This prayer for Tu biShvat, derived from the prayer included with the seder for Tu biShvat, the Pri Ets Hadar, are based on the Ḳabbalah of the four worlds and the ancient idea that everything physical is an image of the spiritual. . . .

Traditional Judaism offers a confessional prayer, or vidui, to be recited during a time of serious illness or near death. If the patient is unable to recite the prayer, others may do so on his or her behalf. This modern adaptation [of vidui] places less emphasis on atonement for sins, and more on the bonds connecting the patient to his or her loved ones. It can be recited by a friend, family member, or chaplain on behalf of a person who is very ill, especially when life and death are hanging in the balance. . . .

Avi Dolgin shares his mindful practice for maintaining “tashlikh consciousness” in the days leading up to Rosh Hashanah. . . .

The formulation for giving thanks for entering wakefulness innovated by Moshe ibn Makhir, as translated by Andrew Shaw. . . .

An original liturgical poem inspired by the Modah|Modeh Ani prayer. . . .

The prayer/songsheet used for the Avodat Lev dawn prayer service of the farmers in the Adamah Fellowship on the campus of the Isabella Freedman Retreat Center in Falls Village, Connecticut. . . .

Noam Raye Lerman and I were co-teachers in the Fall 2011 season at Kolot Chayeinu‘s children’s learning program in Park Slope Brooklyn, and as a Ḥanukkah present we made a Ḥanukkah Madrikh for our Kittah Gimmel class. I’m certain there are Jewish educators all over the world preparing curricular resources for Ḥanukkah right about now. We hope that by sharing this they can take it and improve on it, or else we’ll save them some energy so they’ll be able to do even more mitsvot. . . .

As the month of Elul wanes, we are preparing. We prepare for the new moon, we prepare for Rosh Hashanah, and we prepare for the zombie invasion. I have it on good authority, as do you, that the onslaught is imminent. The alarm blares every morning — a shofar blast and a warning… . . .

In the wake of the continued uprooting of fruit trees and human settlements in the Land of Israel, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights shared the following petitionary prayer. . . .

A song in English with Arabic translation, addressed from a Jew living in Jerusalem to his Arab neighbors, locally and regionally during the Arab Spring. . . .

We are hereby ready to fulfill our obligation of K’vod Habriot, respect for the dignity of every human being. We pray that our fellow citizens shall not be the source of suffering in others. We commit ourselves to raise our voices in support of universal human rights, to know the heart of the stranger, and to feel compassion for those whose humanity is denied. May our compassion lead us to fight for justice. Blessed is the Source of Life, who redeemed our ancestors from Egypt and brought us together this night of Passover to tell the story of freedom. May God bring us security and peace, enabling us to celebrate together year after year. Praised are you, Source of Righteousness, who redeems the world and loves justice and freedom. . . .

Some rabbinic sourcetexts related to the topic of how to write in your siddur, shared with translations by Rabbi Mordechai Torczyner. . . .

A prayer on the anniversary of the attacks on 11 September 2001. . . .

A Passover Haggadah compiled by Jewish Boston and the Jewish Women’s Archive containing numerous haggadah supplements. . . .

In this article, the authors introduce the concept of sharing in a free culture context as a model for the future of online Jewish educational resources, presenting a new resource-sharing/creating project that they hope will revolutionize the study of the siddur.

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We are pleased to announce that the first copyleft licensed haggadah

A prayer offered by Rabbi Arnold Resnicoff at the Presidential signing ceremony for the repeal of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” (DADT) law on December 22, 2010, in Washington, D.C. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 16 June 2010. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 5 May 2010. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 27 January 2010. . . .

God of all spirit, all directions, all winds You have placed in our hands power unlike any since the world began to overturn the orders of creation. . . .

A prayer following the Israel Land Administration’s 2010 eviction and demolition of Al-Araqeeb, a Bedouin village in the Negev. The prayer was written with the intention that its recitation is made “on behalf of justice and the rededication of Israel to the ideals of her Declaration of Independence.” . . .

An authentic siddur of Ashkenazic holy congregations without the changes made by later grammarians and maskilim, prepared by Rabbi Rallis Wiesenthal according to the minhag of Bad Homburg. . . .

Geshem and tal: rain and dew. We pray for each in its season, geshem all winter and tal as summer approaches…not everywhere, necessarily, but in the land of Israel where our prayers have their roots. In a desert climate, water is clearly a gift from God. It’s easy for us to forget that, here with all of this rain and snow. But our liturgy reminds us. Through the winter months, during our daily amidah we’ve prayed “mashiv ha-ruach u-morid ha-gashem” — You cause the winds to blow and the rains to fall! We only pray for rain during the rainy season, because it is frustrating both to us and to God when we pray for impossibilities. . . .

