Crucifixus / Umă‘ănish

The Crucifixus occupies the central position among the nine movements of the Credo of Bach’s Mass in B minor, reflecting the central importance of the Crucifixion in Christian belief. It is the most intensely emotional moment in Bach’s Credo, expressing the grief felt by the Christian over Christ’s suffering and death on the cross. Bach adapted it from the opening chorus of his Cantata 12, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, which is written in the style of a traditional seventeenth century Baroque lament. For the Crucifixus, Bach changed the setting to four-part chorus with flutes, strings and continuo, and changed the key from F minor to E minor, a key that is traditionally associated in Baroque music with the Passion, and which appears nowhere else in the B minor Mass. He animated the mournful ground base in the continuo, increased the complexity and drama of the slow sarabande rhythm, and intensified the chromaticism of the music. In the word crucifixus (“he was crucified”) Bach incorporated the “sigh motive,” the slurred falling second interval, which we heard in the opening movement of the Kyrie. As the movement concludes, the instruments drop out and the voices soften to piano, descending to the lowest registers to repeat the words passus et sepultus est (“he suffered and was buried”); a magical augmented sixth chord, like the one Bach used in the Et incarnatus est to highlight the Virgin Birth, brings about a modulation to G major, in preparation for the D major of the Et resurrexit.

Here is the text of the Crucifixus:

Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato, passus et sepultus est. (He was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate, suffered and was buried.)

To find a Jewish equivalent of the Crucifixus was Sara Levy’s greatest challenge as she struggled to fit her Jewish Credo into Bach’s sublime music. The music of the Crucifixus is so fitting to the events of Christ’s Passion, that it is hard to imagine how it would be possible to create a Jewish equivalent. The lifting up onto the the Cross, the grief, and the expectation of salvation can be heard throughout; and the final measures reproduce the silence and peacefulness of the tomb where Christ’s body is laid to rest.  But Sara may have come up with a solution by reasoning as follows.

What are the central events in the relationship between God and the Jewish people? They are the Covenant with Abraham; the Exodus from Egypt; the giving of the Torah at Sinai; and the destruction of the Temple. Of these, only the destruction of the Temple would be a suitable subject for the music of the Crucifixus; but it does not belong in a Credo.

What are the central tenets of Judaism? That God is One; and the Ten Commandments. The oneness of God is the subject of the third movement of the Credo. The prohibition against worshiping other gods, the substance of the second Commandment, was incorporated by Sara Levy into the Et resurrexit; the rest of the Commandments are too specific to occupy a central position in her Credo.

However, considering that a Credo is a personal profession of faith which governs the daily feelings and actions of the believer, what must we recognize as the central tenet of a traditional Jewish Credo? That God gave His people a Law, a set of commandments, which they are bound to follow; that if they observe the commandments, God rewards them; and that if they violate the commandments, God punishes them.

This idea is stated repeatedly in the written Torah, or Pentateuch, and underlined by the Prophets. It is perhaps most clearly expressed in Deuteronomy 28, which begins (28:1-2), “Now if you obey the voice of the Lord your God, observing the performance of all His commandments that I give you this day, then the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth, and all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the Lord your God”; and continues (28:15), “But if you do not obey the voice of the Lord your God by observing all His commandments and statutes that I give you this day, then shall all these curses come upon you and overtake you”; and ends with a terrifying list of punishments that look backward to the plagues of Egypt and forward to the horrors of conquest and exile at the hands of a strange nation.

As we saw in our last post, Maimonides, in his discussion of Divine Providence, presents the above doctrine as the one taught by Moses and the Prophets, and by the rabbis. In principle number 11 of the Ăni mă’ămin, the Prayer Book version of Maimonides’ thirteen principles of faith, it is stated in the following words: “I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, may His name be blessed, rewards those who observe His commandments, and punishes those who violate His commandments.” Sara Levy adapted this principle for her Jewish versions of the Crucifixus and the Et resurrexit, putting punishment before reward, so that the gloom of transgression gives way to the jubilation of observance.

Here is Sara’s Hebrew text for the music of the Crucifixus:

Umă‘ănish hăbore l’‘ov’re mitsṿotaṿ, lahem akhen mă‘ănish. (And [that] the Creator punishes those who violate His commandments, surely He punishes them.)

Some repetition was necessary in the Hebrew to fill out the music.  Umă‘ănish (“And He punishes”) corresponds rhythmically to the Latin “Crucifixus”; hăbore (“the Creator”) is repeated to cover both “etiam” and “pro nobis”; l’‘ov’re mitsṿotaṿ (“those who violate His commandments”) corresponds to “sub Pontio Pilato”; and Sara added lahĕm akhen mă‘ănish (“them, surely, does He punish”) for tragic emphasis, and to correspond to the Latin “passus et sepultus est.” (Note that the long u — “and” — in u-mă‘ănish is the conjunction ṿaṿ pronounced as a long vowel sound, u, as usually happens when the word to which it is prefixed begins with one of the three labial consonants bet, mem and pe.)

