Selichot

Selichot are Jewish penitential prayers, petitions for forgiveness recited in the period surrounding the High Holy Days and on fast days, giving voice to repentance and pleading for divine mercy. The prayers centre on the recitation of the "Thirteen Attributes of Mercy", the description God gives of himself in Exodus as compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in kindness, forgiving iniquity, which the tradition, on the strength of a Talmudic teaching, holds to be especially powerful in moving God to pardon. Around this core are gathered poems and supplications, many of them medieval compositions of great literary richness, expressing contrition and the hope of mercy.

Selichot are recited chiefly in the weeks leading up to Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and through the solemn Ten Days of Repentance that culminate in Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Among Ashkenazi Jews the recitation begins on the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah, often at midnight or before dawn, while Sephardi communities begin considerably earlier, at the start of the preceding month, so that the season of return to God is entered gradually through daily penitential prayer.

Selichot is kept as a communal event as much as a text, and the Ashkenazi custom of beginning it late on a Saturday night, often close to midnight, has produced a distinctive social practice: communities gather in the dark, sometimes with a public address or a period of reflection preceding the prayers themselves, so that the first Selichot service of the season is treated as a notable communal occasion rather than an ordinary weekday prayer.

A considerable portion of the poetry recited was composed in direct response to specific historical catastrophes rather than as general devotional writing, most significantly compositions written by and for communities that suffered the Crusader massacres of Rhineland Jewish communities in 1096, an atrocity that produced some of the most anguished Hebrew liturgical poetry to survive from medieval Europe and that is still recited by name in Ashkenazi Selichot services centuries later. This gives the Selichot season a documentary character unusual among fixed daily and festival prayers: rather than reciting only timeless praise and petition, worshippers are reciting a specific medieval community's testimony to specific historical violence, embedded permanently within a liturgy that otherwise addresses timeless themes of repentance and mercy. The differing start dates, Ashkenazi practice beginning the Saturday night before Rosh Hashanah and Sephardi practice beginning at the start of Elul and continuing forty days, reflect two different views on how long penitential preparation before the High Holidays ought to last, a disagreement the two traditions simply continue to observe in parallel rather than resolving.