It is unlikely that, in an earlier age, a book focusing primarily, though not exclusively, on synagogal poetry of a somewhat unconventional or unusual theological character would have included poem no. 8. It is a poem which speaks of man's being prone to sin, of his physical weakness, and of his great difficulty in meeting the standards set by God. The only life our poet finds meaningful is the life lived in obedience to God's will. The poem is, therefore, an eloquent exemplification of what Erich Fromm has called ‘authoritarian religion,’ defined by him as ‘the surrender to a power transcending man. The main virtue of this type of religion is obedience, its cardinal sin is disobedience. Just as the deity is conceived as omnipotent and omniscient, man is conceived as being powerless and insignificant.'

There were times when the burden of this poem would not have been felt to be unusual or out of keeping with the normative theological position of Judaism. But times have changed. Abraham Geiger, in 1870, still found it possible to include this poem in his Day of Atonement liturgy. So did the ‘union prayerbook’ (Einheitsgebetbuch) of German Liberal Judaism, in 1929. And, for that matter, so did the 1945 revision of the ritual of American Reform Judaism. But it is missing in the Reconstructionist High Holiday Prayer Book of 1948; nor is it contained in Gate of Repentance, the prayerbook published in 1973 by the Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues in London, which has been adopted as the basis for the next revision of the American Reform Jewish prayerbook. Even the new American Conservative Mabzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yorn Kippur, edited by Jules Harlow, and published by the Rabbinical Assembly in 1972, omits this poem.

The fate of the poem may, in part, be due to the upsurge in our time of what Erich Fromm calls ‘humanistic religion,’ which ‘is centered around man and his strength … Man's aim in humanistic religion is to achieve the greatest strength, not the greatest powerlessness; virtue is self-realization, not obedience … Inasmuch as humanistic religions are theistic, God is a symbol of man's own powers which he tries to realize in his life, and not a symbol of force and domination, having power over man.’