Mishkan T'fillah (5)

[cellio]

This Shabbat was day 6 with Mishkan T'fillah, the new (draft) siddur. I don't have a lot of new observations this week; mostly more re-inforcement of previous observations (and one new experiment we tried).

Specifically:

• Translations need to be translations, not vague adaptations. My patience for this sort of thing is basically non-existent.
• Some of the (properly-labelled) adaptations and interpretive readings are very nice.
• I really like the layout (modulo some nits).
• They break the formatting conventions in a few places, and it's confusing.
• I'd rather that they use more pages than shrink things down to hard-to-read sizes. Some of the older members of our group are having problems with some of the small print.

Some people have complained that with this layout, the person leading the service has to be more of a leader and guide people to the right places. I think this is a good thing; I want the person leading the service to have that kind of flexibility, and anyone in that position ought to be qualified to do it. If we're releasing into the wild rabbis who can't follow a service without an extremely-blatant guide, we're doing something wrong. (Note that I don't believe the premise of that last sentence.)

Our group experimented with having the entire group read (in unison) some of the English stuff. We already did that for certain key parts (most prominently, the translation of the Shema); for the rest of the service, our custom is to go around the circle taking turns. I don't like group reading; people have to spend effort staying "in sync", so they pay less attention to the actual words. I hope we don't continue that experiment -- but we had to try it once, for the sake of completeness.

The service also ran long enough this week that we lost the rabbi's talk (which is usually about 10 minutes, not long); we had to finish in time for the rabbi to go to the bar-mitzvah service after ours. This was disappointing. I think the solution is to reduce the number (or length) of English readings that are basically translations; there are a number of places where we read the Hebrew and then read the translation, and I'd rather we didn't do that so much. (This comment pre-dates the new siddur, actually.) I said something like that to the rabbi, but we didn't really have time to discuss it. Maybe we can discuss it next time we get together to learn talmud.

I hope that I'll be able to borrow a copy of this siddur while writing up my formal evaluation. It would be handy to be able to refer to specific texts, page numbers, etc. I hope they'll welcome that level of feedback.

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Comments

[goljerp]

Some people have complained that with this layout, the person leading the service has to be more of a leader and guide people to the right places.

This touches upon the general question of "when does one call out page numbers". Of course this will be different for different siddurim, and different populations of people. Also if people are constantly coming in, then there should probably be more announcement of page numbers than otherwise (since, in my opinion, it's often much easier to figure out that you're on a new prayer and turn page(s) than to figure out which prayer is being said. There are some times when my personal method of figuring out where the leader is is very poor -- I don't always want to wait for psalm 150 to catch up with p'suke. On the other hand, maybe I should just go through the psalms at my own pace anyhow...)

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

Ellisif scritta:

* Translations need to be translations, not vague adaptations. My patience for this sort of thing is basically non-existent.

Debbie tells me this is a Reform siddur. If so, that has long been standard practice in heterodox siddurim. Retain the Hebrew text with minimal changes, for tradition's sake, while softening the ideologically uncomfortable expressions, and changing the message of the text, in the English, which is what most people read anyway. Hebrew School does not usually teach enough Hebrew to understand the prayers, so most people are cast upon the English.
Bokser's Conservative siddur is an example of this - his translation is awful, consciously so. Even Birnbaum has his conscious mistranslation moments - his version of the shorter confession Ashamnu on Yom Kippur is abhominable. The original has 24 verbs expressing how we have sinned, while Birnbaum has 12 in the English.

* I'd rather that they use more pages than shrink things down to hard-to-read sizes. Some of the older members of our group are having problems with some of the small print.

My parents' summer C-nagogue has been going through this. It's mostly an older congregation, but their High Holidays rabbi (they have interns during the summer, since they can't really afford a full-time rabbi) pushed them to get new Harlow machzorim, replacing the relatively new (10-15 years old) Birnbaums. Harlow has modern English, fitting Conservative ideology (while the congregation is fairly traditional - mostly German refugees) and reduces the Hebrew to almost unreadably small print. My mother has visual problems, there are lots of other older people in the congregation who can't deal with the small type, but most of the service is in Hebrew. Mom pushed them to get a few large-type copies, but large-type copies are heavier, again a problem for older people.

there are a number of places where we read the Hebrew and then read the translation, and I'd rather we didn't do that so much.

Well, yeah. Redundancy is bad. If it includes a blessing, it can be halachically bad as well, but in a Reform shul, odds are that weighs less heavily with the leadership.

Deudone