The Text of the Piyyut
I thank the God who probes the heart.
Pay heed, pay heed, to your own soul:
As bright as is the sun’s warm glow,
Hewn from God’s throne
To redeem us from wrath’s flame
Awake! Awake! For every night
And there accounts for her deeds that day
[If He finds her filthy and disheveled,
Like a maidservant disgraced
If He finds her restored and renewed,
Like a bride adorned for her wedding,
If He finds her fair and fetching,
Like a bride dressed for her wedding,
He’ll be her faithful guardian
No one need die in his sin,
Don’t let her be a homeless waif,
He who cannot keep her alive,
May we see this very year God
And say, our grief replaced by cheer,
When stars sing in the morning.
Jacinth, agate, and crystal,
Seven times brighter than the morning!
In this wilderness she roams,
And light our way before morning.
Your soul ascends to a place on high
To the Maker of night and of morning.
Covered in iniquity and sin,
It will be in the morning.
Clothed in merit and dignity,
It will be in the morning.
Garbed in tallit and t’fillin,
It will be in the morning.]
Thus restoring her to you.
For after night comes morning.
Once so innocent and chaste.
What light will he have in the morning?
Once His graciousness appear
You shall hear my voice in the morning?[3]
The Author
The piyyut Odeh La-El, which takes the form of an acrostic featuring the name Shemayahu, is generally attributed to Rabbi Shemayah Kosson. Little is known about him, but it is believed that he was among the Spanish exiles of 1492 who settled in North Africa, probably in Morocco. A number of his kinot (dirges) for Tishah B’av, such as Yom Mei-orei Ḥoshekh B’geirush Castilia, appear in Moroccan manuscripts and compilations.[4] Some claim that the poem’s author lived in the mid- to late-sixteenth century in the Galilee, at the time of the spread of Kabbalah, and that he was a disciple of Rabbi Moshe Cordovero (1522–1570).[5]
The Opening Line: The Soul Joins the Song of the Morning Stars
The opening line of this poem, “I thank the God who probes the heart / When stars sing in the morning” (which serves as the refrain when the piyyut is sung), weaves together three biblical verses:[6]
Genesis 29:35: “She [Leah] conceived again and bore a son, and declared, ‘This time I will thank (odeh) the Eternal. Therefore, she named him Yehudah. And then she stopped bearing.”[7]
Jeremiah 17:10: “I, the Eternal, probe the heart, search the mind—to repay every man according to his ways, with the proper fruit of his deeds.”
Job 38:7: “When the morning stars sang together and all the divine beings shouted for joy.”
The use of the verse from Genesis allows the poet subtly to suggest the words of gratitude to God with which a Jewish religious individual opens each new day, modeh ani. The very name “Yehudah” signifies praise and gratitude, and it is ultimately this name that comes to identify the Jewish people. Both the prayer Modeh Ani and the piyyut Odeh La-El remind us that gratitude is at the essence of Jewishness.
After being examined by God, “who probes the heart,” and being given a new opportunity at life, the worshiper joins the cosmic song of praise of the morning stars.
The First Stanza: Pay Heed to Your Own Soul
Upon awakening, one is urged to immediately “pay heed to your own soul.” The soul adorns each person and shines just like the precious stones on the third row of the High Priest’s breastplate, “jacinth, agate, and crystal” (Exodus 28:19). The soul’s light is as bright as the sun’s when it reaches its zenith, “seven times brighter” than it is at the day’s break. The poet here echoes Isaiah’s vision of redemption, when “the light of the moon shall become like the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall become sevenfold, like the light of the seven days, when the Eternal binds up His people’s wounds and heals the injuries they have suffered” (30:26).
According to the Talmud, the moon was equal to the sun in size and luminosity when the world was first created, but God subsequently diminished the moon.[8] In the Zohar, the moon symbolizes the Shekhinah, diminished and without a light of her own, and condemned to wander in exile.[9] The Zohar finds the promise that the moon will be restored to its original size and luminosity in the verse from Isaiah (“the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun”).[10] By quoting this verse, the poet affirms that just as was the case with the moon and the Shekhinah, the soul too will eventually end its exile and will be restored to its pristine state.
The Second Stanza: The Soul’s Descent into This World
This stanza describes how the soul, though cut from the material of God’s throne, roams the earth (in a body, presumably), where her guiding light “redeem[s] us from wrath’s flame.”[11] The Zohar develops this concept and explains why the soul must descend from the divine realm to join the body in this world, a desolate wilderness:[12]
Said Rabbi Yaakov bar Idi: All soul-breaths of the righteous have been carved from the bedrock of the Throne of Glory to guide the body like a father guiding his son. For without the soul the body cannot conduct itself and would not be aware of the Will, could not actualize the Will of the Creator. As Rabbi Abbahu has said: “The soul-breath directs and trains the human being and initiates him into every straight path.”[13]
If a person protects oneself from sin, one’s soul will remain safe from the fires of hell, and the person will allow it to shine forth its light into the world.
