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During a discussion among medievalists on prayer, I mentioned the ember days in the Church\u2019s liturgy. Middle-aged participants asked: \u201cWhat are ember days?\u201d<\/p>\nDuring a discussion among medievalists on prayer, I mentioned the ember days in the Church\u2019s liturgy. Middle-aged participants asked: \u201cWhat are ember days?\u201d<\/p>\n
My friend Frank Henderson and I gave some attention to the topic in \u201cJews and Judaism in the Medieval Latin Liturgy”<\/a> (see p. 191-92).<\/p>\n In the proceedings of a conference The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages<\/em><\/a>, edited by Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2007), Daniel St\u00f6kl Ben Ezra offers a wide-ranging study, \u201cWhose Fast Is It? The Ember Day of September and Yom Kippur\u201d<\/a> (pp. 259-82 with charts of the Biblical readings in the Roman rite). He introduces his essay with a quotation from Pope St. Leo I (the Great), who reigned from A.D. 440-461:<\/p>\n Confidently encouraging you with fatherly counsels, dearly beloved, we preach the fast dedicated in the seventh month to the exercises of common devotion, sure that what was first the Jewish fast will become Christian by your observance. (Sermon 90:1)<\/p>\n Did this fast merely recall Zechariah\u2019s mention of four times of fasting (7:5; 8:18-19), developing independently of contemporary Jewish practices in Rome?\u00a0 Dr. Ben Ezra responds:<\/p>\n Particularly in light of Leo\u2019s familiarity with contemporary Judaism and his references to the fast as part of the Jewish heritage of the church, the theory of a completely independent development of these Christian and Jewish readings seems highly unlikely. Competition with and influence from the Jewish Yom Kippur plausibly explains the dominance of Old Testament readings and the focus on repentance and propitiation.<\/p>\n Because detailed sources for Jewish practices in Rome in the fifth century are not available, Dr. Ben Ezra\u2019s conclusion is tentative, but it seems that non-polemical contacts allowed for Christians in Rome to learn from and adapt the Jewish practices of fasting. In the modern period we can learn from each other, and Christians should learn from the Jewish background to Matthew 5:1-18 how prayer, fasting and alms-giving reinforce each other.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" During a discussion among medievalists on prayer, I mentioned the ember days in the Church\u2019s liturgy. Middle-aged participants asked: \u201cWhat are ember days?\u201d My friend Frank Henderson and I gave some attention to the topic in \u201cJews and Judaism in … Continue reading