The Raḥamana piyyut is a litany beloved in Sephardic and Mizraḥi communities, a standard part of their Seliḥoth services throughout the month of Elul and the days of repentance. Traditionally it cites a list of Biblical men (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Pinhas, David, and Solomon) and asks to be remembered for their merit and their covenants, for the sake of “Va-yaŋabor” — the first word of Exodus 34:6, the introduction to the verses of the Thirteen Attributes recited in Seliḥoth services. This text instead uses Biblical women (Sarah, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel, Serach, Miriam, Deborah, Ruth, Hannah, and Esther). . . .
The Open Siddur Project is pleased to offer the world the first freely licensed Seder Megillat Esther. We would like to thank our contributors: the Jewish Publication Society for sharing an authoritative digital edition of their 1917 English Translation of the TaNaKh (The Holy Scriptures According to the Masoretic Text), Christopher Kimball and the Westminster Leningrad Codex digitzation project for an authoritative digital text of the TaNaKh. We would also like to thank Rabbi Rallis Wiesenthal for his contribution of the Siddur Bnei Ashkenaz, Shmueli Gonzales for his transcriptions of siddurim witnessing the Nusach Ha-Ari, and Aharon Varady, the editor of opensiddur.org and founder of the Open Siddur Project. If you have any free licensed resources representing other nuschaot and minhagim, please share them. . . .
This is a bentsher that my wife and I made for our same-sex wedding, designed by Hillel Smith, based on a base text by José and Josh Portuondo-Dember. It is: fully egalitarian, has full transliteration, has non-gendered language for G-d, and has full option of wife/husband/spouse pairings for sheva brachot. The PDF attached is for anyone to use (it has a couple of errors, sorry about that), and if you want, you can download the Adobe InDesign file to edit and create your own bentsher! . . .
If one were to accept that a kosher Jewish wedding needs some element of what the Mishnah calls “acquisition” (and, more or less, we accepted this to be the case), any wedding must be conscientious in rethinking the following questions: What exactly is “acquisition” in the Mishnah’s eyes? And, if “acquisition” is inherently offensive to our sensibilities, how can we lessen the role that “acquisition” plays in a kosher wedding? . . .
A teshuvah (responsum) on, and text of, a ketubbah whereby a groom acquires a bride, and a ketubbah whereby a bride acquires a groom. . . .
An egalitarian adaptation of the seliḥa for Yom Kippur. . . .
This is one of my favourite Sukkot piyyutim, not least because of the wonderful and easily singable call-and-response melody! The seven verses each highlight one of the seven traditional ushpizin [mythic guests], and a few years ago I wrote an additional seven verses for the seven female ushpizata according to the order of Rabbi David Seidenberg (neohasid.org). . . .

Contributor(s): Isaac Gantwerk Mayer
Shared on ט׳ באלול ה׳תשע״ח (2018-08-19) — under the following terms: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) 4.0 International copyleft license
Categories: Yom Kippur
Tags: סליחות seliḥot, egalitarian, Star Trek, Avot and Imahot, Mi She’anah, crossovers, deuterocanonical works, Jews of Star Trek, 24th century C.E., United Federation of Planets, Starfleet, liturgy of the wandering stars, 62nd century A.M., תשובה teshuvah
A derivation of the popular piyyut for the Yamim Noraim, “Mi She’anu” which references the archetypal characters of the Star Trek paracosm. . . .
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