Philologos
Mosaic Magazine, Nov. 30, 2021
“Sacks, a chief rabbi who was knighted and awarded a peerage by the British Crown, found this stanza embarrassing. His solution was not very different from Ma’oz Tsur’s: to publish and conceal simultaneously.”
How many stanzas of the candle-lighting song Ma’oz Tsur Y’shu’ati are you familiar with? If you’re like most people who light Hanukkah candles, the answer is one. If you grew up in a home like mine, it’s two. If you’ve seen Ma’oz Tsur as it is generally printed in a non-Orthodox siddur, or some older Orthodox ones, it’s five. If you know its full story, it’s six—and it’s the sixth that is the most interesting.
But let’s start with the first, the one we all know. The late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s rendering of it in the compendious Koren Siddur (2009) that he edited and translated reads: “Refuge, Rock of my salvation,/ to You it is a delight to give praise./ Restore my house of prayer,/ so that there I may offer You thanksgiving./ When You silence the loud-mouthed foe,/ Then will I complete, with song and psalm, the altar’s dedication.”
Sacks’s version is not singable, since it lacks the metrics of the Hebrew stanza, which has four lines as opposed to Sacks’s six. Moreover, all four of these lines rhyme with one another, and the last of them—az egmor b’shir mizmor ḥanukkat ha-mizbeaḥ—has an internal rhyme as well, a pattern that is followed by the subsequent stanzas.
When, where, and by whom was Ma’oz Tsur written? The literary evidence dates its composition to late 12th-century Europe. (The melody to which most Jews of Ashkenazi descent sing it is old, too, and probably had Christian origins, although when compared with that of the Christian hymn it most resembles, Martin Luther’s Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein, which can be heard on YouTube, it is similar only in its odd-numbered lines.) As for Ma’oz Tsur’s author, he wove his name into it as medieval Hebrew poets often did. Thus, the initial letter of the first stanza is mem, מ; of the second, resh, ר; of the third, dalet, ד; of the fourth, khaf, כ; and of the fifth, yod, י, together yielding מרדכי or Mordekhai.
Just who this Mordekhai was, however, remains conjectural, for the ח or ḥet with which the sixth stanza begins stands not for a last name or epithet but for the word ḥazak, “be strong.” Taken from the phrase ḥazak, ḥazak, v’nitḥazek, “be strong, be strong, and let us get stronger,” which is traditionally chanted by congregations upon finishing the last portion of a book of the Torah, ḥazak’s initial letter was sometimes used in medieval times to commence a poem’s last part. …Source