Hebrew Voices #165 – Open Siddur Project

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Nehemia: It’s understood that one of the roles of the prophets is to pray, and even the prophets need God’s help in order to engage in that prayer. That’s profound. Wow!

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Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon with Hebrew Voices, and I am here today at the Klau Library of the Hebrew Union College with Aharon Varady of the Open Siddur Project. Shalom, Aharon.

Aharon: Shalom. It’s really an honor to be interviewed here today!

Nehemia: It’s great to have you. And you contacted me a number of years ago, and I think you asked me to contribute something to the Open Siddur Project, some Karaite siddur I had basically typed up, something from the 1800’s. What is the Open Siddur Project, and why would the Open Siddur Project be interested in a Karaite siddur from the 1800’s?

Aharon: Our project is a project to liberate the content of Jewish prayer and prayer-related works for people who are crafting their own prayer books. That could be individuals or groups – anyone who wants to create their own prayer book in expression of their intimate spiritual practice. We believe they should have access and permission to create that work. That could be as individually distinguished, or as conforming to a particular lineage, but it’s going to be a very special expression of what they’re doing. We want to make that available to people.

Nehemia: There's so much to unpack here. I think we have to back up a little bit for my audience, who maybe isn't familiar with Jewish prayer books. Jewish prayers tend to be what I think in Christianity we call would liturgical. I think we call it that too – liturgical.

Aharon: We call it liturgical.

Nehemia: But in the Christian world it would be more what they would know as high liturgy. Do you think that's a fair definition? In other words, when you go to a Reform synagogue, or a Karaite synagogue, or an Orthodox synagogue, or a Conservative synagogue - I don't know about Reconstructionist – but you go to most synagogues, and it doesn't matter which denomination… or even a Samaritan synagogue, I'm assuming - they have a set liturgy that's being recited. You have a cantor at the front or in the middle, he's somewhere, and he recites certain prayers, and the congregation goes along, or they respond, or they answer. And I think that would be what certainly some Christians would be familiar with, from, let’s say, the Lutheran church. Actually, I haven’t been to enough to churches to know the difference exactly the difference, but it’s actually a very set liturgy, or it tends to be, in most Jewish traditions, which is surprising.

As a Karaite Jew, this is something that I have definitely struggled with. You know, I left Rabbinical Judaism… one of the things I struggled with is that I had this feeling in the synagogue that we were just reciting the same words each week, week after week. And then I go to the Karaite synagogue, and we’re doing the same thing. The difference is, instead of reciting words that were written by men in the Middle Ages or early poets in the 5th century, we’re reciting prayers that come out of the Bible. But we’re doing basically the same thing.

So, Jewish prayer tends to be very liturgical; meaning we have these set prayers, and what you’re trying to do is liberate those prayers. I love that concept of liberating the prayers. What does that mean?

Aharon: When we think of scripture, we think of a text that was divinely inspired, if not through some kind of mechanism. It could be in terms of a logos. Think of the text like the expression of divinity itself that we are participating in when we perform it.

Nehemia: Woah, we’re getting into theology here.

Aharon: I'm just saying, there are different ways that people relate to liturgy. For Maimonides, liturgy is an expression of a self-reflective practice. For another thinker, liturgy is theurgical – it’s a kind of way of creating change in the world, with tools that God gave us.

Nehemia: Woah! Explain this. Theurgical; doesn’t that mean magic?

Aharon: It means…

Nehemia: Help me out here. I forgot to mention, Aharon has a master's in Jewish Education from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He has another master's degree in Community Planning from the University of Cincinnati, so he likes to use words like “theurgical.” What is theurgical? I’m Googling it right now to get a simple definition. Isn't it basically magic? It means “divine working”, according to Wikipedia, for whatever that’s worth.

Aharon: Just to contextualize what I’m saying, there are different relationships towards liturgy in the way people use it as a means of performing some kind of spiritual practice.

Nehemia: Okay. Let me go back to that. When you say theurgical, you don’t mean that it’s magic. You mean that there's people who believe their prayers have actual power. Maybe that it’s not a request of God, but that it actually has an inherent power in itself. You're saying within the Jewish tradition there are some expressions or beliefs about that?

Aharon: Absolutely.

Nehemia: Who would have been a Jewish sage, or a Jewish movement, that would have believed that the prayer has power in itself?

Aharon: There's so many.

Nehemia: Just give us one.

Aharon: The Ba’al Shem Tov.

Nehemia: Okay. So, tell us who the Ba’al Shem Tov is, for those who don’t know. I mean, I know who he is, but tell my audience.

Aharon: The founder of the Hasidic movement. He was part of a larger lineage, receiving the ideas that when one impresses one's intention in a text, one can create change. It can create change not only in our physical world, but in other worlds that also require changes. There’s a lot of work that's needed…

Nehemia: I have no idea what any of that last part meant. I think I do know what it means, but I think, but I think it deals with Kabbalistic issues that I don’t want to get into. Am I right? When you say, "other worlds", what are you talking about? In the spiritual realm?

Aharon: Yeah, in the spiritual realm.

