By Raphael Ahren Tags: Aharon Varady, Israel News . . . → Read More: Welcome Haaretz Readers!]]> Raphael Ahren wrote a nice article on the project in this week’s Anglo File Section of Haaretz that appeared both online and in-print (pdf). Please read the article at Haaretz (support Raphael’s page views!), and return here to comment — below the reprint.

Prayer ala carte

By Raphael Ahren

Tags: Aharon Varady, Israel News

Aharon Varady always dreamed of putting together his own prayer book. Realizing that many people – including himself – often see prayer as a dull and robotic exercise in the fulfillment of a religious duty, he thought for years about ways to enable people to create their own prayer book, or siddur, in order to make the most of their experience. A fellow at this year’s PresenTense Institute, Varady earlier this month finally embarked on a daring project, creating a tool for “individuals and groups to build the siddur they’ve always wanted,” as his Web site explains. Varady’s Open Siddur project aspires to funnel all different regional traditions, translations, commentaries and instructional notes that Jews from the four corners of the world have produced through the ages into one Web application. The site will provide the core liturgy and enable users to freely add content, comparable to cooking Web sites where food aficionados exchange and comment on each other’s recipes. Similarly, at OpenSiddur.net users can download different prayers, add creative translations, commentaries and other “siddur recipes,” as the 34-year-old Philadelphia resident put it. Looking for an oriental version of the morning services or a rare medieval religious poem? Chances are that sooner or later someone will upload it to the site, Varady assures. “We believe the text of the siddur is an aggregate of thousands of years of inspired authors,” Varady told Anglo File this week. “This culture, which right now is locked in text we can [only] read on paper, is not yet available easily to manipulation and remixing, adopting and tweaking for people who want to use the siddur as a spiritual tool.” While the new site facilitates the study of Jewish liturgy, he says, its main purpose is helping those who are dissatisfied with the way conventional siddurs dictate prayer. “People don’t feel they can be engaged with their prayer,” Varady says. “It’s programmed for them.” Varady is one of sixteen fellows currently participating in the Jerusalem-based PresenTense Institute, which for the third consecutive summer invited Jewish social entrepreneurs mostly from English-speaking countries into its headquarters on Emek Refaim Street to assist them in launching their various projects. During the six-week program, fellows have a designated work space, whenever their full schedule of skill-building sessions, “Lunch N’ Learn” forums and field trips allows it. Sparking a paradigm shift Ariel Beery, the New York-born co-founder and director of the PresenTense Group, believes that Varady’s project might “spark a paradigm shift in how we approach individual spirituality and group coordination in an age of radical interdependence,” as he told Anglo File this week. “If we’ve learned anything from Facebook it’s that even though every person has their own page and profile, it is the interaction [that] provides the value people seek.” But the soft-spoken Varady, a technology consultant and city planner by profession, takes a more modest approach. “If there’s anything radical about my project,” he says, “it’s that an individual can start creating an archive of personal prayers and keep it private or share it with others.” He notes that his innovative project was inspired by Jacob Freedman’s “polychrome” siddur, which color coded parts of the text to indicate during which time periods various prayers were added. Freedman started his project in the late 1960s but never completed it. Now, Varady says, the time has come to once again try to create a prayer book for people “who take their prayer very seriously, or for independent congregations that are struggling to create a relevant siddur for their community.” Varady realizes that some people – especially those who are proud to pray with their grandfather’s siddur – will not be attracted to a Web site offering prayer a la carte, picking and choosing texts from various geographic areas, time epochs and religious streams. Yet he thinks his project has the potential to make praying interesting to those who otherwise wouldn’t bother. “We can teach children that prayer is important,” he says, “but we can’t take for granted that this will be relevant for them when they are adults, when they have a choice. What we can do is provide the deepest resources for them to engage in this essential creative process.”

Each Wednesday, PT encourages its fellows by requiring the submission of a deliverable. The first was . . . → Read More: First Pitch from the Hotseat]]> 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]

Over the course of the summer I will be in Jerusalem attending the PresenTense Institute‘s summer workshop. Before I arrived I set in mind an intention, (or kavanah, as it were) to achieve the following goals: