Frishman, Elyse D., ed., Mishkah T’filah, A Reform Siddur. New York: CCAR, 2007. 3 vols.

The new Reform siddur is finally out, after years of preparation and consultations. The last one, Gates of Prayer, came out 27 years ago, so it is well time for a revision, and a number of changes are to be seen. Gates was, for one thing, very heavy, clearly designed by a committee standing around something like an architect’s table, with no regard for a congregant over 40 who would have to hold the thing for an extended period of time.

This edition comes in three volumes, one for Sabbath, one for weekdays and festivals, and one for everything but the High Holy Days. Congregations will have to make choices: the two-volume set will be more costly but easier to handle; there seems no point to purchasing all three.

Like its predecessor, the pages have an enormous amount of white space, which sometimes gives the text the illusion of poetry. A certain amount of artistry is shown in the use of diverse fonts and especially in the impressive calligraphy used for the Shema.

Over the years, Reform has become visibly more conservative, and if there remain any Classical Reformers, they will note with dismay the rituals for laying tephillin in the morning service. The tropes have also been restored to the Shema and the paragraphs following it, so they may be chanted.

There is inevitably a bow to gender equality, so that God is never Lord, but only Sovereign. God is, as expected, “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, and God of Jacob, God of Sarah, God of Rebecca, God of Rachel, and God of Leah.” Exhausting, and utterly beyond scansion, but politically correct.

The problem is how to render the Tetragrammaton as opposed to Elohim. An Orthodox siddur renders the former by GOD, as opposed to god. Most commonly in English books the former is LORD, the latter God. The solution adopted here is to treat Adonai as a proper name – “Praised are You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe” – which makes a certain amount of sense since the Tetragrammaton is treated as a proper name in the Bible, but it will grate on the ear of the English reader accustomed to hearing “The Lord is my shepherd.”

The most consistent Hebrew font is of the Koren pattern popular in Israel. It is a clean, simplified typeface that avoids the classical flame shapes of the letters used in most siddurim, including Gates of Prayer. Reform rabbinical students are required to spend a year in Israel, so they will be accustomed to seeing that font.

They are also accustomed to using the Sephardi or Spanish and Portuguese pronunciation of Hebrew employed in Israel. That pronunciation requires certain nice grammatical distinctions, generally confounded or ignored by most Israelis in street speech. By failing to distinguish clearly the short qamatz as some other prayer books do, and by failing to provide the raphe or the metheg, this new text virtually guarantees that no one but an expert grammarian or a trained rabbi will pronounce the Hebrew correctly. For common speech it does not matter much, but for a prayer book, it makes a difference. Or it should.
(To be sure, the short qamatz is shown perhaps 1/100th of an inch thicker than its long form, following an unfortunate Israeli usage; but even readers familiar with Hebrew are nearly certain to miss that distinction.)

The translations are felicitous and graceful for the most part, and the decision to transliterate nearly everything acknowledges, quite reasonably, the lamentable ignorance expected of the congregant-user.
Happily the superfluity of unrelated services in Gates, a collection that required a published scorecard to tell which services were theistic, deistic, atheistic, or naturalistic, is gone. Two services are given for evening and two for morning, and the main distinction is the layout and intended usage: the first provides a running fairly traditional service on the right-hand pages, and a set of interpretive parallel readings on the left-hand ones. One may alternate, mix and match, or use only the right-hand pages. The second service is a continuous reading, whose English is not a veridical translation of the Hebrew. There, choices have already been made by the editors. No effort has been made to include all possible philosophies, for which one may be thankful.

The test is in the using. Congregations are being asked to undertake a considerable expense, and congregants are being asked to learn a new system of prayer. It is a noble, even eximious effort, and impressive. The editors have learned much from the clumsy but well-intentioned 1975 revision of the elegant old Freehof Union Prayer Book.
This book will not fill the synagogues; there is no novel revision that will do that. But it may well help those who come to synagogues to express their spiritual needs in a more satisfying and meaningful way.

Comments? apodet@yahoo.com

Updated 3/19/08