Open Siddur Project • the Open Siddur Project ✍ פְּרוֺיֶקְט הַסִּדּוּר הַפָּתוּחַ

📰 “Color-Coded Prayerbook Devised by Rabbi” (Martin Lauer, Springfield Republican 1972)

the Hierophant — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 02:15:26 +0000

Crop of Color Key from the Bookmark included with the Polychrome Historic Haggadah (image not included in original article)

Color-Coded Prayerbook Devised by Rabbi

Springfield Republican, May 21st, 1972 by Martin Lauer

Religious books like the Bible and scholarly works have traditionally been printed in the manner to which everyone is accustomed. Page after page of type with footnotes or indices taking up a good portion of each sheet has long seemed acceptable.

Now, within a year, a book is expected to come out which will change not only the basic nature of such books but also indicate sources by color code.

Rabbi Jacob Freedman of 68 Calhoun St., Springfield has already produced such a book which he calls “a sample.” A larger book is planned for which “90 per cent of the research is completed,” he said.

The book called a “polychrome historical prayerbook” in Hebrew will be titled “Siddur Bays Yosef” in remembrance of Rabbi Freedman’s late father, the Rev. Joseph Freedman.

From the color of the print readers can determine the historical period during which the prayer or section of the prayer was written.

Color blocks to the fight and left of the prayer show when the prayer became part of the Jewish service. In English along with the block color code appear the abbreviations of the references.

For an example the color key for the entire book is: black denotes a Biblical soure or era; red denotes the Talmudic Period to 650 C.E. (Christian Era); green, Geonic Period, 650-1075; brown, Middle Ages, 1100-1500; purple, pre-modern, 1500-1800: dark blue, modern era. 1800-1900, and light blue, contemporary, 1900-1970.

The footnotes have the same code.

In March, Rabbi Freedman received an honorary doctorate degree from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New Yew York, N.Y. He said the seminary recognized him at that time as the originator of the color coded process.

The code’s benefits are many, he said. A reader gains the historical perspective of the prayer, not only an understanding of what the person was undergoing when he wrote it, but also why Jews might have included it in a service or in their prayers.

In another instance, a contemporary work might have its base or words taken from the Bible or that era. References through the color code show the reader that these ideas were phrased in a like manner centuries ago.

Rabbi Freedman said the coding can help persons all the way from elementary grades through the seminary. He said the English footnotes are there so Christian scholars can use the book and note his references.

One example is the Zohar, a prayer said just before taking the Holy Scrolls from the Ark. The color for the entire prayer except for four Hebrew symbols is the same. The four, Aramaic for the idea of truth, show a Biblical reference.

Rabbi Freedman said this is an example of how interwoven some of the prayers are.

He has been a rabbi for 42 years, serving congregations in Chelsea, Fall River, Pittsfield and Long Beach, Calif.

by Martin Lauer, Springfield Republican, 1972

Above is a transcription of Rabbi Freedman’s news clipping of the article by Lauer. Obvious typos and misspellings have been corrected. Thank you to Harry Aizenstadt for contributing this clipping to us.

In our project history, we explain how Rabbi Jacob Freedman’s Polychrome Historical Haggadah was a major inspiration behind our vision for an open siddur project. While researching it’s history I was so pleased to discover that the haggadah Rabbi Freedman managed to self-publish in 1974 to rave reviews, was really only a proof-of-concept for his life’s ambition — a Polychrome Historical Siddur. Rabbi Freedman published a brochure outlining the scope and color of his envisioned siddur in 1969. In the papers of Rabbi Freedman donated to the Open Siddur Project by Harry Aizenstadt and Lisa Rubins, this article printed May 21st, 1972 by Martin Lauer in the Springfield Republican describes the completed siddur that Freedman was never able to publish in his lifetime. — Aharon Varady

📰 “Database Davvenen” by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (circa mid-1980s)

Zalman Schachter-Shalomi — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 19:06:12 +0000

In the following Q&A with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, prepared for a Ḥavurah publication sometime in the early to mid-1980s, Reb Zalman presciently describes a digital database of liturgy and liturgy-related work that ḥavurah groups across the world could use to bring together custom designed and crafted works for use in communal prayer. We are grateful to Reb Zalman for bringing this work to our attention. If anyone can help us identify the exact date and issue of this work’s original publication (if indeed, it was ever published), please leave a comment or contact us.

Folks might already be aware that Reb Zalman and Rebbetzin Eve Ilsen were among those impacted by the flooding in Colorado this summer (2013). Their house was flooded, with Reb Zalman’s office containing many years of his documents and visions being especially damaged. Reb Zalman found this piece of writing while cleaning up the remains of his office and sent it to us as a testament to the long-held vision that we intend to fulfill through our Open Siddur Project. –Aharon Varady

Last spring, ḤAVURAH spoke with Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi about the kind of liturgy needed in the ḥavurah movement, and how a siddur could be put together. Here are some of Zalman’s thoughts about why and how we davven, and what we can create.

WHY DO WE DAVVEN?

At one time we used to have a notion that davvenen was in order to impress God. But the philosophers said, “Come on, you can’t impress God.” Most of the ḥavurah folks don’t davven just because halacha says to do it. That’s not the way we are touched or connected. What we are connected with is harder to talk about, but what keeps coming up is this: “A whole week I’m “I”; now I want to become “we.” I must have some connection with transcendence, but transcendence as defined by my reference group.” It has to be non-sexist, non-age-ist, and so forth; it becomes very hard to have a siddur, because if it had any zap, it’s been circumscribed out; it has to be an androgynous zap, and we don’t have that in our language.

A SOFTWARE SIDDUR

Let’s play a little science fiction. Imagine that we have davvenen software. The program gets projected on one of those big projection screens, or on the wall. You enter on the computer, “Ḥavurah style” and the time allotted, the number of participants, the different participants (Ḥazan, Baal Korah, etc.) and all the parts of the minyan. Then it gives you a little musical interlude, and it invites you to do some movements along with Birchat haShachar. Whenever you’ve finished with that (you can make it go slower or faster) it begins with a text for “Mizmor Shir, hannukat habayit leDavid,” done in clusters, so you have, “mizmor Shir,” “Ḥannukat habayit,” “leDavid,” and each cluster has an English side and a Hebrew side to it. As it goes on with the text, it flashes bits of Tanach on the side, with posek aleph and posek bet, with imagery. We’re trying to translate what kavvanah is doing into imagery, giving options all the time.

THE DATABASE

The idea is to have a central database, into which lots of people in the ḥavurah movement can make their contribution. Many options could be included for all parts of the service, created by different people and different groups. People will add their own personal rubrics, based on their own experience. Right now we have calendar rubrics, e.g., on Monday and Thursday you don’t recite this, but we will add, “Birchot haShachar works best close to dawn,” and ways to involve the group. We don’t put it as law, but as suggestion, as a recipe. We make a big appendix to the siddur. We leave out some of the things now in the siddurs, things that are so hackneyed that you can’t put them in your mouth, but we include the ones that are good. And we might want to have a series of poems. Many poets who never think of themselves as religious poets (or even religious people), are writing poetry that is current prophesy, that is modern piyyut. We want to use that stuff for musaf, where we need one more fortissimo after k’riat ha Torah. This poetry is not the kind of thing that’s made for reading by the group, but if someone reads it well and dramatically, the congregation can say amen afterward.

The way this would be used, is that people would phone in, on their modems, and have a printout on which they could assemble the siddurim they want from the things that are available. It wouldn’t even have to be on paper; it could be made into transparencies, to be projected overhead, so that people’s hands are free to move as they want. All this would be very fluid, with new possibilities available all the time. For example, you have a printout, “Elokenu, Elokei avotenu, Elokei Avraham v’Eloket Yitzhak, v’Elokei Yaakov.” Then you have an alternate: “Elokei Avraham v’Sarah; alternate: Elokei Avraham, Yitzhok v’Yaakov, Elokei Sarah, Rivkah, Leah v’Rochel; you can have Bilhah v’Zilpah, and you can show the fantastic range of what people have done—Baruch Atah Adoshem, magen Avraham v’Sarah; Baruch Atah HaShem, magen Avraham v’esrat Sarah—so much is already floating around, there’s no need for people always to have to reinvent the wheel, instead of adding to the storehouse of what we’ve already got. The database can also include a little handbook for the baal tefillah, to point out what are the social dimensions of the service, a sort of checklist to review with chaverim after the service: “how did go, how did that go, how can we improve it?”

VIDEOTAPE

There are other forms, song-forms and dance-forms. At B’nai Or we’ve been doing things with different phases of the service. Some people have been doing dance, and motion choirs to certain responses that get incorporated into the davvenen; you don’t have to be a ballet dancer, and yet you’ll be able to do something more than shucklen. We can record some of the very fluid things that the women are creating for Rosh Hodesh. We can record whole services. Moshe Waldoks recorded a Ma’ariv service that B’nai Or is working on, which is not finished yet. Shut-in people can especially benefit from these videotapes, so that if they have a VCR, they can put on their Shaḥarit, Minha and Ma’ariv and davven along, and get kavvanah along with it. In order to be good the material can’t come from one source. A lot of people are working on many different pieces. This kind of usage will also make it possible for things to get tried out by people davvening. Sometimes things [work] real well for the eye, but not for the ear; you have to try out how it sings.

I really believe that a wonderful renaissance of davvenen can be made, using a central database. Because then you don’t have to tell anyone, do this or that, because our people aren’t the ones to be told—but if you give them resources, they sure use resources. And every ḥavurah has at least one member who can connect with a database. People who have the equipment are proud to have it and show it off; it’s a nice magic.

Zalman Schachter-Shalomi is Professor of Religion and Jewish Mysticism at Temple University, and is the Rebbe of the B’nai Or Community. He was a founding member of Ḥavurat Shalom.

PresenTense Institute Summer Workshop (Aharon Varady 2009)

Aharon N. Varady — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:08:48 +0000

W00t! First post!

Over the course of the summer I will be in Jerusalem attending the PresenTense Institute‘s summer workshop. Before I arrived I set in mind an intention, (or kavvanah, as it were) to achieve the following goals:

gaining expert understanding of the licensing and technical challenges for developing partnerships between creative projects founded on works in the public domain
learning about how to manage and sustain non-commercial open source projects, and
cultivating relationships with future partners and users of the Open Siddur and its affiliate projects.

First Pitch from the Hotseat at the PresenTense Start-Up Incubator (Aharon Varady 2009)

Aharon N. Varady — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:47:15 +0000

During the summer of 2009, Aharon Varady was accepted as a fellow of PresenTense start-up incubator for social entrepreneurship organized by Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz in Jerusalem. As part of that program, he blogged about his experience noting ideas that would feed into other essays articulating the principles behind the Open Siddur Project.

Busy days this week at the PresenTense (PT) hub for the Open Siddur project. Wednesday was the heaviest and began in earnest with work on a website, opensiddur.org, from late Tuesday night into the lonely hours before the sunrise.

Each Wednesday, PT encourages its fellows by requiring the submission of a deliverable. The first was the “Visioning Deliverable”–a short narrative of Open Siddur’s quest to improve an imperfect world, how we will attract minions to our cause, and what we need in order to accomplish our goal. For this deliverable, I submitted the About page of opensiddur.org.

Later in the morning, and after a few hours rest, I explained the Open Siddur project to a journalist from a major Israeli English language newspaper/website (!) A challenging interview, I’m hopeful the story is accepted for publication in the next few weeks.

One of the ideas I elaborated in the interview that I had not developed beforehand was the idea that the project of the Open Siddur is important for both beginner and advanced Siddur users because it enables a more dynamic and content-rich mental Siddur. Regular Siddur users have so many prayers memorized, that practically they could recite t’fillah (prayer) verbatim without printed text. A siddur with variations between nusḥot made visible and accessible would both enrich the experience of t’fillah as well as improve one’s understanding and respect of Jewish diversity — an important value in the Jewish tradition of minhagim (regional customs) and nusḥaot (regional variations in liturgy).

The idea of a mental Siddur should sound similar to anyone who has read the interesting theories concerning mental maps and developed further by critical cartographers such as Matthew Edney. Physical maps are artifacts reflecting cultural worldviews, and I think similarly, the seder (order), liturgy, and rules concerning group and individual prayer reflect particular Jewish values. The fact that Judaism so respects the diversity of minhagim and nusaḥot reflects a value of pluralism engaged in one of the most intimate experiences of Jewish spirituality.

Post-interview I was keen to share what I said with my partners at our sister project at jewishliturgy.org. Volume on our listserve is spiking and I noticed jewschool writer David A.M. Wilensky is now participating on it too. I’m enthusiastic that we’re working on a new proof of concept highlighting our vision for the Open Siddur which will apply Efraim Feinstein’s important work developing a Jewish liturgy extension to the Text Enconding Initiative XML schema for encoding text.

After a brisk afternoon walk to find a SIM card at the local Hadar mall (new cell number, 052 789 2435), I returned to the PresenTense hub in time to give the first pitch from the “Hotseat” (the name Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz have for their version of pitchgiving methodology). It boils down to 3 minutes of pitching, 5 minutes of questions, 5 minutes of comments, and 2 minutes of wrap-up. Many people use slide application such as MS PowerPoint for this. There was simply no time for a slide presentation at short notice, even while multitasking, and I welcomed fellow PT fellow Russel Neiss’ encouragement to take confidence in myself as the unbound expression of the Open Siddur inside me.

The pitch actually went pretty well, all things considered. Given Ariel’s formula I quickly outlined my remarks and delivered them with passion. PT encourages social entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas in the form of a narrative describing the imperfect present, the improved future, and what’s needed to get there.

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 sincere 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.

During the comment period of my Hotseat pitch, a PT fellow made an important comment. The problem I described wasn’t necessarily solved by the solution provided. For example: there might be a deeper problem to the concept of a spiritual tool with a formal liturgy being capable of successfully engaging the spiritual and creative expression of its users — even with the freedom provided by remixing content. Understanding this, we nevertheless see the siddur also relevant to the value of communal spiritual engagement–and this is why formal text exists–so that participants can share in a common structure for engagement.

[cross-posted to PresenTense]

Logo for the Open Siddur Project, by Aharon Varady (2009)

Aharon N. Varady — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 06:40:07 +0000

DOWNLOAD: SVG | PNG

This is the Open Siddur Project logo, with twelve delineated colors representing the twelve shevatim (tribes) and mazalot (constellations) — a reference to the diversity of the remnant of the Israelite people and the international Jewish community in its expressions of prayer. The spectrum of colors evokes the divine canopy of peace protecting the earth after the covenant with Noaḥ that humanity never let itself become as depraved as the predatory dor hamabul (generation of the flood). The colorwheel itself is derived from Johannes Itten’s Farbkreis (“color wheel” 1961) and is a nod to both the Arts & Crafts movement of William Morris and its development by the Bauhaus movement in Weimar Germany.

The circle here is a reference to the form of Sandalfon, the angel of prayer, who daily weaves the prayers of the world into a wreath crown that is delivered to Hashem during the Qedushah.^[1] Chagigah 13b.4. Also find Rabbi Dr. Arthur Green’s Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism (1997). As the Latin letter ‘O’, the circle also stands for the word ‘Open’ in connection to the open-source principle and licensing framework undergirding this project, and in reciprocity to the divine project of giving through the renewal of creation in every moment (per Psalms 145:16).

The Hebrew letters forming the word סידוּר (siddur, an arrangement of prayers, i.e. a prayerbook) appear inside the circle. The text appears here and elsewhere with various styles of Hebrew typography. In the reference image below, the type is sourced from the Times New Roman digital font.

Notes

Notes
1	Chagigah 13b.4. Also find Rabbi Dr. Arthur Green’s Keter: The Crown of God in Early Jewish Mysticism (1997).

On Sharing Siddur Texts — by Aharon Varady (Open Siddur, PresenTense 2009)

Aharon N. Varady — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:33:55 +0000

During the summer of 2009, Aharon Varady was accepted as a fellow of PresenTense start-up incubator for social entrepreneurship organized by Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz in Jerusalem. As part of that program, he began to articulate and explain many of the principles behind the conception of the Open Siddur Project in a series of essays.

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).

Given that over 50% of the siddur is sourced in the TaNaKh, and since it can be referenced chapter and verse by XML, our digitization efforts for the core content of the siddur can be considered over 50% complete. To obtain the rest from siddurim in the public domain, we either need an excellent Hebrew OCR program, or a large team of (hopefully crowdsourced) transcribers. Both methods will require a rigorous quality control process.

However, there’s yet another more obvious alternative to the digitization challenge: finding siddurim that have already been digitized by others. Since arriving in Jerusalem last Wednesday I’ve already been clued to three digital siddurim available on the web (in Ashkenazi, Sefardi, and Mizrachi nusḥaot). I am hopeful that their likely owner–the people responsible for digitizing the text at the DAAT project–will be agreeable to contributing them with a permissive license that will allow the Open Siddur to create a derivative XML encoded text from them.

One might ask why the content of the siddur isn’t free from copyright to begin with. Well, it is in a sense–all work published prior to 1923 is considered to be in the Public Domain. But copyright is applied even to transcribed texts so unless the publisher has consented to their digital transcription having a permissive copyleft license (some rights reserved), it is protected copyright (all rights reserved). So, projects like the Open Siddur that seek to work creatively with Jewish culture must work cooperatively to liberate the legacy of Jewish culture and tradition from the current restrictive climate determined by intellectual property law.

For those of us interested in working with Jewish texts, the idea others claiming copyright on our foundational sourcetexts, digitized or not, seems like an absurdity. We enliven the works of our ancestors by studying their teachings, and meditating on and singing with their prayers. The inspired author or authors of these works gave their work freely to the Jewish people and to the world. All the tradition demands is correct attribution, as is taught in the Pirkei Avot chapter 6:6, התורה נקנית בערבעים ושמונה דברים. ואלו הן….והאומר דבר בשם אומרו. הא למדת כל־האומר דבר בשם אומרו מביא גאלה לעולם, שנאמר “ותאמר אסתר למלך בשם מרדכי”׃ — “…the Torah is acquired by means of forty-eight qualities, which are…[and lastly] what the student has heard from others she will quote in the name of him of whom she has heard it. For so you have learned: He who quotes something in the name of the person who said it brings deliverance to the world. For it is said: ‘And Esther said to the King in the name of Mordechai’ (Esther 2:21)” [emphasis mine]. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch comments: “[A student] is careful to absorb and repeat accurately what they have heard from others and will never pass off as their own what others have told them.”

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

Aharon N. Varady — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:16:59 +0000

During the summer of 2009, Aharon Varady was accepted as a fellow of PresenTense start-up incubator for social entrepreneurship organized by Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz in Jerusalem. As part of that program, he began to articulate and explain many of the principles behind the conception of the Open Siddur Project in a series of essays.

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.

Imagine if a tool existed for a diverse group of Hillel students at a small college to easily develop a transdenominational siddur reflecting the unique backgrounds of their community. Now imagine if this was a summer camp, a classroom at a pluralistic Jewish day school, or an indpendent minyan.

Imagine if the first siddur presented to a first or second grade day school student was actually developed by that student over the course of a year while learning about the traditionally liturgy from a teacher, while integrating personal art, poetry and inspirational quotes and teaching from other classes into their structured daily t’fillah.

Imagine a bar or bat mitsvah where the young teenager has composed a bentsher with graphics and images, translation, commentary and transliteration tailor made for his or her guests. Imagine if this were a wedding or simply a custom bentsher developed by a family as a resource of their favorite traditions.

Imagine a young professional struggling to find time in the morning to continue their daily practice and keep it meaningful rather than a rote routine. They use the Open Siddur to find unfamiliar content and new ways to daven, integrating yoga with prayer, or subscribing to a stream of commentary or source text integrating learning within their practice.

Imagine a nusaḥ that is only followed by a small community that speaks a language other than Hebrew. They use the Open Siddur to preserve their nusaḥ, teach Hebrew, and update their old siddur with a translation and transliteration of their prayers in the non-Latin script their community is literate in.

The Open Siddur enables all of these possibilities and more.

The Open Siddur is not meant as a replacement for traditional nusḥaot but as a platform for the development and publication of siddurim relevant to individuals and groups not served by the one-size fits all siddurim already available in print.

Furthermore, by digitizing the traditional text of the siddur and making it available under a copyright permissive license, the Open Siddur and the Jewish Liturgy project liberates the cultural works of our ancestors for use by our children and our children’s children without requiring them to ask for copyright permission. By encoding the siddur and its commentaries, instructional text, and translations using open text encoding standards, the Open Siddur enables other open cultural projects to build on our achievement without having to reinvent the wheel.

Spiritual Alienation and the Siddur — by Aharon Varady (Open Siddur 2009)

Aharon N. Varady — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:39:44 +0000

In his essay, “Even A New Siddur Can’t Close the ‘God Gap’” (in The Forward, 8/18/2009), Rabbi Saul Berman seems almost ready to give an honest critique of the siddur and the practice of t’fillah, but instead steps back to make a more general critique on modernity. The central problem Berman addresses is the problem of Jewish spiritual alienation in an age of comfort and optimism in technological and industrial progress.

Berman argues that “new and creative siddurim” will not help translate the text of the prayer into a language understandable to “modern, socially integrated” Jews. Rather, he calls for the reintroduction of “God and God’s values into the truly vibrant dimensions of our lives.”

What Berman is calling for isn’t exactly new. I think you can hear his critique of modernity, not only in a stream of sermons dating back to pious worries of the pernicious influence of the Haskala (Enlightenment). Similar worries were also expressed by Romantic Christian theologians and continue to be voiced by religious thinkers of all sorts concerned with assimilation and materialism.