Nehemia: Ok. Let’s bring a Tanakh example, because ultimately, I love the Tanakh; that’s my thing. There’s an example in the Tanakh where I know that the Rabbinical commentators – I think Karaites too – struggle with this issue where there’s a battle between the Amalekites and the Israelites, and Moses raises his hands, and his hands get tired, and two people are holding up his hands, and whenever his hands are raised, they win, and whenever his hands are down, they lose. Some Jewish commentators have looked at that and said, “It’s the hands being up that made them win.” And others said, “No, the hands were raised in prayer.” And I think that’s maybe what you mean by “theurgical;” that there was some power in his hands being raised.

Rashbam, for example, the grandson of Rashi, comes along and says, “If we say that the hands of power weren’t some sort of supplication of prayer, then we’re saying that Moses was using magic.” He is kind of like me, very skeptical of anything theurgical. But you’re saying that does exist within the Jewish tradition, that prayers have inherent power versus asking God and He can say yes or no.

Aharon: There’s also the great story of Ya’akov gazing on these rods.

Nehemia: Yeah, I have no idea what that story means.

Aharon: Yeah, the flock of Laban, and what is happening with these differently striped rods? What’s going on there?

Nehemia: Right, although that wasn't prayer per se. Or maybe it was, actually. That’s a really good point. Going back to Open Siddur – what is an “open siddur?” What’s the Open Siddur Project? What does it mean to “liberate prayers”?

Aharon: When we make a petition, whether we make a petition before a judge, or before our friends, or before strangers who don’t know us personally, we’re engaged in a relationship of maybe convincing them or creating empathy. These relationships are creating a reality. And that’s real. A relationship is real. It might not be as solid as this table, or it might actually seem to be really, really solid. So that’s a change that I think people can understand. If people believe in God, then a relationship in which they’re in communication with divinity is establishing change.

Nehemia: I heard a lecture from Shalom Hartman, where he talks about prayer, saying, "Come on, God's not listening. We all know that. We're just praying to make ourselves feel better," basically, he's saying. That's a very extreme position within the Jewish world, and you're saying maybe the other extreme. I'm saying that maybe the other extreme is, think about two different models. I send an email, and I say to somebody, “Can you please send me this text, I want to use it in my project,” and they can either say yes or no. Or I send an email and there’s an autoresponder. Some people treat prayer like an autoresponder. I write a request and it automatically comes back with the response. Maybe I don't even know that it was received, meaning the receiver. If I set up an autoresponder, I don't necessarily know you even sent me an email, I just know I set up the auto responder, and some people in Judaism treat prayer that way. I think maybe every religious tradition.

Aharon: I don't think so. I definitely don't think so. I mean, certainly I'm familiar with Rabbi Hartman's…

Nehemia: And I've been misquoting him, and I may be confusing him with somebody else.

Aharon: His position, I think, is rather dominant nowadays, depending on which community you're in. But I'm very familiar with that attitude.

Nehemia: Oh, you are. That we're praying to the air… Or God is real, but He's not going to respond.

Aharon: It’s an idea of prayer as a self-reflective practice. That when we're engaged in this discipline, we're doing it because this practice, we’re told, in this lineage, ultimately will change ourselves. I see prayer as… whether one thinks that way, or whether one thinks theurgically, that prayer is a practice that people engage in, I hope, because it's relevant to them. I created this Open Siddur Project in the belief that prayer can be a relevant practice, and if one wants to invest in that practice and make it really important, one can't help but find a prayer book off the shelf and feel like they want to start to tweak it as their practice evolves. They might want to change this thing or that thing, and they should have the tools to be able to do that.

Nehemia: Okay. Hold that thought. I just want to go back to this issue of… So, we have on the one end, when we’re praying, it’s really just for ourselves, because God isn't going to respond to it. On the other end, it’s theurgical, it's almost like God's an autoresponder. And I feel like there's something in the middle, which is more my approach, and I want to say, I feel like this is the biblical approach, and maybe the more traditional Jewish approach, that when we're praying to God, we're engaging in this relationship with Him and coming before Him as a king in supplication. And it's not that He's an autoresponder or ignoring us… Does that make any sense? Like we're actually engaging in this… and I think you said that, but then when you summarized it, you didn't mention that middle position.

Aharon: Yeah, well, I haven't put my own stake in this either. I haven't revealed my hand about how I see it.

Nehemia: How do you see it?

Aharon: I'm really coming at this from the perspective of wanting a prayer book for myself that is helping me to mature and develop my creative and emotional intelligence over the course of my life. I really want to be a thoughtful, kind person in the world. I want a place to contain my insights and the insights of my teachers. I personally follow the teaching of Shimon Ben Zoma in Pirkei Avot which says, "Who is wise? One who learns from everyone."

Nehemia: I love that, I've quoted that in one of my books. I love that phrase. I think that's a very Jewish approach, and I say that in contrast to certain other traditions I've encountered, where they'll say, "Well, if you're not part of this particular very narrow denomination, then we can't even talk to you." I mean, I'll give you an example. I have a friend who's a Southern Baptist, and he'll meet somebody who isn’t evangelical, who's maybe an Anglican Christian, and from his perspective they're going to hell. And I said, "I don’t understand. They believe in Jesus just the same way you believe." "No, they don't. They're going to hell." And he won't want to hear anything they have to say.

And what you're saying is, the Jewish approach - I love this. I love that you brought up Ben Zoma. I didn't remember that's who had said it. “Eizeh hu chakham, halomed mikol adam.” “Who is wise? He who learns from every man.” That's profound. And Maimonides is reputed to have said, although we don't have this in his writings, he is reputed to have said, "Accept the truth from whoever speaks it."