The Third Stanza: The Soul Ascends Each Night To Be Judged
While the movement of the soul in the previous stanza is downward, traveling from its divine source to the human body it inhabits, here it is depicted as moving back up, nightly, toward its source: “Your soul ascends to a place on high.” This concept, which the poet may have known from the Modeh Ani prayer, has its origins elsewhere and is already found in an ancient collection of midrashim and sermons based on the Book of Genesis. The text there reads as follows:
Rabbi Bisni, Rabbi Aḥa, and Rabbi Yoḥanan said in the name of Rabbi Meir: The soul fills the entire body and, when a person sleeps, it ascends and draws down life from above.[14]
This idea is also part of a later collection of midrashim based on the Book of Deuteronomy, where it is “proven” with reference to biblical verses from Job and Isaiah:
All idolaters anger Him and when they sleep all souls go up to Him, as it says, “in His hand is every living soul” (Job 12:10), and in the morning He returns to each one his soul, as it says, “who gave soul-breath to the people upon it” (Isaiah 42:5).[15]
The poet develops the idea that every night the “soul ascends to a place on high” by introducing the concept of nightly judgment found in the Zohar, where the text explains that, when it reaches the Upper World, the soul is judged:
Come and see: Every night, when a person climbs into bed, his soul leaves him to be judged before the King’s Court of Justice. If deserving to endure, she is restored to this world.[16]
The Fourth Stanza: The Soul’s Demeanor
Three different versions for this stanza appear in various printed editions of the piyyut, each depicting the soul in a different state:
The soul that has succumbed to sin during the day appears before God “filthy and disheveled” and is returned in the morning in a state of shame. Rabbi Moshe ibn Makhir, author of Seder Ha-yom (where Modeh Ani first appears), uses similar language: “For the soul that is not worthy and that is filthy and contaminated by evil deeds and dressed in dirty clothes is vulnerable to the accusers that stand in her way and prevent her from ascending.”[17]
After a day filled with good deeds, the soul presents itself before God “clothed in merit and dignity,” and it returns to the worshiper’s body in the morning “restored and renewed,” radiant as a bride.
After a day filled with good deeds, the soul presents itself before God, who sees its merit and returns it to the worshiper bedecked as a bride ready to meet her groom. The image of a bride garbed in male religious symbols, tallit and t’fillin, is striking, to say the least. Upon its return, the female soul rejoins the body—presumable male—of the worshiper who is also wearing tallit and t’fillin, and they merge together to stand before God in morning prayer.
Determining which is the original version has been a matter of debate.[18] Some books, relying on the tradition that the additional soul (n’shamah y’teirah) that a person acquires on Shabbat is deemed to be restorative and regenerative, indicate that the first version is to be recited on weekdays while the second is for Shabbat.
Personally, I think that the first version, featuring the notion that the soul ascends polluted by sin and is then restored to purity, is more likely to be the poet’s original one. The words in the next stanza—“He’ll be her faithful guardian” and “no one need die in his sin”—indicate that it is the soul contaminated by sin that appears before God, and that God lovingly preserves and restores, thus saving the person from harsh judgement.
The Fifth Stanza: The Soul’s Return to The Body
This stanza articulates the notion that it is reasonable for a person to trust in a favorable judgment and the return of one’s soul in the morning, despite what one knows of one’s own sins: “He [God] will be her [the soul’s] faithful guardian / Thus restoring her to you.” The word yaḥzirenah (“will return/restore it”) evokes the words she-heḥezarta bi nishmati (“You have restored my soul to me”) that appear in the Modeh Ani, as well as the words u-l’haḥazirah bi and ha-maḥazir n’shamot (both phrases referencing God’s ability to restore the soul to an individual’s otherwise lifeless body) that we know from the Elohai Neshamah prayer.
This idea too has a midrashic background. Consider, for example, this passage from the Tanna D’vei Eliyahu, an old collection of homiletical texts:
As he turns back his soul in the evening, a person must praise, bless, exalt, enhance, and hallow the name of the Blessed One who spoke and the world came into being, who entrusted it to him and who will return it to him in the morning, as it says, “Into Your hand I entrust my spirit; You redeem me, Eternal One, faithful God” (Psalm 31:6).[19]
To make the point just that much stronger, the poet then quotes the end of a strongly monitory biblical verse: “When Akhan son of Zeraḥ violated the proscription, anger struck the whole community of Israel; he was not the only one who perished for that sin.”[20] And in order to further strengthen his readers’ confidence, the poet distorts the original meaning of the verse so that it reads as though it appears to mean just the opposite of what it actually does means in its original setting—namely, that “no one need die for one’s sin.” And, with that, a new day begins, as new as one of the days of creation: “And there was evening, and there was morning” (Genesis 1:5, 8, 13, 19, 23, 31).
The Sixth Stanza: The Worshiper’s Responsibility to Protect the Soul
The early kabbalists, perhaps noticing that different aspects of the soul appear to be present or operative at different times of a person’s life, determined that the soul actually does consist of different parts, and so the kabbalists assigned names to them as well. In this stanza, the poet hints obliquely at this aspect of kabbalistic psychology. He focuses his attention on the lower psychic level, the nefesh, and describes it as the closest to the corporeal and, as the most susceptible to human desire, the most vulnerable to sin. The poet expresses this vulnerability by characterizing the soul as “a homeless waif,” poor (aniyah), perfect (tammah), and pure (n’kiyah).[21]
No longer exhibiting the optimism of the previous stanza, here the poet ascribes to all people the responsibility of protecting their souls (“keep[ing] her alive”) by exposing them to the life-giving influence of Torah study and the pursuit of good deeds, so that they may see the light of day and ensure their own continued existence.