What might be new is his use of the Siddur as a prop in a straw man argument. Berman chronicles a list of popular siddurim published in the last century. I don’t think any editors of these works expected their new siddur to change how Jews relate to holiness and divinity in their lives. Their more modest goal was (and remains) to simply help make Jewish liturgy more accessible to Jewish communities in their native languages and in accordance with the philosophies undergirding their communal religious identities.

As printed and bound texts prepared by others, pre-programmed siddurim, “new and creative” or old and familiar, do not permit easy modification. I hardly expect anyone to not feel alienated or bored when provided with texts written by others in different languages and different contexts. This is as true for folks well practiced in davvening thrice daily as those who visit shul once a year for Yom Kippur. Without a program of learning that helps someone become familiar with the liturgy I wouldn’t expect them to engage the texts of the siddur and prepare their rote recitation with kavvanah (intention). I wouldn’t expect them to breathe an improvisational and creative spirit into the verses they hurry to read without having some feeling of profound intimacy with the words themselves.

Like Berman, I don’t have too much hope that any of the modern siddurim he writes of will end spiritual alienation for Jews that may not know (or care) that Berman thinks they’re alienated. Neither the siddurim as currently designed, nor the practice of t’fillah as mandated in Halakha can guarantee the intimate relationship that Berman hopes is renewed in the Jewish people.

And yet, Jewish tradition does offer Jews a toolkit and a practice for engaging and growing integral relationships. I do think a new siddur can have an impact on the problem Berman tries to articulate, even for a Jew that doesn’t share Berman’s idea of God or “Godly values” as he puts it.

Berman doesn’t elaborate on how his hoped for reintroduction of values will take place, but they must begin somewhere. Considering the essential place of the siddur within the spiritual and educational toolkit provided to each and every Jew, thinking of it as part of a comprehensive program of Jewish spiritual renewal is essential. The initiation of the sons and daughters of Israel to their eponymous mission of wrestling with God begins with their wrestling with the siddur: the languages of the source texts, the translations, the instructions, and the energy to maintain and preserve the practice as an individual in a group and while practicing t’filla alone.

I have some faith that a siddur, thought of as a tool and thus open for redesign to achieve certain goals, can be useful and relevant—so long as it is user modifiable, and in an importance sense, crafted. The term “alienation” was first promulgated in the mid 19^th century in connection with craft workers who through the industrial processes of mass production were “alienated” from their essential creative natures. At the Open Siddur Project, we hope to empower individuals in a collaborative online workshop where they can craft their own custom siddur, relevant to their spiritual practice.

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.

Once upon a time, Jews — Israelites — prayed from the heart — sans Siddurim. (The first example of the standing silent meditation, the Amidah, is attributed to Ḥanah the mother of the prophet Shmuel (in 1 Samuel 1:13).) What kind of siddur might we design today if our goal was to help Jews again pray from the heart? Would it be a tome full of psalms attributed to King David or might it be a sequence of exercises that reference and emphasize values that help prime our daily practice of gmillut chasadim (acts of loving-kindness) and other mitzvot? Perhaps it could be a combination of both – historically authentic and yet impressed with the meaning that only an individual can author from their heart.

Personally, I would very much like to see an attempt made to designed a siddur with this goal in mind. But, the mission of the Open Siddur is not to create a new siddur and then prescriptively offer it up as the expression of a new movment. Rather, our mission is to provide a collaborative publishing platform where any aspiring siddur maker can try their hand at crafting a siddur relevant to their practice.

I would also recommend anyone interested in taking Berman’s concern seriously to check out Aryeh Ben David’s suggestions for personalizing t’fillah in his book “The Godfile: 10 Approaches to Personalizing Prayer” (2007, Devorah Publishing). Rav Ben David has an organization that is devoted to helping both individual Jews and congregations grow in a serious practice that is engaging and nourishes integral relationships. Check out http://www.ayeka.org.il.

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

Aharon N. Varady — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 11:51:09 +0000

During the summer of 2009, Aharon Varady was accepted as a fellow of PresenTense start-up incubator for social entrepreneurship organized by Ariel Beery and Aharon Horwitz in Jerusalem. As part of that program, he began to articulate and explain many of the principles behind the conception of the Open Siddur Project in a series of essays.

In the free culture movement, culture hacking employs copyright law in new and unintended ways: by using the law to ensure attribution while abrogating restrictions on redistribution and adaptive reuse. This is one way we use copyright law at the Open Siddur in our 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 Roman; 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.

To make this previous example a reality, the Open Siddur is committed to only using copyright permissive licenses for our core siddur content that permit the generation of non-commercial and commercially derivative works. Copyright permissive licenses that allow this include CC0, CC-BY, and CC-BY-SA. Licenses that conflict with this objective include the Creative Commons licenses with the NC (non-commercial) and ND (no derivative) clauses. (We envision that users of our siddur building tool will be able to choose the license under which they wish to share their content.)

For example, a number of siddurim are available digitally at the Hebrew language site of wikisource, a sister of the wikipedia project. Up until mid-2009, creative work on wikisource was shared with the GFDL license. Because the GFDL was incompatibile with other copyleft licenses like the CC-BY-SA, we weren’t able to incorporate wikisource work in our project until wikisource changed its licensing policy.

If this sounds frustrating and absurd given that the authors of these piyyutim and tehillim could hardly imagine the publishing and intellectual property restrictions of the 20th and 21st centuries, it is. The fact remains that copyright is applied to the digitization of text and that includes the imaging/scanning, as well as the manual or automated (OCR) transcription of the text.

Why, you ask, can’t we simply cut and paste these digitized siddurim and simply ignore copyright restrictions. Why indeed? I am quite certain that other online siddur projects have done this and may even currently be doing this with a laissez faire attitude towards the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886), the Universal Copyright Convention (1955), and the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty (1996) just to name a few of the relevant international intellectual property laws. To make certain, that our content is as free and open (really, in a sense, liberated) as culture within this legal environment we have endeavored to ensure all our core content is transcribed from works in the free cultural commons (e.g. the public domain).

To do otherwise would frankly be much simpler… and thus, faster, especially for an ambitious project such as the Open Siddur and its sister, the Jewish Liturgy project. To do so, however, we would probably have to change our name to the Pirate Siddur, just to keep things honest.

As tempting as this strategy is, the developers of the Open Siddur believe that the sustainability of this project as a platform for the creation of new cultural products within Judaism depends on our respect and awareness of the current restrictions on copyright and copyleft licensed works. We want the siddur to be Free as in Freedom, unencumbered, and unhassled.

In our minds, this is a great act of loving-kindness (and gives us all a great big mitsvah-rush!). But besides this, awareness of copyright licensing is essential for a project that envisions itself as a cultural platform for as yet unimagined projects that will add value to the project and programs of Judaism in general.

📰 “Prayer a la Carte” (Raphael Ahren, Haaretz 2009)

the Hierophant — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:04:02 +0000

Raphael Ahren wrote a nice article on the project in this week’s Anglo File Section of Haaretz that appeared both online and in-print (pdf). Please read the article at Haaretz (support Raphael’s page views!), and return here to comment — below the reprint.

Prayer ala carte

By Raphael Ahren

Tags: Aharon Varady, Israel News

Aharon Varady always dreamed of putting together his own prayer book. Realizing that many people – including himself – often see prayer as a dull and robotic exercise in the fulfillment of a religious duty, he thought for years about ways to enable people to create their own prayer book, or siddur, in order to make the most of their experience. A fellow at this year’s PresenTense Institute, Varady earlier this month finally embarked on a daring project, creating a tool for “individuals and groups to build the siddur they’ve always wanted,” as his Web site explains.

Varady’s Open Siddur project aspires to funnel all different regional traditions, translations, commentaries and instructional notes that Jews from the four corners of the world have produced through the ages into one Web application. The site will provide the core liturgy and enable users to freely add content, comparable to cooking Web sites where food aficionados exchange and comment on each other’s recipes.

Similarly, at OpenSiddur.net users can download different prayers, add creative translations, commentaries and other “siddur recipes,” as the 34-year-old Philadelphia resident put it. Looking for an oriental version of the morning services or a rare medieval religious poem? Chances are that sooner or later someone will upload it to the site, Varady assures.

“We believe the text of the siddur is an aggregate of thousands of years of inspired authors,” Varady told Anglo File this week. “This culture, which right now is locked in text we can [only] read on paper, is not yet available easily to manipulation and remixing, adopting and tweaking for people who want to use the siddur as a spiritual tool.”

While the new site facilitates the study of Jewish liturgy, he says, its main purpose is helping those who are dissatisfied with the way conventional siddurs dictate prayer. “People don’t feel they can be engaged with their prayer,” Varady says. “It’s programmed for them.”

Varady is one of sixteen fellows currently participating in the Jerusalem-based PresenTense Institute, which for the third consecutive summer invited Jewish social entrepreneurs mostly from English-speaking countries into its headquarters on Emek Refaim Street to assist them in launching their various projects. During the six-week program, fellows have a designated work space, whenever their full schedule of skill-building sessions, “Lunch N’ Learn” forums and field trips allows it.

Sparking a paradigm shift

Ariel Beery, the New York-born co-founder and director of the PresenTense Group, believes that Varady’s project might “spark a paradigm shift in how we approach individual spirituality and group coordination in an age of radical interdependence,” as he told Anglo File this week. “If we’ve learned anything from Facebook it’s that even though every person has their own page and profile, it is the interaction [that] provides the value people seek.”

But the soft-spoken Varady, a technology consultant and city planner by profession, takes a more modest approach. “If there’s anything radical about my project,” he says, “it’s that an individual can start creating an archive of personal prayers and keep it private or share it with others.”

He notes that his innovative project was inspired by Jacob Freedman’s “polychrome” siddur, which color coded parts of the text to indicate during which time periods various prayers were added. Freedman started his project in the late 1960s but never completed it. Now, Varady says, the time has come to once again try to create a prayer book for people “who take their prayer very seriously, or for independent congregations that are struggling to create a relevant siddur for their community.”

Varady realizes that some people – especially those who are proud to pray with their grandfather’s siddur – will not be attracted to a Web site offering prayer a la carte, picking and choosing texts from various geographic areas, time epochs and religious streams.

Yet he thinks his project has the potential to make praying interesting to those who otherwise wouldn’t bother. “We can teach children that prayer is important,” he says, “but we can’t take for granted that this will be relevant for them when they are adults, when they have a choice. What we can do is provide the deepest resources for them to engage in this essential creative process.”

📰 “Prayer Unbound” (Hadara Graubart, Tablet Magazine 2009)

the Hierophant — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:24:40 +0000

In 2009, we were honored to have our project the focus of an article in Tablet Magazine.

Development Status (2009-08-23)

the Hierophant — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 21:30:21 +0000

Open Siddur Project Development Status as of 8/23/2009

This is our first development status post. Normally, this post will try to wrap up what we’ve achieved in the past week. Since this is our first, I’ll be summing up some of the progress we’ve made in the last month or so. It will serve as something like a newsletter, and will be posted on the discussion list and at opensiddur.org. Contact us if you want to include something we haven’t covered.

If you’d like to get news of Open Siddur as it happens, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter.

Contributions (Aharon)

Digitized: Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi contributed his Weekday Siddur under a CC-BY-SA license. Anyone who would similarly like to contribute their texts to the Open Siddur under CC-BY-SA may now do so by simply emailing us with the following statement attached.

“I am/We are the original author(s) of _______ and I am/We are licensing the following attachments under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Attribution may be given as ‘Contributors to the Jewish Liturgy Project/Open Siddur’, with the author’s name(s) _______ included in the contributors list.”

(You may also contribute your work under CC-BY, or CC0; simply change the name of the license in the above. Only CC-BY-SA and CC-BY *need* the attribution line.)

Efraim reports that all the texts of the TaNaKh have been reformatted for use with our new schema.

Undigitized scanned texts: Aharon discovered some good scans of historical siddurim in the public domain at the Internet Archive, scanned and contributed by the University of Toronto, including the Seder Rav Amram hashalem (1922). Next step: deconstruct PDF into constituent image files according to the JLP/OS scanning guidelines (http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/Transcription:Scanning_Guidelines).

Wikisource siddurim (קטגוריה:סידורי תפילה) that used to be licensed GFDL are now licensed CC-BY-SA, making their license compatible with Open Siddur. For those siddurim at wikisource that are truly in the Public Domain we need to scan the original sources and begin proofreading the transcription, e.g. סידור תורה אור. We need help finding a scan or Public Domain (pre-1923) print copy of Siddur Torah Ohr by R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi.

Scanning: Yonah and yitz_ (the latter, who we met on our 8/16 live chat) offered to investigate scanning protocols at UT. Ilan offered to do the same for Cornell. We need to review scanning guidelines.

Automated Transcription (via OCR): Aharon found an open source Hebrew OCR that recognizes nikkud and teamim. Efraim says if we can get 80% accuracy minimum we’re in business — we’d prefer 95% accuracy (1 mistake every 20 characters). We need testers. Also, if you are a coder interested in OCR, both Hocr and qHocr (a cross platform Qt4 port) would love your assistance.

Manual Transcription: 11 pages of Seder Avodat Yisroel transcribed and ready for proofreading, 470 more to complete (sans commentary).

Software Development

Frontend (Azriel) — Transcription Interface: Old interface still running in wiki. New interface is ready except for the following issues… (needs help?). Other interfaces: XML endoding Interface, Translation, Commentary, and the other collaborative and personal user interfaces that will make up the Open Siddur web application will use the XML database. Looking at the new transcription interface as a proof of concept API for future interfaces. Azriel wants to get some other volunteer developers comfortable with using Google Web Toolkit (GWT, http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/) and get familiar with his code.

Backend (Efraim) — New XML database using eXist is running. Azriel using it for transcription interface.
Toolkit API: contributor list management API and bibliography managment API source code is now available. Some of this code is being rewritten to extract all eXist-specific features and syntax into separate XQuery files. Also, working on XML validation (RelaxNG, Schematron) for use during real-time updates. Rendering code requires a complete rewrite for the new JLPTEI encoding.

Documentation

Draft of the Website User Interface needs to be revisited. http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/Website_User_Interface . David Cohen recommends we write some use case scenarios in addition to our diagramming the architecture of the front/back ends.

Here’s a document on the wiki that is very useful: http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/JewishLiturgyProject:Copyrights

The first draft of the JLPTEI guidelines are written on the wiki. Needs review, requesting feedback. Needs work on an encoding tutorial, with the intended audience of application developers. http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/JLPTEI

A working draft of the schema ODD which compiles to RelaxNG, DTD, and W3C XML Schema) is available in our Google Code-hosted Subversion archive. (ODD stands for One Document Does it all, a

TEI schema, see http://jewishliturgy.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/schema . More info on ODD at http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/Customization/odds.xml).

System Administration (Azriel, Efraim, and Aharon):

We want to thank Josh Rosenberg for hosting the JLP/Open Siddur documentation wiki! Wiki is now addressed at http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org. Please update your links.
Efraim purchased a virtual private server service. (Thanks Efraim!)
The new XML database is hosted at http://shell.jewishliturgy.org:8080/exist on the VPS.
New Transcription interface is not ready yet but will be accessible at http://www.jewishliturgy.org
Opensiddur.net has been refreshed, links and material in pages and posts updated.
All JLP/Open Siddur sites now being tracked with google analytics. (Other statistics also available.)

Volunteer Management (Aharon)

50 persons have now filled out the survey form at Open Siddur.net
Began replying to volunteer transcribers. Waiting for word of new transcription interface. Interested in what feedback to provide volunteer translators, commentary writers.
Would like an XML encoding interface for digitized texts these folk may want to contribute.
A handful of people would like to donate money. Holding off on soliciting funds for now. Really looking for more in-kind contributions. Researching how to structure foundations to support open source software development (e.g., Mozilla Foundation).

Organization/Structure

Open Siddur is not yet incorporated as a non-profit entity, however, through fiscal sponsorship provided by the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity (jewishcreativity.org), a registered 501(3)c non-profit, Open Siddur can now receive tax-deductible donations. (Thanks Bob Goldfarb!)

Open Siddur and the Jewish Liturgy Project are the names of projects initiated by Aharon Varady and Efraim Feinstein, respectively. Efraim and Aharon are drafting a “team charter” to further define a structure and mission statement compatible with their mutual efforts as well as their shared open source and free culture values.

Communication and Promotion (Aharon)

In three weeks, 180 members to our facebook group, 50 completed surveys at opensiddur.org, 56 members on discussion list, 49 twitter followers. Facebook group used to communicate upcoming live chats, solicit for volunteers, update dev status, and other important news.

Efraim asks, What sorts of print materials can we create to help promote Open Siddur and attract developers and volunteers? Can we get Jewish day school and high school computer clubs to take an interest in helping develop Open Siddur and by extension learn about Open Source and Free Culture?

First live chat on August 16th and we had a minyan! Focused at first on soliciting technical help. Non-software devs also want to help. Initial response: Open Siddur needs help with historical research, scanning, and promotion. Non software devs can also help with reseach, transcription, and documentation. Translations, art, and commentaries prepared today can be contributed tomorrow. (Thanks to everyone who attended!)

Rabbi Shalom Berger at the Lookstein Foundation noted Open Siddur in their recent newsletter (8/20). (Thanks!)

Team Member Updates

Aharon is back in the US after finishing up the PresenTense Institute Summer workshop on Jewish social entrepreneurship and innovation, and is once again working on the Open Siddur. First week in September he’ll be relocating to NYC for a fellowship at Yeshivat Hadar. Besides blogging at aharon.varady.net/omphalos and at opensiddur.org he tweets at @aharonium

Sarah Allen, a volunteer translator for Open Siddur, is stepping up as our Israel contact person. (Welcome aboard!) She tweets from @sarahballen

Azriel will need to take a step back from some Open Siddur work with the onset of school, hopes to have committed a substantial part of what will become the basis for the transcription framework. Azriel is now blogging about technical development problems/solutions/milestones at realazthat.blogspot.com.

In June, Efraim graduated with a doctoral degree from Harvard in biophysics. Congratulations Efraim! Efraim occasionally tweets from @efraimdf

Development Status (2009-09-22)

the Hierophant — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 08:46:37 +0000

Open Siddur Project Development Status as of 9/22/2009

Our second development status covers progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update 8/23/09. Email aharon@opensiddur.org if you want to include something we haven’t covered. For now we’ll be sending these out once a month but if you’d like to get news of Open Siddur as it happens, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter.
Contributions

A beautiful scan of the Routledge Mahzor was contributed to the Internet Archive by the Princeton Theological Seminary Library (see http://groups.google.com/group/jewishliturgy-discuss/t/433a218e6f5a130b). Other important scans of siddurim in the public domain have been uploaded by the University of Toronto and the YIVO Institute. Scans contributed through the Internet Archive provide the Open Siddur project with a well of texts for digital transcription.

We are looking for a copy of Siddur Torah Ohr to correct and proof a digital transcription of the siddur already available CC-BY-SA at wikisource. Do you have one we could use? Please let us know.

The Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law and Culture is consulting with Open Siddur on the copyright status of extant works that may be in the public domain. Thanks Ben and Justin!

Documentation

How can folk contribute material to the Open Siddur Project right now? See our new https://opensiddur.org/contribute/upload/ for more information.

We are looking for volunteers to just look over our documentation and help us know how it reads and where we can make improvements. Anyone can freely register to edit on our conditional inclusion feature.

Volunteer Management

Open Siddur is looking for someone to gradually step into the role of volunteer manager. If folks want to step up, then Efraim and Aharon are ready to apprentice them :)

Organization/Structure

How can we best describe the principles which inspire a project that seeks to be both a repository of traditional historical texts and a resource for folks sharing new translations, t’fillot, commentary, and other content? We now have a draft Mission Statement. We’ve had some feedback on the discussion list and would like some more.

We also have a list of milestones to help track our progress and note where we are falling behind.

Communication and Promotion

JT Waldman at the Jewish Publication Society posted a lovely article with some choice quotes from Aharon Varady on “Judaism, Free Culture, and the Open Siddur Project.” (Thanks to JT and JPS! Check out http://jpsinteractive.org/blog/jt/sneak-peek-tagged-tanakh for a sneak peek at JPS’ innovative interactive TaNaKh project.)

Rabbi Saul Berman had some thoughts on why new siddurim cannot mitigate against the influence of modernity. Aharon responds here, and also on our discussion list here.

The Lookstein Institute has been helping to inform educators about the work of the Open Siddur in their newsletter. (Thank you!)

The Lookstein Institute and JESNA also helped us disseminate our invitation to educators who might know of students that might be interested in developing theirs skills with a compelling software project such as ours: https://opensiddur.org/2009/08/invitation-to-young-technologists/ (Thank you!)

We had our second ever Open Siddur Open Chat at irc://irc.freenode.net/jewisliturgy on September 13th. The summary and logs of the chat are available on our wiki.

Software Development

Efraim is working on a partial implementation of XPointer to be used in our XSLT transforms and XQuery. In the process, he developed a generic parser generator for XSLT (http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/XSLT_Grammar_Parser). This is a prerequisite to the continued development of (1) toolkit APIs that grab ordered text segments from JLPTEI documents and (2) transforms to convert JLPTEI to other forms. The code is currently under testing.

Azriel has been developing OSNAT, the Open Siddur Network Application for Transcription. It’s still in rough alpha, but includes a fly in-browser Hebrew Unicode 5.0 standard keyboard.

We are always looking for more software developers! Interested? Please contact us with your skills.

System Administration

Azriel writes, “We have begun nightly backups of the MySQL database.” If anyone would like to give us a hand with administration of the wiki or the *nix system it lives on, please email him, azriel@opensiddur.org

Efraim writes, “I’ve upgraded the eXist installation to a version closer to the 1.4 release candidate (eXist subversion revision 10000), and set up the versioning filter in the /db/base collection. This should give us revision tracking for newly stored XML data. Revision tracking on the code and schemas will still be done using Google Code subversion.”