Aharon: That's right.

Nehemia: Yeah, that's pretty cool. I like that.

Aharon: Yeah, it's really fascinating. I mean, I think there's a place for fear. I think nowadays the correct term is "awe” because the Hebrew word yira can be translated as either awe or fear. And part of our teaching from the Torah is that our relationship to divinity is one which is also one of yira, awe and fear. So, I'm sympathetic to those whose relationship is one of fear, but it's balanced, at least in the teaching that I was brought up with. There is awe/fear, but there is also a great deal of love.

Nehemia: Now you're talking about the relationship towards God. I want to jump for a second back to this whole idea of liturgy. We’re not saying something that to us is obvious, and it just occurred to me that some of the audience might not be familiar with it.

So, I just got an email this morning from this woman, and she writes to me. She said, "So as a Jew, how do you get forgiveness from God, because there's no sacrifices?" And I think that's actually one of the aspects that we're taking for granted, that in Judaism we have this concept of prayer in place of sacrifices. Hosea chapter 14, verses 2-4 in Psalm 51, and certainly in the Rabbinical tradition that's a dominant theme.

Aharon: Psalm 51. Yeah.

Nehemia: Yeah. Can we talk about Psalm 51?

Aharon: Yeah, well, “God does not desire your animal offerings," you know it's the verse right close to the verse, "Adonai sfatai tiftakh, u’fi yagid tehilatekha.” “My Master, open my lips so that my praise can be borne out from me.”

Nehemia: It's actually really profound, because the psalmist is asking God for help in praying to Him. That's actually really profound. Because sometimes I'll stand before God, and if I'm not using a set liturgy, I don't know what to say.

Aharon: I mean, it's really beautiful, and it's an allusion…

Nehemia: Allusion with an "A".

Aharon: That’s an allusion to this incredible story of Isaiah, where he needs to come before the throne of glory, and petition to God the needs of his people, and he can't speak. He says that his mouth is impure. "How can I speak?" How can he open up his lips, and this angel… this is beautiful to me, this angel, anticipating, or knowing, his frustration, his great desperation, rushes over with tongs and grasps this glowing stone and presses it to his lips. It’s a burning, fiery stone. You know, it's a very dangerous… If this happened…

Nehemia: In real life, meaning not in a vision…

Aharon: In real life. You would be hospitalized, you know, it would be a terrible circumstance. But, there’s this transformational aspect. This fiery experience… now he can open his lips. This transformation allows him to speak, and I guess in heaven they're also not offering animal offerings. There, it's a different world, and in that world, maybe it's a world of ideas or words where words have as much or more currency than animal offerings.

Nehemia: Wow! So, what you’re saying is really profound. In Psalm 51, and I think it's Isaiah 6, where we're seeing transformation, meaning prayer isn't just the autoresponder. God, "Here's what I need. I expect You to do it," it's, "I’m engaging in this interaction with God, and I'm asking for His help in the interaction, to open my lips," and in the case of Isaiah, to purify his lips. And by the way, here you're talking about Isaiah in the role as the intercessor, which is one of the central roles of the prophets. They didn't just tell the future, that's a misconception in the Tanakh.

One of their main functions, the first time a prophet's mentioned is in Genesis 14. God says to Avimelech, the Philistine king, He says, "Go to Abraham and ask him to pray for you, 'ki navi hu,' 'for he is a prophet'." I mean, it's understood that one of the roles of the prophets is to pray, and even the prophet needs God's help to in order to engage in that prayer. That's profound! Wow, that's really something. Wow, that's really profound.

Let's go back to Psalm 51. Then he talks about how the prayer, this idea of prayer in place of sacrifice. But if we go back to the sacrifices themselves, there's this repeated theme throughout the Tanakh. “Look, I don't want all these sacrifices. I want you to really do this from your heart.” And that's the point of Psalm 51: “I can accept even prayer from your heart in place of sacrifice.” But what happens when we get to prayer? Look, I'm going to tell you… this is me unloading my baggage from my childhood. I remember being in shul, in the Orthodox shul, on Yom Kippur, on the Day of Atonement.

Aharon: We’re still in Rabbinic Judaism.

Nehemia: We're still in Rabbinical Judaism. And it would go all… and I'm just an 8-9-year-old kid, and it goes all day, and they literally… I didn't understand at the time, but they literally hired an opera singer. We used to joke and say he was an opera singer. Later I found out he actually was an opera singer in his regular job. They would hire an opera singer as a cantor, and he would sing opera all day, and we used to joke, “What are we doing here?” And my mother used to make the jokes. She would say, “If God likes opera, we'll all be blessed.” And I was a kid going out of my mind. What is the purpose of these prayers, where the cantor was yodeling the prayers? I know that's disrespectful; I apologize. But it's the pain of my childhood trying to come to terms with this. I mean, that to me is high liturgy to its extreme, to the point where people were sitting and having conversations, they were reading books. Sometimes they were Hebrew books, let's give them some credit. My father was sitting there reading a Talmud in the back row on a little table in the back of the synagogue. So, why is he even there? It's like, "But we have to be here while the man recites the Mussaf on Yom Kippur.

So, help me understand. How do we get from Isaiah 51 to that? Talk to me about this.

