Piyut פיוט

The order of prayer is fixed, its words are counted—and yet every year the community wants to say something of its own in them. Hence the piyut: a poem set into a blessing or between blessings, for a festival, a fast, a particular Sabbath.

The Land of Israel. The first paytanim—Yose ben Yose, Yannai, Elazar haKalir—wrote in a hard language full of allusions to midrash: the piyut assumed a listener who caught the reference at half a word. Much of it reached us only because it lay in the geniza.

Spain. There the piyut met Arabic poetry and took from it metre and exact rhyme, while the language became clear, almost biblical. Solomon ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevi, Moses and Abraham ibn Ezra—their verses are still sung in synagogues, and often those who sing them do not know whose they are.

The quarrel. Whether the blessings of the Shema may be interrupted by a piyut is an old and living question: the Shulchan Aruch brings both opinions, and the Rema defends the custom of the places that do it. Rambam objected to something else: to the freedom with which the paytanim describe God—to speak of Him in words of praise we do not understand he held to be not reverence but carelessness. The argument is worth knowing: it is about where beauty ends and untruth begins.