A pun filled ditty by the Fall 2010 Jewish environmental educators of the Teva Learning Center. . . .

In place of the blood of the slaughtered bulls from the covenantal ceremony in Exodus, we looked for another substance to effect the covenant ceremony. Amalya was born right after Shavuot, on which we have a tradition to eat dairy. In fact, milk itself is associated with the acceptance of Torah, as described in the following Midrash which quotes a verse from Song of Songs (4:11): “Sweetness drops from your lips, O bride; honey and milk are under your tongue and the scent of your robes is like the scent of Lebanon.” . . .

Three short havdallah meditations that culminate in a havdallah prayer/blessing. . . .

This is a prayer for parents to say for safe sleep for their newborn children. It is based almost entirely on the longer form of the traditional prayers before sleep. Because of gender there are two forms, for a boy and for a girl. I wrote this as part of my daughter’s naming ceremony in January 2001. I used it again in 2006 when my second daughter was born. . . .

Just in time for Ḥanukkah, Chajm Guski shares a חנוכה מדריך (Ḥanukkah Madrikh), Handbook for Ḥanukkah, with a Deutsch translation and transliteration of the blessings on lighting the Ḥanukiah, the kavanah, HaNerot HaLalu, and the piyyut, Maoz Tzur. . . .

We are grateful to the Vilna Shul in Boston and their Ḥavurah on the Hill program for preparing “Siddur on the Hill,” (2011) a beautiful siddur for Shabbat Friday night services and sharing it with free-culture compatible, open content licensing. The siddur includes original translations in English from Rabbi Sam Seicol, interpretive writings by Rabbi Rami Shapiro, and illustrations by Georgi Vogel Rosen, as well as contributions from numerous others. Thank you for sharing your siddur, open source! . . .

A Tu biShvat seder supplement recognizing the Israeli-Jewish settler violence and land theft under the State of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank. . . .

A haggadah for the Pesaḥ seder with an Esperanto translation. . . .

A Jewish Prayer for Graduation and an Interfaith Meditation on Wisdom and Learning, by Rabbi Jonah Rank (2010) . . .

An interview with Jonah Lowenfeld of the Jewish Journal on the values of sharing Torah learning as practiced by the Open Siddur Project. . . .

In January 2010, the Jewish Week published a piece about the Open Siddur Project by Steve Lipman, entitled, “Taking Prayer Into Their Own Hands.” The article is no longer available online at the Jewish Week website or in any online cache. We have archived it here for posterity. . . .

My struggle to realize this project is personal, but I never ever wanted my own dissatisfaction to overshadow what anyone else could bring to this project. We each have a unique creative light, and wow, does it ever grow bright when our light shines together. I knew this project was important because it came as an epiphany — an intersection of multiple passions each calling with their own creative, intellectual, and political genius. I just had to finally listen and take note. In the shadow of the Holocaust, a revitalized Jewish culture must be sought that does not rely entirely on ethnic nationalist movements to advance and preserve Jewish identity. Renaissance in all cultures, including Jewish culture, depends on the freedom of its participants, its cultural constituents, to be creative and expressive individuals, engaging with the meaning that culture broadcasts through its traditions. I said it in the interview but it bears repeating, the lingering dialectic that defines religion as somehow separate from culture relies on a notion that religion is no longer creative — a mere replication of viral memes, in Dawkin’s language. We liberate religion when we return it to culture, as a creative and relevant force for helping to shape our individual and collective consciousness. Religion in this way provides exercises, practices and other social technologies to help us evolve. If its creativity isn’t maintained, its relevance is ceded to other systems to function in its place — or it is ceded to social elements and authorities who might use it to sustain self-serving agendas. . . .

I invite you to think of the Torah as a free and open platform rather than a closed one, and to see your work similarly. The takeaway I have for you today is to adopt an open source strategy for your non-profit work in the manner that Maimonides, Hillel the Elder, or the Sfas Emes would. Express faith in your organizational mission by opening up the development of that which you are innovating to the broader community, maintain a low bar for entry and to cultivate a market for wide adoption, and eschew closed source development and proprietary licensing. When your actions are guided by your business model rather than your mission statement, it’s time to revisit your mission statement and rethink your business model. . . .

This journey really started with my time spent with the myriad of other folk who prepared for and showed up at Jews in the Woods gatherings. It was at one such retreat at the old Eilat Chayyim in upstate New York that I met Dan Sieradski who had worked on his own Open Source Siddur project and who afterward invited me to the advisory board of what was then called Matzat and which might now be called Jew-It-Yourself. I promised him that the siddur we would develop would be an important feature of the larger constellation of resources we were imagining, resources all complementary due to our use of free and open source licensing. . . .