Team Member Updates

Dan Sieradski’s Jew It Yourself and Eileen Levinson’s Haggadot.com recently got seed funding from Lynn Schusterman’s ROI. Congrats!

Aharon Varady began a fellowship for Judaic Studies at North America’s first egalitarian yeshiva, Yeshivat Hadar. Huzzah!

On behalf of the entire Open Siddur Project team, Happy New Year 5770! Here’s wishing you all a productive year of inspired learning, compassionate living, and loving-kindness nourished by creativity and wonder.

Development Status (2009-11-11)

the Hierophant — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:31:58 +0000

Open Siddur Project Development Status as of 11/11/2009

Our third development status covers progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update 9/22/09. Email aharon@opensiddur.org if you want to include something we haven’t covered. For now we’ll be sending these out once a month but if you’d like to get news of Open Siddur as it happens, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter.

Contributions

Aharon read through Reb Zalman’s weekday and shabbat evening siddur and prepared the document for sharing as a PDF as well as in the ODT (open document) format. Folks can now use this to help make their own siddurim offline while we continue to work on creating our online open siddur web application. Want to craft your own siddur using material from Reb Zalman’s siddur? Check it out here.

We need a print copy of Siddur Torah Ohr (pre-1923) to correct and proof a digital transcription of the siddur already available CC-BY-SA at wikisource. Do you have one we could use? Please let us know. With this text vetted and proofed, we could use it to help folk begin making their own siddurim as well as for comparing it with our transcription of Siddur Avodat Israel.

Manual transcription of Seligman Baer’s Siddur Avodat Israel slowed over the last few months, but this is the easiest place someone with little technical capability can make a big difference. Every line of text transcribed is digitally liberated for use in future siddurim. If you haven’t yet, register on the wiki and start transcribing here.

Software Development

Efraim completed an implementation of XPointer to be used in our XSLT transforms and XQuery. In the process, he developed a generic parser generator for XSLT (http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/XSLT_Grammar_Parser). This is a prerequisite to the continued development of (1) toolkit APIs that grab ordered text segments from JLPTEI documents and (2) transforms to convert JLPTEI to other forms. The code is complete and committed to subversion. The code has had some minimal testing.
Efraim explains in more detail in a posting on our listserve: http://groups.google.com/group/jewishliturgy-discuss/browse_thread/thread/61285fef05e1846f

Efraim also finished a first pass of XSLT code to combine multiple overlapping hierarchies as described on our wiki. Finishing this take us one step closer to processing JLPTEI. Help wanted!

Azriel’s OSNAT (Open Siddur Network Application for Transcription) is still pre-alpha, but includes a fly in-browser Hebrew Unicode 5.0 standard keyboard. Interested and familiar with Javascript and jQuery?

We are always looking for more software developers! Please contact us with your skills.

Documentation

We are still looking for volunteers to just look over our documentation and help us know how it reads and where we can make improvements. Anyone can freely register to edit on our wiki.

Organization/Structure

w00t! The Open Siddur now has a mission statement. see http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/Mission_Statement

How can we better track progress now that we have a list of milestones (http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/Milestones)? Aharon is thinking of a fractal tree showing milestone markers and child dependencies.

Communication and Promotion

We had our third Open Siddur Open Chat at irc://irc.freenode.net/jewisliturgy on October 16th. The logs of the chat are available on our wiki at http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org/IRC_Conference

Our next Open Chat is scheduled for November 22nd, 11am EST.

Team Member Updates

At Yeshivat Hadar, Aharon is studying with R. Elie Kaunfer the evolution of Jewish spiritual practice in prayer and meditation and where Jewish liturgy supports this practice in the evolution of nusaḥ.

Software Architecture of the Open Siddur Web Application — by Efraim Feinstein (Open Siddur 2009)

Efraim Feinstein — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 23:02:17 +0000

Lead developer, Efraim Feinstein, recently contributed this helpful diagram of Open Siddur’s architecture on our wiki.

An Open Siddur – Summary Diagram (Efraim Feinstein 2009)

An Invitation to Young Technologists — from Efraim Feinstein (Open Siddur 2009)

Efraim Feinstein — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 22:26:13 +0000

The Open Siddur Project is a free and open source software project founded around a community of folk passionate about the siddur. We are developing an online collaborative publishing platform for crafting custom siddurim, for preserving the diversity of Jewish prayer traditions, and for sharing translations, commentary, t’fillot, meditations, and art in the siddur.

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.

Students who participate will be treated like adults and will be expected to interact with the same level of dereḥ eretz (common courtesy) as all the other participants in the Open Siddur.

If you are a teacher or school administrator interested in this project for your students, we would just like to ask that participation in the project never be compulsory, for example, that it never be used as a homework assignment or classroom exercise.

We will be happy to recognize the participation of your school or project represented by its volunteer programmers. To participate, please invite your students to fill out our survey form available at https://opensiddur.org/contribute/join-us/.^[1] While we are not a commercial entity, in case we ever do fall under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, we avoid collecting personal information from students under the age of 13. To browse our websites please visit, https://opensiddur.org and http://wiki.jewishliturgy.org. To join our discussion list directly, please visit http://groups.google.com/group/opensiddur-talk/. Please feel free to contact us via our contact form or via email for more information.

Notes

Notes
1	While we are not a commercial entity, in case we ever do fall under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, we avoid collecting personal information from students under the age of 13.

Why all the software? — by Efraim Feinstein (Open Siddur 2009)

Efraim Feinstein — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:16:42 +0000

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?

In actuality, there is no such thing as a single text called the Ashkenazic siddur, the Hasidic siddur, or the Sephardic siddur, etc. A nusaḥ is a major division which uniquely specifies a common denominator of customs within a group of customs. Within Ashkenaz, there are differences between the Polish and German customs. The Iraqi custom is not the same as the Yemenite custom, and the Lubavitch custom is not the same as the Breslov custom. There are also divisions within each rite along major the philosophical boundaries that have developed in recent centuries, which lead to differences in custom and text. The traditional-egalitarian rite (usually a variant of the Ashkenazic rite), for example, is still undergoing major evolution.

Now, let’s say that we provided a single text for each sub-rite within the major rites, and simply copy-pasted the common text between them. The amount of replication of very similar material between the texts would be huge. If a mistake were found in one copy, it would have to be corrected separately in all copies. Further, there would be no real connection between the copies other than their content. If we were tracking some data (say, grammatical or historical data about the text), it too would have to have each change copied to all copies of the texts. This would quickly result in an unmaintainable mess.

The Open Siddur’s current approach is different. It involves (1) minimizing the amount of stored text, (2) storing the differences between the texts and (3) sets of conditions that specify when each variant is selected. If a typo is corrected in one variant, it is corrected for all variants. Any stored metadata is also automatically consistent between all texts. An additional advantage of this approach is that a community with a custom that differs from the “base” custom of the rite only has to make a different choice of variants. No change is required in the text in order to support a slightly differing custom.

The disadvantage of this approach is that each user likely only wants one variant of the text. Something has to (1) convert human-typed text into the unified format used in the archive and (2) splice the archival text into a unified “printable” text that can be used as a siddur. And that is one answer to why we need to develop software.

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

Aharon N. Varady — Fri, 28 May 2010 07:36:33 +0000

Is spirituality important to a meaningful Jewish identity? If spirituality describes an intimate and evolving experience within and between individuals, then what might a meaningful resource look like that is both rooted in tradition and respects the integrity of personal and communal growth? Most Jews would say such a resource does not yet exist. The problem is that while Judaism has invented a regular program for engaging individuals and communities directly in developing their spiritual lives, no technology exists to foster a program for this development. No technology exists except for, possibly the Siddur, the Jewish prayer book, a technology in the form of a printed reference book, that presents the practice of Jewish spiritual practice as an arrangement of sacred literature for daily periods of devotional reading and singing.

If we answer in the affirmative that spirituality is important to our lives as thoughtful and creative beings, and we believe in a Judaism that is responsive and responsible for helping to grow mature individuals, then those technologies which presume to help develop spiritual relationships should be open to critique and redesign by those individuals pursuing Jewish spiritual practices. There should be some resource for individuals to craft their own tools to further develop their practice. Such a resource, were it to exist, would need to at once be rooted in the grand diversity of Jewish spiritual traditions while at the same time provide the individual with at least the freedom to adapt this material to their own evolving experience. Such a resource, when actively used, might take the form of a printed Siddur, but unlike other siddurim, this one would be uniquely crafted — a reflection of the creative engagement of a practitioner in the development of their spiritual experience.

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.

It’s also no surprise that given the time invested in engaging in Jewish worship by individuals alone or in communal settings, that they have at least some pet peeve with the Siddur handed to them. Until now however, they’ve had no recourse to craft their own Siddur. And so they’ve had to live with their siddurim as they are, resigned to their circumstance.

For those Jews unfamiliar at all with Jewish spirituality, the Siddur and the set arrangement of prayers presents an esoterically coded map for communing with one’s spirit. Decoding it is certainly rewarding, but the immediate experience is alienating. Imagine a resource by which individuals becoming familiar with the practices of Jewish spirituality are educated (or educate themselves) as they craft their own Siddur.

And yet, such a resource is now possible for us to create, and this is the project that the Open Siddur and its community of volunteers is embarking on. We are a community of Jews contributing to a communal archive for Jewish spiritual material, as our hearts are stirred: כֹּל אֲשֶׁר נְשָׂאוֹ לִבּוֹ. The project recognizes that Jewish spirituality is diverse and so while our volunteers represent every stream and flavor of Judaism, our project is non-denominational and non-prescriptive. We are simply dedicated to provide other Jews with the resource for creatively engaging in the construction of their own Siddurim. For some that means collaborating on the transcription of a historic text, or translating a prayer into another language, or sharing their own blessing, meditation, and prayer with other Jews.

While other individuals and groups are designing new siddurim, no project is making an open source resource available that helps others design new siddurim. While others projects are transcribing and digitizing public domain texts in Judaism, no project besides the Open Siddur is doing the same and sharing those texts with unrestricted free licenses. While individuals and groups might value their innovations and yet consider them proprietary, only the Open Siddur Project is facilitating the sharing of public domain and recently copyrighted work by redistributing them with standard free culture licensing. Only the Open Siddur is combining the respect for open source, open standards, cultural diversity, religious pluralism, and personal integrity into one application liberating Jewish spirituality for everyone.

We are granting the powers of individuals to program their own spirituality within Judaism and thus mitigate against the experience of alienation that is familiar to all mediated relationships. What we are offering for the first time ever, is a freedom in crafting Jewish spiritual resources akin to the freedom one might experience in any unmediated, intimate experience, and thus we feel the time for the Open Siddur is now and vital for a vibrant, free, and creative Jewish culture.

Testing Our Transliteration Engine with help from James Strong’s Biblical Hebrew Dictionary

the Hierophant — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 02:53:08 +0000

The mark of a particularly valuable dictionary is how long it is still being used years after it’s introduced. Marcus Jastrow’s Dictionary of the Targumim, Talmud Babli, Talmud Yerushalmi and Midrashic Literature (1903), Brown-Driver-Brigg’s Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (1906), and James Strong’s Concise Dictionary of the Words in the Hebrew Bible with their Renderings (1890) are all standard reference works still used today.

But dictionaries are not only invaluable reference tools for scholarly research. They are also useful features in online applications–and not only for their definitions. Dictionaries also include transliterations. Both translations and transliterations are features we would like to provide for users of the Open Siddur application we are developing. But in order to provide these features, the dictionaries must be digitized and their contents encoded in a standard searchable format.

Strong’s dictionary, prepared as a companion to his famous concordance, contains a complete list of Hebrew words that appear in the TaNaKh, transliterated with a consistent ruleset. By formatting the words in the dictionary and replicating the transliteration as it appears in the dictionary the Open Siddur Project could test the transliteration engine that will be used to transliterate Hebrew text with nikkud (vowels) to any other script (Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Amharic, etc.).

Strong’s dictionary was digitized (PDF) in 1998 by unknown contributors. Converting the digitized, machine-readable text to an open standard format was a milestone sought by a number of projects including OpenScriptures, an open source project digitizing and encoding variant manuscripts of the Gospels. In partnership with Open Scripture contributing developers, the Open Siddur Project created a quality XML encoding of Strong’s dictionary. Work began early in February and was completed by the second week of April. The data and XML is available as public domain text, here.

The project served to test our transliteration engine and develop a good working and ecumenical relationship between two worthy open source projects sharing technology for advancing the digital humanities. The three main contributors on the project were David Troidl, Ze’ev Clementson, and Efraim Feinstein (lead developer of the Open Siddur). Ze’ev initiated the project in a forum discussion, here. (Ze’ev is a regular contributor to the Open Siddur Project and creator of innovative Jewish educational software for the iPhone/iPad platforms (so far)). Initially, David obtained Strong’s Hebrew data in the form of a PHP script from Dr. David Instone-Brewer. (The data is the basis for Instone-Brewer’s website 2 Letter Lookup). Troidl then parsed out the data and converted it to the Open Scripture Information Standard (OSIS) XML schema, “using the best available OSIS structure for the data, since OSIS has no official dictionary module,” he explained. ~~Efraim~~ Ze’ev converted the XML to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) standard used by the Open Siddur Project. Efraim helped define the tag usage for the Open Siddur extension to the TEI — the JLPTEI.

James Strong is best known for his concordance and the scholarly tools he innovated show a prescient interest in linked data. Were Strong to look down from his perch in the heavenly yeshiva/academy at our work, I think he might be quite pleased with this collaboration. I asked David, Ze’ev and Efraim if they would comment on their work together contributing to the Open Siddur Project.

Why was updating Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary to Unicode and XML such an important target?

David: The existing ASCII transliterations were neither fully accurate, nor a faithful representation of the ones in Strong’s printed dictionary.

Ze’ev: Having a standard “dictionary” in Open Siddur allows us to provide new functionality that we didn’t have before. So, for example, someone might want to make a child’s siddur or a siddur for people who don’t know understand or read Hebrew well that contains definitions (perhaps at the bottom of the page or in the margin) for some of the less common Hebrew words. We now have the ability to add accurate transliterations (either alongside the Hebrew or instead of the Hebrew in the siddur) for people who can’t read Hebrew.

Efraim: It opened a route of collaboration between projects. Specific to the Open Siddur, working on this provided a specification for a new type of associated data — dictionary words.

How did this collaboration advance your project’s specific goals?

Efraim: By having a second independent implementation of transliteration we could debug our transliterator and discover corrections to make in Strong’s original document.

Ze’ev: The collaboration with David was great in that it helped us to identify a number of shortfalls/bugs in the existing Open Siddur transliteration code. However, the collaboration worked both ways in that, as a result of the email discussions, David was able to make changes to his source document (e.g. – adding qamets qatan, holam haser for vav, spelling corrections, etc) and Open Siddur was able to “robustify” the transliteration code so that it handled more “corner cases” than it did before (e.g. – adding dagesh transliteration support for non-bgdkft letters, improved handling of silent letters, support for literally-transliterated tetragrammaton, etc) and it also helped us to generally test/verify other transliterations. We also now have a “transliteration tester” which lets us automatically validate our programmatically-generated transliterations against static versions of the Strong’s transliterations (this can be used in unit tests in the future to ensure that transliteration code changes don’t “break” the existing Strong’s transliteration logic).

David: Ze’ev’s questions about Strong’s transliterations, while developing his transliteration table, spurred me on to work on a project that I had been wanting to do for some time anyway. After using the existing ASCII transliterations as a comparison metric, we started trading our results, to compare the Unicode transliterations. This allowed both of us to fine tune our code and produced a significantly higher degree of accuracy in the transliterations themselves.

The XML and code generated by this effort are available to everyone with open/free culture licensing. Besides this obvious advantage, how will this work help other folk’s projects worldwide?

David: Many Internet resources that I’ve come across fall far short of a print publisher’s tolerance for error. While the availability of the information is commendable, I would like to see a greater emphasis on the accuracy of existing resources. There are many texts, in print and electronic, that utilize Strong’s numbering system, and a reliable reference will be a benefit.

Ze’ev: The major additional “public” benefit from the exercise is that there is now an open-source, digital Strong’s source document that has accurate transliterations in the style defined in the Strong’s Concordance book and which has been edited to correct misspellings (both Hebrew misspellings and errors in the English transliterations). Already, at least one application (my Hebrew Bible iPhone/iPad app) is utilizing the Strong’s Concordance data and currently provides integrated word definition display when reading the TaNaKh as well as Hebrew root lookup.

What new opportunities for collaboration and development do you see coming out of this work?

Efraim: One thing we (Open Siddur) don’t have is a way for the general public to get access to it! It’s in SVN, and we have a way to convert it to HTML, but no public interface [exists yet] to transform it or to look up words.

David: The ideal markup format is still an open question. My version is pushing the limits of OSIS, in its present form. The TEI form that Ze’ev [Open Siddur] is using is verbose and repetitive. I have some ideas that are still coalescing. Also, we are moving toward adding a Brown, Driver, Briggs layer on top of the Strong’s data, striving for a richer and more accurate dictionary.

Ze’ev: This was a bit of a unique scenario in that we were both attempting to validate independently-developed transliteration code with the same source document. We have now completed the validation of the Strong’s transliteration scheme and have discussed following through with a similar exercise for the SBL transliterations.

Development Status (2010-02-15)

the Hierophant — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 06:39:30 +0000

Open Siddur Project Development Status as of February 2010/Adar 5770

Friends,

The communal project of Jewish spirituality can only be improved through cooperation and collaboration. The creative work used in our traditional liturgies is the common cultural heritage of the Jewish people. Most of this work resides in the public domain. The Open Siddur is your Siddur. Join the Open Siddur Project today and begin crafting and sharing the siddur you’ve always wanted.

This development status update chronicles progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update 11/11/2009. If you’d like to get news of Open Siddur Project development as it occurs, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter, or join the opensiddur-announce email list.

Contributions (Aharon, Anonymous, Gabriel, Efraim, Eve, Daniel, John)

Following the contribution of Reb Zalman’s Siddur Tehillat HaShem, Rabbi Daniel Brenner, executive director of Birthright Israel Next, contributed a >Ḳaddish he composed in English. Check it out here. Feel free to adapt and modify these works for yourself. They are distributed with a Creative Commons 3.0 Share Alike By Attribution license. (All derivative works must show attribution to the original authors and must also be distributed under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license.)

John B. Hare of the Internet Sacred Text Archive contributed the scans and auto-transcribed text of the 1917 JPS English Translation of the TaNaKh. We are currently helping John release the first ever free licensed digital text of the 1917 JPS TaNaKh translation and have proofread the Book of Neḥemia and nearly 70% of Psalms. Please help us complete this task by proofreading a few pages — it’s a relatively easy way to begin working on the Open Siddur Project.

John Hare also scanned and transcribed a 1915 edition of the Singer Siddur, an English translation based on Seligman Baer’s Seder Avodat Yisrael. Thank you, John!

Transcription of Seder Avodat Yisrael has picked up since our last update. We have transcribed 33 pages of the liturgy from Baer’s critical edition. Every line of text transcribed is digitally liberated with the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license for free use in future siddurim. If you haven’t yet, register on the wiki and start transcribing today. This is a great way to become fluent typing Hebrew with nikkudot (vowels) — a real skill!

Gabriel Wasserman contributed his transcription of many sections of the Seder Avodat Yisrael that he had incorporated into his Maḥzor for Shabbat Ḥanukkah. Thank you, Gabriel!

Efraim Feinstein acquired and scanned a work of the Siddur Torah Ohr (Nusaḥ HaAri/Lubavitch) an important siddur based on the text edited by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi. A partial digital transcription of the siddur is already available on Wikisource and this scan will help us complete that transcription and provide a source for proofreading it. Thanks Efraim!

An anonymous contributor provided a text of the Spanish-Portuguese Nusaḥ. The text is currently formatted in the proprietary format of DavkaWriter Platinum. Please let us know if you have a copy of this software and if you can help us convert this document to an open standard Unicode format.

If you have digitized any text of the siddur or prepared a siddur that you’d like to share, please consider contributing your work to the Open Siddur Project.

Software Development (Efraim, Ze’ev, Ilan, Raphael)

We have now a functioning demonstration of how we can display text encoded in JLPTEI XML on a webpage. Click here for examples of working Open Siddur technology.

An update to our demo is forthcoming this week. License statements and contributor credits lists are now being generated by the code, and both are mostly functional. These should be incorporated in demo release 0.3.1 Generating a bibliography correctly is a bit harder, and may have to wait for 0.4. We are in the process of moving our Tanach to get its data directly from the Westminster Leningrad Codex. The process is almost complete, and the new code will likely be in demo release 0.4.

Since our last update, we’ve passed a few milestones, especially in our work on data transforms. The major improvements we’ve made are the following:

JLPTEI’s conditional inclusion feature
Parallel text alignment for translations
Generic standoff annotations, the basis for instructions, commentary, linkages, historical notation

With a lot of help from Ze’ev Clementson, cross platform build procedures and instructions were tested; many build errors and documentation errors were conditional inclusion feature.

Ze’ev has been checking in code to converting the STML formatted text of the Singer Siddur provided by John B. Hare (see above) into a more easily parsed XML representation. He’s now working on encoding this into JLPTEI XML formatted text for integration into the Open Siddur’s database. Ze’ev has also committed code for converting Strong’s Hebrew Dictionary into JLPTEI XML for integration into the Open Siddur. (It’s currently formatted in OSIS.) Ze’ev is currently working on the conversion of David Troidl’s digitization of the Strong’s Biblical Hebrew dictionary from OSIS to JLPTEI for integration into the Open Siddur.

Ilan Cohen committed an outline of the jQuery port of the transcription interface. Thanks Ilan!

