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

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

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

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.

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.”

[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.

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?’

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:

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

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

1. 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).
2. 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

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:

1. filtering: a higher degree of selectivity in reading [& therefore]
2. skimming: less text actually read
3. 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.

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