Amidah

The Amidah, the standing prayer, said silently while facing Jerusalem with the feet together, is the fixed centre of every Jewish prayer service, so central that it is often called simply ha-tefillah, the prayer. It runs to nineteen benedictions on weekdays, praises, petitions and thanksgivings in a set order, and to a shorter form on the Sabbath and festivals, when the middle petitions are replaced by a single benediction on the holiness of the day, since one does not ask for one's needs on days of rest and rejoicing.

Its structure is deliberate and old: it opens with three benedictions of praise, closes with three of thanksgiving, and places the requests in between, on the model, the rabbis said, of a servant who first praises the king, then makes requests, then takes respectful leave. The tradition ascribes the ordering of the benedictions to the assembly at Yavneh under Rabban Gamliel after the destruction of the Second Temple, when fixed communal prayer came to stand in for the sacrifices that could no longer be offered. Recited three times daily, silently and then, in congregation, repeated aloud by the prayer leader, the Amidah is the armature on which the whole of the rabbinic liturgy is built.

The Amidah's traditional Hebrew name, Shemoneh Esrei, means simply the eighteen, a name that has stuck even though the prayer recited today actually contains nineteen benedictions, a mismatch with a specific historical explanation: an additional benediction, Birkat HaMinim, directed against sectarians and informers, was added to the original set some time around the early rabbinic period, generally connected by scholars to the period of consolidation at Yavneh after the Temple's destruction, when the developing rabbinic movement was working to define its boundaries against groups it considered dangerously heterodox. Rather than renaming the prayer once a benediction had been added, the traditional name simply continued in use, so reciting the eighteen today means reciting nineteen, a small but telling piece of evidence for how liturgy can accumulate real changes while retaining an older name that no longer describes it precisely.

The scholarly question of exactly whom Birkat HaMinim originally targeted, and whether early Christian Jews specifically were among its intended targets, has been debated at length by historians of early Judaism and Christianity, since some early Christian sources describe experiencing exclusion connected to a curse recited in the synagogue around this period, while other scholars caution that the benediction's original wording and target are not preserved with enough precision in the earliest sources to settle definitively whether it was aimed specifically at Jewish Christians, at a broader range of sectarians, or at both without clear distinction.