Some of the work we’re doing requires expertise in the rules of Hebrew grammar and its effect on vowel markings. Jonah Rank provided Joshua Jacobson’s rules written in Chanting the Hebrew Bible for determining qamats qatan. Raphael Finkel completed the first-pass qamats qatan/sheva na detection code. That code (currently written in Perl) needs to be integrated into our infrastructure (mostly XQuery/XSLT; might be able to work in Java). The transliteration engine used in Efraim’s early proof-of-concept Haggadah is now incorporated into the code again. It will need some tweaking again once we integrate a system for indicating a definite sheva na in the encoding, and it does not work properly unless the qamats qatan is properly encoded).

Documentation (Efraim, Aharon, Ze’ev)

We are still looking for volunteers to just look over our documentation and help us know how it reads and where we can make improvements. Anyone can freely register to edit on our wiki.

Much thanks are due to Ze’ev Clementson whose many questions posed on our discussion list helped us clarify our documentation and fix bugs in our build processes.

Aharon and Efraim, besides blogging on opensiddur.net, they are also contributing to the new J-Tech list set up by Dan Sieradski. If you’re a Jewish technologist, we recommend this list as a useful space for sharing knowledge and ideas.

Organizational Structure (Aharon, Efraim)

After some feedback, we’ve made an effort to merge all project resources under the Open Siddur Project banner. If you look closely, you’ll still see the Jewish Liturgy Project. Hint: take a look at our XML encoding documentation :)

Efraim and Aharon are looking into economic models to keep this project both free and sustainable in the long term. One of these models is a cooperative of contributors. We are certainly looking for more input here.

We are now capable of receiving tax deductible donations via Razoo through a fiscal sponsorship agreement with the United States 501(c)3 registered non-profit, Center for Jewish Culture & Creativity. Money raised this way can help us pay for our major operational expenses (server costs, domain registration fees).

Communications and Promotion (Aharon)

Aharon gave a presentation at this year’s Limmud NY and pitched the Open Siddur Project. Answering his question, what’s the siddur you’ve always wanted, 11 year old Leora answered: “I’ve grown a lot since I was given my first siddur in second grade, but I’m still using the same blue Shiloh siddur. I’d like to make a siddur that I can draw in, write my own prayers, and share them with my friends.” Help the Open Siddur Project bring Leora’s vision to fruition, there are many ways to contribute.

We now have two discussion email lists and an announcement email list. Much of the volume on our old jewishliturgy-discuss list was focused on software development. To avoid having our non-developer list members tune out of the discussion, we thought it better to divide the list into opensiddur-talk and opensiddur-tech.

The opensiddur-announcement list will be used mainly for sending out regular updates like this one. Announcements will also be shared via twitter (149 followers) and our facebook group (nearly 300 users).

Since last November we have had 3 Open Siddur Open Chats at irc://irc.freenode.net/jewisliturgy . During these chats we’ve talked shop with all sorts of curious folks, software developers, liturgy researchers, and Jewish educators. The format and medium of the communication (Internet Relay Chat) is proving difficult for a number of participants and we’re investigating alternatives. So far we’ve looked at DimDim and came away unimpressed. Any suggestions for cross-platform group chat technology accessible to users at no cost?

Thanks to quick action on the part of Azriel, the Open Siddur Project now owns the opensiddur.org domain. Good work, Azriel! :)

The logs of the chat are available on our wiki, here.

Our next Open Chat is scheduled for February 21st, 1pm EST/10am PST/8pm Israel.

Aharon will be speaking on the Open Siddur at the Academy for Jewish Religion in Riverdale, March 15th.

Press (Aharon, Efraim)

Since our last update in November, two major articles appeared in Jewish media concerning the Open Siddur Project. Hadara Graubart’s “Prayer Unbound“, in Tablet Magazine and Steve Lipman’s “Taking Prayer Into Their Own Hands“, in Jewish Week. Sociologist Dr. Steven M. Cohen may have also been thinking of us when he wrote concerning the use of New media by young Jewish innovators in an article for the JPR Newsletter, “From Jewish people to Jewish purpose: The new age of social innovation in American Jewish life, and its implications for British Jewry“:

“The growth of Jewish culture may partly be attributed to the expansion of the Internet and the decline in production costs. The Internet has allowed new music, videos and films to be produced and distributed at almost no cost. Much of the recent Jewish innovation focuses on building websites, which typically empower Jews to create their own Jewish lives on their own terms. As the Internet has become a two-way communications device, online innovations often allow users to participate in interesting Jewish activities that are free of any controlling authority. Examples include online facilities that allow people to create their own siddurim (prayer books) or access midrashim (Biblical commentaries) in ways that enable Jews to discover traditional texts.”

Team Member Updates (Azriel, Aharon)

Azriel writes that this semester has kept him super busy and so hasn’t been able to give as much as he’d like to the Open Siddur this semester. Everyone here misses him.

Most of our developers are either working full time or studying full time. Aharon’s fellowship at Yeshivat Hadar is coming to a close in May and he’s been busy thinking about where he can go next to help improve awareness, increase compassion, and inspire creativity through Jewish spiritual techniques and technologies. If you’re looking for someone multi-talented, capable, and visionary all at once, reach out to him while he’s still available. Your Jewish institution could hardly do better and you’d be supporting the Open Siddur Project at the same time.

Wishing you a happy and warm Adar,
Aharon Varady
Founder & Co-director
The Open Siddur Project
https://opensiddur.net/join-us/

Development Status (2010-08-15)

the Hierophant — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 08:46:52 +0000

Hello friends,

Check out our progress! This development status update chronicles progress on the Open Siddur made since our last update, February 15, 2010.

If you’d like to get news of Open Siddur Project development as it occurs, make sure to follow @opensiddur at Twitter, or join the opensiddur-announce email list. We also recommend following updates on opensiddur.org with our RSS feed. (Just visit this URL with your favorite RSS reader: https://opensiddur.org/feed/ .)

The creative work used in our traditional liturgies is the common cultural heritage of the Jewish people. Most of this work resides in the public domain. The Open Siddur is your Siddur. Join the Open Siddur Project today and begin crafting and sharing the siddur you’ve always wanted.

Project Overview

Ever wonder what our project looks like as a flowchart? Aharon updated the old one to be more readable — do you get it?

Did you want an Open Siddur web application last year and aren’t sure how you can help bring it into reality? Check out these ways you can help advance this project — even if you’re not a computer programmer!

Fascinated by technology and wondering how our work fits into the future of book publishing? Check out this link if you were wondering what a print-to-digital-to-print technology project such as our web application can offer the world more generally: http://thinkubator.ccsp.sfu.ca/wikis/xmlProduction/XMLProductionStartWithTheWeb

Project Team Updates

One way of helping to contribute to the project is offering work opportunities for our volunteers, some of whom are unemployed, freelance, and pay for their own health insurance. If you have a job opportunity and need committed workers and creative thinkers, contact us.

We welcome Shmueli Gonzales and Amir Starr Weg to our team of transcribers. Shmuel’s work can already be appreciated here.

Ben Varadi may have graduated Tulane’s Law School (congrats!) but the Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law & Culture continues to provide the Open Siddur Project with excellent copyright research thanks to Justin A. Levy and an application that Ben devised, the Durationator. Ben’s also created a rather excellent Book Scanner. Ben’s now working for jgrad, a project of the NOLA Jewish federation providing Jewish resources for graduate students and recent college grads.

New Contributions

We now have a contribution form for folk to share their work directly at opensiddur.org. While progress continues on developing our web application, there’s no reason we can’t begin sharing our work now — just in a more conventional way.

A growing historical map charting Jewish liturgies by Aharon, now in version 2.3 with input from Dr. Richard Sarason (HUC-JIR) and Dr. Kay Shelemay (Harvard).
A d’var tefillah and kavanah on the springtime Prayer for the Dew contributed by Rachel Barenblat.
A kavanah on the meaning of one’s posture in the Amidah by Virginia Spatz.
Two Simḥat Bat ceremonies were contributed, both from teachers at Yeshivat Hadar (Mechon Hadar): one by Rav Elie Kaunfer and Lisa Exler, and one by Dr. Devora Steinmetz and Rabbi David Silber.
Twenty-seven translations of important halakhic source texts providing halakhic guidance on creative innovation with Jewish litury within the history of Rabbinic Jewish discourse. These were provided by Rav Ethan Tucker (Yeshivat Hadar, Mechon Hadar).
A new English translation of Louis Ginzberg’s Prayer for the Government by Rabbi Tim Bernard.
Modular transcriptions of the Nusaḥ Ha-Ari by Shmuel Gonzales. Nine modules so far. These transcriptions will be added to our transcription of Siddur Torah Ohr and proofread.
A transcription of the 1917 JPS English translation of Shir HaShirim, the Song of Songs, was just completed by Aharon and proofread by Efraim.
A digital JLPTEI XML formatted edition of James Strong’s venerable Dictionary of Biblical Hebrew, prepared with the help from Ze’ev Clementson, David Troidl, and Efraim Feinstein. Also, a digital JLPTEI XML formatted edition of the Singer Siddur, Rabbi Marcus Adler’s authorised siddur translated by Rabbi Simeon Singer. Both of these XML formatted editions are available for download with our source code.
FONTS: Ze’ev helped convince the Culmus Ancient Hebrew Script Project to make their free (GPL) fonts even free-er with the GPL font exception. Google helped convince the maintainer of the Cardo font to share the font with SIL’s Open Font License.

Application Development (step by step until it’s ready)

We tested and then made public our transliteration engine with eight transliteration tables to choose from including International Phonetic Alphabet, Modern Ashkenazi dialect, and Academy of the Hebrew Language.

Efraim documented and tested his encoding engine on the Singer Siddur.

Work on a replacement for our transcription/proofreading interface on our wiki is beginning. All transcribers are invited to provide input on the design and function of this transcription interface. (We want to make it easier for you to help us transcribe text.) Contact us directly or share your ideas on the opensiddur-talk discussion list.

Communications

We’ve made an effort to separate technical discussion into its own area for non-tech participants and followers of the Open Siddur Project.

Most recently we separated the Live Chat conferences we organize on IRC into separate tech and non-tech sessions. Logs are posted here.

Following his session at Limmud NY in January, Aharon Varady gave a public presentation on the Open Siddur Project at the Academy of Jewish Religon’s Spring Intensive in Riverdale, NY last March. (Other guest speakers included authors Lawrence Hoffman and Jill Hammer).

Aharon gave another public presentation on the value of Open Source for Jewish non-profits at the Future of Jewish Nonprofit Summit late last month in New York City. Afterwards, Aharon was interviewed by Radio613’s co-hosts Avi and Malcha, on CFRC Kingston, Ontario 101.9 FM.

Efraim presented the Open Siddur Project at the NewCAJE conference for Jewish educators. Follow-up thoughts are here.

New Documentation

Our Transcription Rules for transcribing and proofreading text were completely revamped.

Efraim wrote up an introduction to conditional inclusion feature.

Many, many additions, disambiguations, and edits were made to existing pages on the wiki and at opensiddur.org .

To follow our development more regularly, follow our opensiddur RSS feed, twitter feed, and facebook group.

Technology is a “plus” not “or” proposition: thoughts after NewCAJE — by Efraim Feinstein (Open Siddur 2010)

Efraim Feinstein — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 08:59:29 +0000

Last week, I attended the first NewCAJE conference for Jewish educators and the young professionals retreat that followed. I met a lot of good people who chose an often under-appreciated profession; all of them dedicated to what they do: teaching the next generation of young Jews what it means to be Jewish. In recent days, my Facebook profile has been more active than it’s ever been, and I hope to stay in contact with those I met at the conference.

I came to the conference from a somewhat different starting point from most of its other participants. The vast majority were religious school teachers in synagogues from across the country, with a smaller contingent from day schools. I came in from the perspective of one who fits an expanded definition of Jewish educator — an Internet content provider. The classroom teachers were certainly encouraging in our work at the Open Siddur Project. Many envisioned uses for our software and data that would not have occurred to me beforehand, and they look forward to our future success.

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.

Those in the front line of education are in a unique position to guide technologists in enabling positive uses of what we create in the virtual world. Technologists often talk about initiating collaboration with educators in the field. They are, after all, the people who will be using, directing the use of, and benefiting from our products. Conferences like NewCAJE are an appropriate forum for this type of dialogue; not to sell products, but to have a bidirectional conversation about the ideas that form the basis of our technological approaches. At the next NewCAJE conference (assuming there will be one!), I would encourage more educational technologists to take advantage of the opportunity for interaction.

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

Aharon N. Varady — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 10:08:21 +0000

Working on the Open Siddur Project has afforded me the opportunity to meet some amazing people, communities, and institutions. On Rosh Chodesh Nissan, 5770, (March 16th, 2010, I was honored to speak before the good folk at the Academy for Jewish Religion (AJR).

AJR is a non-denominational Rabbinical College in Riverdale, New York committed to pluralism. The school has an annual spring intensive, a three day mini-conference focused on a particularly fertile subject of importance to rabbinical and lay leaders. This year the Intensive entitled “PITḤU LI SHA’AREI TZEDEK: Opening the Synagogue Worship Experience” was focused on understanding, preparing, and selecting resources for communal prayer. Rabbi Jeff Hoffman had heard me speak at Limmud NY in January this year and subsequently recommended me to Sandy Kilstein, dean of AJR. I was asked to speak to show what technologies were “on the horizon” as Sandy put it, understanding that our project is at an early stage of development. Also speaking at the intensive were R’ Lawrence Hoffman (The People’s Prayerbook), R’ Jill Hammer, R’ Jeff Hoffman, Dr. Ora Horn Prouser, Hazzan Ari Priven, Dr. Livia Straus, and others. My only regret is that due to my own intensive schedule at Hadar I was only able to take off that one afternoon to present and wasn’t able to learn from the rest of the program.

I arrived on the campus the College of Mt. Saint Vincent a few days after a particularly horrendous late winter storm. Because of electrical problems our presentations were moved from a large ballroom to an old science building’s lecture hall with stepped seating. I brought a Open Siddur Presentation v.0.2 (3mb PDF) to illustrate my narrative with leading questions, but the room wasn’t really easily set up to use a projector while lecturing from the center stage. Making matters a little more difficult, there was no Internet access to illustrate some of the work we’ve accomplished. Thankfully, I also brought an 8.5 x 14 handout to teach the participants how to make a book (even a siddur!) with a single sheet of paper — a neat piece of kirigami taught me by master book binder, Olivia Antsis.

The final speaker on the second day, I spoke for a bit less than an hour, and then there were some questions and we made books together. I spoke extemporaneously on the vision for the Open Siddur and where it comes from: the importance of collaboration and sharing and how free culture licensing make this possible. How our Jewish spiritual projects are only enlivened and deepened by improving access to all Jews to engage creatively in them, and how the Open Siddur creates a bridge between cultural and individual authenticity. I spoke about romanticism and the Arts & Crafts movement and on the revival of making, on arduino, and on feeling profound ownership in a creative process of making meaning.

I think it went over well. There were a few questions afterward. One question I remember asked for clarification on how the Open siddur was different from a wiki. (The answer is the Open Siddur is committed to privacy in creating personal spaces where the user controls the degree to which their work is shared. Collaborative groups are groups of friends sharing access to particular pieces of work.) Someone else, sensing that the orientation of the project was on individual spirituality, wanted to know more about how this resource might be useful for communities and siddur committees. (The answer is that the resource provides a mechanism for maintaining a text for modification over generations regardless of who prepares it, and that through collaboration a siddur committee could do a great deal more work without organizing their effort with scissors, rubber glue, copy sheets and a binder. All material by a collaboration group is stored in a database and accessible from anywhere over the Internet. Consultants can provide advice or guidance as needed.)

But I think the most fun had by everyone was in making books from a single sheet of paper. Actually, not one book but two books. Since the paper was printed with different text on either side, depending on which direction the paper was folded one would see a different book. One side of the page contained some of the blessings from Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s Siddur Tehillat Hashem. The other side contained an essay explaining the vision and mission of the Open Siddur Project. If you have some blank 8.5 x 14 pages lying around you can make your own. Just print out The Open Siddur Demo v.0.2 on either side of single sheet of 8.5 x 14 paper. The book demonstrates the potential of sharing and modifying free culture licensed texts for print and use as part of a personal or communal spiritual practice.

Instructions

fold sheet down the center, lengthwise
open up the sheet of paper and fold the sheet again down the center, widthwise
open up the sheet of paper again and fold the width-length ends towards the center fold creating quarter folds
fold the center of the sheet together widthwise letting the quarter folds open freely. Should look like a T. Make a cut from the center towards the quarter folds
fold the sheet over lengthwise, pulling the center out to form an open square.
squeeze together the ends. the cover page should go on top.

Just to retrace my steps a bit… 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.

At that time, back in 2006 I was still in Louisiana working for engineering companies as an urban planner and cartographer after hurricane Katrina and Rita. It wasn’t until I left Louisiana and started earnestly looking for work on the East Coast that I began to spend my free seriously working on the Open Siddur Project again. Pretty soon I met Efraim Feinstein and Azriel Fasten, fellow collaborators on the Open Siddur, and thereafter, J.T. Waldman and the kind folks at PresenTense Institute Summer Workshop, Ariel Beery, Aharon Horwitz, and the other fellows there, Russel Neiss, Charlie Schwartz, and Matt Berkowitz. PresenTense opened me to a world of creatives operating all over the Jewish world: Sarah Kass at AviChai, Elisheva at PerlMonks, Avi Warshavsky at the Center for Educational Technology, and Bob Goldfarb at the Center for Jewish Culture & Creativity. And then this year at Yeshivat Hadar, to have so much access to R’ Elie Kaunfer, R’ Shai Held, Dr. Devorah Steinmetz, R’ Ethan Tucker, Ram Avital Hochenstin, and my fellow peers. All of these intelligent people helped me to think and rethink what it was I was really suggesting with the Open Siddur Project, to understand its value and meaning. I think we are just at the beginning of understanding how this this resource could build bridges between our diverse communities.

📰 “Taking Prayer Into Their Own Hands” (Steve Lipman, New York Jewish Week 2010)

the Hierophant — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 02:25:15 +0000

In January 2010, the New York 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. Below is an excerpt preserved for posterity:

Five and a half centuries after Gutenberg invented the printing press and changed the face of Christianity by making mass-produced copies of the Bible available to the laity, 21st-century technology is beginning to revolutionize Judaism in a similar, if more individualizing way. Jewish individuals, Jewish denominations and Jewish organizations, who don’t find a prayer book to their liking in the pews of synagogues or on the shelves of book stores, are finding an answer in cyberspace.

“I would enjoy more davening out of a siddur if it had what I say,” says Josh Rosenberg, a computer analyst in Philadelphia and a founder of an independent minyan there who hopes to make his own siddur through opensiddur.org.

Through a growing number of Web sites that offer the text of prayer books (words in Hebrew or English that can be customized with a keystroke) and self-publishing programs that allow anyone with a computer and printer to print their own books (tomes that can be professionally bound), anyone can make a siddur in his or her image.

No one compiles figures on this trend, but it appears that hundreds, if not thousands, of Jewish people have already designed and made their own siddurim in the last few years. And this does not include the wider-scale productions of customized prayer books produced for Jewish institutions.

Many of these prayer books are used to supplement, not replace, the siddurim already found in synagogue pews.

Many of the Jews making their own siddurim are unaffiliated, or loosely affiliated with established congregations or denominations. “We’re all in the business of giving Jews the tools to empower themselves and create meaningful prayer experiences,” says Rabbi Elie Kaunfer, a leader in the movement of independent minyanim.

People who make their own siddurim feel free to cut and paste, accepting creative translations and excluding parts of the liturgy they do not find meaningful. In many cases, this means a new sensitivity to gender issues, adding the Matriarchs at the beginning of key prayers or subtracting prayers like “…who did not create me as a woman.”

“You cannot do any of this without the technology developing,” says Efraim Feinstein, lead developer of the Open Siddur Project. “We’re enabling people to do something they couldn’t do before.” The volunteer-driven project, now in its “early stages,” offers only a limited amount of downloadable, public domain text.

This trend parallels other developments in Jewish life, such as families turning to tutors for their children’s religious education instead of synagogues’ Hebrew schools, or worshippers “attending” services streamed on the Internet instead of attending in person.

Interviews with a cross-section of observers in the Jewish community offer several reasons why a growing number of Jews are creating their own siddurim: a return to tradition, a greater interest in spirituality, more desire for theological autonomy and less allegiance to the branches of Judaism, which for decades dominated the writing and production of siddurim.

In many non-Orthodox congregations, rabbis have produced siddurim, with members’ input, in line with their congregations’ approaches to Judaism.

“When congregants produce a prayer book, that often leads to more meaningful prayer — for at least a while,” says Jonathan Sarna, professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University. “Congregants feel empowered.”

The signs of niche siddurim can been seen across the denominational spectrum, from Reform, whose CCAR Press recently issued a new version of its Mishkan T’filah prayer book earmarked for Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, to Orthodox, whose “Koren Siddur” edited by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, chief rabbi of the British Empire, offers new competition to the variety of haredi prayer books published by ArtScroll.

Outside of the Orthodox world, where the basic text of the siddur is sacrosanct, with built-in opportunities for individual expressions of thanks or request, the ability to print one own’s siddur raises an inevitable question — is this good or bad for the Jewish community? That is, if everyone is praying on a different page, literally and figuratively, what happens to a sense of Jewish community?

How far can you push the limits of individual expression?

Will a variety of prayers produce more worshippers?

What will happen to the minyan, the quorum of 10 worshippers — all male, in the case of the Orthodox — that Judaism requires for the recital of certain prayers?

Will this lead to a community of Jews davening alone? Feinstein and his colleagues at the Open Siddur Project –– have heard these reservations.

