Proper pauses make sense of what you say We also have to realize that if you say that phrase without pauses, or too many pauses, then we will not be sure who or what is big, the truck or the driver. So to be clear, pausing in the right place and not in the wrong place is important to convey our intended meaning of what we say. This should certainly be the case for our davening. Examples to come. One more word of introduction: There are also phrases that a misplaced pause will not change the meaning, but the result is simply awkward. One does not say, my favorite baseball team is the New <pause> York-Mets. Assuming there is no such thing as York-Mets, old or new, then the phrase wont be misunderstood; it's just clumsy. So is Boston Red <pause> Sox. An example of a benign misplaced pause - commonly heard in shul - is the end of the second b'racha preceding Sh'ma in Maariv. Baruch ata HaShem, OHEIV <pause> AMO YISRAEL. G-d loves his nation Israel. Not OHEIV AMO <pause> YISRAEL, which would mean, He loves His nation... Israel. It means the same, sort of, but the former flows better. This one is easy to "correct". It just takes a little practice. The next examples are more difficult to correct, because of habit, because of what most other people do, because of the "melody" of davening. After Sh'ma, still at Maariv: Most people will pause before B'SIMCHA RABA and then say B'SIMCHA RABA V'A-M'RU CHULAM... It doesn't flow nicely. V'A-M'RU CHULAM really belongs to MI CHAMOCHA. The problem is that the way we (Ashkenazim) do CHAZAN and KAHAL davening, we pause (for a long time) after V'A-M'RU CHULAM, which attaches it to the previous sentence rather than to the following words, where it belongs. And we do this a lot in our davening. In a more CHAZAN KAHAL responsive style davening, the words in this example (and others) would flow much better. [The Parshat Balak Homepage]
|