Aharon: All right. Well, maybe there's an opportunity to kind of bring this full circle or into the first question you were asking, about how does prayer relate to God and our theological discussion here. Because I usually think about prayer in a different way. I already assume that there’s this distinction between ways people think of prayer, as we said, theurgical, or as a reflective practice. But that's already a very individually focused orientation to prayer because the “dialectic…”

Nehemia: No, no. Use English. Come on. Plain English!

Aharon: Okay. The two experiences of prayer that I think most people can relate to are prayer as this communal function, as when you're in a congregation and you're singing, or it's a quiet time and you're expected to be doing something. That's personal, but everybody else is also doing something alone in a group. This is all in the context of a communal experience versus an individual personal experience, just to contextualize.

Nehemia: Let me explain what the Shemoneh Esreh, the Amidah, looks like.

Aharon: I could do it.

Nehemia: Or can you do it? Do it in 60 seconds or less.

Aharon: Okay. The Amidah is a standing meditation. When we think of meditation, a lot of people think of an open time that's going to be filled with thoughtful breathing or maybe an expansive imagination. In Jewish prayer books, it's filled with liturgy, liturgy that is read. Often, if it's read enough, it's already memorized, and then while people are reciting these words, sometimes by rote, the hope, possibly, could be that they are in the liturgy and that their intention is focused on the meaning of the words, and it’s associating with concerns in their daily life. The feeling that one is petitioning the divine directly is related through these words.

There are 18 blessings in this liturgy, and they describe, as Maimonides explains, three things: praising God, asking God for help… maybe not in one’s own life, but in the life of the community at large, and also one's own life, and thanking, having gratitude. But there is this tripartite organization…

Nehemia: That means three parts in English, yeah.

Aharon: There are these three parts. I mean, in Judaism 101, or for me in Hebrew day school, this is when my teachers really wanted us to grasp that if we were going to compose our own prayer, if we were going to be doing something on our own, we could do that. We should make sure that it be structured in this way: praising, asking, and thanking.

Nehemia: That it has those components, yeah. I want to get to a different part of it though, and you described it wonderfully. Here’s the image, and again, I'm sharing from my childhood. I was in the synagogue, and there's a hundred men. The women are in a different section in my synagogue. And they all stand up at the same time. They take their prayer books, and they silently recite these prayers. At the end, they take three steps back and three steps forward, and then they sit down, and they wait till everybody catches up, until everybody finishes, because some people do it really fast and some people do it really slow. That's actually really profound, what you're describing, because what you're talking about is a communal activity in which everybody does something in unison, individually. That is, as far as I know, a very unusual thing.

Like I said, in the traditional Karaite prayers, there’s one section at the end where that's done, and it's not for anywhere near the same span of time. It might be 60 seconds. Nobody does the Shemoneh Esreh in 60 seconds if they're really doing it. A lot of the prayers are like that; they might not be standing up, they might be sitting down, where the cantor will recite the first few words of the prayer, and then a hundred different men sitting by themselves will recite the prayer silently or semi-silently until they get to the end, and then the cantor ends the prayer with the blessing. That is definitely something, I think, unique, maybe. I don’t know if it’s unique. I don’t know of that from any other traditions, even within Judaism. I've never seen that in a church, by the way. And again, I haven’t been to that many churches, I'll be honest with you.

Aharon: Well, this word, I only know of it coming out of Christian scholarship, but it's a really great word that describes a spiritual experience or the framework for a spiritual experience, and it's called praxis.

Nehemia: What’s praxis in plain English?

Aharon: The praxis is the means by which a kind of experience is engaged. So, if we think of a teacher who has a goal for students’ learning, and their way of doing that is by lecturing them and students taking notes. So, speaking and taking notes, that would be the praxis of that learning. If you’re learning Torah, if your way of feeling the spirit of God, for example, is by opening up the text of a Bible and by reading ten verses a day and reading them with intention, and you have this idea, that "through this practice I am going to be stimulated and feel this connection.”

Nehemia: To God.

Aharon: Yes. That's a praxis by which one is perhaps acquiring an experience or finding an experience. As a Jewish educator, and as an experiential educator, that's something that I focused on at the Jewish Theological Seminary, is praxis. How we form, how we find different kinds of experiences that are really, really significant to us… Again, my interest as a Jewish educator, for myself, for my students, is developing their creative and emotional intelligence. What other people would say, developing spirituality.

Nehemia: Okay. Can I tell you what I find very refreshing about what you're saying? In my upbringing, I once had a rabbi ask me, “Did you pray this morning?” I said, “Well, yeah, I prayed.” He said, “What? How did you pray?” I said, “I prayed in my own words, and I recited some psalms.” He said, “You didn't daven. That's not prayer.” Because I didn't recite the specific words in the liturgy. And look, I came from an ultra-Orthodox upbringing, so it was a very narrow, specific experience.

Aharon: No, I had a very similar experience to you, and I think… I don’t want to say that this framework for composing prayers or arranging one's thoughts in words and saying something that's meaningful is conflicting with having an organized discipline of set prayers to say. And that being understood as “the discipline” and if you haven't engaged in that discipline, you haven't fulfilled it.

Nehemia: So, it is a conflict, in a sense, with that, you're saying.

Aharon: It could be, but it doesn't have to be.

