270 CHAPTER NINEglory, by listening to the biblical readings and their poetic adaptations, will
yet see its restoration .The vision of Zechariah, which closes the stanza, sym-
bolized, according to the prophet’s angelic guide, the victory of Yahweh’s
spirit—at the End of Days, as all later interpreters believed.
The first stanza is in all likelihood meant as introductory, for what follows
begins with a straightforward ecphrastic expansion of the biblical description
of the menorah, different from its ultimate models in Greek rhetoric only in
that it is written in rhyming Hebrew .The third stanza, finally, returns to the
gloom of the present, tacitly accepting the worldview of Christian trium-
phalists by contrasting the glory of the Byzantine empire with the debasement
of Israel.^79 This stanza is an alphabetic acrostic, and the manuscript breaks off
after the letternun, four lines before the end of the poem .The last of the
surviving verses may indicate that a change is about to occur, and the poem
will conclude with the punishment of the Christians and the restoration of
Israel .The menorah is thus used in this poem as a symbol of the historical
myth of Israel, a myth of Israel’s past glory, its present degradation, and its
future restoration, which awaits especially those who continue to remember,
to witness performances of, the myth (shom’ei hezyon godlah).
However, the menorah also serves, in thesilluq(i.e., the final extant stanza)
as the earthly counterpart of the heavenly bodies, identified with the angels.
The notion that our liturgy corresponds to an angelic or a planetary liturgy is
a commonplace of thesilluq, for theqedushah(i.e., thesanctus), which forms
the core of thesilluq, has as its main theme that Israel joins with the angels
in their praise of God .The divine chariot, an allusion to the first chapter of
Ezekiel, also inescapably evokes the solar chariot of the synagogue mosaics;
but in this poem, the subordination of all the heavenly bodies, especially the
sun, to God is given repetitive (one might almost say, polemical) emphasis.
The angels do not serve here even as intermediaries; instead they are the
heavenly counterparts of the menorah .When humans conform to God’s will
by lighting the menorah, they imitate God in his creation of the heavenly
lights .In this way, the cosmic imagery of the synagogue is tamed by subordi-
nating it completely, in an ecstatic litany, to God’s will and Israel’s action (but
its past action, for the menorah is no longer lit).
In several extantpiyyutim, the zodiac is pressed into service directly to testify
to Israel’s past and its future restoration.^80 Best known of these is an anonymous
(^79) On this stanza, see Yahalom,Poetry and Society, pp .73–75.
(^80) Qerovotfor the first day of Passover and the eighth day of Tabernacles, which contain prayers
for dew and rain, respectively, conventionally mentioned the signs of the zodiac (equated with
the twelve tribes of Israel and the months) .But this practice is first attested in the work of R.
Elazar Qiliri (fl .c .600), and its subsequent transformation into a topos (with, naturally, less and
less connection to the realia of the synagogue) may have been due to his influence; see E.
Fleischer, “Lekadmoniot Piyyutei Hatal (Vehageshem): Kerovah Kedam-Yannait Ligevurot
Hatal,”Kobez al Yad8 (1975): 91–139, especially 107.