Maps showing the relationship between the nusḥaot are quite helpful to us. The Open Siddur Project is seeking to digitize all the extant nusḥaot witnessed in siddurim and other manuscripts, in order to show the evolution of individual prayers and blessings. This will helpfully represent at least the textual diversity of Jewish spiritual expression in the many geographically dispersed Jewish communities over the past three thousand years. I also hope that representing this diversity in t’fillah will be an inspiration to individuals engaging in davvening as an intellectually engaged and creative discourse speaking across generations. The extent to which we’ll be able to realize this vision will be limited to how many source texts we’ll be able to identify, transcribe, and share with open standards and free culture licenses. Seeing that the design of the map appearing in Hoffman’s book left much to be desired, I redesigned it for clarity while adding some additional nusḥaot. I hope that the following map based on Joseph Heinemann’s work will help inspire fellow researchers to contribute to this project. . . .

Keep the Internet as open as Avraham and Sarah’s tent. Help us oppose ACTA & TPP: — free trade legislation with specific language that will undermine free speech on the Internet. . . .

An important licensing update made to a collection of digital fonts maintained by the open-source Hebrew type foundry, the Culmus Project, . . .

Cultures, including our own, breathe creativity and exhale innovation. We rely on the creative works bequeathed to us by earlier generations to remain rooted in our cultural identity. Synagogue members and kids in day schools, summer camps, youth orgs, and creative Jews working on their own can all benefit from our educational, cultural, and spiritual institutions cooperating with one another in sharing the bounty of our cultural heritage. As Jews, are we not all collaborating on a grand project of Torah learning, spiritual improvement, and tikkun olam? It’s time our cultural licensing choices reflect these profound intentions. . . .

This post continues the series of advocacy posts directed at Jewish content creators and aggregators. Other parts of the series discussed the global communal benefit of free primary data resources and issues of copyright license compatibility and the connection between copyright licensing and remixability. While my previous post briefly mentioned the non-free Creative Commons licenses, this post details why you should choose a free culture license. In particular, it urges you to avoid the licenses with the non-commercial-use only (NC) terms. . . .

In education, technology is a means to an end, not an end in itself. There are some problems technology can solve, and others it can’t. As Joel Grishaver said better than I can, technology is a “plus” not “or” proposition. Learners will have different success rates using technological solutions, such as distance learning, and the use of computers cannot take the place of a real-world social community. On the other hand, technology also has the potential to transform learning and learning environments and to make both learning materials and the teachers to guide their use accessible where they would not have otherwise been. . . .

At the beginning of the talk, the audience expressed some discomfort with the idea of copying from one website to another, even if the original author is attributed. The main concern seemed to be that the author potentially loses control of his/her message if he/she has no idea of the remainder of the content of the website. On the other hand, one audience member who posts reviews on book review sites had an innate sense of the concept of mutual benefit: she posts reviews of the books she reads in part because she reads reviews posted by others. . . .

Advocacy for creative works’ freedom represents a paradigm shift in thought among content creators: In a free culture, a premium is not placed on the material as-such or even the particular rights associated with the material. Instead, it is on the users’ freedom, and it is that freedom that is the prerequisite to large-scale creative engagement with educational material. . . .

Free, open data prevents the necessity of duplication of effort, which, in turn, prevents the community as a whole from unnecessarily wasteful spending. Particularly for organizations with a social mission, its use is a win for everyone. . . .

The free culture community has developed mechanisms to make sharing and collaborative development easier. The principles that define works of free culture are:

1. the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
2. the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
3. the freedom to make and redistribute copies, in whole or in part, of the information or expression
4. the freedom to make changes and improvements, and to distribute derivative works

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. . . .

Last Sukkot 5771 (2011), Efraim Feinstein shared the sourcesheet for his late night shiur (lesson) on copyright in Rabbinic Halakhah (Jewish law). Efraim’s research adds a great deal of important perspective to our work here on the Open Siddur Project. It provides relevant historical context for our work advocating the adoption of free culture principles and free-culture licenses to facilitate sharing (tachlis) within the Jewish world. . . .

A series of tests to determine how well some popular and some less well-known web browsers perform in supporting the technology for displaying Hebrew text. In particular, I’m interested to see which browsers are failing to use a web standard called CSS @font-face to properly display Unicode Hebrew fonts that support the full range of Hebrew diacritics and which contain excellent font logic for diacritical positioning. . . .