The literal translation of line number 9 is "But we bend our knees and bow down and express thanks". The Sefardic/Mizrahi tradition shortens this line to ואנחנוּ משׁתּחום -- Va'anchnu mishtachavim -- "But we bow down".

The quotation in lines 18-21 is Deuteronomy 4:39.

Use in the synagogue

Aleinu is recited with all the congregants standing. One reason for this are noble sentiments expressed, but also that the first and last letters of the prayer spell עד - "witness" - and it is appropriate for a witness to stand when testifying.

The original context of this prayer was as part of the middle paragraphs of the Amidah

Amidah

The Amidah , also called the Shmoneh Esreh , is the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy. This prayer, among others, is found in the siddur, the traditional Jewish prayer book...

 prayer in the mussaf

Mussaf

Mussaf is an additional service that is recited on Shabbat, Yom Tov, Chol Hamoed, and Rosh Chodesh. The service, which is traditionally combined with the Shacharit in synagogues, is considered to be additional to the regular services of Shacharit, Mincha, and Maariv.During the days of the Holy...

 (additional) service on Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah

Rosh Hashanah , , is the Jewish New Year. It is the first of the High Holy Days or Yamim Nora'im which occur in the autumn...

 (Jewish New Year), and more specifically in the passage known as Malchuyot (the kingdom of God). In this context it includes both paragraphs of the prayer. The first paragraph is also included at the equivalent point in the liturgy for Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur , also known as Day of Atonement, is the holiest and most solemn day of the year for the Jews. Its central themes are atonement and repentance. Jews traditionally observe this holy day with a 25-hour period of fasting and intensive prayer, often spending most of the day in synagogue...

. The second paragraph, which begins with the words על כּן -- Al kayn, "Therefore we put our hope in you...." -- is not presented here. This second paragraph is not recited by some Sefardic communities, such as those in London and Amsterdam, but it is recited in others.

In the Middle Ages the custom grew up of reciting the first paragraph every day, at the end either of the morning service alone or of all the prayer services for the day. In the 16th century the kabbalist

Kabbalah

Kabbalah/Kabala is a discipline and school of thought concerned with the esoteric aspect of Rabbinic Judaism. It was systematized in 11th-13th century Hachmei Provence and Spain, and again after the Expulsion from Spain, in 16th century Ottoman Palestine...

 Hayim Vital

Hayyim ben Joseph Vital

Hayyim ben Joseph Vital was a rabbi in Safed and the foremost disciple of Isaac Luria. He recorded much of his master's teachings...

, recording the opinions of Isaac Luria

Isaac Luria

Isaac Luria , also called Yitzhak Ben Shlomo Ashkenazi acronym "The Ari" "Ari-Hakadosh", or "Arizal", meaning "The Lion", was a foremost rabbi and Jewish mystic in the community of Safed in the Galilee region of Ottoman Palestine...

, ruled that both paragraphs should be included in all services, and should end with the verse "on that day the Lord shall be one and His Name one". This has been accepted in all communities except for the Spanish and Portuguese Jews

Spanish and Portuguese Jews

Spanish and Portuguese Jews are a distinctive sub-group of Sephardim who have their main ethnic origins within the Jewish communities of the Iberian peninsula and who shaped communities mainly in Western Europe and the Americas from the late 16th century on...

, who retain the "short Alenu".

In the daily and Sabbath services, when the line (numbered, above, as line 9, here translated literally) "But we bend our knees and bow" is recited, the worshipper will flex his knees and then bend from the waist, straightening up by the time the words "before (lif'nei) the King of kings of kings" are reached. But on the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the worshipper will not merely flex and bend, but will actually get down on his knees at those words, and some Sefardic and Mizrahi congregants will prostrate themselves on the floor (in those synagogues with sufficient floor space).

In Orthodox and Conservative congregations, the Torah Ark remains closed while it is recited (except on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, when the Ark is opened), but in Reform congregations the Ark is opened whenever Aleinu is recited. In Sefardic congregations, as well as in the Askenazic traditions of Frankfurt and Mainz, Alieinu is not followed by the Mourner's Kaddish

Kaddish

Kaddish is a prayer found in the Jewish prayer service. The central theme of the Kaddish is the magnification and sanctification of God's name. In the liturgy different versions of the Kaddish are used functionally as separators between sections of the service...

 (because, variously, Aleinu was whispered to avoid antagonizing the Christian authorities, or because Aleinu is not a reading from Scripture), elsewhere it is.

