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Advocacy

This is an archive of essays and articles written and published by Open Siddur Project contributors on the significance of the open-source strategies it employs to share content and facilitate collaboration within the project and partnership among other projects in Open-source Judaism.

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Why, davka, an Open Siddur Project? — by Aharon Varady (Open Siddur, PresenTense 2009)

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. . . .

Categories: Advocacy, Essays

Tags: philosophy, PresenTense

Contributor(s): Aharon N. Varady

Pirate Siddurim vs. Open Siddurim — by Aharon Varady (Open Siddur, PresenTense 2009)

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: Advocacy, Essays

Tags: copyleft, copyright, digitization, philosophy, PresenTense

Contributor(s): Aharon N. Varady

Our hearts are stirred to create and to share — by Aharon Varady (Open Siddur, 2010)

For a relationship as intimate as that with one’s own spirit, we might assume that the only spiritual tools provided to individuals have this degree of personalization, but this of course, is not so. Printed siddurim were designed with other goals in mind. As a technology the siddur only became widely adopted by the Jewish public in the mid-19th century. Printers of siddurim have designed their siddurim to appeal to mass markets, each edition of the siddur representing a specific communal custom, and when translated, the specific language of a community. It’s no surprise then that for many Jews their spiritual identity is closely mapped to the liturgical variations represented by their Siddurim. . . .

Categories: Advocacy, Essays

Tags: identity, technology

Contributor(s): Aharon N. Varady

On the Open Siddur Project, a brochure presented at the Spring Intensive of the Academy for Jewish Religion by Aharon Varady (Open Siddur 2010)

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. . . .

Categories: Advocacy, Essays

Tags: book binding, 切り紙 kirigami, public speaking

Contributor(s): Aharon N. Varady

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Additional Notes:

The views expressed on this page and in these shared works represents the views of their creator(s) and do not necessarily represent the views of the Open Siddur Project's developers, its diverse community of volunteer contributors, or its institutional partners.
We strongly advise against printing sacred texts and art containing divine names as these copies must be regarded with reverence, complicating their casual treatment and disposal.
If you must dispose of a printed sacred text (one containing Divine Names), please locate the closest genizah (often established by a synagogue) and contact its custodians for further instructions. We also recommend using Morah Yehudis Fishman's Prayer for Adding a Work to the Genizah.

Support this work: The Open Siddur Project is a volunteer-driven, non-profit, non-commercial, non-denominational, non-prescriptive, gratis & libre Open Access archive of contemplative praxes, liturgical readings, and Jewish prayer literature (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) composed in every era, region, and language Jews have ever prayed. Our goal is to provide a platform for sharing open-source resources, tools, and content for individuals and communities crafting their own prayerbook (siddur). Through this we hope to empower personal autonomy, preserve customs, and foster creativity in religious culture.

ויהי נעם אדני אלהינו עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננה עלינו ומעשה ידינו כוננהו "May the pleasantness of אדֹני our elo’ah be upon us; may our handiwork be established for us — our handiwork, may it be established." –Psalms 90:17

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