My Christian readers may be astonished by Sara’s transformation of the Crucifixus into a lament over the punishment of sinners. After all, what makes the Crucifixion so powerful emotionally, and gives it redeeming power, is the fact that the crucified Christ is spotless, free of sin! But I would defend Sara’s choice for three reasons. First of all, the principle of divine justice is central to Jewish faith. Second, from the point of view of Judaism there is nothing so tragic, in the experience of the Jewish people, as their forsaking the commandments of the Law. And third, there is a theological kinship between the Crucifixion in Christianity and the punishment of sinners in Judaism, as they both mark the beginning of a path to the forgiveness of sin: in Christianity, Christ is crucified for our sins, and his sacrifice makes forgiveness possible; in Judaism, the punishment of the sinner is both a prerequisite for his being forgiven, and a sign that he has violated the commandments and must repent.

I would not argue with those of you who are of the opinion that our Hebrew version of the Crucifixus is pale in comparison with the Latin original; I would say you are right, that God’s punishment of the sinner is hardly as moving or dramatic an event as His Son’s giving his life on the cross for the salvation of humanity. But I would point out that there is a traditional Jewish sense of anguish over the forsaking of the Law, which is perhaps comparable to the Christian feeling of anguish over Christ’s suffering on the cross.

I first encountered this form of Jewish anguish as a boy. My grandfather, Gedaliah, already an old man, was quite religious. He had done well in business, and was able to donate money, and two Torah scrolls, to a young Hasidic rabbi who led a small congregation in Brooklyn. My grandfather adored his grandchildren, but hardly spoke a word to us, as his language was Yiddish. It had not occurred to our parents or grandparents that we might want to speak the language of our Eastern European ancestors; they did not teach it to us, and we did not learn to speak it. They rarely talked to us about the European world they came from. They wanted us to become fully American, while somehow retaining our Jewish identity. This deliberate forgetting of the “old country” by Jewish immigrants in America is the theme of Sylvie Weil’s charming novel, Le hareng et le saxophone (Buchet-Chastel, 2013), in which she tells the story of a family that very much resembles my own.

My grandfather’s rabbi also spoke only Yiddish. He was from a sect of Hasidim whose men never trimmed their beards or shortened their sidelocks. Usually he kept his beard pinned up under his chin, and his sidelocks pulled up and pinned under his skullcap. On the Jewish High Holy Days, I would walk with my father to the small synagogue, where my grandfather was already seated, and follow the service. The rabbi would lead the prayers, and deliver a sermon in Yiddish of which I understood only a small part. Every year there came a point in the sermon where the rabbi would begin to cry; his crying would turn into weeping; he would shake his right fist in the air, then wipe away his tears, and continue to weep. I came to understand what he was weeping about, although he was speaking in Yiddish. He was weeping over the young Jews in America who were forsaking the Torah, turning away from God’s commandments. I believe the anguish he expressed was real. The fact that in my early teens, though my parents were not religious, I studied the Torah and observed the commandments, gave joy to this Hasidic rabbi.

Some years later, as an undergraduate, I became close to another rabbi, who was my teacher and religious authority. He was not at all Hasidic; he had been trained in the method of study of the great Talmudic academies of Lithuania. When, at the age of 19, I lost my religious faith, I wrote him a letter, telling him what had happened to me. I did not want him to wonder why I had suddenly disappeared from his world, or to feel that he was in any way responsible for the unexpected change that had come over me. His nephew, who was my college classmate, told me that his uncle wept upon reading my letter. Did he weep for me as a father for a lost son? Perhaps; but mostly he wept for the Jewish people who had forsaken God’s commandments. His expression of anguish was less dramatic and less public than that of the young Hasidic rabbi; but it came from the same source.

In the Zohar we find a kabbalistic version of the grief traditionally felt by Jews over the neglect of the commandments: “Rabbi Shimon wept, and said, ‘Woe to them, to the sons of Adam, for they do not know, and do not care for, the dignity of their Master. Who makes the holy Name every day? You must say, it is he who gives charity to the poor.'” (Zohar, Part 3, 114b)

For Rabbi Shimon bar Yoḥai, the central character of the Zohar, the most important commandment is charity, ts’daḳa, which also means justice. By giving charity to the poor, the Jew “makes” the holy Name of God; that is, he contributes to the unity of the Godhead, which is symbolized by the four letters of the Tetragrammaton. When Rabbi Shimon sees that people are neglecting the commandment of giving charity to the poor, he weeps over the catastrophe that this may bring about in the upper realm.

The book of Lamentations embodies the ancient version of this same anguish, as it was experienced by the Jewish people at the moment of their greatest sorrow, at the destruction of Jerusalem: “‘See, Lord, how I am in distress; my insides are inflamed, my heart is turned within me, for I have greatly rebelled. In the street the sword bereaves, in the house it is like death.'” (Lamentations 1:20)

As understood by the Prophets, and subsequently by the rabbis, this tragedy was a direct consequence of the Jewish people’s turning away from God and His commandments. The bitter weeping of Lamentations, the degradation and death that it describes, may be heard in Sara’s Umă‘ănish, the Jewish version of the Crucifixus. As the music descends into the depths of despair, the final G major cadence signifies the moment of repentance, and heralds the transformation of our sorrow into joy.

Here is the score of the Umă’ănish. And here is a performance of the Crucifixus conducted slowly, but with feeling, by Helmuth Rilling.