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a community-grown, libre Open Access archive of Jewish prayer and liturgical resources — for those crafting their own prayerbooks and sharing the content of their practice
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2009 The free culture community has developed mechanisms to make sharing and collaborative development easier. The principles that define works of free culture are:
Note that these freedoms do not discriminate on the basis of endeavor, and all free culture works allow creation of derivative works and commercial use. . . . One question I’ve been asked a number of times about the Open Siddur Project is: why are you developing all that software? It’s a fair question. After all, the siddur is just text. There are other do-it-yourself siddur kits out there. They sell you (or, more accurately, license you) a text. You open the text in a word processor, make a few stylistic changes, and voila, you have your own custom siddur. The “advanced” ones may even hand you one copy of a “nusaḥ Ashkenaz” siddur, one copy of a “nusaḥ Sefard” siddur, and one copy of a “nusaḥ Edot Hamizrah” siddur, giving you some choices. All good, right? So, once again, why does the Open Siddur need so much software? . . . The Jewish Day School systems are filled with many talented students, and we would like to reach out to those interested in technology and computer science, particularly in high schools. The Open Siddur Project offers an opportunity for these students to participate in a real free software and open source project that is also relevant to the entire Jewish community. We invite them to participate in development discussions, provide original research, learn and write programs in a number of computer languages, edit, proofread, and correct texts, and work with others of many different backgrounds, in a pluralistic Jewish context. . . . Often we are asked here at the Open Siddur Project why we cannot simply use the digitized texts of the siddur that are available from Davka Corporation. Our instinct was that Davka only granted permission for individuals to use their digitized Hebrew texts under fair use doctrine. To be certain, we sought to find the the text of Davka Corporation’s End User License Agreement (EULA) and failing to locate this information online, friends of the project provided us with the EULA included with the packaging and software installer for a Davka software product: DavkaWriter Dimensions II. From the language of these license agreements, it is clear that the text Davka is providing is not free for end-users to distribute or to create derivative works. Section 4(a) of the EULA reads: “You may not use the texts in the software to publish materials for sale without express written permission from Davka Corporation. Preparation of these texts has entailed considerable effort and expense. They are not shareware, and should be used by no one other than the purchaser.” . . . Categories: Tags: Contributor(s): Lead developer, Efraim Feinstein, recently contributed this helpful diagram of Open Siddur’s architecture. . . . A paraliturgical reading of an abridged mourner’s ḳaddish by Rabbi Daniel Brenner set side-by-side with the (amended) Aramaic text. . . . Categories: Tags: 21st century C.E., 58th century A.M., interpretive translation, North America, paraliturgical ḳaddish Contributor(s): If you are not used to reading Hebrew with comprehension and with the ability to dilate the Hebrew from the literal meaning, or if you cannot read Hebrew and need a resource for daily davvenen, I offer you this set of texts, which I, too, use frequently for myself. I translated the Psalms and the liturgy in the way in which I experience them in my feeling consciousness. This does not offer the ‘pshat’, the literal meaning of the words, but the devotional interpretation that can make it a prayer of the heart. . . . Categories: Tags: 21st century C.E., 58th century A.M., devotional interpretation, English Translation, English vernacular prayer, four worlds, interpretive translation, Jewish Renewal, neo-lurianic Contributor(s): Open . . . Open . . . Open . . . We’re honored to have our project the focus of an article in Tablet. . . . From the summer of 2009, the first article ever written about our project, the Open Siddur, in the pages of Ha’aretz. By Raphael Ahren. . . . 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 Romaniote; 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. . . . Categories: Tags: Contributor(s): 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. . . . 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. . . . One of the enduring challenges of the Open Siddur has been acquiring digitized siddur content that is in the public domain (or which is at least distributed with a, Open Content copyleft license such as CC BY-SA). Our greatest advance so far been attaining a digitized Public Domain text of the Leningrad Codex of the TaNaKh (in XML). . . . 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 nusḥaot 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. . . . The inaugural first post here at the Open Siddur Project website. . . . This is a critical text of the liturgy for Shaḥarit (Shabbat) nusaḥ Ashkenaz as prepared by Isaac Seligman Baer in Seder Avodat Yisrael (1868). . . . Categories: Tags: Contributor(s): | ||
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