Censored passage

Referring the lines above numbered 7 & 8:

The earlier form of this prayer contains an additional sentence:

For they worship vanity and emptiness, and pray to a god who cannot save.

This sentence is built from two quotes from the Bible, specifically from the Book of Isaiah, Isaiah

Isaiah

Isaiah ; Greek: ', Ēsaïās ; "Yahu is salvation") was a prophet in the 8th-century BC Kingdom of Judah.Jews and Christians consider the Book of Isaiah a part of their Biblical canon; he is the first listed of the neviim akharonim, the later prophets. Many of the New Testament teachings of Jesus...

 30:7, "For the help of Egypt shall be (הבל וריק) vain and empty...."; and Isaiah

Isaiah

Isaiah ; Greek: ', Ēsaïās ; "Yahu is salvation") was a prophet in the 8th-century BC Kingdom of Judah.Jews and Christians consider the Book of Isaiah a part of their Biblical canon; he is the first listed of the neviim akharonim, the later prophets. Many of the New Testament teachings of Jesus...

 45:20. "... No foreknowledge had they who carry their wooden images (וּמתפּללים אל־אל לא יוֹשׁיע) and pray to a God who cannot give success." (New JPS) The line is still set out in full in Sephardi and Italian prayer books, but was omitted in most of the older printed Ashkenazi prayer books. In some older editions of other rites (e.g. the Maḥzor Aram Soba, 1560) a blank line was left in the printing, leaving it free for the missing line to be filled in in handwriting. In many current Orthodox Jewish siddurim (prayer books) this line has been restored, and the practice of reciting it has increased.

Although the above text, which includes the censored verse, is taken from the 2009 Koren Sacks Siddur, edited by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Jonathan Sacks

Jonathan Henry Sacks, Baron Sacks, Kt is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. His Hebrew name is Yaakov Zvi...

 (in that edition the censored verse is printed without any distinguishing marks), the 2007 4th edition of The Authorised Daily Prayer Book of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth, edited by the same Rabbi Sacks, omits the censored verse completely and without any indication that such a verse ever existed.

History of the censorship

Approximately a century after this prayer was incorporated into the daily liturgy, circa 1300, an apostate Jew, known as Pesach Peter, denounced it as a secret anti-Christian slur on the grounds that the word וריק - varik, "and emptiness" - had, in gematria

Gematria

Gematria or gimatria is a system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase, in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other, or bear some relation to the number itself as it may apply to a person's age, the calendar year, or the like...

 (Hebrew numerology) the value of 316, the same as ישׁו - Jesus. In vain did the rabbis defend the sentence on the grounds that the expression came from the Book of Isaiah, or that the whole prayer came from Joshua, and therefore must predate Christianity, or, if the prayer was attributed to Rav, living in third century Babylonia (Persia), that he never encountered a Christian. -- It probably did not help that at roughly the same time a rabbinic commentary on the prayers, Arugat haBosem by Abraham ben Azriel, made the point that, in gematria

Gematria

Gematria or gimatria is a system of assigning numerical value to a word or phrase, in the belief that words or phrases with identical numerical values bear some relation to each other, or bear some relation to the number itself as it may apply to a person's age, the calendar year, or the like...

, "vanity and emptiness" had the same value as ישׁו ומחמט - "Jesus and Mohammed". As a result of this, in various places the Christian authorities censored the sentence, usually omitting it.

Circa 1938, Herbert Lowe, the Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge University, wrote: "No Jew who recites it ever thinks of it in relation to Christians: the chief thought in his mind is the noble conclusion. It is, in fact, a universalist pronouncement of the Messianic hope, and with this idea every service concludes."

As a result of this censorship a curious practice arose - it may have predated the censorship but thereafter acquired encouragement as a form of resistance - that where the word "emptiness" occurred - or should have occurred - the individual was supposed to spit (on the floor), on the pretext that "emptiness" is very similar to the Hebrew word for "spittle". This practice was mentioned by the early 15th century. When, for example, the accusations about this verse were revived in Prussia in 1703, the government (in Berlin) enacted that the controversial verse should be omitted altogether and that spitting or recoiling was forbidden and that the prayer would be recited aloud "in unison" by the whole congregation (to make sure nobody was surreptitiously reciting the verse) and that government inspectors would be posted in synagogues to ensure compliance. Apparently no one was ever prosecuted for violating this edict. In some other places the practice of spitting persisted (or at least was remembered), and there arose a Yiddish expression for someone arriving very late for services (perhaps just to recite the Mourners' Kaddish

Kaddish

Kaddish is a prayer found in the Jewish prayer service. The central theme of the Kaddish is the magnification and sanctification of God's name. In the liturgy different versions of the Kaddish are used functionally as separators between sections of the service...

