Sündenbekenntnis (Widduj) | A prayer upon completing the Vidui on Yom Kippur, by Lise Tarlau (1907)

Contributor(s):

Aharon N. Varady (transcription), Aharon N. Varady (translation) and Lise Tarlau

Shared on:

5 January 2023 under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license

Categories:

Yom Kippur

Tags:

תחינות teḥinot, 57th century A.M., Jewish Women's Prayers, Teḥinot in German, German vernacular prayer, paraliturgical vidui, 20th century C.E., וידוי vidui

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Source (German)

Translation (English)

Mein Gott, eh ich entstanden, war ich nichts
Und bin auch jetzt nichts, da den Tag ich seh,
Und nichts bin ich am Tage des Gerichts,
Ich kam wie Wasser und wie Wind ich geh.
Fröstelnd vor Scham, so stehe ich vor Dir
Und muß mich zitternd Deiner Huld vertrau’n,
Denn ob ich nichts bin, hilfst Du doch auch mir
Und selbst ich kann auf Deine Gnade bau’n.
So stärke Du mir meine schwache Kraft
Und hilf, daß sündig ich nicht sei fortan,
Daß nicht die ungezähmte Leidenschaft
In mir den guten Trieb vernichten kann,
Und was gefehlt ich, Herr, das lösche aus
Und nimm als Buße meiner Reue Not
Und schütze mich und schütze auch mein Haus
Und halte fern uns Krankheit, Leid und Tod
Und laß mich, die so lange irrgegangen,
Zu Deinem Frieden endlich, Herr, gelangen!

My God, before I came into being I was nothing
And, as I see this day, I am nothing still,
And nothing am I on the Day of Judgment,
I came like water and like wind I go.
Shivering with shame, I stand before You
And, trembling, I must trust in your mercy,
For even though I am nothing, you still help me
And even I can rely on your clemency.
So reinforce my feeble strength
And help that I not be sinful henceforth,
That the untamed passion
Cannot destroy the good instinct in me,
And what I have deficient, Lord, blot out
And take as penance my remorseful distress
And protect me and protect also my house
And keep away from us sickness, sorrow and death
And let me, who has so long gone astray,
Attain, o Lord, your peace at last!

This untitled prayer by Lise Tarlau for concluding the vidui prayers on Yom Kippur (“Sündenbekenntnis. (Widduj.)”) can be found in Rabbi Max Grunwald’s anthology of Jewish women’s prayer, Beruria: Gebet- und Andachtsbuch für jüdische Frauen und Mädchen (1907), pages 217-218.

The transcription of the German provided machine-readable text for machine translations by DeepL, which we then edited for accuracy and clarity. We welcome any/all corrections, improvements, and additional transcriptions and translations of this work’s contents. –Aharon Varady

Source(s)

Notes[+]

Notes
1	i.e., the yetser hara
2	the yetser hatov

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“Sündenbekenntnis (Widduj) | A prayer upon completing the Vidui on Yom Kippur, by Lise Tarlau (1907)” is shared by the living contributor(s) with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.

Aharon N. Varady (transcription)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer transcriber for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his transcriptions, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also translates prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes of the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Aharon N. Varady (translation)

Aharon Varady (M.A.J.Ed./JTSA Davidson) is a volunteer translator for the Open Siddur Project. If you find any mistakes in his translations, please let him know. Shgiyot mi yavin; Ministarot Naqeni שְׁגִיאוֹת מִי־יָבִין; מִנִּסְתָּרוֹת נַקֵּנִי "Who can know all one's flaws? From hidden errors, correct me" (Psalms 19:13). If you'd like to directly support his work, please consider donating via his Patreon account. (Varady also transcribes prayers and contributes his own original work besides serving as the primary shammes for the Open Siddur Project and its website, opensiddur.org.)

Lise Tarlau

Lise Tarlau (also known as L'Ysaye/Isaye/Ysaye/Ysale, Lisa, Lize, Elizabeth, Luise, and Louise Tarleau; 1879-1952), was a writer born to a prominent Viennese Bohemian Jewish family, the daughter of Rabbi Dr. Joseph Samuel Bloch and Laura Lachmann. In an essay published in 1906, "The Religious Problem," she expressed enthusiasm for Zionism and a deep sympathy for East European, Yiddish speaking Jewry, praising them for having retained their own distinctive cultural identity and their own language. This posture was accompanied by harsh criticism of Western European Jewish cultural assimilation, writing that they have “lived as parasites on the creative possibilities of the dreams of beauty of other peoples” (as quoted in Peter Singer's Pushing Time Away, 2003). Before emigrating to the United States in 1908, nearly two dozen prayers she wrote were published in Beruria (1907), an anthology of teḥinot in German compiled by her sister's husband Rabbi Dr. Max Grunwald. A decade later in the US, Houghton Mifflin Company and Riverside Press published The Inn of Disenchantment (1917), a collection of her prose and several short stories. Tarlau's fiction also appeared in major magazines of the day, including The Nation (105:2725, September 20, 1917), The Atlantic Monthly (in 1919), and Harper's Magazine. In 1924, her short story "Loutré" was awarded second place in Harper's first ever short story contest. During World War II, she wrote a number of scripts for radio and film and worked as a translator for the US military. Several of her works were included in The Fireside Book of Romance (ed. C. Edward Wagenknecht, 1948). She died on October 9, 1952 in Kew Gardens, Queens, Long Island, New York.

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ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established."–Psalms 90:17