The Open Siddur Project » philosophy

Spiritual Alienation and the Siddur

Aharon Varady — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:39:44 +0000

In his essay, “Even A New Siddur Can’t Close the ‘God Gap’” (in The Forward, 8/18/2009), Rabbi Saul Berman seems almost ready to give an honest critique of the siddur and the practice of t’fillah, but instead steps back to make a more general critique on modernity. The central problem Berman addresses is the problem of Jewish spiritual alienation in an age of comfort and optimism in technological and industrial progress.

Berman argues that “new and creative siddurim” will not help translate the text of the prayer into a language understandable to “modern, socially integrated” Jews. Rather, he calls for the reintroduction of “God and God’s values into the truly vibrant dimensions of our lives.”

What Berman is calling for isn’t exactly new. I think you can hear his critique of modernity, not only in a stream of sermons dating back to pious worries of the pernicious influence of the Haskala (Enlightenment). Similar worries were also expressed by Romantic Christian theologians and continue to be voiced by religious thinkers of all sorts concerned with assimilation and materialism.

What might be new is his use of the Siddur as a prop in a straw man argument. Berman chronicles a list of popular siddurim published in the last century. I don’t think any editors of these works expected their new siddur to change how Jews relate to holiness and divinity in their lives. Their more modest goal was (and remains) to simply help make Jewish liturgy more accessible to Jewish communities in their native languages and in accordance with the philosophies undergirding their communal religious identities.

As printed and bound texts prepared by others, pre-programmed siddurim, “new and creative” or old and familiar, do not permit easy modification. I hardly expect anyone to not feel alienated or bored when provided with texts written by others in different languages and different contexts. This is as true for folks well practiced in davvening thrice daily as those who visit shul once a year for Yom Kippur. Without a program of learning that helps someone become familiar with the liturgy I wouldn’t expect them to engage the texts of the siddur and prepare their rote recitation with kavanah (intention). I wouldn’t expect them to breathe an improvisational and creative spirit into the verses they hurry to read without having some feeling of profound intimacy with the words themselves.

Like Berman, I don’t have too much hope that any of the modern siddurim he writes of will end spiritual alienation for Jews that may not know (or care) that Berman thinks they’re alienated. Neither the siddurim as currently designed, nor the practice of t’fillah as mandated in Halakha can guarantee the intimate relationship that Berman hopes is renewed in the Jewish people.

And yet, Jewish tradition does offer Jews a toolkit and a practice for engaging and growing integral relationships. I do think a new siddur can have an impact on the problem Berman tries to articulate, even for a Jew that doesn’t share Berman’s idea of God or “Godly values” as he puts it.

Berman doesn’t elaborate on how his hoped for reintroduction of values will take place, but they must begin somewhere. Considering the essential place of the siddur within the spiritual and educational toolkit provided to each and every Jew, thinking of it as part of a comprehensive program of Jewish spiritual renewal is essential. The initiation of the sons and daughters of Israel to their eponymous mission of wrestling with God begins with their wrestling with the siddur: the languages of the source texts, the translations, the instructions, and the energy to maintain and preserve the practice as an individual in a group and while practicing t’filla alone.

I have some faith that a siddur, thought of as a tool and thus open for redesign to achieve certain goals, can be useful and relevant—so long as it is user modifiable, and in an importance sense, crafted. The term “alienation” was first promulgated in the mid 19^th century in connection with craft workers who through the industrial processes of mass production were “alienated” from their essential creative natures. At the Open Siddur Project, we hope to empower individuals in a collaborative online workshop where they can craft their own custom siddur, relevant to their spiritual practice.

Giving an individual a choice of how verses that are tripping them up are translated, or even how the ineffable name, YHVH, and other divine names in Hebrew are represented in a siddur, can make a difference in their experience of t’fillah (prayer) for someone engaging in individual or communal prayer. Giving someone a place to share their personally authored t’fillot, meditation or commentary, or else collaborate on a translation of a medieval piyut (liturgical poem) can connect Jews to each other in a meaningful way where before they were isolated in their passion and earnest devotion. Providing historical data revealing the siddur as an aggregate of thousands of years of creatively inspired texts can help a Jew understand that their creativity and contribution is also important in this enduring conversation.