“You’re making a new pick-and-choose Judaism,” critics tell him. “We’re enabling people to strengthen their ties with Judaism,” Feinstein counters. He, a physicist in training, notes that many of the people behind the make-your-own-siddur-trend have backgrounds in science, rather than theology.

Experts contacted by The Jewish Week offer mixed answers to these questions.

“In the sense that this can help draw people” to lives of prayer, “it’s a good thing,” says Rabbi Nosson Scherman, general editor of ArtScroll. “Anything that brings people to prayer is a good thing. Jews need things that will keep Jews Jewish, even tangentially so.”

People taking prayer into their own hands “creates a larger tzibur,” Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, president of CLAL-The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership, says, using the Hebrew term for community.

“I think it will help Judaism,” says Danny Levine, owner of J. Levine Books & Judaica in Manhattan, “because it allows people at more levels to reach out to God.” The movement to customize siddurim probably won’t hurt sales of extant prayer books, he says, because orders for siddurim come from synagogues affiliated with denominations.

On the other hand, Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, a leader of the hands-on havurah movement and co-editor of The Jewish Catalog series in the 1970s, senses “a tension” between individual autonomy and fealty to a wider community. “A greater communal aspect” was evident in the havurah movement, Rabbi Strassfeld says.

“This is of a piece with the tenor of our times,” says Dr. Jack Wertheimer, professor of American Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

“People want to tailor religion to fit their individualized tastes. What is lost, of course, is the concept of matbea shel tefila, a required structure and canon of prayers, as well as the role of prayers as force for unifying Jews.

“The traditional siddur once offered Jews a fairly universal way of connecting with one another, across the ages and in many lands,” Wertheimer says. “When you enter a synagogue not knowing what to expect, you might be charmed or left utterly bewildered.”

The Open Siddur Project, founded by urban planner Aharon Varady, is aiming at mostly young, mostly computer literate Jews who feel uncomfortable praying from fixed texts.

“I hardly expect anyone to not feel alienated or bored when provided by texts written by others in different languages and different contexts,” Varady’s website states. “This is as true for folks well practiced on davening thrice daily as it is for those who visit shul once a year on Yom Kippur.” The new custom of customized siddurim represents both a break from and a bridge with the past.

“Once upon a time, Jews — Israelites — prayed from the heart — sans Siddurim,” Varady states.

The current system of Jewish prayer derives from the impromptu tefillot said by the Patriarchs, and the formalized prayers, often said concurrently with sacrifices offered in the First and Second Temple in Jerusalem. The first written siddur, for use by scholars, is attributed to Amram ben Sheshna haGaon in 875 CE Babylonia; the first printed siddur appeared in Italy in 1486; siddurim for general use were not available until 1865.

“In the 19th century,” Sarna says, “it was common for rabbis to produce their own siddurim.”

“The problem is, the prayer book became fixed,” Rabbi Strassfeld says. The secret is finding a balance between saying the words in one’s heart and reciting the prepared text in unison with fellow worshippers, says Rabbi Kenneth Brander, dean of Yeshiva University’s Center for the Jewish Future.

“Judaism is looking for there to be creativity within prayer,” Rabbi Brander says. “Every person has the responsibility of making sure the prayer service does not become routine.”

But, he adds, “There is a structure. I fear that some of the people who are making their own prayer books have not studied the structure.”

Aryeh Ben David, a Scarsdale native who moved in 1980 to Israel, where he heads Ayeka (ayeka.org), a “transdenominational … Spiritual Education” initiative, says people who are looking for answers to questions about the experience of prayer in a new siddur are asking the wrong questions.

“The siddur is really incidental when it comes to prayer,” he says — the key is one’s attitude when talking to the Creator. “The issue is not the siddur. The issue is Jews don’t have a relationship with God. It doesn’t matter what siddur you have.”

True prayer, Ben David says, is not reading words from a book; it’s talking from the heart.

Like Teyve, in “Fiddler on the Roof,” who addresses God like a close friend. “That’s how we should daven,” Ben David says.

📰 “Ten Commandments of Jewish Social Networking” (Jonah Lowenfeld, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles 2010)

the Hierophant — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 04:48:21 +0000

A belated post that our humble project was mentioned in a cover story in the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles on September 28th, 2010. Thanks to writer Jonah Lowenfeld, a very patient interviewer. In his article, “The Ten Commandments of social networking” Jonah felt the Open Siddur Project exemplified the eighth commandment:

[No.] 8. Don’t steal content; share.

For Jews living in accordance with halachah—and law-abiding Americans—there’s no ambiguity when it comes to illegally downloading music, movies, software, books or any other intellectual property.

“Because business ethics are among the most central legal obligations of Judaism in all the Torah,” said Rabbi Dov Fischer of Young Israel of Orange County, “there is just no way that a person can identify as a practicing religious Jew while actively or regularly downloading or sharing protected intellectual property without paying the required fees.”

But if social media pose a challenge to those who wish to protect their work, new technologies also present opportunities for unique projects that could not have been imagined a generation ago. The Open Siddur Project, for instance, allows individuals to craft their own personalized prayer books from texts that have been uploaded to their site, which includes texts that are in the public domain (like the prayers said by Jews living in the Byzantine empire) as well as prayers written by ordinary individuals who choose to share them.

“The golden rule here is that when people share Torah,” said Aharon N. Varady, founder and director of the Open Siddur Project, “Torah is increased in the world.”

In my interview with Jonah, I explained to him the teaching of the Sfas Emes, the Gerrer Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, who taught in his drash on parshat Terumah, the following.^[1] Translation is Rabbi Arthur Green’s from The Language of Truth: The Torah Commentary of Sefat Emet (JPS 1998, p.121, copyright all rights reserved, and here quoted through Fair Use.

The Midrash Tanhuma quotes: “I have given you good lekaḥ (teaching)” (Proverbs 4:2). [Lekaḥ can also refer to something acquired by purchase.] It then offers a parable of two merchants, one who has silk and the other peppers. Once they exchange their goods, each is again deprived of that which the other has. But if there are two scholars, one who has mastered the Order of Seeds and the other who knows the Order of Festivals, once they teach each other, each has both orders.

The point is that each one of Israel has a particular portion within Torah, yet it is also Torah that joins all our souls together. That is why Torah is called “perfect, restoring the soul” (Psalms 19:8). We become one through the power of Torah; it is “an inheritance of the assembly of Yaakov” (Deuteronomy 33:4). We receive from one another the distinctive viewpoint that belongs to each of us.

Of this, Scripture says: “God gives strength [=Torah] to His people, God bless His people with peace” (Psalm 29:11). The blessed Holy One’s name is “peace”; God is called the King of Peace, who makes peace in the heights. Torah, too, is composed of names of God and that is why Torah leads us to peace. So, too, it says: “He calls them all by name” (Isaiah 40:26), for the name of God includes all the hosts of heaven, joined together by that name. So, too, are the souls of Israel joined together by Torah.

The same was true in the building of the tabernacle. Each one gave his own offering, but they were all joined together by the tabernacle, until they became one. Only then did they merit Shekhinah‘s presence.

This oneness has to exist on the three planes of thought, word, and deed. The tabernacle and Temple represent oneness in deed, Torah stands for unity of word, and God is the One of thought or contemplation.

The word nefesh, used for the “seventy souls” [who went into Egypt], appears to be singular. They all worshiped the same God, had the same longing and desire in their hearts. All of them were turned to God, and thus they became a single nation.

The Open Siddur Project envisions Jewish spirituality as a shared and collaborative project that is rooted in the wisdom of our traditions and which finds expression through the evolving diversity of our communities and the intimate experiences of our individual relationships. Much like the mishkan, the traveling tent of meeting (or tabernacle) was the focal point for those creatively inspired Israelites to share their work, כֹּל אֲשֶׁר נְשָׂאוֹ לִבּוֹ, as their hearts were stirred (Exodus 36:2), so too we see the Open Siddur Project as a kind of יִחוּד, a unification of holy כַּוָּנוֹת (intentions) for those sharing their חִדּוּשִׁים (innovations) in Jewish spiritual practice, in sacred liturgy, in meditations and exercises, and in understanding through translations and commentary. In an age when our עֲבוֹדָה avodah (intentional practice) is expressed by communities and individuals in a multiplicity of ways, it behooves us to take our avodah seriously, respect and reflect this diversity, and provide the means for crafting newly designed סִידּוּרִים Siddurim accordingly. The Open Siddur Project is a community, space, and licensing framework for sharing those designs and enrich our individual and communal avodah with each others’ creativity and insight.

Notes

Notes
1	Translation is Rabbi Arthur Green’s from The Language of Truth: The Torah Commentary of Sefat Emet (JPS 1998, p.121, copyright all rights reserved, and here quoted through Fair Use.

📰 “The Open Siddur: A next generation communal Jewish educational resource,” by Dr. Efraim Feinstein and Dr. Devorah Preiss (Jewish Educational Leadership, Lookstein Center 2010 )

the Hierophant — Thu, 08 Aug 2024 20:00:52 +0000

DOWNLOAD: PDF

Efraim Feinstein, Ph.D., is a day school graduate, a biophysicist by training, and has had a long term interest in technology, free software, and the intersection of copyright and culture. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University, and is co-director and lead developer of the Open Siddur Project. Devorah Preiss, Ed.D, is the founder of PrayerLive, a collaborative computer supported program for the creative exploration and meaning-making in prayer. She is on the faculty of David Yellin College and Michelelet Efrata in Jerusalem, where she lectures on educational technology. Devorah directs and produces multimedia and, prior to making aliyah, spent many years as an instructional technologist at SAR Academy.

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.

The Open Siddur: A next generation communal Jewish educational resource

Efraim Feinstein and Devorah Preiss

In the past, paper books were the primary source of Jewish texts, and teaching was a one-to-many activity. However, today’s students find information independently on Google and Wikipedia. Searching for knowledge is second nature and requires no intermediary. The popularity of tools like Facebook and Twitter among school age children, highlights that the web is no longer a read-only resource; it is now a social medium that facilitates many-to-many communication. If we are to keep pace with this culture and engage learners with our ritual texts, the next generation of Jewish educational resources, for both students and teachers, must be available online.

The social web does not just promise unprecedented access to material; this environment also provides opportunities for large-scale collaboration between students and for creative engagement with text. The use of technology and collaborative Judaic learning has already been demonstrated to be an effective medium for adolescents (Preiss, 2009), in which a group of students extended their connection to traditional prayer by creatively interacting with it on the computer. On the Internet, such collaboration can be expanded to a global scale. Just as the popularization of movable type in the 15th century shifted the balance of literacy from a few persons to the masses, the Internet – or Information Age – has the potential to effect an equally profound change in scholarship.

This article will introduce the Open Siddur Project (http://www.opensiddur.org), which aims to be the first of a new breed of Jewish communal resources that use social web technologies to allow the sharing and collaborative development of online Jewish liturgical resources. All content will be fully reusable and redistributable under liberal terms compatible with a “free culture” philosophy. The article will first define “free culture” resources, and explain why such a philosophy works to the advantage of their users. It will then discuss the envisioned product, followed by a brief discussion of its current state of development. Finally, it will contrast the project with existing resources.

Free culture

By default, all works of culture, including educational works, are proprietary. Copyright law restricts the distribution and modification of all creative works whether or not copyright has been filed or claimed. The copyright system is intended to protect authors’ and publishers’ economic interests in their creative work by introducing a legal barrier to unlimited dissemination of a work. A negative consequence of this system is that it blocks the types of positive reuse of work that are required for creative engagement. As educational material developed by teachers and students leaves the private confines of a classroom and enters the public sphere of the Internet, website operators and educators increasingly face the restrictions imposed by all-rights-reserved copyright terms.

The free culture movement developed as a response to the locking up of culturally relevant materials in copyright terms that last multiple generations (Lessig, 2004). Free culture resources allow users the freedoms to study, modify, and redistribute the content they offer in original or modified form. These freedoms are assured by contributing authors’ granting rights that would otherwise be reserved by them to anyone who receives the material by way of copyright licenses. A set of popular and well-understood free culture copyright licenses is maintained by the Creative Commons organization (http://www.creativecommons.org).

If a website is to support creative engagement with both traditional material and newly developed original material, all contributors to the project must agree that the rights to do so are secured for all the projects’ users. Adhering to a free culture framework is a necessary prerequisite to building a website built on collaborative development of material by its users that does not take unfair advantage of its users’ contributions. Under such a framework, authors retain ownership of their contributed material; all other users and the site itself reuse and redistribute it under the same permissive license grant. By facilitating collaborative development, free culture encourages educators to form communities of practice (Lave & Wenger, 1998) that center around our common heritage.

Siddur toolkit

Although the siddur is a resource shared by a people, the individual editions are bound by copyright law and thus inaccessible for legal reuse. The Open Siddur’s goal is to provide liturgical material that is free from copyright restrictions that disable its positive reuse. The Open Siddur, a multipurpose educational resource, will allow students of all ages to be exposed to extant and historical Jewish liturgies in one accessible location. As a collaborative environment, it will enable learners to develop and share their own expressions and experiments in liturgy and to comment on each others’ work.

The core of the toolkit will be a database of liturgical resources, including digitized copies of historically important siddurim and base texts for common traditional rites. These will be linked to scans of their sources, allowing verification of their accuracy and error correction. The database will also include user-contributed materials, which may include new ritual texts, new translations, commentary and halakhic or instructional information. All of the materials will be shared under free culture terms, presenting no legal or moral impediment to their sharing and modification.

A web-based interface will be built over the database backend. This interface will allow users to browse existing liturgical material, enabling, for example, online study of the liturgy’s history. Beyond browsing, it will allow users to mix together material that is already in the database to create a new siddur, add new material to the database, add new variant texts and comments, and share what they have created with other users of the project. In addition to primary material, the toolkit will support a library of user-contributed secondary material that could then be built upon by other users.

Aside from acting as an electronic library, the Open Siddur has other potential uses in an educational environment. For example, in an introductory class on the liturgy, each student may develop his/her own siddur (a low-tech version is described in Brown (2001)) that combines standardized texts with personal comments or insights collected from the database that resonate with him/her and personalized design. The web toolkit will include a collaborative workspace that will allow students to view each others’ work and provide real-time constructive critique, or to work with students located in other classrooms or schools. The Open Siddur could also be used as a resource for educators to share curricular material that is related to teaching or understanding the liturgy.

The database platform will be open to outside programmers developing applications that dovetail on the project itself or are tailored toward the use of repository data by students of specific age groups, or for specific educational purposes. Data from the same core repository could therefore serve elementary school students encountering the siddur for the first time, bar or bat mitzvah students learning the practical aspects of leading prayers, or an advanced high school class in Jewish liturgy.

Current development status

As of this writing, the Open Siddur is at an early stage of development. It is developed entirely on volunteer time, and each stage will be released when it is ready. Even though the software framework described above is not yet available, the Open Siddur Project is accepting contributed material on two tracks: the first involves gathering material from siddurim that are known to be in the public domain and digitizing and making these siddurim available. These public-domain siddurim will form the basis of our texts for traditional prayer rites. We have obtained scanned copies of Seligmann Baer’s Seder Avodat Yisrael (Nusah Ashkenaz) and the Lubavitcher Siddur Torah Or (Nusah Ha-Ari), and contributors have donated transcriptions of substantial amounts of those siddurim. We have also obtained a transcribed copy of the English translation in Simeon Singer’s Standard Prayer Book. We are also working on a free computerized version of the 1917 Jewish Publication Society translation of the Hebrew Bible. We are also seeking historical prayer books that we can scan and/or transcribe. Until an integrated transcription interface is developed, these materials are being transcribed and proofread against their original scans on the project’s wiki.

The second track involves sharing newly written original materials. As of now, examples of these materials include a Simhat Bat ceremony and a new translation of a 1927 prayer for the American government. As the software toolkit develops, new, traditional and historical materials will be integrated into the same database. Currently, users may download contributed material in a manner similar to other online library resources.

Comparison to other resources

In general, free culture values have not entered the Jewish educational content community, as evidenced by the terms of use of some of our most popular resources. The Bar Ilan Responsa Project (www.responsa.co.il) is released under a proprietary licensing agreement. Mechon Mamre’s online text repository goes to great length to justify its all-rights-reserved copyright claims on its digitized TaNaKh, Talmud, and Mishneh Torah (www.mechon-mamre.org). New online resources show similar trends. Mechon Hadar’s extensive library of original source sheets and music reserves reproduction and modification rights (www.mechonhadar.org). Both the American Jewish World Service’s On1Foot source sheet builder (www.on1foot.org) and the Jewish Publication Society’s Tagged Tanakh application (http://taggedtanakh.org) require users to agree to grant unlimited rights to their contributed content to the site, but other users and contributors are not granted similar rights to use of the material offsite. All of these websites provide valuable resources to the community, including primary source texts and secondary compilations of materials. If they were to accept the values of sharing, they would have potential for even greater impact.

One project whose values align with Open Siddur’s is Wikisource (http://wikisource.org), which includes a collection of user-contributed source material, including siddurim. Its basis in wiki technology results in limitations that make it less than ideal for the storage of a pluralistic prayer resource. Wiki technology presupposes that only a single copy of each page can exist at a time; therefore, each siddur’s text must be a consensus among all contributors. Because achieving consensus becomes increasingly difficult as the number of contributors increases, Wikisource has multiple independent copies of siddurim, including multiple copies for each major rite. Error correction becomes difficult, because an error in one version must be corrected in all versions separately. Because copies have to be made manually, additions to one copy do not become available to others without manual intervention. In order to achieve consensus, each siddur includes a statement of purpose that limits the types of editing that is considered acceptable. All of the user-contributed siddurim (see, for example Siddur Ha-esh, 2010) currently warn that contributed material may not contradict Orthodox sources.

In contrast, the Open Siddur’s technological backend improves upon wiki technology by recognizing textual variance, obviating the need for project-wide ideological standards or duplicate divergent copies of similar texts. While any siddur produced by an individual or group within the Open Siddur framework may have its own textual or ideological standards, all of the material produced within the global site will be immediately usable in other works. Improvements to one part of the project will be immediately available to all others. The future of the web promises to include increasing opportunities for interactivity. Likewise, the new generation of students will have the proficiency and mind set of owning digital resources and tailoring content. This has already become second nature with the advent of Facebook and YouTube. The Open Siddur is a paradigm that holds great promise in that it may be adapted for other traditional texts.

References

Creative Commons. (2010) Metrics. Retrieved on June 12, 2010 from http://wiki.creativecommons.org/Metrics

Siddur Ha-esh. (2010) Retrieved on Sept 26, 2010 from http://tinyurl.com/35q

Brown, S. (2001) The Looseleaf Siddur. In Clark, S. (Ed.). Noteworthy practices in Jewish day school education. Volume II: Tefilah, 51-53. Boston: Partnership for Excellence in Education.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity: Cambridge University Press.

Lessig, Lawrence (2004). Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity. Retrieved on June 12, 2010 from http://www.free-culture.cc/

Open Source Initiative. (2004). The Open Source Definition. Retrieved on June 12, 2010 from http://opensource.org/docs/osd.html

Preiss, D. (2009). Meaning-making in prayer: A model for the use of collaborative constructivist technology for spiritual engagement (Ed.D thesis). Retrieved on June 12, 2010 from www.lookstein.org/retrieve.php?ID=-2403008

Testing Web browsers as Platforms for Hebrew Text Publishing

Aharon N. Varady — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 09:49:55 +0000

Given that one important aspiration of the Open Siddur Project is the development of a web application for anyone to edit, maintain, and share the content of a personal prayerbook that they can craft online, I’m very concerned at how well web browsers today display the Hebrew language with all of its diacritical (vowels, cantillation) marks. Indeed, the Open Siddur Project has an international scope, so ostensibly, we wish to support text in every language Jews speak or have ever spoken liturgy or liturgy-related text (the creative content of Jewish spiritual practice). Combine a digital font or fonts that support the full range of human written languages with a platform that correctly displays such fonts, and you have one basis for an excellent potential collaborative publishing platform.

So for the last year, I’ve been working on 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. I’m also keen on seeing which browsers might even be failing at recognizing bidirectional (BIDI) and right-to-left (RTL) text, given that Hebrew is read RTL and it’s not uncommon to find עִבְרִית and other left-to-right (LTR) languages written together with one another.

With these tests I also hoped to find some simple way by which an individual browsing the web could troubleshoot whether the problem is in their browser, their browser’s settings, or in a web page, when they find a web page that is poorly displaying Hebrew. I learned a great deal in the process and so I also made a page for web designer/coders to learn the correct way to craft a web page that will correctly display Hebrew.

This post was originally posted to Aharon’s Omphalos.

📕︎ “People of the (Open Source) Book” by Dan Mendelsohn Aviv (Key Publishing, 2012)

Dan Mendelsohn Aviv — Tue, 25 Mar 2014 20:10:21 +0000

We are grateful to Dan Mendelsohn Aviv and Key Publishing House for sharing “People of the (Open Source) Book,” chapter 12 of his work, End of the Jews: Radical Breaks, Remakes, and What Comes Next. Published in 2012 by Key Publishing House, Dr. Mendelsohn Aviv surveyed a number of user-generated content projects then active in the Jewish world, including the Open Siddur Project and several others. To note, many of the efforts described might not qualify as open source projects as their content and code is not or never was shared with an open content, open source, or free-culture copyright license. However, as Dr. Mendelsohn Aviv explains,

All of the individuals mentioned in this chapter—designers, bloggers and innovators—are engaged in a transformative endeavour. The digitization of seminal Jewish texts with the ability to remix, share and annotate them has changed the way in which they are perceived as texts. In the eyes of the Next Jew, these documents are no longer static artifacts to be passively consumed. They are vibrant, dynamic entities that grow with each user’s engagement. This engagement is also continual, ever-evolving and, though personal, also connects the individual to the broader Jewish learning community. In other words, every text is accompanied by a threaded discussion and more Jews are taking part, be it through creating their own religious texts or adding their voice to the emerging “Spoken Torah” of the Jewish blogosphere. Though Jewish community was historically maintained by the work of elites, be they the priests, soferim, or rabbis, the Next Jew no longer relies on scholars sequestered in yeshivas to carry the weight of the tradition. All one needs today is commitment and a stable Wi-Fi connection.

