cellio | Mishkan T'filah: first impressions

The UAHC (the national organization of Reform congregations) is getting ready to publish a new siddur (prayer book), which it does every 25 or 30 years. This time, for the first time, some congregations are being asked to test-drive a draft and provide feedback. We are testing the Shabbat morning service. This morning was our first run through it.

Since I'm going to be one of the people providing official feedback (there's a limit to the number from each congregation), I'm going to try to record some thoughts after each time I use it, so I can later evaluate both initial and final impressions. I'm guessing that most of my readers won't care about these entries.

The layout is well-thought-out, mostly. Each page includes a "nav bar" showing where in the rubric you are for that part of the service -- but the overall position (e.g. "we're in kriat shema now", as opposed to "we're on the third blessing") is missing. There should be running page headers showing which of the five major parts of the service we're in, so that when you flip through the book looking for something you can be guided at the higher level. Yeah, eventually we'll all end up memorizing the key page numbers, but we shouldn't have to.

(Almost) every two-page spread has the Hebrew and transliteration on the right, a reasonable translation below that, alternate English readings on the left page, and (often) commentary in the bottom margins explaining why this prayer is here, historical notes, etc. This is very good, and may be the first time that the Reform movement has gone in for translations and not just "adaptations". I feel it is very, very important for people to have an actual translation of what they're saying available.

That said, some of the translations aren't really accurate, and in a book that mostly got it right, the places where they didn't are especially jarring. This might also mislead people who don't know Hebrew or the traditional service: so many of the translations are faithful that they may just automatically trust all of them. The publishers need to fix this or add an introduction warning about it, preferably the former.

It's gender-sensitive in a non-intrusive way, from what I've seen. This puts it ahead of most texts that try to get rid of "he" and "lord" and such for God. Usually the results of such efforts are either awkward or cheesy.

I said that almost every page follows this layout. Some don't, to the book's detriment, and I'm not sure why. Transliteration is missing for Ashrei, as is an accurate translation. (There is a cheesy adaptation.) It's ok to use more than two pages for such a long psalm -- really! (Aside: there are some really annoying typos in the Hebrew for Ashrei. I know they haven't proofed for typos yet, but these are really glaring.)

Another place that breaks the layout pattern is at the end, for Aleinu. We do not need three alternative versions of Aleinu; just use one and include all the paragraphs, marking the one that most congregations skip as optional. One of the versions seemed to be completely different (didn't have time to study it today), rather than being a subset; what's up with that? (Someone said that one might be a west-coast thing.)

They restored the missing paragraphs of the Shema, while providing navigation that makes it easy to skip them. I think this is a good thing; someone else was complaining bitterly about it because "Reform got rid of those for a reason". Yes, it did, but some people today see reasons to bring them back, and it's clearly optional as presented. This seems reasonable to me. (When I am praying by myself, I include one of these paragraphs and exclude the other, for what I feel are sound reasons.)

In the set of blessings early in the service where we thank God for all sorts of things (there are more than a dozen in this batch; I'm just spacing on the overall name), they added in two that I'm used to from Tree of Life but have never seen in a Reform siddur. This makes sense; if you're going to do, say, 15, you may as well just do all 17, yes? I don't know why they were dropped originally; I don't see theological issues with the content. To this section they also added one that I am not used to, "...who has created me in his image" (b'tzeit Elohim). This restores parity that had been absent (in his image, made me free, made me a Jew -- to parallel the negatives from the traditional service of not a slave, not a gentile, not a woman). I like it.

They changed the order of the trio from body/torah/soul to body/soul/torah. I am told that this was a huge debate in the committee. I disagree with the change pretty strongly, but that fight has already been lost so I will merely note it and move on in my final comments.

They changed one "avoteinu" (God of our fathers) to "doroteinu" (God of our generations). Not sure what my reaction is; just noting it. They changed another "avoteinu" to "yotzreinu" (our creator), which is ok. So long as they don't mess with the first blessing of the Amidah (which is called "avot"), I'm probably fine with this. They had already added "imoteinu" (our mothers) to "avoteinu" there, which is grammatically incorrect but makes people feel better. Whatever.

They did something I find very surprising: in the second blessing of the Amidah, they sort of restored "meitim". This was a huge point in early Reform Judaism: the text originally said "he gives life to the dead" (referring to messianic times), but Reform rejected ressurection and changed it to "gives life to all" (which is true too, of course). The latter is actually from the holiday Amidah; it's "all" there and "the dead" for Shabbat and weekdays, for reasons unknown to me. So they decided to just use the holiday wording all the time on that one.

So anyway, "meitim" is back, but only kind of. The controversial phrase appears three times in the text; they changed one of them (the one in the middle) to "meitim" and left the others as "ha kol". If you're only going to change one then they chose the logical one, but this has "compromise" written all over it and I don't know how it will fly. Now there might be two camps who object: those who object to "meitim" at all, and those who object to doing it only part-way. We'll see.

(It was kind of funny when we got to this one this morning: you could tell who was reading and who was doing it by rote. I usually do it by rote, so I can concentrate better, but I knew there were going to be changes so I was carefully reading everything today, and will for as long as this experiment continues. There were a few people who were doing it by rote and who know what "meitim" means, and they looked truly startled when some of us said it.)

We didn't have a Torah service this morning, so I haven't seen that part of the siddur yet.

I think that, on balance, I'm going to end up liking the new siddur. It's got some warts, and maybe some of them will be addressed as a result of this test-drive. It's got things I disagree with, but probably fewer than the book it'll replace. A lot of thought has gone into making it very flexible and adaptable for congregations with different needs. I'm looking forward to the rest of the trial run.

Mishkan T'filah: first impressions

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