[Avodah] Selichos and Kinnos

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Moshe Y. Gluck asked:

> Why did the writers of Selichos and Kinnos do so in such difficult
> to understand language?

This bothered me for many years. (Yom Tov piyutim are another example.) It is particularly strong when we compare these prayers with the various Amidahs of the year, which (in my opinion) are mostly quite at the other end of the spectrum.

The answer I came up with is that different people are moved by different styles. Most people, if they can understand Hebrew at all, need the simplicity of the Shemoneh Esreh or the Shema. Others need the delicacy of the sort of poetry found in Selichos and Kinnos. (I'd stress word "need"; there's no accounting for taste, and for some people, prose is simply inadequate to the task.) Both styles are important, and both had their authors throughout the ages.

My wild guess - which I have absolutely no evidence for - is that the People collectively accepted flowery tefilos only if they were to be said only on rare occasions, and insisted on simpler prose for frequently-recited tefilos. If a tefila was too complicated, it simply didn't get accepted as a daily prayer. On the other hand, there were indeed some simple prayers which were accepted for Yamim Noraim -- two examples which come to mind are Unesaneh Tokef and V'chol Maaminim.

Akiva Miller

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