Chapter 12: The People of the (Open Source) Book

For Jews, the People of the Book, the most traditional book is a Torah scroll. It serves not only as the ultimate authority in Jewish law but even its physical form manifests the preservation of a millennia-long practice. Hearkening back to the eighth century BCE, the present day sofer, or scribe^[1] Today, women have also started writing Torah scrolls as well. Though there is a commandment for each individual to write their own Torah (based on verse Deuteronomy 31:19), women were exempt as Maimonides argued in his Sefer haMitsvot (positive commandment 18) that the purpose of writing a Torah is to study it—and women were not required to study Torah. However, as consensus has shifted in the Orthodox world about women and Torah study, more women have taken an interest in fulfilling the commandment of writing Torah scrolls and training to become a soferet. Writing a Torah requires much advanced study as there are about 4,000 rules that guide the process and requires the steady hand of an artist and calligrapher. whose job it is to hand-write a Torah scroll works with all-natural materials: klaf or gevil,^[2] According to Babylonian Talmud Bava Batra 14b, Moses inscribed the first Torah scroll on gevil, or unsplit cowhide. Gevil differs from klaf in that it is made from the whole hide after removal of the animal’s hair. Once the cow’s skin has been removed and depilated, it is limed and stretched on a frame. Klaf on the other hand, is a segment of tanned skin. parchment produced from cowhide (although the skin of any kosher animal will do)—sixty-two panels in total, thread fabricated from hair or sinew to sew the parchment panels together, three bottles of ink made from gall-nut juice, gum and darkening tints,^[3] Apparently, even the recipe of the ink is considered to be “Torah from Sinai” as reflected in the following anecdote from Babylonian Talmud Eruvin 13a:

Rabbi Yehuda said in the name of Shmuel who quoted Rabbi Meir: When I was learning from Rabbi Akiva, I used to add vitriol [i.e., ferrous sulphate} to the ink [used to write a Torah scroll] and he said nothing to me. When I came to Rabbi Ishmael he said to me: Son, what is your profession? I said to him: I am a scribe. He said: Son, be careful in your work, for your work is the work of Heaven. If you leave out a single letter or add in an extra letter— you destroy the entire world. I said to him: I have something called vitriol, which I put into the ink. He said to me: Did they [i.e., our ancestors] place vitriol into their ink? Did not the Torah say ‘And wrote and erased’ (Numbers 5:23)—[which means] writing which can be erased?’

about twenty quills fashioned from a turkey-feather or reed, and finally, wooden rollers known as the Atzei Ḥayyim, or “Trees of Life.” The sofer works with a sargel or ruler to delineate the margins and the required forty-two rows in each column. He must reproduce each of the 304,805 letters of the Pentateuch with great care as any transcription error or penmanship malfunction might render the whole scroll pasul, or “invalid.” The whole project could take anywhere between twelve and eighteen months to complete. Because of the precision of the craft and the attention paid to detail, popular belief is that the Torah scrolls found in synagogue Arks across the world were written and produced in exactly the same manner as Moses did over three thousand years ago.

However, for the People of the Book, as soon as their Torah took written form (known as Torah she’Biḥtav—the Written Torah), an oral tradition of parsing, interpreting and spirited disputing (known as Torah she’Ba’al Peh— the Spoken or Oral Torah) emerged to explicate the meaning of the text— or, at least, that is how the Rabbis understood it in their representation in Mishnah Avot 1:1. Within four generations, the “spoken” Torah began to accumulate upon and grow the original Torah. (We perhaps might more appropriately be called “The People Who Talk A Lot About the Book”….)

And yet, despite all the protestations about the Spoken Torah’s spokenness, it, like its counterpart, is a written text, embracing and straddling both oral and literary conventions. In a sense, the Torah is all about making links; between written and spoken, between God and the Jews, and between individual Jews. By way of illustration, consider the following exchange in Mishnah Berakhot (4:3) between three Tanna’im (i.e., Mishnah-era Rabbis) about the Amidah, a central pillar of Jewish prayer and t he essential part of any synagogue service:

Rabban Gamliel says: Every day a person must pray eighteen [blessings of the Amidah].
Rabbi Yehoshua says: [One may say] an abbreviated [form of the] eighteen [blessings].
Rabbi Akiva says: If the prayer is fluent in his mouth, he must say eighteen [blessings]; but if it is not—[he may say] an abbreviated eighteen [because otherwise he may stumble on the words].

These stylized, semi-staccato utterances read almost as tweets in their brevity. Try rereading them without all the explanatory notes inside the brackets with the appropriate hashtags. (The longest, Rabbi Akiva’s statement, comes in at 102 characters, well under Twitter’s 140 character limit.) However, as one conversant in mishnaic or Talmudic discourse, the work of troubadour poets, or Twitter will tell you, these compressions and shorthands are quite common. They make the words easy to remember in sequence and repeat, linking students to each other and to the chain of tradition. For the reader, this philomnemonic style is equally effective.

Additionally, and most novel, the way in which the written text was employed and deployed by traditional scholars prefigures the way in which many “use” texts today in the postmodern digital age. For example, one could read the first chapter in Mishnah Avot as an email that had been forwarded multiple times, with each sender adding on a comment or two before passing on the attachment (i.e., “the Torah”) to the next. (And each addition could easily qualify as a profound tweet.) Jonathan Rosen noted the similarities between Talmud and the Internet in the appropriately titled The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds. But even the most casual glance at any page of Talmud would reveal a deeply embedded network of texts from different places and different centuries. In other words, Talmud text, with its embedded links to other Jewish texts, is hypertext without Wi-Fi—and what Next Jews do today with text is not any different from what the Amora’im (i.e., Talmudic-era Rabbis) did back then. What is radically different is how.

In this light, one can develop a more historical appreciation for the place, role and status of Jewish blogs. Like Torah, blogging as a form of expression also straddles oral and literary conventions. At the most superficial level, a blog reads like a book but sounds like a monologue. It also crackles with the immediacy of the spoken word, the “realtime-ness of speech as, unlike a book, it can be updated daily, hourly and, in some extreme cases, even minute-ly. It also attempts and invites connections and permalinks. The body of work, otherwise known as ‘Jewish blogs” might include all blogs written by Jews, but even if left to the blogs whose subject matter deals directly with the Next Jew-ish experience in all of its diverse expressions, the numbers are staggering and growing each day. This chapter will look at some of those blogs and bloggers and consider how blogging might become Torah she’Baal Peh for the digital age. Blogging is one of the driving forces that animates Jewish-protean tribalism. Its relentless grappling with Jewish tribal meta-issues—or, as some might dismiss it “navel-gazing”—takes many forms beyond the general “Is good for the Jews?” Jewish bloggers ask tough, occasionally irreverent questions about the nature of the Jewish tribe and their own place and participation in tribal affairs. The answers they generate are often unconventional and contentious—but equally illuminating.

DIY, FOSS and FLOSS

The most commonly cited statistic about Michael and Sharon Strassfeld’s The Jewish Catalog: A Do-It-Yourself Kit is that it sold more copies than any other Jewish book in American history besides the Bible. Published in 1973, it was modeled after the Whole Earth Catalog which had been published from 1968 to 1972. Both volumes were all about “access to tools” (as Whole Earth Catalog was subtitled), providing individuals with empowering information to “conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”^[5] See page 3 for the quote and the rest of the Whole Earth Catalog. The Jewish Catalog provided basic information about Judaism and Jewish life in America. It also offered information about Jewish crafts, recipes, meditational practices, and tips on grass-roots activism.

Its do-it-yourself ethos successfully captured the imagination of a generation of young Jews who were searching for a way to connect to Judaism outside of staid institutional frameworks. (Sound familiar?)

And so, thirty-five years later, a blogger by the name of BZ^[6] See here for the complete post. asked: What will be our generation’s Jewish Catalog? This question gave rise to a rumination about the place of seminal texts in the present moment, with BZ wondering aloud if it “isn’t necessarily a book, and isn’t necessarily a static document.”

This is but one example of how, with the assistance of technology, the People of the Book have gone open source and do-it-yourself (DIY). This is a profound and significant move which has implications for proliferation of Jewish engagement and learning.

The methodology and philosophy of “open source” first evolved in the realm of software development. In 1997, Eric S. Raymond, a programmer and shepherd of fetchmail (a free email client) began to think aloud about the Linux operating system, free and open source software and the ramifications for radical collaboration. Fetchmail was developed to test out “the surprising theories about software engineering suggested by the history of Linux.” Linux (unlike Windows and Mac OS) was designed and distributed as free software, otherwise known as FOSS—free and open source software. (The variation, FLOSS, stands for “free/libre open source software”) More important, its source code was open to users so they could tweak the design, make improvements and share them with peers. Raymond’s thoughts eventually coalesced online into the essay entitled “The Cathedral and the Bazaar,” which evolved and grew with subsequent feedback and discussions. The website,^[7] For the essay (and subsequent discussion about Raymond’s ideas), see here. (as with all open source materials) gives permission “to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0.” Although, as Raymond quickly points out, he sold O’Reilly the exclusive commercial printing rights.

As mentioned earlier, free and open source software makes the source code freely available to users. Where the “cathedral” and “bazaar” metaphors are most illustrative is in between official software releases. Let us say that a new free and open source app was released two months ago, but developers are busily working on Version 2.0 and are set to release the updated app early next year. In the cathedral model, that source code, the one in process, is only accessible to an exclusive group, the bishops, priests and monks of software development. Upon release, it will be available to all. In the “bazaar,” the source code is freely available online to all users at all times. Linus Torvalds pioneered this process in 2006 with Linux and though he wrote the largest proportion of code (around 2 percent),^[8] For more about the Linux development process and the philosophy of open source, see here. the operating system was developed by a crowd of enthusiastic users for free.^[9] How big that crowd should be to be maximally effective, see, for example, here. Raymonds main idea and observation about this process is that, in the bazaar, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” Open sourcing and unfettered access also welcomes the crowd to vigilantly test the accuracy of code and maintain the integrity of content. As Raymond also observed, the prevalence of open source is a victory for hacker culture, where once-marginal users have emerged from the fringes to command the center and dominate it.^[10] See here.

Jewish users, too, have embraced this do-it-yourself and open source ethos. In coming together to open source a project, users not only produce an evolving and meaningful Jewish artifact, they also construct a Jewish community that often extends both temporally and physically beyond the scope of the original project. Riffing on Raymond, Jewish users are definitely creatures of the bazaar as they revisit, reconsider and, in some cases, rework many of the seminal texts in Jewish life: the Siddur, the Tanakh, the d’var torah [sermon], the Haggadah and The Book of Legends. These “open source projects” not only invited involvement by users at their individual level of learning and desire for engagement, but created connections and forged bonds between individuals across time zones and denominations. More important, open source projects invite participation from individuals who tend to lurk at the margins of the mainstream Jewish community.

For the Next Jew, empowered with a high-speed connection and a lot of good will, many traditional Jewish experiences (i.e., Shabbat prayer, sitting through a d’var torah, sharing the Seder with family, or studying Tanakh) have been redesigned from the bottom up to include the user’s experience, involvement and engagement. So, let us say, the Next Jew is rolling into the weekend. It is Shabbat morning … what’s next?

The Siddur

Each denomination has its own siddur of choice, although each synagogue within the various movements express their own preference for specific prayerbooks. The Modern Orthodox generally embrace the ArtScroll edition, although many use the Siddur HaShalem (”The Complete Siddur”) otherwise known as the Birnbaum Siddur (after its editor Philip Birnbaum) or other editions which include the traditional liturgy with little to no English whatsoever in between the covers. If the Next Jew is not so traditionally minded, these volumes might not work for her.

The Conservative movement employs Siddur Sim Shalom, which provides a translation of the prayers on the left-hand page with annotations and instructions in English (e.g., “Congregation [recites], then Reader:”). Sim Shalom retains the traditional Hebrew text throughout except when, for ideological reasons, some key passages (like those about the hope for the restoration of sacrifices) are taken out. Also, the Matriarchs are included in a parallel rendering of the beginning of the Amidah prayer. Sim Shalom also includes prayers for Israel’s Independence Day and Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Some congregations in the Greater Toronto Area have adopted Siddur Ḥadash, which is regarded as “more traditional” than Sim Shalom.^[11] See here for the complete story of Siddur Ḥadash’s launch. (Toronto’s Conservatives swing more conservatively than sister congregations in the United States.) Though Sim Shalom might be a good fit, depending on the Next Jew’s facility with Hebrew, she might be interested in something a bit more accessible.

The Reform has traditionally employed Gates of Prayer which was originally published in 1975. Though including prayers in Hebrew, it offers substantially more English on each page. Additionally, the siddur includes alternative versions of every service. However, since 2007, a new siddur entitled Mishkan T’filah has been embraced by hundreds of congregations across North America. Mishkan T’filah differs from Gates of Prayer in four significant ways. First, Mishkan T’filah has a Hebrew title, which reflects its greater emphasis on Hebrew language. It reads from right to left like a Hebrew book. (Gates of Prayer could come that way too, but you would have to special order it.) Second, it does not refer to God as “He,” opting for more gender-neutral language. Third, or arguably an extension of the previous point about gender-neutrality, Mishkan T’filah is also gender-equal, including the Matriarchs as well as the Patriarchs in the Amidah prayer. And, finally, while Gates of Prayer offered variations of whole services, Mishkan T’filah also offers four variations of an individual prayer on the same page spread. The curious Next Jew will find the Hebrew prayer on the right side, accompanied by an English transliteration and a literal English translation, but on the left side, she will find more poetic renderings with passages to ponder, meditate and consider on her own.

The Reconstructionists prefer Kol HaNeshamah, a compendium of the movement’s weekday, Shabbat and Holyday prayer book. As Rabbi Peretz Rodman noted in his review of the gamut of siddurim, Kol HaNeshamah is “traditionalist in form, but radical in ideology”^[12] See here for the complete review. —and rather bulky. Would its purported radicality or significant heft be a deal breaker?

But what if the Next Jew does not comfortably fit into any of these denominational boxes? What if none of these options seems like a good one for Shabbat morning? “Imagine,” writes The Hierophant,^[13] A hierophant is someone who guides congregants into sacred encounters. The Open Siddur Project uses the title as a referent to the project’s director responsible for communicating the mission of the project and welcoming potential contributors. “a printing press and book arts studio shared by everyone in the world looking to design and craft their own siddur.” He continues:

Imagine a social network focused on publishing built around privacy, collaboration, and a public database and digital library of Jewish liturgy in a format that can easily show historical variations and changes across Jewish traditions, manuscripts, and facsimile editions. Imagine a collection of text and recordings, freely licensed for creative reuse in every language Jews pray in or have ever prayed. Reimagine your siddur, custom tailored to your practice, replete with your insights and those selected from your friends, family, and the complete corpus of Jewish tradition, and a record of your family’s and community’s minhagim and nusaḥ.

There is much to unpack in The Hierophant’s vision, but what I found curious was the order of the bedrock principles of the Open Siddur social network. I wondered: Why privacy first? [The Hierophant, otherwise known as] Aharon Varady, the founding director for the project, told me that Open Siddur “is not Wikipedia,” which is anything but private. The project’s goal is for users to employ technology to improve “a spiritual practice which is at its core, personal, although personal practice is often framed within a communal structure.” He went on to observe that:

[i]f we really respect that the siddur is the traditionally technological means by which Jews mediate their spiritual and thus personal practice, then we must ensure that their creative work is as private as any personal journal or diary, until they wish to share their content.

Varady is deeply steeped in the thinking and practice of Open-Source. Indeed, he prefaced his communication with me by letting me know that the content is licensed with a CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license, which means that I am free:

to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work
to Remix — to adapt the work
to make commercial use of the work

But I am only free to do so under the following conditions:

Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).
Share Alike — If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one.^[14] See here for the full extent of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license, including waivers, the public domain, and other rights.

(I hope I am living up to the terms of this agreement!)

Though the Open Siddur website, as Varady indicates, is really a “placeholder for a much more interactive web application,” its premise is an interesting one, compelling to many and only possible in the present moment: the sharing of liturgy-related content in real-time, created and annotated by the user. The user’s content serves as both a resource and repository for traditions at the individual, familial and national levels, tracking changes and variations across time. In other words, the Open Siddur is a truly living siddur. It is born and matures with each use. And, hopefully, it will never die. Most importantly, the user connects with others through this process of maturing ritual practice.

Where the Open Siddur works at the macro level, Build a Prayer works on the micro. Described as an “online space where Jews of all ages and backgrounds can connect on a deeply personal level with prayer and Shabbat,” Build a Prayer facilitates the creation and customization of the Shabbat service “in a fun and interactive way that is meaningful for you and your community.” Despite the interface’s ease of use, the experience of putting together a service exposes some of the limitations of this user-created prayer experience. First, the organization providing the server space for the user-interface will most probably frame the extent of the user experience. For example, BBYO, a historically secular organization and sponsor of Build a Prayer, opted to provide its members with this DIY experience. However, for example, the user can only select the traditional format for the Amidah prayer without an option to add the Matriarchs alongside the traditionally lauded Patriarchs. (This emendation is standard in most progressive minyans and in many of the siddurim mentioned above.) Was leaving this out a sin of omission or commission? Was BBYO sending a message or simply not clued in?

Second, and most important to someone like Aharon Varady:^[15] See here for Aharon’s complete comment. who ultimately owns the content? If I am building a prayer, is it truly my prayer? Can I share it without getting permission from the folks who paid for the server space? Can someone else remix my prayer or must they wait until seventy years after I die? That remains to be seen … but if Aharon Varady has his way and a lot of help from informed Jewish users, Open Siddur will be the one-stop and source for online Jewish liturgical content of all stripes and shapes.

https://opensiddur.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Dan-Mendelsohn-Aviv-End-of-the-Jews-People-of-the-Open-Source-Book-ch.12-p.168-195.pdf

Buy the Book: End of the Jews: Radical Breaks, Remakes, and What Comes Next

Notes

Notes
1	Today, women have also started writing Torah scrolls as well. Though there is a commandment for each individual to write their own Torah (based on verse Deuteronomy 31:19), women were exempt as Maimonides argued in his Sefer haMitsvot (positive commandment 18) that the purpose of writing a Torah is to study it—and women were not required to study Torah. However, as consensus has shifted in the Orthodox world about women and Torah study, more women have taken an interest in fulfilling the commandment of writing Torah scrolls and training to become a soferet. Writing a Torah requires much advanced study as there are about 4,000 rules that guide the process and requires the steady hand of an artist and calligrapher.
2	According to Babylonian Talmud Bava Batra 14b, Moses inscribed the first Torah scroll on gevil, or unsplit cowhide. Gevil differs from klaf in that it is made from the whole hide after removal of the animal’s hair. Once the cow’s skin has been removed and depilated, it is limed and stretched on a frame. Klaf on the other hand, is a segment of tanned skin.
3	Apparently, even the recipe of the ink is considered to be “Torah from Sinai” as reflected in the following anecdote from Babylonian Talmud Eruvin 13a: Rabbi Yehuda said in the name of Shmuel who quoted Rabbi Meir: When I was learning from Rabbi Akiva, I used to add vitriol [i.e., ferrous sulphate} to the ink [used to write a Torah scroll] and he said nothing to me. When I came to Rabbi Ishmael he said to me: Son, what is your profession? I said to him: I am a scribe. He said: Son, be careful in your work, for your work is the work of Heaven. If you leave out a single letter or add in an extra letter— you destroy the entire world. I said to him: I have something called vitriol, which I put into the ink. He said to me: Did they [i.e., our ancestors] place vitriol into their ink? Did not the Torah say ‘And wrote and erased’ (Numbers 5:23)—[which means] writing which can be erased?’
4	See Deuteronomy 31:22ff.
5	See page 3 for the quote and the rest of the Whole Earth Catalog.
6	See here for the complete post.
7	For the essay (and subsequent discussion about Raymond’s ideas), see here.
8	For more about the Linux development process and the philosophy of open source, see here.
9	How big that crowd should be to be maximally effective, see, for example, here.
10	See here.
11	See here for the complete story of Siddur Ḥadash’s launch.
12	See here for the complete review.
13	A hierophant is someone who guides congregants into sacred encounters. The Open Siddur Project uses the title as a referent to the project’s director responsible for communicating the mission of the project and welcoming potential contributors.
14	See here for the full extent of the CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license, including waivers, the public domain, and other rights.
15	See here for Aharon’s complete comment.

📕︎ “A Case Study on the Open Siddur Project,” by Gabrielle Girau Pieck (University of Basel, 2014)

Gabrielle Girau Pieck — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 23:22:17 +0000

The Scriptorium was in turmoil. Brother Paul, the precentor in charge, had detected a murmur from the back row and, furious that the rule of silence was being compromised, strode down the aisle just in time to see Brother Jacob tuck something under his robe. When he demanded to see it, Brother Jacob shame-facedly produced a codex, but not one that the antiquarii of this monastery had copied. or of any monastery, for this Psalter was printed. Shocked as much by the sight of the mechanical type as by Brother Jacob’s transgression, Brother Paul so far forgot himself that he too broke the silence, thundering that if books could be produced by fast, cheap, and mechanical means, their value as precious artifacts would be compromised. […] And how would the spread of cheap printed materials affect the culture of the Word, bringing scribbling into every hut and hovel whose occupants had hitherto relied on priests to interpret writing for them?^[1] N. Katherin N. Hayles. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. p. 2. Print.