Once upon a time, Jews — Israelites — prayed from the heart — sans Siddurim. (The first example of the standing silent meditation, the Amidah, is attributed to Ḥanah the mother of the prophet Shmuel (in 1 Samuel 1:13).) What kind of siddur might we design today if our goal was to help Jews again pray from the heart? Would it be a tome full of psalms attributed to King David or might it be a sequence of exercises that reference and emphasize values that help prime our daily practice of gmillut chasadim (acts of loving-kindness) and other mitzvot? Perhaps it could be a combination of both – historically authentic and yet impressed with the meaning that only an individual can author from their heart.

Personally, I would very much like to see an attempt made to designed a siddur with this goal in mind. But, the mission of the Open Siddur is not to create a new siddur and then prescriptively offer it up as the expression of a new movment. Rather, our mission is to provide a collaborative publishing platform where any aspiring siddur maker can try their hand at crafting a siddur relevant to their practice.

I would also recommend anyone interested in taking Berman’s concern seriously to check out Aryeh Ben David’s suggestions for personalizing t’fillah in his book “The Godfile: 10 Approaches to Personalizing Prayer” (2007, Devorah Publishing). Rav Ben David has an organization that is devoted to helping both individual Jews and congregations grow in a serious practice that is engaging and nourishes integral relationships. Check out http://www.ayeka.org.il.

Why, davka, an Open Siddur Project

Aharon Varady — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 11:16:59 +0000

The Open Siddur is an online tool for individuals and groups to craft the siddur they’ve always wanted. The Open Siddur will provide content (translations, transliterations, art, tfillot, piyutim, and other source texts) from an archive of current and historic nusḥaot (both well-known and obscure) and enable users to adapt, contribute new content, and share the siddurim they’ve generated. Partnerships with on-demand printers enable users to print beautiful copies of their personally customized siddurim and machzorim. The Open Siddur benefits independent minyanim and trans-denominational communities, pluralistic institutions, teachers of Jewish liturgy, and Jews of all ages evolving their personal use of t’fillah in their own daily practice, both alone and within groups.

Imagine if a tool existed for a diverse group of Hillel students at a small college to easily develop a transdenominational siddur reflecting the unique backgrounds of their community. Now imagine if this was a summer camp, a classroom at a pluralistic Jewish day school, or an indpendent minyan.

Imagine if the first siddur presented to a first or second grade day school student was actually developed by that student over the course of a year while learning about the traditionally liturgy from a teacher, while integrating personal art, poetry and inspirational quotes and teaching from other classes into their structured daily t’fillah.

Imagine a bar or bat mitzvah where the young teenager has composed a bencher with graphics and images, translation, commentary and transliteration tailor made for his or her guests. Imagine if this were a wedding or simply a custom bencher developed by a family as a resource of their favorite traditions.

Imagine a young professional struggling to find time in the morning to continue their daily practice and keep it meaningful rather than a rote routine. They use the Open Siddur to find unfamiliar content and new ways to daven, integrating yoga with prayer, or subscribing to a stream of commentary or source text integrating learning within their practice.

Imagine a nusaḥ that is only followed by a small community that speaks a language other than Hebrew. They use the Open Siddur to preserve their nusaḥ, teach Hebrew, and update their old siddur with a translation and transliteration of their prayers in the non-Latin script their community is literate in.

The Open Siddur enables all of these possibilities and more.

The Open Siddur is not meant as a replacement for traditional nusḥaot but as a platform for the development and publication of siddurim relevant to individuals and groups not served by the one-size fits all siddurim already available in print.

Furthermore, by digitizing the traditional text of the siddur and making it available under a copyright permissive license, the Open Siddur and the Jewish Liturgy project liberates the cultural works of our ancestors for use by our children and our children’s children without requiring them to ask for copyright permission. By encoding the siddur and its commentaries, instructional text, and translations using open text encoding standards, the Open Siddur enables other open cultural projects to build on our achievement without having to reinvent the wheel.

