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. . . .

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). . . .

The logo of the Open Siddur Project, as derived from the “color wheel” of the Bauhaus artist Johannes Itten (1961). . . .

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. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. Senate on 25 September 2008. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 30 July 2008. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 17 July 2008. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 30 June 2008. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. Senate on 22 May 2008. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 23 April 2008. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. Senate on 7 February 2008. . . .

A supplement to the Al Ḥet of the Yom Kippur vidui. . . .

A personal declaration to become a shomer/et shalom on Yom Kippur. . . .

A contemporary Jewish prayer for healng, used at congregation Tzedek Chicago. . . .

A prayer offered at the Broadview Detention Center for an interfaith vigil in support of the detainees and for change in US immigration policy. . . .

The full text of Rabbi David Saperstein’s invocation offered on the fourth day of the Democratic National Convention, August 8th, 2008. . . .

This prayer was first published in an op-ed, “A Jew’s Prayer for the Children of Gaza,” in the newspaper, Ha’aretz, on 7 January 2009. . . .

“Orah hee” was composed by Rabbi Jill Hammer in 2008 and first published at Tel Shemesh in romanized Hebrew and English translation. . . .

The prayer for the State of Israel, composed May 2008/lyyar 5768 on the 60th Anniversary of the State of Israel, was first shared on the web on May 7th, 2008 here and published on paper and PDF on May 8th, 2008 in an event organized by Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, “Embracing Justice: An Alternative Celebration and Learning for Yom Ha’Atzma’ut/Israel’s 60th Independence Day.” . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 7 November 2007. . . .

A prayer for the great aspirations of the country of the United States of America. . . .

With gratitude to the One True God, and to the original creators, this is a derivation of the “Battlestar Seder Haggadah” prepared by David “Razor” Lieberman, Alison “Fat Six” Ogden, and Mary “Actual” Bruch, for “A Seder on Battlestar Galactica,” an event held on Saturday, 26 April 2008, on Earth. The seder was first posted to galacticahaggadah.com and later to battlestarseder.org under a GNU Free Document License. Both of these domains having gone to ruin, the Haggadah was thankfully preserved on the Wayback Machine thanks to the Internet Archives. I resurrected the Haggadah, adding the following: 1) alternate blessings for crypto-Cylons, 2) संस्कृतम् sourcetext in Sanskrit script along with annotation indicating the source of the prayer/mantra included, 3) a short prayer that Priestess Elosha recites at the very beginning of the funeral scene near the end of the miniseries. –Aharon Varady . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 12 July 2007. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 18 September 2007. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 28 March 2007. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. Senate on 22 March 2007. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 15 March 2007. . . .

The evening service for entering Shabbat and Yom Tov as is the custom of Kehillat Kol Haneshama in south Jerusalem, Israel. . . .

It’s always a real struggle for the Left to successfully tackle oppression within its own ranks. But when we do it, our movements gain, every time, from the deeper understandings that emerge. To start the process this time, we need some basic information about what anti-Jewish oppression is and how to counter it. But it has to come from a perspective of justice for all people, not from opportunistic attempts to slander or censor social justice efforts that are gaining strength. . . .

Eternal God, You created earth and heavens with mercy, and blew the breath of life into animals and human beings. We were created amidst a world of wholeness, a world called “very good,” pure and beautiful, but now your many works are being erased by us from the book of life. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 14 September 2006. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. Senate on 6 April 2006. . . .

“Mi she-Berakh Prayer for Agunot and Women who are Denied a Writ of Divorce (mesorvot get)” was written by Dr. Yael Levine in the summer of 2006 and first published in the journal De’ot in advance of Purim 2007. The Hebrew version of the prayer was subsequently reprinted in the monumental Sefer ha-Shabbat, edited by Yonadav Kaploun and issued by Yediot Aharonot in 2011 (p. 260). The English translation was first published in The Jerusalem Post 16 March 2016 (Comment & Features), p. 13. The Hebrew annotation of the sources appeared already in the initial article in De’ot, and was subsequently published, inter alia, in an article published on kipa.co.il on 13 March 2019. . . .

In Jewish tradition, on this very day of disaster Mashiaḥ (Messiah) was born, but hidden away till a generation would come that is ready to make peace and eco-social justice in the world. So this year, we offer this story of hope and redemption to be read by Jews and Muslims together on the fast day or for the evening break-fast when it ends. . . .

Judy Gumbo co-authored this Al Ḥeit with her partner Stew Albert, ז״ל, before his passing in 2006. This Al Ḥeit was most recently used as part of Yom Kippur Kol Nidre services across the country in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street 5772. . . .

The Opening Prayer given in the U.S. House of Representatives on 12 July 2005. . . .

A public reading offered by Rabbi Arthur Waskow for the Fast of Esther in response to recent events in the State of Israel by the right-wing government of Bibi Netanyahu admitting Jewish fascists into their administration. . . .

We are sharing these tables for Taamei haMikra (cantillation for Torah reading) because we weren’t able to find these available in Unicode Hebrew text anywhere else on the Internet. We would very much like to also share the traditional tables of Taamei haMikra for the Nusaḥ Roma (Italy), Nusaḥ Teman (Yemen), and others along with excellent free-culture licensed recordings of these tables being chanted. Unfortunately, there is a paucity of free-culture licensed audio and video of the taamei hamikra being chanted. Please help us by sharing your audio or video with a Creative Commons Attribution license. . . .

Some Jewish line art to aid in illustrating your siddur or other liturgy-related work. . . .

Asarah B’Tevet (10th of Tevet) is one of the minor fast days in the Jewish calendar. Mechon Hadar’s Rabbi Ethan Tucker provides an overview of the various halakhic issues that are raised by a fasting on a Friday due to the upcoming Shabbat – how do we balance the tragedy of the fall of Jerusalem in 6th century BCE, which our fasting commemorates, with the joy of Shabbat? . . .

We are honored to share a paper of the eminent sociologist of American Jewry, Dr. Samuel Klausner. In this paper, Dr. Klausner presents his observations of the Pew Study of American Jewry (2013). Dr. Klausner writes: “Why have so many of my sociologist friends and leaders of the American Jewish community accepted the Pew report findings at face value? A Portrait of Jewish Americans has received wide attention. An article appeared in the Forward and Arnold Eisen discussed it in his blog. My list serv from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry (ASSJ) has had a running discussion of both findings and methods. Recently, I received a Board Briefing from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture which describes the report as “important and impartial.” The subtext of “impartial” may account for some of the uncritical impact of the findings. Pew has published ‘raw’ numbers, unexplained summaries of interview responses. The results evoked skepticism in this reader. An examination of how these results were obtained, a methodological critique, confirmed my skepticism.” . . .

Miqra `al pi ha-Mesorah is a new experimental edition of the Tanakh in digital online format, now available as a carefully corrected draft of the entire Tanakh. Two features make this edition of the Tanakh unique: Full editorial documentation and a free content license. Full editorial documentation: Various editions of the Torah or Tanakh in Hebrew may seem identical to the untrained eye, but the truth is that each and every edition—from Koren to Breuer and from Artscroll to JPS—makes numerous important editorial decisions. In most editions these decisions are not transparent, and the student of Torah therefore relies upon the good judgment of the editor. But in Miqra `al pi ha-Mesorah the entire editorial process and the reasoning behind it are fully described in all of their details: Every stylistic alteration and every textual decision made regarding every letter, niqqud, and ta`am in the entire Tanakh is documented. . . .