This fictitious sketch from N. Katherine Hayles in Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary evokes the present day tumultuous dynamics surrounding electronic literature and the search by humans to find meaning within it whether with or without the help of religious or other authorities. The setting is a Christian one, hundreds of years ago, but it could just as well be applied to the Jewish context today. Many contemporary Jewish scholars like Rabbi Dr. Abraham Lifshitz in his article “Tefilla Mitokh Siddur Electroni [Praying from an electronic prayer book]” are debating the acceptability of electronic prayer books that can be found on computers, iPods or mobile phones. Lifshitz argues that praying from an electronic siddur (Jewish prayer book) is not an acceptable medium for prayer. He bases his ruling on an injunction that Jews should not hold anything while praying. The person praying may become distracted by the object and by a fear of losing it forcing the person’s attention away from prayer. Lifshitz reasons that electronic devices like iPhones that house electronic siddurs can cause the same lack of concentration during prayer due to incoming messages or calls that might be “lost” during prayer.^[2] Yoel Cohen. “Jewish cyber-theology.” Communication Research Trends 31.1 (2012): 4–14, p.10. Print.

The shift is not just about going electronic. It is about how the electronic form of the siddur is allowing for new theological functions. Like religious authority, where digital media can be used to either reinforce traditional forms or open up new landscapes for alternative visions of leadership, the Internet also offers both possibilities regarding the siddur, one of the most precious ritual objects in Judaism. The Open Siddur Project, as its name implies, is aiming to open up previous conceptions of the siddur by shaping and fine-tuning the possibilities of the Internet to make the siddur accessible and personalized for everyone. Reaching back into the rich history of print media in describing the mission of the project, the welcome page of the website compares their goals for the siddur with a printing press:

Imagine a printing press and book arts studio shared by everyone in the world looking to design and craft their own siddur. The Open Siddur Project is building it, online, on the web: a collaborative digital-to-print publishing application where you can make your own siddur, share your work, and adopt, adapt, and redistribute work shared by others. work intended for creative reuse and inclusion in new siddurim and related works of Jewish spiritual practice.^[3] Aharon Varady. “Welcome to the Open Siddur Project.” The Open Siddur Project. 11 April 2011. Web. 1 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/development/open-siddur/welcome-to-the-open-siddur-project/.

One can only imagine how Brother Paul or a Jewish version of him would react to this, in his eyes, further transgression of the culture of the Word, bringing personalized siddurs into every hovel in the world without any rabbinic authorities to control the process. However, the Open Siddur Project finds that this is exactly what is necessary to preserve the culture of the siddur and revitalize Jewish spirituality. The Open Siddur Project wants to provide a platform where creative and inspiring prayer texts can remain in the public domain free for reuse and redistribution.

This emphasis on creative production and free distribution of theological texts supports post-rabbinic and post-denominational functions, in this instance that of proactively creating theology instead of passively consuming it, particularly within collaborative arrangements between experts and amateurs. In another of N. Katherine Hayles’ works, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis, she presents how, unlike in the time of the introduction of the printing press, worldwide collaborations between expert scholars and expert amateurs are now possible.^[4] N. Katherine Hayles. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. p. 36. Print. She cites Willeke Wendrich, director of the digital Encyclopedia of Egyptology, who often worked with archeologists. In his experience they regularly hoarded artifacts and refused access to them to strengthen their power bases. In contrast to these offline artifacts, Wendrich argues that “[…] database forms and web dissemination mechanisms allow for increased diversity of interpretation and richness of insights, because now the data are freely available to anyone.”^[5] ibid, 39. Scholars and amateurs alike can access the databases and disseminate their work on the web, invigorating the possibilities for creative collaborations like the Open Siddur Project in its production of theological texts and new interpretations of prayer.

In an interview with Alan Jacobs entitled, “The Potential and Promise of Open-Source Judaism,” one of the founders of The Open Siddur Project, Aharon Varady, describes his project as “[an expression of] open-source religion.” He wants to see the digitization of extant works in the public domain and enlarge the circle of “students, scholars, practitioners, and communities that were already adopting, adapting, and distributing their inspired creativity and scholarship – but were only doing so in the highly restricted channel of copyrighted work.”^[6] Aharon Varady quoted by Alan Jacobs. “The Potential and Promise of Open-Source Judaism.” The Atlantic. 12 June 2012. Web. 18 April 2014. <http://www.theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2012/06/the-potential-and-promise-of-open-source-judaism/258394/>. He sees copyright laws as one of the main barriers to keeping culturally collaborative religious projects like the siddur creative, alive and robust and not technological barriers that are being overcome especially in an age of web dissemination. “By using free-culture and open source licensing, everyone who wants to participate in Judaism (or any religion) as a collaborative and creatively vital culture, can do so.”^[7] ibid. Open source licensing safeguards the attribution of creative work until they become part of the Public Domain. This makes a significant difference particularly in the U.S. where copyright laws remain in effect for the life of the creator and another 70 years, dragging out a process that then keeps creative works obscure and ultimately forgotten.

The form of open source licensing in conjunction with web dissemination of creative works allows for the collaboration of authorities and amateurs alike in keeping religious and cultural artifacts alive and relevant. To this end, Varady counters dialectics that place religion in a separate sphere from culture, keeping religion uninspired. In Varady’s discourse and communal framing of the Open Siddur Project, he justifies the use of technology for Jewish religion by stating, “We liberate religion when we return it to culture, as a creative and relevant force for helping to shape our individual and collective consciousness […] 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”^[8] Aharon Varady. “An Interview with Aharon Varady on Open Source Judaism.” The Open Siddur Project. 5 August 2010. Web. 18 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/development/press/radio-613-an-interview- with-aharon-varady-on-open-source-judaism/>. Varady’s discourse and communal framing are justification for the Open Siddur Project. Through digital media and open licensing it frees individuals and communities to be creative and collaborative in their religiosity and acts as a counter to the appropriation of religious meaning and interpretation into other spheres or to selfish authorities who take the power of creativity away from the collective and control it in their own hands and for their own mercenary ends.

David Piff and Margit Warburg in “Seeking for truth: Plausibility alignment on a Baha’I email list” also support Varady’s claims that religion is competing with and potentially losing out to other systems. They state, “In pluralistic situations, religions have to compete not only with one another but also with the reality-defining agencies of society at large. government, the media, the scientific establishment, and so forth.”^[9] David Piff and Margit Warburg. “Seeking for truth: Plausibility alignment on a Baha’I email list.” Religion and Cyberspace. Ed. Morten T. Hojsgaard and Margit Warburg. New York: Routledge, 2005. 86-101. p. 87. Print. Secular systems such as governments and scientific institutions pose a threat to religions, not just other religions. To stay competitive in this fierce environment of clashing meaning making structures, the Open Siddur Project offers to conjoin creativity with religiosity anew. The conclusions of Rachel Wagner in “You are what you install: Religious authenticity and identity in mobile apps” likewise supports Varady’s claims for the connection between creativity, religiosity and non- authoritarianism in the digital sphere. She found:

As our use of religious apps places control of religious interpretation and ritual performance increasingly in the hands of individuals, it also suggests a fluidity, hybridity, bricolage, and flow that gesture against traditional notions of fixed religious authority. The questions raised about authenticity by our use of religious apps also gesture toward a renewed sense of ownership and awareness of who we are and what we choose to believe, and thus presage a new kind of individualized, personalized authenticity of religious experience.^[10] Rachel Wagner. “You are what you install: Religious authenticity and identity in mobile apps.” Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds. Ed. Heidi A. Campbell. Oxon: Routledge, 2013. 199-206, p.199. Print.

Technology is bringing religious interpretation and control over rituals and ritual objects into the hands of individuals away from the control of authorities and the reliance of amateurs on experts to guide their religious lives. The Open Siddur Project as a religious app is placing the control of the construction of the siddur in the hands of individual Jews no matter their level of expertise. The software of the Open Siddur project allows for the fluid and hybrid construction of individualized prayer books outside the bailiwick of Jewish institutions, denominations and rabbinic authorities that have had a monopoly on the production of siddurs. It is countering any self-serving agendas of reified authoritarian structures that can be found in Jewish denominations and rabbinic institutions and keeping Jewish religiosity vibrant.

An example of prayers from expert amateurs and experts that can be found and mixed together at the Open Siddur Project is a prayer for Abraham Lincoln and one for Thanksgiving. Isaac Goldstein the Levite, an American Jewish novelist, wrote the prayer for Abraham Lincoln. He was an expert writer, but an expert amateur in Jewish liturgy. His prayer was written in the form of an acrostic and published a few weeks after Lincoln’s death in The Jewish Messenger on May 25, 1865 under the title, “ACROSTIC ON ABRAHAM LINCOLN, Assassinated Nisan 18th, 5625” ^[11] Isaac Goldstein. “Memorial Prayer for Abraham Lincoln.” republished by The Open Siddur Project. 11 February 2012. Web. 20 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/life-cycle/death/memorial-prayer-for-abraham-lincoln-by-isaac-goldstein-the-levi/>. . The prayer highly resembles prayers of exultation towards God, but replacing God with Lincoln. The prayer begins:

Exalted are you Lincoln. Who is like you! You were highly respected among Kings and Princes. All that you accomplished you did with a humble spirit. You are singular and cannot be compared to anyone else. Who among the great are like Lincoln? Who can be praised like you?

This prayer takes the liberty of creatively infusing standard liturgical features of God’s greatness with appreciation for Lincoln’s governmental accomplishments. Rather than religion competing with governments, Goldstein is incorporating government and one of its most historic leaders within Jewish liturgical structures. In this way the author, as a novelist, is preserving the creativity and culture that is part of religion instead of ceding it to other realms and keeping religion alive, healthy and liberated from self-serving agendas.

Using the Open Siddur Project’s software, this prayer for Lincoln from 1865 can be set side by side in a personalized siddur with a contemporary prayer for Thanksgiving, but this prayer comes from an expert, the Rabbi David Seidenberg, the founder of NeoHasid.org. He has received two rabbinic ordinations, one from the Conservative movement and one from the Jewish Renewal movement. Rabbi Seidenberg shared this prayer with the Open Siddur Project on November 25th, 2013. Thanksgiving is replaced with Thanksgivukkah, a blending of Ḥanukkah and Thanksgiving since Thanksgiving fell on one of the eight days of Ḥanukkah during 2013:

May the next Thanksgivukkah be a time of health and abundance for all of you who will receive the world from our hands.

May we together find a way to make sure that there is health and wealth and beauty not just for our family, not just for the Jewish people and humanity, but for all living creatures who share this planet with us.

May the One bless us with the power and wisdom to birth a society that shows love to the world around us, that lives with love towards all beings.^[12] David Seidenberg. “Thanksgivukah.” The Open Siddur Project. 25 November 2013. <https://opensiddur.org/thanksgiving-days/%E1%B8%A5anukah/prayer-for-thanksgivukah-by-david-seidenberg-neohasid-org/>. Web 20 April 2014.

Instead of competing with the secular holiday of Thanksgiving, through this prayer, Rabbi Seidenberg uses his creativity to produce liturgy that shapes Jewish individual and communal consciousness to extend to all people and to all creatures. By openly sharing his creative use of liturgy he becomes an agent in defining reality and meaning in contemporary society. The free-culture and open source software that is shaping this technology is allowing for prayers from experts like Seidenberg and amateurs like Goldstein to be used side by side, supporting post-denominational and post-rabbinic functions. By shaping the Internet to support these theological functions, the Open Siddur Project allows authorities to interpret religious experience, but amateurs as well, mixing and matching prayers for their own personal liturgy. Additionally, within the Open Siddur Project, Jewish theology and liturgy are not localized in a building or denomination or even a time period. Their software is helping Jews link up to do meaningful and inspiring liturgical work across cultures, expertises, geographic regions and time periods. The founders of the Open Siddur Project and the volunteers who are creating and shaping the software to make it work are akin to caring and inspiring leaders in a post-denominational and post-rabbinic sense. They are helping and inspiring Jews to create meaningful experiences for themselves by crafting their own siddurs instead of being given a preset liturgy from on high. These types of leaders are helping to bring ‘the Word’ into every Jewish hut and hovel, empowering amateurs and experts alike to interpret liturgical writing without having to rely on institutions or religious authorities.

The Open Siddur Project as a form of digital Judaism highlights a shift in writing liturgy from the written word to the printed word and from the printed word to the electronic word. The shift to the medium of the electronic written word has also revolutionized our reading practices. N. Katherine Hayles sees reading as a complex practice that needs to be rethought within the “rich mixtures of works and images, sounds and animations, graphics and letters that constitute the environments of twenty-first century literacies.”^[13] Hayles. How We Think. p.79 One scholar who has spent years rethinking reading practices is James J. Sosnoski. In “Hyper-Readers and Their Reading Engines” he speculates that reading electronic texts will become our main reading practice. He terms this practice hyper-reading which is a constructive act similar to constructive hypertexts used by writers to connect bits of information for their own needs. He finds that hyper-reading differs from reading printed texts in many ways. For example, a few characteristics of hyper-reading are:

filtering: a higher degree of selectivity in reading [& therefore]
skimming: less text actually read
pecking: a less linear sequencing of passages read^[14] James J. Sosnoski. “Hyper-Readers and Their Reading Engines.” In Passions, Politics, and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Illinois: Utah State University Press, 1999. 161 – 177. p. 2. Print.

Many anti-technologists view this new mode of reading as a loss of meaning, coherence and authorship. By contrast, Sosnoski states, “I am concerned with the ways in which hyper-readers can ‘dismantle the technology of the print book.’ I subscribe to the notion that we live in a postmodern era and that we cannot operate on the conventions that governed the reading practices of previous generations.”^[15] ibid, 3. Part of how hyper-readers dismantle the technology of the print book is by becoming de facto writers. The practice of hyper-reading is almost the same as hyper-writing since hyper-readers “tend to assemble the texts they read.”^[16] ibid, 7. They are comparable to textual burglars who “break into electronic texts and once they have found the source codes hidden from sight, steal them away with their cut & paste tools and reassemble them (minus the serial numbers so to speak) in their own home pages.”^[17] ibid.

Through techniques such as filtering, skimming and pecking, readers no longer follow a linear sequence given by an author to a text. They, like writers, steal bits and pieces of various texts and reassemble them in a sequence of their own choosing. These bits and pieces were previously held together in an apparently seamless manner giving the appearance of coherence to a text. Source codes now make these seams visible, but similar processes were undertaken before the advent of hyper-reading and writing. Part of the inspiration and vision for the Open Siddur Project was Rabbi Jacob Freedman’s Polychrome Historical Haggadah for Passover. A Haggadah is the accompanying prayer book for the seder ritual of Passover when the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt is recounted. With the polychrome haggadah and an additional polychrome siddur, Rabbi Freedman departed from institutionalized reading practices by engaging in a type of hyper-reading in a pre-digitized age:

[He represented] the text of the Haggadah and Siddur as aggregate texts with different authors and periods of composition […] In a pamphlet illustrating his vision for a Polychrome Historical Jewish Prayerbook, Rabbi Freedman wrote:

This is perhaps the first attempt to present for publication a polychrome historical prayerbook. The author herewith presents a random selection of prayers in colors merely as examples to show the various levels of historical development […] The marginal symbols, also in color, indicate the period when certain prayers or phrases were first formulated and/or introduced into the prayerbook. The references are not to be considered exhaustive.
^[18] Jacob Freedman. Polychrome Historical Haggadah for Passover. Springfield: Jacob Freedman Liturgy Research Foundation, 1974. Print. quoted by The Open Siddur Project. “Project History.” Web. 1 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/development/history/>.

Previous to Freedman, the seams of the haggadah and the siddur were invisible to almost all amateurs and to many experts as well. Yet he brought the seams to the fore through color-coding.

In the digital context Sosnoski characterizes this type of reading practice as “de-authorizing,” As seen through Freedman’s color-coded liturgy, hyper- writing in the sense of splicing bits and pieces of text together, at least in the Jewish liturgical context, is nothing new. However, digital media allows for new religious and theological reading practices alongside hyper-writing. In a de-authorized reading practice ownership of texts as intellectual property is often ignored and texts are seen as public property. Moreover hyper-readers go one step further. They ignore any authorial intentions as to the sequence of a text. As hyper-readers/writers their own intentions are the guiding force behind how a text should be read or written.”^[19] Sosnoski, p.8.

The Open Siddur Project has realized the transformative potential of this new type of de-authorized reading practice. Dan Mendelsohn Aviv in End of the Jews: Radical Breaks, Remakes, and What Comes Next devotes a chapter to the Open Siddur Project entitled “People of the (Open Source) Book,” He describes how individuals at the Open Siddur Project are putting their mark on the digital sphere by facilitating complex de-authorized reading practices:

All of the individuals mentioned in this chapter – designers, bloggers and innovators – are engaged in a transformative endeavour. The digitization of seminal Jewish texts with the ability to remix, share and annotate them has changed the way in which they are perceived as texts. In the eyes of the Next Jew, these documents are no longer static artifacts to be passively consumed. They are vibrant, dynamic entities that grow with each user’s engagement.^[20] Dan Mendelsohn Aviv. End of the Jews: Radical Breaks, Remakes, and What Comes Next. Toronto: Key Publishing House, 2012, p.180. Print. [online at The Open Siddur Project <https://opensiddur.org/development/open-source-judaism/people-of-the-open-source-book-by-dan-mendelsohn-aviv/>]

Digital practices that de-author texts grant new theological approaches to texts such as siddurs. ‘Next’ Jews proactively create the theology of their liturgy becoming part of a dynamic evolution of the text. This dynamic reflects another characteristic of hyper-reading according to Sosnoski. fragmenting. Hyper- readers often prefer fragmented texts to long linear texts and arrange new texts according to associative patterns rather than conventional structures and genres. “In other words, many hyper-readers may be more comfortable selecting textual details and reassembling them in their own virtual frameworks than using the frameworks imposed upon them.”^[21] Sosnoski 8.

The Open Siddur Project is quite aware of this reading/writing practice and is shaping their software to help readers and writers realize their creativity within the digital sphere. The Open Siddur Project makes clear that when authors share their work it should be with the intention of letting others modify and adapt it as long as they correctly cite the work and any changes they may have made to it. For potential contributors to the Open Siddur Project, the guidelines emphasize:

The Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) and Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) require that derivative works state that they are modified and that there is no implication that any of the contributors endorse the modified work. (Additionally, the license preserves the chain of attribution by requiring all derivative works to be shared with that same license.) If you want to share your work but remain concerned about how your work might be modified, you may also choose to contribute the work anonymously or pseudonymously. Within the Open Siddur web application we are developing, your work will only be editable by individuals or groups you have permitted.^[22] The Open Siddur Project. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Web. 1 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/development/faq/>.

The Open Siddur project regulates the modification of works, recognizing hyper-reader tendencies of de-authorization and fragmenting and giving some control back into the hands of the original writers to decide if they still want to have their names as authors attached to altered texts or if they rather publish anonymously or with a pseudonym. Moreover, they are developing software where authors can control which individuals or groups can edit their work. All of these efforts on the part of the Open Siddur Project counterbalance de-authorizing reading practices that tend to assume that all texts are public property. The Open Siddur Project is shaping the digital sphere to give a platform for creative hyper-reading and writing practices of liturgy and in so doing the digital sphere is shaping new and meaningful functions for Jewish theology. Mendelsohn Aviv affirms that for Jews at the Open Siddur Project hyper-reading/writing leads to a deepened sense of ownership of the siddur and meaningful liturgical practices rather than a loss of meaning and ownership as feared by many anti-technologists:

This engagement is also continual, ever-evolving and, though personal, also connects the individual to the broader Jewish learning community. In other words, every text is accompanied by a threaded discussion and more Jews are taking part, be it through creating their own religious texts or adding their voice to the emerging “Spoken Torah” of the Jewish blogosphere. Though Jewish community was historically maintained by the work of elites, be they the priests, soferim, or rabbis, the Next Jew no longer relies on scholars sequestered in yeshivas to carry the weight of the tradition. All one needs today is commitment and a stable Wi-Fi connection.^[23] Mendelsohn-Aviv, p.181.

Individuals who commit to the broader learning community of the Open Siddur Project and have a WiFi connection are benefiting from the post-denominational and post-rabbinic theological functions enabled through this form of digital Judaism. They get to creatively bring their hyper-reading and writing practices to Jewish liturgy proactively and dynamically producing new theologies. They are adding their voice and their interpretation of Torah through threaded discussions and collaborations in the blogosphere. The work of these amateurs and experts is a new form of collaboration within Jewish tradition. The work rests in the digital sphere instead of in elite institutions like brick and mortar yeshivas or denominations. The digital Judaism of the Open Siddur Project is augmenting Jewish experiences and the holiness of Jewish liturgical texts, keeping siddurs as precious and evolving artifacts and cultivating the culture of the ‘Word’ for generations to come.

This article is an extensive quote from Jewish Theology after Google: Post-Rabbinic and Post-Denominational Judaisms in a Digitized World (a Masters thesis for the University of Basel, 2014). Bibliographic references have been converted to notations. We are honored to have been a subject for a case study in her Masters thesis. See below for comments. — Aharon Varady.

