What We Can Learn about the High Holy Day Liturgy from “Dies Irae”

In the essay I mentioned at the beginning of this newsletter, Meir Soloveichik meditates on the absence of the Ashkenazi prayer Un’taneh Tokef, with its dramatic refrain about “who shall live and who shall die,” from the Sephardi liturgy. Matt Austerklein makes a different contrast: between Un’taneh Tokef and the Catholic hymn “Dies irae,” whose title, “Days of Wrath” sounds a lot like Days of Awe. Indeed, the similarities between the words of both prayers led one scholar to argue (unconvincingly) for mutual influence. (The truth is rather that both were composed in a Byzantine milieu and likely drew on similar biblical themes.)