Ezra Fleischer

So i- I found it interesting.

And, uh, well, I can mention al- also, also the fact that I had, uh, two years before, uh, the late Ezra Fleischer retired from, from, uh, teaching, uh, I had the chance of, of hearing one of his classes, and then I was really impressed by, by, uh, by hi- by him as a, as a, as a...

He was a very impressive person.

And somehow since, since then, I, I, I, I took that path.

Okay, you do have the [coughs] alphabetic acrostic, but you don't have rhymes, and also you don't have this special kind of acrostic that, uh, gives you the name of the poet.

That's a later invention.

So the earliest, uh, period, uh, is, is, uh, we-- Ezra Fleischer called it the pre-classical period, and we have piyyutim which are un-rhymed and anonymous without name acrostics.

Uh, the only exception is a, uh, small group of, uh, very refined piyyutim that we've got a medieval tradition that says that they were all composed by a certain Yosi Ben Yosi or Yose Ben Yose.

There's a piot from Eretz Israel that curiously talks about chaining the shofar to the amut, to the bimah on Shabbat, on Shabbat Rosh Hashanah.

And this was, I think, discovered actually by, this piot was discovered, I think, by Ezra Fleischer.

And David Henschke wrote an article in which he says that the...

He says that the earlier halakha views...

So I want to start with something that you almost assuredly have not seen.

About 40 years ago, Professor Ezra Fleischer, who I had the schud to meet once before he passed away, Professor Ezra Fleischer publicized a piyut that he found in the Gneiza, which was from Eretz Yisrael, sixth or seventh century, probably.

And the piyut was, Melech hizkam b'limud, shiehei shofar kashur le'amud.

So Hashem strengthened them to know to have the shofar tied to the amud, to the shtender.