Pirate Siddurim vs. Open Siddurim

Aharon Varady — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 07:51:09 +0000

Culture hacking either respects copyright or ignores it. One of the pillars of the Open Siddur is its respect of copyright and its attempt to make available a digitized repository of Siddur content that is available for editing, mashups, and remixing, i.e., “derivative works” that may be redistributed without restriction.

For example, we want you to have the freedom to take the nusaḥ Ashkenaz, borrow kavanot from the nusaḥ sfard, and piyyutim (liturgical poetry) from the nusaḥ Roman; add and edit existing translations of familiar psalms and contribute and share your own translation of obscure piyyutim; share the pdf you build at Open Siddur and give it to an artist to apply an even more beautiful layout than the one we provide; and even redistribute the siddur commercially.

To make this previous example a reality, the Open Siddur is committed to only using copyright permissive licenses for our core siddur content that permit the generation of non-commercial and commercially derivative works. Copyright permissive licenses that allow this include CC0, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA. Licenses that conflict with this objective include copyleft licenses such as the GNU Free Document License (GFDL) and CC-BY-NC-SA. (We envision that users of our siddur building tool will be able to choose the license under which they wish to share their content.)

For example, a number of siddurim are available digitally at the Hebrew language site of wikisource, a sister of the wikipedia project. Up until mid-2009, creative work on wikisource was shared with the GFDL license. Because the GFDL was incompatibile with other copyleft licenses like the CC-BY-SA, we weren’t able to incorporate wikisource work in our project until wikisource changed its licensing policy.

If this sounds frustrating and absurd given that the authors of these piyyutim and tehillim could hardly imagine the publishing and intellectual property restrictions of the 20th and 21st centuries, it is. The fact remains that copyright is applied to the digitization of text and that includes the imaging/scanning, as well as the manual or automated (OCR) transcription of the text.

Why, you ask, can’t we simply cut and paste these digitized siddurim and simply ignore copyright restrictions. Why indeed? I am quite certain that other online siddur projects have done this and may even currently be doing this with a laissez faire attitude towards the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886), the Universal Copyright Convention (1955), and the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty (1996) just to name a few of the relevant international intellectual property laws. To make certain, that our content is as free and open (really, in a sense, liberated) as culture within this legal environment we have endeavored to ensure all our core content is transcribed from works in the free cultural commons (e.g. the public domain).

To do otherwise would frankly be much simpler… and thus, faster, especially for an ambitious project such as the Open Siddur and its sister, the Jewish Liturgy project. To do so, however, we would probably have to change our name to the Pirate Siddur, just to keep things honest.

As tempting as this strategy is, the developers of the Open Siddur that the sustainability of this project as a platform for the creation of new cultural products within Judaism depends on our respect and awareness of the current restrictions on copyright and copyleft licensed works. We want the siddur to be Free as in Freedom, unencumbered, and unhassled.

In our minds, this is a great act of loving-kindness (and gives us all a great big Mitzvah-rush!). But besides this, awareness of copyright licensing is essential for a project that envisions itself as a cultural platform for as yet unimagined projects that will add value to the project and programs of Judaism in general.

First Pitch from the Hotseat

Aharon Varady — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:47:15 +0000

Busy days this week at the PresenTense (PT) hub for the Open Siddur project. Wednesday was the heaviest and began in earnest with work on a website, opensiddur.org, from late Tuesday night into the lonely hours before the sunrise.

Each Wednesday, PT encourages its fellows by requiring the submission of a deliverable. The first was the “Visioning Deliverable”–a short narrative of Open Siddur’s quest to improve an imperfect world, how we will attract minions to our cause, and what we need in order to accomplish our goal. For this deliverable, I submitted the About page of opensiddur.org.

