MARK WASHOFSKY

(Hallel bedilug) was recited, he concluded that"such is their ancestral custom(minhag avoteihem b’yadam)." The Talmud concludes by citing a baraita which states than an individual praying alone need not begin the Hallel, but if he does he may complete it.

Since Rav allowed this minhag to stand, subsequent rabbinic authorities saw no need to suppress it. Still, it caused them no little conceptual difficulty. Although the recitation of Hallel was ordained for festival days, as a reminder of God 's redemptive acts for Israel, ’ Rosh Hodesh is not a festival and commemorates no redemptive acts. The people's practice, in other words, contradicts the liturgical theory behind the Hallel, a fact which compelled halakhic scholars to search for means to remove this contradiction, to accommodate the minhag to the existing halakhah and the halakhah to it. One way to do this was to construct a systemic justification for Hallel on Rosh Hodesh, to buttress the custom with text and theory. Thus, the suggestion that this Hallel is hinted in the twelve mentions of the word haleluyah in Psalm 150, or the more mundane observation that the Hallel served as a reminder to the Babylonians that today was Rosh Hodesh.'® A second task was to define and adjust the terms of the minhag according to the existing halakhic prescriptions for Hallel. For example, some gaonic authorities had already established that there is no legal distinction to be made concerning Hallel between the yahid(individual) and the tzibur(the minyan of ten), when the individual does not complete the Hallel, neither does the community.” On the other hand, the baraita on Ta'anit 28b suggests to others than an individual praying without a minyan should not recite Hallel at all on Rosh Hodesh.' Eventually, rabbinic opinion reached a consensus that the individual should indeed recite it.'”° A more difficult issue concerned the berakhot before and after the Hallel. On other days, when the obligation to recite Hallel was based upon a rabbinic ordinance, there was no question that a benediction was to be pronounced, since it is entirely proper to say v'tzivanu,"who

104