Seventh Stanza: You Will Hear My Voice
Some communities use a version of Odeh La-El that includes five additional stanzas spelling “Kosson,” the poet’s last name, in acrostic.[22] Most versions of this piyyut, however (including the one presented here), incorporate only the last of those stanzas.[23]
The poet here touches on two verses from the Book of Psalms: “One thing I ask of the Eternal, only that do I seek: to live in the house of the Eternal all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Eternal (la-ḥazot b’no∙am Adonai), to frequent His temple” (27:4) and “Hear my voice, O Eternal, in the morning; for in the morning I plead before You and wait” (5:4). However, the poet changes the tense of the latter verse from the past (as found in the psalm) to the future (as used in the piyyut), to make it more of a declaration or faith than an ordinary petition that God do something, writing “You shall hear my voice at daybreak.”
No longer focused exclusively on the soul, the concluding lines of the piyyut are a plea to behold God’s beauty, followed by the affirmation that the worshiper’s individual voice will be heard by God each morning. Indeed, “You shall hear my voice” complements the prayer recited by the faithful thrice daily in the Amidah that begins with the words sh’ma koleinu, “Hear our voice.”
The piyyut closes with a statement of affirmation and hope and, at the end of the stanza, repeats yet again the word that has resonated throughout the poem: “morning.” The poet’s ultimate meaning thus becomes clear: faithful worshipers, their souls restored to them by God, are to rise from their beds ready to recite the Modeh Ani and thus begin a new day in a context of gratitude, prayer, and devotional acknowledgement of life as a gift from God.
Devotional Uses of the Piyyut
Odeh La-El spread widely and was adopted by Jewish communities both in the East and in the West. At least ten different melodies exist for this piyyut, each representative of a different community in which it is sung.[24]
In the Middle Eastern Jewish communities, it appears among the sixty-four piyyutim that constitute the collection of bakkashot.[25] This practice of reciting bakkashot (“petitions”) goes back to the sixteenth-century kabbalists of the Galilee—if not all the way back to Spain—and has been faithfully maintained by some communities, primarily by Jews originally from Aleppo. Until this day, particularly in Jerusalem, worshipers rise in the dark, in the very early hours of Shabbat morning, to chant these devotional bakkashot in the style of Middle Eastern melody-types known as maqam. The bakkashot thus span many generations, from eleventh-century Spain to sixteenth-century Galilee to twenty-first-century Israel.
North African communities, as well as some hasidic communities, include Odeh La-El among the songs sung on Shabbat evening at home,[26] while in some Ashkenazic prayerbooks the poem appears among several other piyyutim that are intended for recitation as a way of preparing to recite the morning prayer service.[27] In the eighteenth-century prayerbook of Jacob Emden, called the Beit Yaakov, the poem is introduced with the following words: “The pious person should make it a habit to recite this piyyut every morning, for its author is among the great [poets] of the Sephardim).”[28]
Finally, it is the custom in some hasidic communities for the Odeh La-el to be sung before Shabbat morning prayers on the weeks during which the first six Torah portions of the Book of Exodus are read.[29] These Shabbatot, known as the weeks of shovavim (after the first letters of the names of their Torah portions), are deemed in Jewish mysticism to be a propitious time for repentance, which requires extra acts of penitence, special prayers, and charity.
Conclusion
Like most piyyutim, Odeh La-El was written in the first-person singular voice. This mode of writing allows the worshiper to speak as an individual and thus makes it distinct as a kind of private expression amidst the multitude of fixed prayers, almost all of which are all communal and in the plural voice.
Whether the author of Odeh La-El actually knew the prayer Modeh Ani remains undetermined, but both Modeh Ani and Odeh La-El provide an opportunity for the worshiper to turn to God as an individual before joining the community to recite the morning prayers. Therefore, even if Shemayah Kosson didn’t actually know the words of the Modeh Ani, he surely understood its message—and accepted that message as a core concept of his Jewish worldview.
Indeed, Odeh La-El unpacks the main theme of the one-line Modeh Ani and provides a window into the great and miraculous journey of the soul to its divine source each night while the worshiper, unaware, sleeps.[30] The routine act of awakening and rising from one’s bed is endowed with deep, satisfying meaning and it is re-imagined so as to provide the context for the individual awakening mindfully to take note of the restoration of the soul, which is at the core of resuming wakeful life after sleep. The day opens with gratitude, a Jewish act in its very essence. The piyyut affirms that today isn’t just another day; rather, each day is like the first day of creation, each daily encounter between body and soul is like the encounter of groom and bride under the wedding canopy, and each person can join the cosmic song of the morning stars—both the first day of creation and the first day of the worshiper’s life, thus a new beginning and a new opportunity.
