Member in good, er, sitting, "I hate Tachanun" club
Note: This is round three. See round two (with a link to round one) here.
About the only thing good that I can say about the Tachanun prayer is that at least we recite it while seated. (Other folks may have different minhagim/customs).
Mark/PT had his say on the subject a while back, and what he had to say wasn't pretty, either.
That fellow from Frum Satire reminded me of the whole sorry story when he recently posted about the parts of the service that he skips. (Parental Guidance Warning: Frum Satire is not a family-oriented blog, and some of the comments deal with adult subject matter.)
I have two major problems with Tachanun. First of all, how much breast-beating over my sins and those of my ancestors do I really want to do every darned weekday? I say Tachanun either at Shacharit (morning service) or at Mincha (afternoon service)--I flatly refused to say it more than once a day. Second of all, the Tachanun for Shacharit on Mondays and Thursdays--the weekdays on which there's a public Torah-reading--is seven pages long! I just said eleven pages worth of Amidah, and now I gotta top it off with seven thoroughly-unpleasant pages more??! Okay, obviously the fact that I'm a slow Hebrew reader with a slight case of ADD doesn't help--I have enough trouble both reading and focusing as it is. But the subject matter and the amount of text to be covered certainly don't help. On Mondays and Thursdays, I read only the first section of Tachanun, then skip directly to "nipla na," and its accompanying psalm, followed directly by "Shomer Yisrael." That's as much of Tachanun as I ever say, and that's as much as I'm ever going to say. Genig, shoin--enough, already!
Hey, Mark, wait a minute, I just took another look at that post: You mean some people actually say the Vidui confessional every weekday??! Before they say Tachanun? Are we Heebs gluttons for punishment?
posted by Shira Salamone at 12:38 PM
6 Comments:
Guilt is a very Jewish thing
You vant I should answer, "Guilty as charged?" :)
I used to love tachanun. Now I sleep during tachanun. This was after I started teaching "introduction to liturgy" and wrote in my shiur notes "tachanun is not halachically required".
Oops :).
"tachanun is not halachically required"
RivkaYael, why am I not surprised?
I'm curious as to what it was that you used to find so lovable about Tachanun.
I think it was because I started saying tachanun during the war in Lebanon. Given that I was in a shul where many kids from the affiliated day school volunteered in the IDF (and some of them died in the war)--and I had classmates at YU who also volunteered, I was just in a very breast-beating state of mind. The words are very beautiful and expressive (which I would be better able to appreciate if I were awake...).
I suppose that having friends serving in a wartime army could have that effect.
As for you not being awake, I suppose that's a natural consequence of getting up before the crack of dawn to davven in a shul in which you won't get the fish-eyed stare for wearing a tallit.
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