The origins of the Tikkun Lel Hoshana Rabba, a text traditionally read on the eve of the seventh day of Sukkot, is a long and evolving one, with many divergent customs, instituted to note the importance of the day, which in Jewish tradition is the final day of the yearly judgment. Originally the custom was to recite the entire Torah on that evening; it eventually evolved to reciting a mixture of passages from the book of Devarim, Tehillim, selections of the Zohar, Selichot and Kabbalistically-infused prayers.
In 1655, the first Ashkenazi edition was published in Venice, by R. Nathan Shapiro, an emissary for the Ashkenazi community in Eretz Israel. In this edition, he included sefer Devarim and Kabbalistic texts, noting that even if one does not understand what he is reciting it has great significance.
A rare early edition I acquired recently is a very different text, published in Amsterdam in 1733, edited by Aaron du Kushta Abendana on behalf of the Honen Dal Society in The Hague, Netherlands. This edition did not include much of what is familiar today; it lacks the sefer Devarim of the Torah, as he writes that the text is readily available, but it does include the beginnings and endings of the other four portions of the Torah, as well as selections of Neviim and Ketuvim, as well as Eshet Chayil and a Tikkun – as well as some Mishnayot from Sukkah, much of which is lacking in today’s Tikkun. None of the Selichot or additional prayers present in today’s Sephardic traditions appear here.
A few years prior, an edition printed in Venice for Sephardic Jews did include Selichot, though, as well as the additional Kabbalistic texts, and various editions in the following decades contained a variety of combinations of prayers and readings. Other editions were purely piyutim, while others had additional Kabbalistic texts. As with many of such customs, their spread was assisted by shadarim, emissaries from the holy land, that brought with them, in their travels, customs and practices of Eretz Yisrael. The rise of chassidim and their Kabbalistic tendencies gave another push to the custom of Hoshana Rabbah, and today it is prevalent in nearly every Jewish community in the world.