Nehemia: I'll give you an example where it's not. Every year at my house in Jerusalem, my apartment, I have a Passover Seder. And the first couple of years when I did it, I did the traditional Karaite Passover Haggadah – the telling over of the Exodus story. After doing this for a couple of years, I decided, “This is boring to me. I don’t want to do this. Why would I do this?” And in a sense, I left the Rabbinical tradition; not to adopt somebody else's tradition, but to have this engagement with the Creator of the universe as I understood it. And so, what I started doing is, every year I would just…

Aharon: Personally, or for your whole family? So, your whole family has this experience…

Nehemia: Well, I usually have like 20 people at my Seder, all kinds of people who aren't just my family, and we'll do different things. For example, this past year, what we ended up doing is we stayed up until 3:00 in the morning going through the story of the Exodus, chapter by chapter. Exodus 1 through 14 or 15, and people sharing about it and discussing it and reading it.

And I've done different things in different years. There’s a year where I put together a biblical Passover Haggadah where I took different passages from the Bible, and other years I invited other people who were guests to lead it and I’d say, "How should we do it this year? I’ve done it in previous years, now you put something together." That’s where I find your Open Siddur a really powerful thing, where you can do that individually or even within a small community, and say, "You know what? The Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur, I find that offensive, not just I don't connect with it. I want to take that out." That's the prayer where you abolish all vows and oaths that you've made. It's been very controversial in Jewish history.

I guess ultimately the goal is to interact with the Open Siddur project and say, "I want to take these elements and recombine something from maybe the Samaritan prayer book and something from a Karaite prayer book and something from the Reconstructionist prayer book and create your own sort of liturgy.” Is that something that the Open Siddur enables? Is that part of the idea? Or is that my idea?

Aharon: Look, it sounds to me that somebody who is engaged in wisdom and believes that by pursuing a kind of practice and having set texts in front of them which lead them through that practice, they could have certain experiences. The more somebody feels and invests in that, the more they are creatively inspired. They might want to try new things, or look around, as you've described. But they could also feel like, "Oh! I really feel like this one lineage is one I want to master," and they will try their best to conform to the authority of that lineage.

In my project, the Open Siddur Project, which is also your project, it's everybody's project. I think everybody who takes their spiritual practice seriously will want to have some control over what they're using in order to attain these experiences. Perhaps what they've received is good enough. Maybe at their synagogue the siddurim, the prayer books on the shelf, are entirely sufficient, and more power to those who are like, "I love the ArtScroll Siddur, that's my go-to siddur." You can find people who are like, "I'm not going to make my own siddur because the Koren Siddur gives me everything I need," and they feel that like it's their beloved, that is just everything.

All I am saying is that every human being… maybe not even human beings, have the potential and opportunity to have really profound experiences. And what are prayer books? Prayer books are arrangements of different tools. Those tools are literary tools. They might be singing tools or instructions for movements, but they are tools for trying to, over time, maybe through one experience or through multiple times of doing this, have certain experiences.

And what are those experiences for? That's probably what each one of our traditions will say. "Well, all of this is for doing something profound for you, or for your family, or for changing the world." Or they're there for the edification of God, and isn’t that wonderful? Isn't that amazing? God's glory needs edification.

So, all of our traditions are telling us that this is an important thing to do, and we human beings, we're judging that for ourselves. And as you experienced as a child growing up in this synagogue, it wasn't quite meeting… well, you didn't have an expectation yet, but you were already…

Nehemia: I knew that whatever it was, it wasn't appropriate for me. It wasn't a way I was able to interact with God in a way that was meaningful for me. In fact, it could have even turned me off from God in some sense. In other words, if I didn't have, in my particular case, the Tanakh to turn to… And one of the interesting things in the Tanakh, if you look at prayer, and let's leave the Psalms out of it, but if you don't include the Psalms, then one of the characteristics of biblical prayer is every prayer is unique. When Daniel prays, he has certain elements. It starts off, "I'm going to give you the history, I'm going to tell you how pathetic we are in all of our sins." There's confession and there's an historical background, and then they'll say "ve’ata", "and now", and then they'll say, “Here's what I really want to ask you.”

So, there are certain elements that are in common in many biblical prayers, but each one's unique. The prayer of Solomon isn't the prayer of Daniel, and the prayer of Daniel isn’t the prayer of David. And again, the Psalms actually do have prayers that you'll actually have certain psalms that appear twice in the Psalms because they're different books, but the point is, those may have been things that were recited in the Temple, but the individual prayer seems to be very spontaneous, ad hoc.

Aharon: They're highly personal.

Nehemia: Right. And what your project allows someone to do, if I'm understanding correctly, is it allows someone to have a highly personal, or even communal, prayer experience while still utilizing traditional Jewish liturgy. That's pretty cool. That's something I appreciate. At the same time, they can say, "You know what? I want to take word for word the prayer book of my community from the Ukraine, from the 1750’s, and we want to perpetuate those prayers with no changes." And your project also allows for that, right?

Aharon: That's right. I mean, what are we limited to? We're limited to works that are either in the public domain or that are under copyright but shared by their creators with certain licenses that allow other people to reintegrate those prayers into their prayer books.

Nehemia: Yesterday I was interviewing David Gilner, the director of this library, and actually of all the libraries of the Hebrew Union College, four other libraries, and he was showing me this very interesting manuscript of the Haggadah. It was put out, interestingly, after printing already came about, but somebody decided to write one out by hand. A very skilled scribe, with all kinds of drawings, it was very beautiful. And the person who bought the Haggadah came along with his own pen, and he added a blessing of his own. Isn't that beautiful? The blessing that he had wanted to say, or maybe his tradition was to say, wasn't in this Haggadah, this “telling over” of Passover, so he added it by hand. Isn’t that cool?

