A Wordpress plugin that renders the Unicode character “Vulcan Salute” (U+1F596) together with its mirror image as inline, bidi-safe markup — in order to display, via shortcode, the traditional nesíăt kapayim (“lifting of the hands”) gesture used by Kohanim during the Birkat Kohanim (a/k/a dukhenen) service. The display defaults to showing both hands side by side (right hand before left hand, thumbs facing inward), however, either hand alone is also selectable. Supports full-color emoji vs. line-art (“vs15”) rendering, and fluid display sizing via CSS clamp(), if desired. Skin tone is available from light to medium to dark with ‘medium-light’ and ‘medium-dark’ also available.

A test page for testing new wordpress code.

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.

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.