, which follows Aleinu), "He arrives at the spitting."

In the daily synagogue services, the Torah Ark is closed while Aleinu is recited, but on Rosh Hashana, when Aleinu is recited during the Mussaf Amidah, the Ark is opened when Aleinu is begun, closed momentarily when the controversial verse was recited (presumably to shield the Torah scrolls from hearing a description of heathen practices) and then opened again as soon as that verse was finished, and then closed again when Aleinu is finished. Even after the controversial verse was deleted from the liturgy, owing to Christian censorship, the Ark was momentarily closed although nothing was recited at that moment, as a relic and reminder of the censored verse.

Conservative

Conservative Judaism

Conservative Judaism is a modern stream of Judaism that arose out of intellectual currents in Germany in the mid-19th century and took institutional form in the United States in the early 1900s.Conservative Judaism has its roots in the school of thought known as Positive-Historical Judaism,...

 and Masorti

Masorti

The Masorti Movement is the name given to Conservative Judaism in Israel and other countries outside Canada and U.S. Masorti means "traditional" in Hebrew...

 Rabbi Reuven Hammer

Reuven Hammer

Reuven Hammer is a Conservative Jewish rabbi, scholar of Jewish liturgy, author and lecturer. He is a founder of the Masorti movement in Israel and a past president of the International Rabbinical Assembly. He served many years as head of the Masorti Beth Din in Israel...

 comments on the excised sentence:

Originally the text read that God has not made us like the nations who "bow down to nothingness and vanity, and pray to an impotent god," ...In the Middle Ages these words were censored, since the church believed they were an insult to Christianity. Omitting them tends to give the impression that the Aleinu teaches that we are both different and better than others. The actual intent is to say that we are thankful that God has enlightened us so that, unlike the pagans, we worship the true God and not idols. There is no inherent superiority in being Jewish, but we do assert the superiority of monotheistic belief over paganism. Although paganism still exists today, we are no longer the only ones to have a belief in one God.

In 1656, Manasseh ben Israel reported that the Sultan Selim (presumably Selim II, died 1573), having read the uncensored text of Aleinu in Turkish translation, declared: "Truly this prayer is sufficient for all purposes. There is no need of any other."

Restoration

Some Orthodox Rabbinical authorities

Posek

Posek is the term in Jewish law for "decider"—a legal scholar who decides the Halakha in cases of law where previous authorities are inconclusive or in those situations where no halakhic precedent exists....

, prominently the 19th century Rabbi Moshe Yehoshua Leib Diskin

Yehoshua Leib Diskin

Yehoshua Yehuda Leib Diskin , also known as the Maharil Diskin, was a leading rabbi, Talmudist and Biblical commentator. He served as a rabbi in Łomża, Mezritch, Kovno, Shklov, Brisk and finally Jerusalem, after moving to Eretz Yisrael in 1878....

 (Maharil Diskin, died 1898), have argued that the disputed phrase should be recited in communities that previously omitted it.

Other variations

"Numberless changes" have been introduced into the text, primarily by Conservative and Reform communities, to make it less controversial and invidious; in some instances these changes have taken the form of less-than-literal translations of the traditional Hebrew into the local language. For example, the British Reform

Reform Judaism

Reform Judaism refers to various beliefs, practices and organizations associated with the Reform Jewish movement in North America, the United Kingdom and elsewhere. In general, it maintains that Judaism and Jewish traditions should be modernized and should be compatible with participation in the...

 version borrows words from the blessings over the Torah, and begins "It is our duty to praise the Ruler of all, to recognise the greatness of the Creator of first things, who has chosen us from all peoples by giving us Torah. Therefore we bend low and submit.." Reconstructionist Judaism

Reconstructionist Judaism

Reconstructionist Judaism is a modern American-based Jewish movement based on the ideas of Mordecai Kaplan . The movement views Judaism as a progressively evolving civilization. It originated as a branch of Conservative Judaism, before it splintered...

changes the lines which reference the chosen people.

For example, in the Italian ritual, "they bow down" was changed to the past tense, "they used to bow down", and "vanity and emptiness" was changed to לאלילים   "idols", so the whole verse refers to ancient idol worship. There was, evidently, an experimental amendment to the preceding verse in one or more Sefardic prayerbooks: "... He has not made us like some nations of other countries ...." But this amendment was abandoned.

External links

• Audio file "Aleinu" (first part); MP3
• Audio file "Aleinu" (second part); MP3