Aharon: It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, it looks to these works not as works of art, not in a particular romantic sense, which would have them as artifacts to be recognized and lauded, but as used material. I think an archivist would be horrified if somebody came to the library and said, "Oh, you know what? This work from the 16th century is missing from this text that I saw from another edition. I'll just take a pen here and I'll write it in with my Sharpie." They'd be horrified, and rightly so, because it's a library, right? But if this was…

Nehemia: This was something that this man owned, and he added his own prayer into it.

Aharon: Right. He owns that.

Nehemia: Yeah. So, this is interesting.

Aharon: Right. The Open Siddur Project is having all of these texts online. It's in the cloud, as it were, it's in an online database, and then people accessing this application that we're building should be able to select texts and even have the opportunity to edit them. To note, they're not editing one text for everyone; that's what Wikipedia is. They can edit it for themselves, and now there is a variation which is theirs, and they can share that personal variation with the world.

Nehemia: Oh, wow! Okay, let's give a concrete example. In my Orthodox tradition that I grew up with, in the beginning of the Shemoneh Esreh, the Amidah prayer, it talks about the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I believe in the Reformed siddur it adds…

Aharon: The imahot, the mothers.

Nehemia: Right. It says not just the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but the God of Sarah, Rivka, Rachel, and Leah.

Aharon: And I added Bilhah and Zilpah to that too.

Nehemia: Ooh, okay, pound it there. He's giving me the hand pound. That's pretty cool.

Aharon: Right. That's me. We can use this as an example. That’s me. I add in Bilhah and Zilpah, and I can share that variation with the world, but I haven't changed the original. Now anybody can select the variation I made, or they can select the earlier work, which does not include the imahot. The main thing is that all of these different variations are attributed.

Nehemia: What does that mean, they're attributed?

Aharon: The original contributor, the composer of the work, the author of the work… if we don't know the author of the work, the place we've originally found this variation, it's credited. There's something called web-to-print publishing, and the Open Siddur Project is really coming out of that ambition, that if we take material in a database and put it on a web browser, individuals, using their printer or creating a PDF and bringing that to a printer, could create something that is legible, readable and authoritative.

Nehemia: Wow. So, tell me, what is the oldest siddur that you have in your database now, that's been transcribed?

Aharon: The oldest siddur in our database? Well, really, I think our main project for years has been to transcribe this critical text from 1868. Now, that doesn't seem to be from so long ago, but there's this incredible set of siddurim and machzorim, those are special prayer books for Jewish festivals, that were created by this publishing house in Germany.

Nehemia: And this is, you said, 1868?

Aharon: Yeah, 1868. There is this publishing house in Germany called Roedelheim, and this publishing house is very keen on presenting, with their textual analysis of ancient manuscripts… maybe we shouldn't say ancient, but very old, hard to find, rare manuscripts from before the age of printing presses. They were looking over these variations in the customs of the Jews of Ashkenaz, and they were coming out with these very, very well-received, considered to be authoritative, critical texts of the siddurim and machzorim.

Nehemia: So, you're trying to digitize and transcribe these siddurim and machzorim, these prayer books from 1868.

Aharon: Right. And this was really something of an argument between me and my partner when we started the project. I actually said, "Let's start with the oldest and work our way forward." He said, "Let's start our way with the most recent critical text and then add to that."

Nehemia: And by critical text, you mean something that's based on reliable manuscripts and done by scholars. And that's the most recent critical text of the siddur? From 1868? Oh, that's out of copyright.

Aharon: That's right. It’s in the public domain. So many of the Jewish prayer books today, they might not have a bibliography and say like what the text in their siddur is based from. Maybe on the cover they’ll say, "This is the Nusach Ashkenaz,” or, this is in the liturgical custom of Ashkenaz.

Nehemia: And Ashkenaz is European Jewry, Central, and Eastern European Jewry-based, more or less?

Aharon: Yeah, let’s say more or less.

Nehemia: Yeah, with some exceptions. Okay.

Aharon: Yeah, and within that category, there's also sub-variations.

Nehemia: That's an interesting point. If you go to different Orthodox synagogues even, you will find differences in the prayer book. In other words, if you walked into an Orthodox synagogue in Hungary, even 100 years ago, and you walked into one in Brazil, you would find that their prayer books might be markedly different in some ways.

Aharon: That's right.

Nehemia: And it wasn't that there was a mistake in one. They had different traditions about different prayers.

Aharon: That's true. Sometimes it could be a difference of a nikkud.

Nehemia: Right, of a pronunciation of one of the vowels. Or it could be whole paragraphs or whole prayers.

Aharon: Right. It could be a difference in arrangements, it could be an extra word here and there. But these variations are very important because liturgy, especially in the Diaspora, becomes a container for identity. And especially after the Holocaust, where whole communities are wiped out, the survivors of those communities, I think rightfully, want some way to remain linked to their ancestors and to honor them, and for them the way to do that is through their liturgy and honoring the distinctions in that liturgy, and that that shouldn't be changed in their minds.

In saying this, I'm really trying to show how our project is trying to create a bridge between, say, people who are feeling creative and who want the ingredients for which they can be creative, and scholars and practitioners who rely upon the authenticity and authority of a received tradition. People say, "Who's your market? What's your market for this project?" and we say, “Practitioners, and scholars, and creatives.”

