Harry
Freedman’s The Talmud: A Biography is
published by Bloomsbury Publications. His next book, The Murderous History
of Bible Translations will be published by Bloomsbury in 2016

In
his book Changing the Immutable Mac Shapiro notes that, for reasons of
propriety, the Birnbaum siddur transliterates the words מי רגליים in פטום הקטרת
[1],
instead of translating them. Philip Birnbaum was not the only translator to be
troubled by these words.

In
1890 Rev. Simeon Singer produced a prayer book in London, with the sanction and
authorisation of Chief Rabbi
Nathan Marcus Adler. Singer’s object was to produce ‘a
correct text and satisfactory translation’ which could be used in ‘Synagogues,
families and schools.’[2] Singer
used Yitzhok (Seligman) Baer’s Avodat Yisrael  as his base text.

As befits a
prestigious Victorian publication, Singer’s siddur was grandly entitled The
Authorised Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British
Empire. Known ever since as The Singer’s, it became and remains the
defining text of Minhag Anglia.

Notwithstanding
its source in the gemara, and the fact that מי רגליים is itself a
euphemism, its translation must have been
considered unsuitable for inclusion in Singer’s family friendly siddur. But
unlike Birnbaum he did not transliterate the Hebrew words. Instead he just left
out the entire translation of והלא מי רגליים יפין לה אלא שאין מכניסין מי רגליים בעזרה מפני הכבוד. He left his readers with no explanatory note as to what he had
done.

In 1904 Arthur Davis and Herbert Adler published a set of
machzorim. Popularly known as the Routledge machzorim  they served for many years  as minhag anglia’s definitive yomtov
texts. They followed Singer in omitting the entire translation of והלא מי רגליים יפין לה אלא שאין מכניסין מי רגליים בעזרה
מפני הכבוד.

By 1939 Singer’s siddur had run to its 16th impression.
Now under the auspices of Chief Rabbi J.H. Hertz, those mitpallelim
accustomed to saying פטום
הקטרת would have
been bemused to find the final sentence missing, not just in English, but now
also in Hebrew. Dayan Ivan Binstock, the Minhag Anglia editor of the Sacks
Koren machzorim, suggests that Hertz required this change for consistency, to
bring the Hebrew and English into line. The alternative remedy, of adding an
English translation to the extant Hebrew, was clearly not appropriate.

This was not Chief Rabbi Hertz’s only editorial
amendment. He substantially reduced the Prayer for the Government (in England
this was known as the Prayer for the Royal Family). Amongst other omissions he
removed הפוצה דוד עבדו מחרב
רעה and
significantly reduced the number of verbs required to elevate and protect the
monarch. Possibly, such over-anxious concern for the monarch’s welfare was not
deemed appropriate for the still-powerful British Empire.

Chief Rabbi Hertz had his own concerns about indelicacy.
In the siddur with commentary that he published in 1946 he too omitted all
mention, in Hebrew and English, of מי רגליים. But he also
ameliorated the words of the Shabbat shacharit Amidah. In the Hertz siddur, the
ערלים who do not dwell in the Sabbath’s rest[3] have
become רשעים. In his commentary Hertz notes that ‘for many
centuries most prayer books had this reading instead of ערלים, which recent
editions, through the influence of Baer, have reintroduced’.[4]

לא ישכנו רשעים is found in a number of siddurim including R. Shlomo
Ganzfried’s Avodat Yisrael, R. Yehudah Leib ben Meir Gordon’s Beit
Yehuda and R. Yosef Teumim’s Higayon Lev. R. Yaakov  Emden[5] and
R. Chaim Elazar Spira[6],
amongst others, argue against it on the grounds that whereas  ערלים are not
obligated to keep the mitzvah of Shabbat, many רשעים are.

Baer, whom Hertz holds responsible for the current use of
ערלים, states in a footnote: ערלים: כן הנוסחא בכל ס”י (=ספרי ישנים) ובסדורי
ספרדים וברמב”ם. [7]  Hertz’s
choice of רשעים in place of reflects at best a minority
opinion and has neither precedent nor subsequent in Minhag Anglia. It
was almost certainly introduced for reasons of propriety.

In 2006 a fourth edition of the Singer’s siddur was
published with a new translation by Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. For the first
time in the history of Minhag Anglia, פטום הקטרת was printed in
full, including the final sentence, in both Hebrew and English. מי רגליים may have not
have been brought to the azarah  מפני הכבוד but in our
more plain-speaking age its restitution to  פטום הקטרת seems just as
much to be an expression of כבוד.