Notes

Notes
1	N. Katherin N. Hayles. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame: The University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. p. 2. Print.
2	Yoel Cohen. “Jewish cyber-theology.” Communication Research Trends 31.1 (2012): 4–14, p.10. Print.
3	Aharon Varady. “Welcome to the Open Siddur Project.” The Open Siddur Project. 11 April 2011. Web. 1 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/development/open-siddur/welcome-to-the-open-siddur-project/.
4	N. Katherine Hayles. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. p. 36. Print.
5	ibid, 39.
6	Aharon Varady quoted by Alan Jacobs. “The Potential and Promise of Open-Source Judaism.” The Atlantic. 12 June 2012. Web. 18 April 2014. <http://www.theatlantic.com/ technology/archive/2012/06/the-potential-and-promise-of-open-source-judaism/258394/>.
7	ibid.
8	Aharon Varady. “An Interview with Aharon Varady on Open Source Judaism.” The Open Siddur Project. 5 August 2010. Web. 18 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/development/press/radio-613-an-interview- with-aharon-varady-on-open-source-judaism/>.
9	David Piff and Margit Warburg. “Seeking for truth: Plausibility alignment on a Baha’I email list.” Religion and Cyberspace. Ed. Morten T. Hojsgaard and Margit Warburg. New York: Routledge, 2005. 86-101. p. 87. Print.
10	Rachel Wagner. “You are what you install: Religious authenticity and identity in mobile apps.” Digital Religion: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds. Ed. Heidi A. Campbell. Oxon: Routledge, 2013. 199-206, p.199. Print.
11	Isaac Goldstein. “Memorial Prayer for Abraham Lincoln.” republished by The Open Siddur Project. 11 February 2012. Web. 20 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/life-cycle/death/memorial-prayer-for-abraham-lincoln-by-isaac-goldstein-the-levi/>.
12	David Seidenberg. “Thanksgivukah.” The Open Siddur Project. 25 November 2013. <https://opensiddur.org/thanksgiving-days/%E1%B8%A5anukah/prayer-for-thanksgivukah-by-david-seidenberg-neohasid-org/>. Web 20 April 2014.
13	Hayles. How We Think. p.79
14	James J. Sosnoski. “Hyper-Readers and Their Reading Engines.” In Passions, Politics, and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Illinois: Utah State University Press, 1999. 161 – 177. p. 2. Print.
15	ibid, 3.
16	ibid, 7.
17	ibid.
18	Jacob Freedman. Polychrome Historical Haggadah for Passover. Springfield: Jacob Freedman Liturgy Research Foundation, 1974. Print. quoted by The Open Siddur Project. “Project History.” Web. 1 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/development/history/>.
19	Sosnoski, p.8.
20	Dan Mendelsohn Aviv. End of the Jews: Radical Breaks, Remakes, and What Comes Next. Toronto: Key Publishing House, 2012, p.180. Print. [online at The Open Siddur Project <https://opensiddur.org/development/open-source-judaism/people-of-the-open-source-book-by-dan-mendelsohn-aviv/>]
21	Sosnoski 8.
22	The Open Siddur Project. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Web. 1 April 2014. <https://opensiddur.org/development/faq/>.
23	Mendelsohn-Aviv, p.181.

📰 “מאַכט אײַער אייגענעם סידור!‏” (Yoel Matveyev, Yiddish Daily Forverts 2019)

the Hierophant — Fri, 23 Jul 2021 19:10:38 +0000

DOWNLOAD: PDF (Yiddish)

On March 4th 2019, Yoel Matveyev honored us by writing an article on the Open Siddur Project for the Yiddish Forverts, “מאַכט אײַער אייגענעם סידור!‏” (Make your own siddur!):

Source (Hebrew)	Translation (English)
הײַיאָר, ווען דעם 20סטן יאַנואַר אין אָוונט האָט זיך אָנגעהויבן דער חמישה־עשׂר־בשבֿט, האָבן די תּושבֿים פֿון אַמעריקע געקאָנט אָבסערווירן אַ זעלטן אַסטראָנאָמיש געשעעניש: אַ פֿולע ליקוי־לבֿנה. די לבֿנה, וועלכע איז דעמאָלט געווען באַזונדערס נאָענט צו דער ערד און אויסגעזען אומגעוויינטלעך גרויס, איז במשך פֿון אַ שעה און צוויי מינוט געוואָרן אינגאַנצן רויט.	This year, when the evening of the 15th of January began on the evening of January 20th, the inhabitants of the United States were able to observe a rare astronomical event: a full lunar eclipse. The moon, which was then particularly close to Earth and looked unusually large, turned completely red in an hour and two minutes.
לכּבֿוד דעם דאָזיקן זעלטענעם הימלישן פֿענאָמען האָט דער ראַבינער דוד זײַדענבערג, אַ פּראָמינענטע פֿיגור אין דער ייִדישער התחדשות־באַוועגונג (Jewish Renewal) און דער גרינדער פֿון דער וועבזײַט neohasid.org, צוגעטראַכט אַ ספּעציעלן נוסח פֿונעם חמישה־עשׂרדיקן סדר און פֿאַרעפֿנטלעכט עס מיט אַ חודש צוריק ווי אַ טייל פֿונעם אינטערנעץ־פּראָיעקט „דער אָפֿענער סידור‟.	In honor of this rare celestial phenomenon, Rabbi David Seidenberg, a prominent figure in the Jewish Renewal movement and the founder of the website neohasid.org, devised a special version of the five-part seder and published it a month ago as part of the Internet project “the Open Siddur.”
בײַ אַ סך ספֿרדים און אין אַ טייל חסידישע קהילות פּראַוועט מען חמישה־עשׂר־בשבֿט אַ לאַנגע סעודה מיט פֿיר כּוסות רויטן און ווײַסן ווײַן. בײַם עסן געוויסע מינים פֿרוכטן און תּבֿואה זאָגן מען ספּעציעלע תּפֿילות. דער דאָזיקער מינהג, דורכגעזאַפּט מיט קבלה־סימבאָליזם, איז געוואָרן פּאָפּולער צווישן די „רעניואַליסטן‟ און נעאָ־חסידים, וועלכע אַסאָציִיִרן עס מיט דער נאַטור און סבֿיבֿה־אַקטיוויזם. דער עיקר־חידוש פֿון זײַדענבערגס נוסח איז די ברכה „עושׂה מעשׂה בראשית‟, וואָס מען זאָגט געוויינטלעך ווען מע זעט אַ בליץ; אין דעם פֿאַל – די ליקוי־לבֿנה. דער מחבר האָט אויך צונויפֿגעשטעלט אייגענע תּפֿילות און פּירושים אויף ענגליש. אַ דאַנק אַהרן וואַראַדי, דעם גרינדער פֿונעם „אָפֿענעם סידור‟, האָט יעדער מענטש געקאָנט אַראָפּלאָדן דעם חידושדיקן נוסח אין אַן עלעקטראָנישן פֿאָרמאַט און אָפּדרוקן דערפֿון אַן אייגן ספֿרל.	In many Sephardi and in some Hasidic communities, a long feast with four glasses of red and white wine is served on the fifteenth of Sh’vat. When eating certain kinds of fruits and grains, special prayers are said. This custom, imbued with Kabbalistic symbolism, has become popular among the “renewalists” and neo-Ḥasidim, who associate it with nature and environmental activism. The main innovation of Seidenberg’s nusaḥ is the blessing ‘Oséh Ma’aséh Beréshit’, which is usually said when one sees lightning; In this case, the eclipse. The author has also compiled his own prayers and commentaries in English. Thanks to Aharon Varady, the founder of Open Siddur, everyone has been able to download this amazing nusaḥ in electronic format and print their own book.
דאָס איז בלויז איין בײַשפּיל פֿון די מאַטעריאַלן, וואָס וואַראַדי האָט געזאַמלט אויף זײַן וועבזײַט opensiddur.org. דער געדאַנק איז בעצם אַ פּשוטער און אַ חנעוודיקער. אַ סך מענטשן האָבן ליב צו מאַכן פֿאַרשיידענע זאַכן אַליין – קליידער, הײַזער, אויטאָס און קאָמפּיוטערס. אויף ענגליש איז אַזאַ טעטיקייט באַקאַנט ווי DIY (ראָשי־תּיבֿות פֿון „מאַך עס אַליין‟). אין דער קאָמפּיוטער־וועלט זענען הײַנט זייער פּאָפּולער פֿאַרשיידענע איניציאַטיוון פֿון פֿרײַ־צוטריטלעכע פּראָגראַמען, וואָס יעדער בקי קאָן אַליין איבערמאַכן אָדער אויסנוצן פֿאַר זײַנע אייגענע פּראָיעקטן. אַ גלענצנדיקער מוסטער פֿון אַזאַ צוגאַנג איז די אָפּעראַציאָנעלע סיסטעם Linux. די זעלבע שיטה קאָן מען אויך אָנווענדן צו רוחניותדיקע ענינים. דאָס דאַוונען קאָן דאָך זײַן לעבעדיק, פֿרײַ און שעפֿעריש!	This is just one example of the material that Varady has collected through the Open Siddur Project website (opensiddur.org). The idea is simple and charming. Many people love to do various things on their own – clothes, houses, cars and computers. In English, such an activity is known as DIY (initials of “do it yourself”). In the computer world today there are very popular various initiatives of free access programs, which each computer programmer can transform or use for their own projects. A great example of such an approach is the Linux operating system. The same method can be applied to spiritual matters. Praying can be lively, free and creative!
אויף וואַראַדיס וועבזײַט זענען געזאַמלט כּלערליי אַלטע סידורים, אַרײַנגערעכנט די תּפֿילה־זאַמלונגען פֿון די קראָים און שומרונים. פֿון וואַנען האָבן זיך בכלל באַקומען אין דער וועלט פֿאַרשיידענע נוסחאָות פֿון סידורים? אַוודאי, האָט זיי עמעצער געשאַפֿן – צומאָל אַ גאַנצע עדה במשך פֿון הונדערטער יאָרן, צומאָל אַ געוויסער יחיד. אַ סך באַרימטע חסידישע צדיקים האָבן צוגעטראַכט פֿאַר זיך פּערזענלעכע וואַריאַנטן פֿון סידורים – שוין אָפּגערעדט פֿון דעם, וואָס אַלע חסידישע סידורים אין אַלגעמיין שטעלן מיט זיך פֿאָר חידושדיקע קאָמבינאַציעס פֿון אַשכּנזישע און ספֿרדישע עלעמענטן; צוליב דעם הייסן זיי דאָך נוסח־ספֿרד.	Varady’s website contains a number of ancient collections, including the prayer collections of the Karaite Jews and Samaritan Israelites. From where did the different nusaḥout of the siddur come from in the world? Of course, someone created them — sometimes an entire congregation over hundreds of years, sometimes a certain individual. Many famous Ḥasidic tsaddikim devised personal variants of Siddur for themselves – not to mention the fact that all Ḥasidic siddurs in general present surprising combinations of Ashkenazi and Sephardic elements; That’s why they are called nusaḥ Sfard.
אויף דער וועבזײַט פֿונעם פּראָיעקט קאָן מען זיך באַקענען מיטן נוסח, מיט וועלכן די ענגלישע ייִדן האָבן זיך באַנוצט אינעם 13טן יאָרהונדערט; מיט די פֿריִיִקע דײַטשישע רעפֿאָרמער נוסח־עקספּערימענטן פֿונעם 19טן יאָרהונדערט; און אַפֿילו מיט אַ גריכישער סידור־איבערזעצונג פֿון 1885.	On the project’s website you can find the nusaḥ used by English Jews in the 13th century; With the early German reformer nusaḥ experiments of the 19th century; And even with a Greek translation of the Siddur of 1885.
נישט לאַנג צוריק, אינעם פֿאַרגאַנגענעם יאָר, האָט וואַראַדי געשאַפֿן זײַן אייגענעם נוסח פֿון קבלת־שבת און דער ערשטער שבת־סעודה, „לבֿנת הספּיר‟. מע קאָן עס אַראָפּלאָדן פֿון דער וועבזײַט אָדער קויפֿן גרייטערהייט ווי אַ ספֿר אויף וואַראַדיס אינטערנעץ־קראָם, Dimus·Parrhesia·Press. זײַן ספֿר אויף 222 זײַטן איז פֿול מיט מיסטישע סימבאָלן, מאָדערנע און אַלטע קונסטווערק פֿון אַרום דער וועלט, בילדער פֿון דער נאַטור און אַפֿילו פֿראַגמענטן פֿונעם אוראַלטן „ספֿר חנוך‟ אויף אַראַמיש, אַלט־עטיאָפּיש (געעז) און גריכיש.	Not long ago, in the past year, Varady created his own version of Kabbalat Shabbat and the first Shabbat feast in his siddur Livnat haSapir. It can be downloaded from the website or purchased in print as a book on Varady’s online store, Dimus·Parrhesia·Press. His 222-page book is full of mystical symbols, modern and ancient artwork from around the world, images of nature, and even fragments of the ancient Book of Enoch in Aramaic, Ancient Ethiopian (Ge’ez), and Greek.
אינעם שמועס מיטן פֿאָרווערטס האָט וואַראַדי דערקלערט, אַז ער אַליין איז נישט קיין מיטגליד פֿון דער „רעניואַליסטישער‟ באַוועגונג. ער האָט זיך געלערנט אינעם ניו־יאָרקער נישט־דענאָמינאַציאָנעלן „מכון הדר‟ און באַקומען זײַן מאַגיסטער אינעם „ייִדישן טעאָלאָגישן סעמינאַר‟ אין ניו־יאָרק, אָבער אין וועלכער־ניט־איז קאָנקרעטער ייִדישער דענאָמינאַציע וויל ער זיך נישט אָנשליסן. הײַנט וווינט ער אין זײַן היימשטאָט, סינסינעטי.	In a conversation with the Forverts, Varady stated that he himself was not a member of the “renewalist” movement. He studied at the New York non-denominational Yeshivat Hadar and received his masters degree (in Jewish education from the non-denominational William Davidson School of Education) at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, but he does not want to join any specific Jewish denomination. Today, he lives in his hometown of Cincinnati.
זײַן פּראָיעקט האָט ער פֿאַרווירקלעכט, כּדי צו העלפֿן אַנדערע מענטשן שאַפֿן אייגענע פּערזענלעכע תּפֿילה־זאַמלונגען. איצט אַרבעט אויף דער וועבזײַט אַ ספּעציעלע פּראָגראַם, וואָס דערמעגלעכט יעדן רעגיסטרירטן באַזוכער צונויפֿצושטעלן אַן אייגענעם סידור.	He implemented his project to help other people create their own personal prayer collections. There is (in-development) a special feature of the project, to enable each registered visitor to create their own siddur.
מיט עטלעכע יאָר צוריק, ווען וואַראַדי האָט צונויפֿגעשטעלט אַ נײַע קריטישע אויסגאַבע פֿון „מגילת אַנטיוכוס‟, באַגלייט מיט אַן איבערזעצונג אויף ענגליש, לשון־קודש און ייִדיש, האָט ער באַשלאָסן צו עפֿענען זײַן אינטערנעץ־קראָם. דער עצם־טעקסט פֿונעם בוך איז פֿרײַ צוטריטלעך ווי אַ טייל פֿונעם „אָפֿענעם סידור‟.	A few years ago, when Varady compiled a new critical edition of Megillat Antiochus, accompanied by a translation into English, Hebrew and Yiddish, he decided to open his own online store (for selling print copies). The text of the book itself is freely accessible as part of the Open Siddur.
אינעם שמועס האָט וואַראַדי צוגעגעבן, אַז ייִדן זענען הײַנט געוואָרן אַ פֿילשפּראַכיק פֿאָלק און זאָלן אַרויסווײַזן זייער שעפֿערישקייט אויף אַלע שפּראַכן. ייִדיש בכלל און דעם „פֿאָרווערטס‟ בפֿרט האַלט ער פֿאַר אַן עכטן אוצר!	In the interview, Varady added that Jews today have become a multilingual people and should show their creativity in all languages. He considers Yiddish in general and Forverts in particular to be a real treasure!

Prayer ala carte
By Raphael Ahren
Tags: Aharon Varady, Israel News

Aharon Varady always dreamed of putting together his own prayer book. Realizing that many people – including himself – often see prayer as a dull and robotic exercise in the fulfillment of a religious duty, he thought for years about ways to enable people to create their own prayer book, or siddur, in order to make the most of their experience. A fellow at this year’s PresenTense Institute, Varady earlier this month finally embarked on a daring project, creating a tool for “individuals and groups to build the siddur they’ve always wanted,” as his Web site explains. Varady’s Open Siddur project aspires to funnel all different regional traditions, translations, commentaries and instructional notes that Jews from the four corners of the world have produced through the ages into one Web application. The site will provide the core liturgy and enable users to freely add content, comparable to cooking Web sites where food aficionados exchange and comment on each other’s recipes. Similarly, at OpenSiddur.net users can download different prayers, add creative translations, commentaries and other “siddur recipes,” as the 34-year-old Philadelphia resident put it. Looking for an oriental version of the morning services or a rare medieval religious poem? Chances are that sooner or later someone will upload it to the site, Varady assures. “We believe the text of the siddur is an aggregate of thousands of years of inspired authors,” Varady told Anglo File this week. “This culture, which right now is locked in text we can [only] read on paper, is not yet available easily to manipulation and remixing, adopting and tweaking for people who want to use the siddur as a spiritual tool.” While the new site facilitates the study of Jewish liturgy, he says, its main purpose is helping those who are dissatisfied with the way conventional siddurs dictate prayer. “People don’t feel they can be engaged with their prayer,” Varady says. “It’s programmed for them.” Varady is one of sixteen fellows currently participating in the Jerusalem-based PresenTense Institute, which for the third consecutive summer invited Jewish social entrepreneurs mostly from English-speaking countries into its headquarters on Emek Refaim Street to assist them in launching their various projects. During the six-week program, fellows have a designated work space, whenever their full schedule of skill-building sessions, “Lunch N’ Learn” forums and field trips allows it. Sparking a paradigm shift Ariel Beery, the New York-born co-founder and director of the PresenTense Group, believes that Varady’s project might “spark a paradigm shift in how we approach individual spirituality and group coordination in an age of radical interdependence,” as he told Anglo File this week. “If we’ve learned anything from Facebook it’s that even though every person has their own page and profile, it is the interaction [that] provides the value people seek.” But the soft-spoken Varady, a technology consultant and city planner by profession, takes a more modest approach. “If there’s anything radical about my project,” he says, “it’s that an individual can start creating an archive of personal prayers and keep it private or share it with others.” He notes that his innovative project was inspired by Jacob Freedman’s “polychrome” siddur, which color coded parts of the text to indicate during which time periods various prayers were added. Freedman started his project in the late 1960s but never completed it. Now, Varady says, the time has come to once again try to create a prayer book for people “who take their prayer very seriously, or for independent congregations that are struggling to create a relevant siddur for their community.” Varady realizes that some people – especially those who are proud to pray with their grandfather’s siddur – will not be attracted to a Web site offering prayer a la carte, picking and choosing texts from various geographic areas, time epochs and religious streams. Yet he thinks his project has the potential to make praying interesting to those who otherwise wouldn’t bother. “We can teach children that prayer is important,” he says, “but we can’t take for granted that this will be relevant for them when they are adults, when they have a choice. What we can do is provide the deepest resources for them to engage in this essential creative process.”

Open Siddur Project • the Open Siddur Project ✍ פְּרוֺיֶקְט הַסִּדּוּר הַפָּתוּחַ

📰 “Color-Coded Prayerbook Devised by Rabbi” (Martin Lauer, Springfield Republican 1972)

Color-Coded Prayerbook Devised by Rabbi

📰 “Database Davvenen” by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (circa mid-1980s)

WHY DO WE DAVVEN?

A SOFTWARE SIDDUR

THE DATABASE

VIDEOTAPE

PresenTense Institute Summer Workshop (Aharon Varady 2009)

First Pitch from the Hotseat at the PresenTense Start-Up Incubator (Aharon Varady 2009)

Logo for the Open Siddur Project, by Aharon Varady (2009)

On Sharing Siddur Texts — by Aharon Varady (Open Siddur, PresenTense 2009)

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

Spiritual Alienation and the Siddur — by Aharon Varady (Open Siddur 2009)

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

📰 “Prayer a la Carte” (Raphael Ahren, Haaretz 2009)

Prayer ala carte

📰 “Prayer Unbound” (Hadara Graubart, Tablet Magazine 2009)

Development Status (2009-08-23)

Development Status (2009-09-22)

Development Status (2009-11-11)

Software Architecture of the Open Siddur Web Application — by Efraim Feinstein (Open Siddur 2009)

An Invitation to Young Technologists — from Efraim Feinstein (Open Siddur 2009)

Why all the software? — by Efraim Feinstein (Open Siddur 2009)

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

Testing Our Transliteration Engine with help from James Strong’s Biblical Hebrew Dictionary

Development Status (2010-02-15)

Development Status (2010-08-15)

Technology is a “plus” not “or” proposition: thoughts after NewCAJE — by Efraim Feinstein (Open Siddur 2010)

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

📰 “Taking Prayer Into Their Own Hands” (Steve Lipman, New York Jewish Week 2010)

📰 “Ten Commandments of Jewish Social Networking” (Jonah Lowenfeld, Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles 2010)

📰 “The Open Siddur: A next generation communal Jewish educational resource,” by Dr. Efraim Feinstein and Dr. Devorah Preiss (Jewish Educational Leadership, Lookstein Center 2010 )

The Open Siddur: A next generation communal Jewish educational resource

Free culture

Siddur toolkit

Current development status

Comparison to other resources

References

Testing Web browsers as Platforms for Hebrew Text Publishing

📕︎ “People of the (Open Source) Book” by Dan Mendelsohn Aviv (Key Publishing, 2012)

Chapter 12: The People of the (Open Source) Book

DIY, FOSS and FLOSS

The Siddur

📕︎ “A Case Study on the Open Siddur Project,” by Gabrielle Girau Pieck (University of Basel, 2014)

📰 “מאַכט אײַער אייגענעם סידור!‏” (Yoel Matveyev, Yiddish Daily Forverts 2019)

Source(s)