Nehemia: And it’s really both extremes from the non-scholarly perspective, because it could be, like I said, before the community leader who had the community in Europe that's been wiped out and now they're in Israel or in New York, and they say, "We want to pray the prayers that were prayed in Germany or Eastern Europe in the 1700’s or the 1880’s.” So, when your project is complete, they'll be able to get all that. At this point, how many prayer books do you have? Will it ever be complete?

Aharon: No, I don't think it will ever be complete.

Nehemia: So maybe that was the wrong way to describe it.

Aharon: I mean, certainly there are, maybe eight important different liturgical traditions – nuskha'ot.

Nehemia: So, what are the eight traditions? I don't think I know what they are.

Aharon: Actually, I made a map of the variations of these liturgical traditions. And that's on the website…

Nehemia: We'll link to that, okay.

Aharon: I wanted to see this, and I actually had to go out and find a chart that Professor Heineman had made in the 1960’s. And still, it seemed to be lacking in some ways, so I added to it, and now… I hope it's useful.

Nehemia: So, what are those eight traditions? We said there's Ashkenaz, which is more or less European Jewry. There's Persian Jewry, there's Nusakh Sephardi, which is Sephardic Jews, and there's Nusakh Sfard, which is used by Ashkenazi Hasidic Jews from Eastern Europe. That's four. You said Yemenite, that’s five.

Aharon: Right. There’s also the Italian tradition. Then there's next to Italy, what we call Roma.

Nehemia: So, the Roman tradition is separate from the Italian tradition?

Aharon: There are actually two Italian traditions.

Nehemia: Okay. That's interesting that Italy has its own distinct tradition out of all of Europe.

Aharon: They do, and in Greece and Turkey, there's also Romaniot.

Nehemia: Which is its own tradition. Is that seven?

Aharaon: Yeah.

Nehemia. Okay, and we're missing one, what's the eighth one?

Aharon: We can choose from a whole bunch of other ones.

Nehemia: Then you said there were eight. What's the eighth?

Aharon: Well, we could say, maybe, we could choose the Maghrebi tradition or the Iraqi tradition.

Nehemia: So, within Sephardi, there's all these subsets that may be different?

Aharon: You could choose. Or we could also say the Karaite tradition. Why not? These are communities that are living side by side with Rabbinic communities.

Nehemia: So, you’ve got more than eight! You were going to give me eight. It’s seven-plus!

Aharon: It really is seven-plus. I mean, you think about the liturgical tradition of the Jews of Ethiopia, the Beta Israel, or the Bene Israel in India.

Nehemia: Is this part of your ambition to get those prayer books incorporated as well, the Ethiopian Jewish ones and the Indian Jewish ones?

Aharon: I do. Look, I'm a North American Jew, and I really take pleasure and it humbles me and I learn from the creativity of other Jews and inspired traditions. I learn from these differences, and I want to know what other people are doing.

Nehemia: This will be a challenge, because in addition to Hebrew you'll then have prayer books in Ge’ez, and the Jews of India, I believe they had some language, Marathi or something like that.

Aharon: Marathi, yeah.

Nehemia: But you haven't at this point completed the 1868 siddur yet, and that's probably more of a priority.

Aharon: You can see it at app.opensiddur.org, and the mother site is opensiddur.org.

Nehemia: We'll put a link on the website, on nehemiaswall.com.

Alright, let's wrap this up. So, you’re liberating the content of Jewish liturgy, and in a practical sense you're transcribing these siddurim that are out of print, or that are out of copyright, or ones that are under copyright, that people let you use.

Aharon: That’s right. We want more people to… if they're translating, or if they're engaged in Jewish spiritual practice, if they feel that their work is valuable to others, to express that value by sharing it rather than maintaining it as a proprietary property that they have an exclusive monopoly on.

Nehemia: Let me briefly explain that a bit. We were talking before we started the recording about translations of the Bible, and one of the things I've encountered, especially, is the New International Version which is owned by Zondervan. And they claim very tight copyright on that translation of the Bible, to the point where if you were to… For example, let's say you wanted to have a website where you recited the Bible in English. If you did that using the New International Version, reading out the entire Bible, you would be violating their copyright. You would need to pay them some type of a licensing fee, if they even gave you permission in the first place. And your point is that these Jewish liturgical texts should be liberated, they should be part of the public domain, is kind of what you're saying.

Aharon: I do, I believe so. I mean, the term in antiquity for this was dimus parrhesia.

Nehemia: Tell us what that means.

Aharon: Dimus are “Aramaicized” Greek terms.

Nehemia: So, the Hebrew term is an Aramaic term that comes from Greek. I love it. Isn't that a picture of Jewish culture?

Aharon: Right. And by the way, these are terms which are… the term parrhesia is one which can be found in the Gospels.

Nehemia: Is it really?

Aharon: Yeah. Parrhesia is bold, honest, open speech. Dimus is from dimosia, which is really referring to a commons, a place of public access.

Nehemia: So, this is actually really profound, and this reminds me of the passage in Isaiah. It’s actually the introduction to this podcast. In the introduction to this podcast, I walked in the market in Jerusalem for two hours, recording people selling their wares in the shuk, in Machane Yehuda, and then we condensed that down to 15 seconds. It came from Isaiah 55, where the prophet is offering the Torah, like the sellers in the shuk. If you've been in the shuk in Jerusalem, and many Middle Eastern shuks, they'll shout out, like they'll be selling oranges and they'll say, “Shalosh be’eser, shalosh be’eser!”, "three for ten, three for ten! It's sweet as honey, sweet as honey!" And they're talking about oranges in that case.

