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On festivals, before Kohanim bless the congregation, Ashkenazim insert an alternative nusach for the “avodah” beracha of the amida prayer:

ותערב לפניך עתירתנו כעולה וכקרבן. אנא, רחום, ברחמיך הרבים השב שכינתך לציון עירך, וסדר העבודה לירושלים. ותחזינה עינינו בשובך לציון ברחמים, ושם נעבדך ביראה כימי עולם וכשנים קדמוניות. ברוך אתה ה’ שאותך לבדך ביראה נעבוד.

May our petition be pleasing before you as a sacrificial offering.¹ Please, the Merciful, in your great mercy, return your presence to Zion your city, and the temple service to Jerusalem. And may our eyes see your return to Zion with mercy, and there we shall serve you in awe as in ancient times and earlier years. Blessed be you, Lord, for you alone will we serve in awe.²

As well as being a beautiful prayer and, it seems, having an interesting history,³ I was alerted a few days ago to a variation in the vowels of the first word.⁴ We find:

וְתֵעָרֵב – v^etēʿārēv

in Artscroll

וְתֶעֱרַב – v^eteʿĕrav

in “Adler”, “Birnbaum”, Hebrew Publishing Co. 1928, Koren, Meforash, Routledge, Shilo, “Singer”

The meaning is apparrently unaffected by the change of vowels. I have become used to the Artscroll version, and yet I prefer the alternative, and not just because it is much more popular. Rather, here’s why…

The root ערב means a number of probably related things: mixing, swarms of insects, taking a pledge, evening, crow, being sweet and pleasing. This meaning of being pleasant takes the adjectival form עָרֵב⁵.

This vowel pattern of qamats then tsere⁶ is common for stative verbs in Biblical Hebrew. As opposed to fientive verbs (such as הָלַך, “went”), these describe a state of being for their subject, and include among them כָּבֵד (heavy), שָׂמֵחַ (joyous), יָכֹל (able), קָטֹן (small), חָכַם (wise), and many more. In Modern Hebrew these would rarely be used as verbs, but only as adjectives, much as in English, used with the prefix “to be”: הָיִיתָ כָּבֵד, not כָּבַדְתָּ. Contrastingly, in Biblical Hebrew, we have expressions like יִשְׂמַח⁷, “he will be joyous”; קָטֹנְתִּי⁸, “I was small”; וְעָרְבָה⁹, “it will be pleasant”.

When a fientive, dynamic verb is used to describe a state, it needs to be put into a passive form. For instance, שָׁמַר means to guard or observe, but “to be on guard”, statically, one forms the passive: נִשְׁמַר¹⁰. We are thus warned to be alert with passive forms הִזָּהֵר¹¹ and הִשָּׁמֵר¹².

As such, I had thought that stative verbs should not need to be passivised, as Artscroll has done with וְתֵעָרֵב (where they got it from, I don’t know). Nonetheless we have a common enough case where they do: מָלֵא, “full” is regularly found in the passive נפעל form. While we have stative uses like “the earth is full (מָלְאָה) of Thy creatures”¹³, we very often see the likes of יִמָּלֵא which we sing on festive dates after a meal.¹⁴

But despite the fact that there may be exceptions, passivisation usually is not used with stative verbs (in qal at least), and is not needed to express “May our petition be pleasing”. Therefore I will suggest that וְתֶעֱרַב is more acceptable, and וְתֵעָרֵב even an error. It is a pity Artscroll has such a monopoly over the English-speaking Jewish world, so that when it errs (even against the majority), all err with it.

So when we get there this Thursday and Friday, I wish that our petitions be pleasing before the Almighty, and that one day Artscroll might be brought into line (at least on this one). Chag sameach!

Notes:

1. Pleasing like a sacrificial offering? As pleasing as a sacrificial offering? Pleasing as if it were a sacrificial offering? The ambiguity seems intentional and enhances the poetic effect. [↩]
2. Some authorities forbid changing the concluding blessing to this variant, and transpose the line “ותחזנה עינינו…” with “ושם נעבדך…” before concluding with “המחזיר שכינתו לציון”. This is the custom of nusach Ashkenaz in Israel (as instructed in the Koren siddur) and was supported by Soloveitchik (or so I hear). While there is strong precedent to declaring earlier customs as faulted, I think that this adjustment loses much of the beauty of the varied blessing; it allows this vanishing prayer tradition to be lost even further (see the next footnote); and using the alternative blessing was clearly permitted by numerous generations before, so why suddenly become stubborn and correct history? Why, when the Ashkenazi tradition already seems too sterile and fixed, should we make it even more rigid? [↩]
3. Supposedly (read: hearsay), the Ashkenazim carried this portion from the nusach of the land of Israel which was rapidly replaced in the spread of Rav Amram Gaon’s siddur, utilising a Babylonian nusach. Consequently, “רצה ה’ אלקינו בעמך ישראל ובתפילתם” (“Have desire, Lord God, in your people Israel and in their prayers, and return service to your holy sanctuary and the people of Israel and their prayers accept with love, with desire, and may the service of Israel forever be desired… Blessed be you, Lord, who returns the service to Israel.”) spread throughout all versions of the prayer service, and ותערב is only resurrected for holidays and by Ashkenazim. [↩]
4. The second word also varies. Some have לפניך (before you) and some have עליך (upon you). In the latter camp lie Artscroll, Singer and Adler alone among those listed. The difference in meaning is again negligible. [↩]
5. Found as an adjective in Prov. 20:17, Songs. 2:14 [↩]
6. Not to be confused with Aramaic participles of a similar form, such as כָּתֵב, the equivalent of Hebrew כּוֹתֵב, following a pattern wherein Hebrew holam (אוֹ) becomes qamats (אָ) in Aramaic. [↩]
7. e.g. Eccl. 3:22 [↩]
8. Gen. 32:11 [↩]
9. Mal. 3:4 [↩]
10. e.g. 2 Sam. 20:10 [↩]
11. Eccl. 12:12 [↩]
12. e.g. Deut. 12:30 [↩]
13. Ps. 104:24 [↩]
14. Although I quite often hear this word in “אָז יִמָּלֵא שְׂחוֹק פִּינוּ” (Ps. 126:2) of “shir hama’alot” being read יְמַלֵּא which means “he will fill” rather than “it will be filled”. Both readings would be valid grammatically (the former having God as the subject of a ditransitive verb, and the latter having “our mouths” as the subject of a passivised ditransitive, in both cases “laughter” being the other object), but our Masoretic tradition is not indicative of God doing the filling. Curiously, we find a remarkably similar passage in Job: עַד יְמַלֵּה שְׂחוֹק פִּיךָ, וּשְׂפָתֶיךָ תְרוּעָה (8:21), but with precisely that active פיעל form and God as the subject. It could equally well have been passive like that in Psalms; the Douay-Rheims Bible and Bible in Basic English translate it as if it were so. Going back briefly to the verse in Psalms: if the subject of the verb is פִּינוּ, “our mouths” (or possibly “our mouth”), shouldn’t we expect a plural verb, i.e. “אָז יִמָּלְאוּ שְׂחוֹק פִּינוּ”? Or maybe pointing it as an active verb יְמַלֵּא would be more accurate to the consonantal text? [↩]