Later in the morning, and after a few hours rest, I explained the Open Siddur project to a journalist from a major Israeli English language newspaper/website (!) A challenging interview, I’m hopeful the story is accepted for publication in the next few weeks.

One of the ideas I elaborated in the interview that I had not developed beforehand was the idea that the project of the Open Siddur is important for both beginner and advanced Siddur users because it enables a more dynamic and content-rich mental Siddur. Regular Siddur users have so many prayers memorized, that practically they could recite t’fillah (prayer) verbatim without printed text. A siddur with variations between nusḥot made visible and accessible would both enrich the experience of t’fillah as well as improve one’s understanding and respect of Jewish diversity — an important value in the Jewish tradition of minhagim (regional customs) and nusaḥot (regional variations in liturgy).

The idea of a mental Siddur should sound similar to anyone who has read the interesting theories concerning mental maps and developed further by critical cartographers such as Matthew Edney. Physical maps are artifacts reflecting cultural worldviews, and I think similarly, the seder (order), liturgy, and rules concerning group and individual prayer reflect particular Jewish values. The fact that Judaism so respects the diversity of minhagim and nusaḥot reflects a value of pluralism engaged in one of the most intimate experiences of Jewish spirituality.

Post-interview I was keen to share what I said with my partners at our sister project at jewishliturgy.org. Volume on our listserve is spiking and I noticed jewschool writer David A.M. Wilensky is now participating on it too. I’m enthusiastic that we’re working on a new proof of concept highlighting our vision for the Open Siddur which will apply Efraim Feinstein’s important work developing a Jewish liturgy extension to the Text Enconding Initiative XML schema for encoding text.

After a brisk afternoon walk to find a SIM card at the local Hadar mall (new cell number, 052 789 2435), I returned to the PresenTense hub in time to give the first pitch from the “Hotseat” (the name Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz have for their version of pitchgiving methodology). It boils down to 3 minutes of pitching, 5 minutes of questions, 5 minutes of comments, and 2 minutes of wrap-up. Many people use slide application such as MS PowerPoint for this. There was simply no time for a slide presentation at short notice, even while multitasking, and I welcomed fellow PT fellow Russel Neiss’ encouragement to take confidence in myself as the unbound expression of the Open Siddur inside me.

The pitch actually went pretty well, all things considered. Given Ariel’s formula I quickly outlined my remarks and delivered them with passion. PT encourages social entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas in the form of a narrative describing the imperfect present, the improved future, and what’s needed to get there.

I began by explaining that in the experience of religion there is a contradiction between the individual’s desire for authentic experience and their need for relevant tools to engage individual growth vis-à-vis the project of Judaism. This contradiction is actually a design challenge for useful tools in Judaism’s toolkit of educational and spiritual resources for its participants. The imperfect present is expressed in many current expressions of the Siddur. Although a siddur’s nusaḥ is an authentic expression of a tradition, its utility as a static tool for engaging the creative improvisation required for sinciere spiritual expression (as well as its ability to serve as the traditional tool for educating Jews in sourcetext) is certainly questionable.

Our solution is a siddur that is a Siddur that users can build for themselves. Ingredients from all available siddur texts (i.e., copyright permitting) will be available for building siddurim ranging from unchanged nusaḥ Ashkenaz, to mashups of different nusaḥot with additional prayers and art added by the user, with user edited translations they contribute to, and with commentary they share with other users. In this way, a siddur user becomes a sophisticated master of t’fillah, seriously engaged in the prayer authored and offered by Jewish tradition with the freedom to enrich the tradition from their own experience privately or publicly.

During the comment period of my Hotseat pitch, a PT fellow made an important comment. The problem I described wasn’t necessarily solved by the solution provided. For example: there might be a deeper problem to the concept of a spiritual tool with a formal liturgy being capable of successfully engaging the spiritual and creative expression of its users — even with the freedom provided by remixing content. Understanding this, we nevertheless see the siddur also relevant to the value of communal spiritual engagement–and this is why formal text exists–so that participants can share in a common structure for engagement.

[cross-posted to PresenTense]