Let me read it. Let's read Isaiah 55. He says, "Come, all who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost." So, he’s in a sense mocking, or doing a play on, what the people in the marketplace are doing. They're selling stuff and they're charging you money and you're still hungry and thirsty the next day. He's saying that with the word of God, you'll be fed. It won't cost you anything. It'll be free and it'll keep you satisfied.

He said, “Why spend your money on what is not bread,” this is verse 2, “and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest affair.” So, in the mekhilta, they're taking this concept and they're comparing it, maybe in very legal terms, to this commons.

Let me give the example from… and I don't know if this is exactly true in ancient Israel, but let's say in medieval Europe when they talk about the commons, everybody had their little plot of land that they would farm, but there was the place where you would graze your cows and your sheep, and that was called the commons. That’s actually a problem they talk about in economics, the tragedy of the commons, because everybody wants to overuse that. You want to squeeze as much out of it, because "why should I leave it for my neighbor?" The Commons is this dimus befarhesia – it belongs to everybody; it doesn't belong to any individual person.

Alright, we've got to wrap this up. What are some final thoughts that you want to share with the people? And also plug your website, and how they can support this project.

Aharon: Oh my gosh, if you wanted to support this project, just note that our project has a relationship with the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity, it's a registered 501(c)(3) non-profit, so all donations are tax-deductible.

Nehemia: Tax-deductible in the United States, yeah. So, people could donate to the Center for Jewish Culture and Creativity with it designated for the Open Siddur Project.

Aharon: That's right, and there’s a link at the bottom of our website to that donation page.

Nehemia: Excellent.

Aharon: We think of the Open Siddur Project as being open to everyone. You don't have to be Jewish to take part in this project. You don't have to be Christian to take part in this project. You simply need to have a great passion for spirituality and a respect for what the Jewish spiritual tradition is offering. We're always looking for volunteers who can contribute. Certainly, transcribers and capable translators.

Nehemia: So, you would need people who can type in Hebrew and have a mastery of the Hebrew language, right?

Aharon: Not necessarily. Not even necessarily. Look, if someone knows Greek… there are very old texts of Jewish liturgy that are in Greek. There are translations of Jewish liturgy in other languages, and we'd like to have those transcribed too. There's a Siddur in a Romanian translation we'd like to have transcribed, and we always are looking for people to translate prayers into other languages.

Nehemia: Okay, so maybe the prayers are in English and they can translate it into Urdu or whatever. How can they contact you, through your website, opensiddur.org?

Aharon: Look, we're doing something very special, I believe, here. We began talking about animal offerings, right? Well, we live in a time where we don't have a Tabernacle or a temple; we're not making offerings of animals. This is an opportunity to offer prayers, and we’re sharing in prayer, so I feel very strongly that we're, in a sense, making a mishkan. We're making a Tabernacle in this project. And in the context of prayers and spirituality, things that are created, that are adapted by communities for their own use, adapted by people in their own contexts to make a proprietary claim on those things. They don't seem to be prayers to me once they are proprietary.

Nehemia: I see. Okay.

Aharon: This is an opportunity for people to share these things in a way which is, as the Pirkei Avot would describe, that of a hesed, or a pious.

Nehemia: So that’s where a person selflessly gives up their right to something so that others can use it.

Aharon: Yeah. All we ask in our projects… we don't ask people to put things in the public domain because that might be too much, we think, at least as the public domain is defined in this country. The public domain doesn't protect a creator from having their work plagiarized.

Nehemia: That’s very interesting. Wow.

Aharon: Having work that's in the public domain doesn't preserve attribution. In the Jewish tradition, you must attribute. That's part of the Jewish creative intellectual tradition.

Nehemia: Remind us of the saying? "Ha'omer davar beshem amo?" How is it…?

Aharon: Right, the teaching is from Rabbi Yoshua Ben Levi. It's also in the Pirkei Avot, it's in Chapter 6, section 6, and this is the 48th attribute of the “excellent student;” attributing a teaching in the name of the one you learned it from.

Nehemia: Giving credit where credit is due.

Aharon: Giving credit where credit is due, as we've learned in the Book of Esther, because Esther says, “in the name of Mordechai”, and what she's saying in the name of Mordechai is that this assassination plot, which is written down…

Nehemia: And she could have taken credit for it, "Hey, I discovered this assassination plot."

Aharon: Right! It’s credited to Mordechai, and this becomes the turning point in the Book of Esther for the salvation, which occurs much later. You know, it's credited on the books that this is Mordechai, but nobody's reading this book until Achashverosh can't sleep, and then he starts reading this book.

Nehemia: And he doesn't remember this.

Aharon: Right. And then he sees the attribution and the Jewish people are saved.

Nehemia: Yeah, that's interesting. That's very interesting. So, we have two very interesting concepts that we've talked about. One is: who is a wise man? He who learns from everyone. And the other is give credit to the person you learned from. That's very interesting, because you could be wise and learn from everybody but then not give them credit, and both of those are key elements in the Jewish way of thinking. That's very profound.

Wonderful. Thank you very much, Aharon.

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