Every day, during pesukei d’zimrah, and on erev shabbat, during kabbalat shabbat, we read the following in Siddur Sim Shalom: “Exalt the Lord our G-d, worship Him in His sanctuary; He is holy. Exalt the Lord our G-d, worship Him at His holy mountain; for the Lord our G-d is holy.”

Our new siddur, Lev Shalem, offers a slightly different version: ““Extol Ad-nai our G-d, worship G-d, who is holy. Extol Ad-nai our G-d, and bow toward G-d’s holy mountain; Ad-nai our G-d is holy.”

Let us note the differences. First, Lev Shalem is quite intentionally gender neutral. No “Him, His, He.” Second, Lev Shalem switches from “Exalt” to “Extol.” My hunch is that “exalt” is probably closer to the original, because “ramah” means “height”. But I suspect that “exalt” is a word that we associate with royalty. Think Milton’s Paradise Lost: “High on a throne of royal state…Satan exalted sat, by merit raised to that bad eminence.” And modern Jews don’t like to talk about G-d as royalty. Hence “extol,” since you can extol the virtues of, say, the U.S Olympic Women’s Hockey Team (shout out to our own Melissa Katz, Communications Manager for the gold medal winning team). That same anti-royalist sentiment can be seen in the tendency to replace “Lord” with the original Hebrew title “Ad-nai.”

All that being said, the biggest difference between the two translations is in the first phrase, where Sim Shalom says “worship Him in His sanctuary,” while Lev Shalem says simply, “worship G-d.” What happened to the sanctuary?

Herein lies a tale. The term translated as “in His sanctuary” in Sim Shalom, and not translated at all in Lev Shalem, is “hadom raglav,” literally “His footstool.” And in the Bible, the term is often used to describe the Temple. So following that interpretation, what we have here are two phrases where the beginning is nearly synonymous: His sanctuary/His holy mountain. And the second phrase sees an intensification from “He is holy” to “the Lord our G-d is holy.”

It looks like this:

Exalt the Lord our G-d, //worship Him in His sanctuary;// He is holy.

Exalt the Lord our G-d, //worship Him at His holy mountain; //for the Lord our G-d is holy.

An intensification is found in Lev Shalem as well in the first phrase, going from “worship G-d” to the much more specific “bow toward G-d holy mountain”

It looks like this:

“Extol Ad-nai our G-d, //worship G-d, //who is holy.

Extol Ad-nai our G-d, //and bow toward G-d’s holy mountain; //Ad-nai our G-d is holy.”

However, G-d’s “footstool” does not necessarily refer to the Temple. There are those who suggest that it is the world as a whole. Think Isaiah 66:1: “Heaven is My throne, and earth is My footstool.” Taken that way, an entire new level of meaning can be found in the verse. This is elucidated by Rabbi Yitzchak Meltzan, who wrote as follows:

“G-d’s footstool refers to this world…where G-d is [simply] holy but in a way that is hidden and mysterious and masked by nature. But “bow toward G-d’s holy mountain” refers to a future time when G-d will dwell on earth and we can refer to G-d as “Ad-nai our G-d” since He can be found among us.”

Here, the parallelism is much more sophisticated. It looks like this:

Exalt the Lord our G-d, //worship [what you can perceive of Him] at His footstool [our natural world] ;// He is holy [but just looking at the natural world, that’s all we know].

Exalt the Lord our G-d, //worship Him at His holy mountain [which He was declared to be His home on earth, and is therefore much more approachable, allowing us to claim Him as our own, hence]; //the Lord our G-d is holy.

The intensification here involves our very perception of G-d, from undefined force in the universe to a very specific divine identity to which we are intimately related.

When I daven, that’s what I think of.