One depends entirely on his moral condition at this moment.

But when he says “Your congregation”, he invokes a wider bond.

It is not only I who turn to You.

We are Yours.

That is already a language of belonging.

And here repentance takes on a national dimension.

The sin may have happened in the individual, but the return takes place within the people.

There is something almost paradoxical in this:

At the beginning of the piyut the man remembers what separates him from the Holy One.

At the end he remembers what connects him.

And this also explains why “the merit of the fathers” appears.

On the literary level, the memory of sin at the start of the poem receives, at the end, a counter answer in the form of the memory of the fathers.

At the beginning:

The man remembers his guilt.

At the end:

He asks the Holy One to remember his fathers.

Two memories stand facing each other.

One memory weighs down.

One memory holds up.

And that is a beautiful move.

The man is saying, in effect:

If You look only at what I did, I do not have much to say.

But if You also look at the story I belong to, at the generations before me and at the congregation I am part of, perhaps I can be seen not only as a lone sinner but as part of a people that tries again and again to return.

And here, in my view, comes the strongest idea:

In this piyut, repentance is not only a person’s return to the Holy One. It is also a person’s return to his own belonging.

As long as he is imprisoned inside his guilt, he is alone.

When he reaches “Your servants” and “Your congregation”, he is part of something again.

And therefore the final stanza in particular can be read as the peak of the process.

The speaker begins with a question:

What have I done?

And ends with an entirely different question:

To whom do I belong?

And the answer to the second question does not erase the first, but it gives it a horizon.

And this is perhaps what the piyut teaches about the relation between personal repentance and national identity:

True repentance is not only the repair of a private past.

It is also the renewal of the bond to the chain.

The man says:

I am responsible for what I did, but I am not only the sum of my failures.

I am also a son of a tradition.

Part of a congregation.

A link in a story.

And from here is born the possibility of rising.

It is no accident that the piyut, which began with a man on his bed, ends with a community rising at midnight.

This is a literary reading, but it sits well on the structure of the poem:

At the beginning one man lies down and remembers his sins. At the end an entire people rises and prays.

And that is an enormous transition - from private guilt to shared identity, and from loneliness to belonging.

More articles in the series on the piyut “Bezochri al Mishkavi”:

• Why did Rabbi Yehuda ibn Bal’am choose to return again and again precisely to “Let us fall into the hand of the Lord, for His mercies are great”?
• How many allusions to the language of the Bible are hidden inside the piyut, and what changes in their meaning when the poet weaves them into a single prayer?
• Is the foe the speaker asks to be saved from necessarily an external enemy, or is the great enemy also inside the person himself?