Ashrei Part 1

My final project for Psalms as Poetry and Spirituality was a 20 page paper on Ashrei. I will share it here in sections, with the introduction included each time. The first section describes my research process, because it was convoluted and haphazard and I need suggestions for better strategies in the future.

Introduction

Ashrei has been part of Jewish liturgy for centuries. Ashrei is a prayer composed as a cento, which opens with Psalms 84:5 and Psalms 144:15, concludes with Psalms 115:18, and is primarily composed of Psalm 145. While Ashrei as a full prayer has its basis in the Babylonian Talmud, Psalm 145’s liturgical roots can be traced to the Dead Sea Scrolls (Feld, 2013). Psalm 145 is the only psalm identified as a “song of praise,” and is composed as an acrostic, although a line for nun was lost some time between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Masoretic Text (Alter, 328). The evolution of Psalm 145 and Ashrei has been an engaging research topic, but what I have ultimately discovered is that the historical details are less important to me than the transmission of tradition throughout the Jewish world. My research process was a bit convoluted, and I have identified some areas for improvement. I have also gained a better understanding of my own religion’s traditions around recitation of Ashrei, and a new appreciation for the prayer.

Research Process

I started out wanting to read about the Book of Psalms in Jewish liturgy. I used the Advanced Search feature on the Z. Smith Reynolds Library (ZSR) website to look up “jew* liturg* AND psalm,” and it was immediately clear this was too broad of a topic. I chose to narrow my topic down to Ashrei because it has the feature I am most interested in: the apparently random cobbling together of lines from Psalms. Ashrei is also a prayer with a static daily form, which made it seem likely that there would be more extensive writing on it, although in retrospect I suppose prayers with less static construction probably lend themselves to more discussion. Regardless, I committed to the topic and forged ahead.

My first step with this narrowed topic was to do a simple ZSR “Books & More” search for Ashrei, and read the available reference entries. The Encyclopaedia Judaica had some information that was not immediately apparent from having prayed Ashrei in services (and some notes about choreography I was previously unaware of), but had a tragically limited bibliography with incomplete citation information to raid for additional sources (Posner). The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion had a more thorough bibliography (Berlin), but most of the articles listed were not available directly from ZSR. I had good luck with getting scans from the library at SUNY Orange via ZSR Delivers requests for two out of three articles. The third I did not initially order because I was worried about overcommitting to an unproven service and then I forgot about it until it was too late. There was a book listed in the article as well, Songs of the Heart: An Introduction to the Book of Psalms by Nahum M. Sarna, which is available in the ZSR stacks. I chose not to pursue this book because it seemed unlikely, based on the title, to have specific and detailed information on Psalm 145 in particular, or to address the role of Ashrei in Jewish liturgy.

Unfortunately, these two reference entries accounted for all of the relevant results for my Ashrei search, with most other results appearing to be newspaper clippings. Searching for “Psalm 145” yielded a set of results that was too broad, because I was looking for specifically Jewish perspectives, and filtering through 40 pages of results without a clearly defined method to identify relevant articles seemed inefficient. Creating an Advanced Search for “psalm 145” AND “jew* liturg*” yielded only three results, one of which was the Jewish Publication Society commentary, which belongs to a different pocket of research. It did not occur to me at the time to remove the “liturg*” specification, although this may have improved my results. Regardless, the next step I chose was to go back to my original search of “psalm” AND “jew* liturg.*” This also yielded 40 pages of results, so I flipped through the first couple of pages of results for anything that seemed promising.

This vague passing attempt to find anything relevant marked a shift in my focus. On the second page of results, I found a promising title: The Power of Psalms in Post-Biblical Judaism: Liturgy, Ritual, and Commentary, which contains an entire article on one of the portions of the service where Ashrei appears. I went to the stacks to collect my prize, and spent some time skimming the shelves around the target for other relevant works. (I did leave with a two volume book, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship by Sigmund Mowinckel, but there were very few references to Ashrei or Psalm 145 in the indexes.) The article in The Power of Psalms in Post-Biblical Judaism sought to answer a similar question to the one I set out to answer, but I struggled to follow it. This redefined my quest around what I needed to understand what I was reading.

A major shortcoming at this stage was that I did not understand what I was asking well enough to coherently articulate the question. This makes it hard to put the question into search terms. I decided to reach out to people I know to stumble through my questions, specifically two members of my synagogue. Rabbi C. was able to confirm that a good general overview of texts and history for an academic audience is one of the holes in the literature, but recommended Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History by Ismar Elbogen. This book was published over 100 years ago, and still did not quite explain what I was trying to understand. The book did help me better understand what my question was. It was finally time to turn to a basic Google search, and I found it: a post from My Jewish Learning with a table of Jewish historical texts organized by time period and type of text (Spitzer). I also found a few books in the pile from Lee Bretan that are adjacent to what I am trying to understand but perhaps not what I need right now.

There are a few conclusions to draw from my research process. One is that I completely forgot about external databases over the course of this project, because I was so focused on internal resources in ZSR. It does appear that there may be some rocks to overturn in that bed of research. This does, however, suggest that there is still room for ZSR to expand its offerings on Jewish Studies, as several of the sources I am using came from outside the university. As an example of this, at present, ZSR has some outdated siddurim (Jewish prayerbooks) on the shelves in the library (I can confirm a copy of Gates of Prayer in the collection from the website, but I could swear I also saw a Sim Shalom when I was in the stacks), but none of the ones currently in use by the relevant movements. Since the siddur I use to pray Ashrei is naturally one of my central references, I have already been in contact with Kaeley McMahan about adding the current conservative movement siddurim, the Lev Shalem series,^, to the ZSR collection.

An additional limitation to my research was inconsistency in transliteration of Hebrew. The accidental discovery of Ruth Langer’s article, “The Early Medieval Emergence of Jewish Daily Morning Psalms Recitation, Pesuqe de-Zimra,” in The Power of Psalms in Post-Biblical Judaism made this especially clear. I would never have thought to search for the full complex of Psalms 145-150, but even if I had, I would have searched using the spelling I am familiar with from Siddur Lev Shalem: for Shabbat and Festivals, P’sukei D’zimra.^, I likely still would not have searched that way, since Siddur Lev Shalem includes substantially more than just Psalms 145-150 in P’sukei/Pesuqe. I have come across alternate spellings of Ashrei in my research, as well, notably ‘ašre in The Psalms in Israel’s Worship. I feel relatively confident that most modern articles would use the Ashrei spelling, since that used in academic references like Encyclopaedia Judaica and The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, as well as religious sources like Siddur Lev Shalem and Chabad, but I likely missed some older sources. Since several of the articles I found refer to Psalm 145 while explicitly addressing Ashrei as a full prayer, it seems this is one way people have attempted to address the issue of transliteration; ironically, this makes it harder to find the texts that are about Ashrei rather than Christian exegesis of Psalm 145.

Bibliography

Robert Alter, ed., The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, First edition, vol. 3 (New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019).

Claudia D. Bergmann et al., eds., The Power of Psalms in Post-Biblical Judaism: Liturgy, Ritual and Community, Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, volume 118 (Leiden Boston (Mass.): Brill, 2023).

Adele Berlin, “Ashrei,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion, ed. Adele Berlin and Maxine Grossman (Oxford University Press, January 1, 2011), https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780199730049.001.0001/acref-9780199730049-e-0278.

Chabad, “Ashrei - Online Siddur with Commentary,” Torah Texts, accessed December 11, 2025, https://www.chabad.org/torah-texts/1524151/Online-Siddur-with-Commentary/Verses-of-Praise/Ashrei.

Ismar Elbogen and Raymond P. Scheindlin, Jewish Liturgy: A Comprehensive History, New ed. (Philadelphia [N.J.] Jerusalem New York Jerusalem: the Jewish publ. society the Jewish theological seminary of America, 5753).

Edward Feld and Rabbinical Assembly of America, eds., Maḥzor Lev Shalem: for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (New York, NY: Rabbinical Assembly, 2010).

Edward Feld, Jan Uhrbach, and Rabbinical Assembly of America, eds., Siddur Lev Shalem: For Shabbat and Festivals (New York: The Rabbinical Assembly, 2013).

Ruth Langer, “The Early Medieval Emergence of Jewish Daily Morning Psalms Recitation, Pesuqe de-Zimra,” in The Power of Psalms in Post-Biblical Judaism: Liturgy, Ritual and Community, ed. Claudia D. Bergmann et al., Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity ; Volume 118 (Leiden ; Brill, 2023).

Sigmund Mowinckel, The Psalms in Israel’s Worship (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962).

Raphael Posner, “Ashrei,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd ed, ed. Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum, Gale eBooks (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA in association with the Keter Publishing House, 2007).

Rabbinical Assembly and The United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, eds., Siddur Sim Shalom: For Shabbat and Festivals (New York City: Rabbinical Assembly, 1998).

Nahum M. Sarna, Songs of the Heart: An Introduction to the Book of Psalms, 1. ed (New York, NY: Schocken Books, 1993).

Jeffrey Spitzer, “A Timeline of Jewish Texts,” My Jewish Learning, n.d., accessed December 3, 2025, https://www.myjewishlearning.com/texts/About_Jewish_Texts/Jewish_Texts/Timeline.shtml.

Chaim Stern and Central Conference of American Rabbis, eds., Gates of Prayer: for Shabbat and Weekdays (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 5755).