night Archives • the Open Siddur Project

גַּמָּדֵי לָיִל | Gnomes of the Night, a poem by Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik (ca. 1894)

Contributor(s): Aharon N. Varady (transcription), the Ben Yehuda Project (transcription), Ben Aronin and Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik
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Bedtime Shema | Tags:

romanticism, 19th century C.E., sheydim, night, modern hebrew poetry, mythopoetic, 57th century A.M., animistic spirits, Jewish faeries, creatures of the night, where the wild things are, vilde ḥayye, whimsy, magical beings, entering magical territory, evening spirits

The poem “Gamodei Layil” (Gnomes of the Night) by Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, ca. 1894. . . .

Night, a poem by Rosa Emma Salaman (1846)

Contributor(s): Aharon N. Varady (transcription) and Rosa Emma Salaman
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Ma'ariv/Arvit | Tags:

19th century C.E., Darkness, night, 57th century A.M., British Jewry, Anglo Jewry, English Romanticism, Inner light, Prayers as poems

The poem, “Night” by Rosa Emma Salaman, was first published in the Occident 3:11, Shebat 5606, February 1846. . . .

מדרשים על אדם הראשון וקלנדס על תקופת החורף | Midrashim on the Origin of the Festival of Kalends on the Winter Solstice by the Primordial Adam

Contributor(s): Devora Steinmetz
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Historical, Ḥanukkah Readings | Tags:

sourcesheet, sunset, night, Winter Solstice, Kalends, Kalendes, Psalms 139, havdalot

Our Rabbis taught: When Adam HaRishon (primitive Adam) saw the day getting gradually shorter, he said, ‘Woe is me, perhaps because I have sinned, the world around me is being darkened and returning to its state of chaos and confusion; this then is the kind of death to which I have been sentenced from Heaven!’ So he began keeping an eight days’ fast. But as he observed the winter solstice and noted the day getting increasingly longer, he said, ‘This is the world’s course’, and he set forth to keep an eight days’ festivity. In the following year he appointed both as festivals. Now, he fixed them for the sake of Heaven, but the [unenlightened] appointed them for the sake of star worship. . . .

Contents

גַּמָּדֵי לָיִל | Gnomes of the Night, a poem by Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik (ca. 1894)

Night, a poem by Rosa Emma Salaman (1846)

מדרשים על אדם הראשון וקלנדס על תקופת החורף | Midrashim on the Origin of the Festival of Kalends on the Winter Solstice by the Primordial Adam