cellio | Mishkan T'fillah

Yesterday morning after services we had a discussion of the new siddur. I think they're going to pass out evaluation forms next week, and they'll be due back a week or two after that.

It looks like the reaction is overall positive, which is a good sign. One person liked it initially but doesn't like it now; a couple people didn't like it initially but like it now. The biggest complaint seemed to be that the leader has to be stronger (because there are options, rather than just starting somewhere and reading through). I don't especially see that as a problem, both because we have a strong leader and because if I were the leader I believe I could do it pretty easily. So if I can do it without any formal training, how big a problem is this really?

A few people said they find the format confusing, which surprises me because I find it so intuitive. It was kind of hard to tease out what is confusing about it, though, so unless we can do that we won't be able to make useful suggestions to address whatever the issue is.

One older woman strongly objects to "change", but change goes with the territory even if it were just a new edition with no text changes, so I don't know what can be done other than to write that off. I wonder how many other people will have that reaction to a new book -- any new book -- when it comes out. When our congregation switched from the older (blue) Gates of Prayer to the newer (gray) one a few years ago, that seemed to go reasonably smoothly. The format was fundamentally the same, though.

The anti-change person said that when people come to services because they need to be comforted (e.g. if they're mourning, or sick, or whatever), those people need to see familiar text without having to work too hard. (As an aside, were I in such a position the standard Gates of Prayer service would be pretty much the last thing I would attend; it's so whittled-down and dry, with some goofy English, that I would be distracted, not comforted, by the service. I'd go to our Shabbat morning minyan, regardless of what siddur was being used, for the community.)

Anyway, someone else pointed out that if they're regular attendees the texts will be familiar and if they're occasional attendees it wouldn't matter what book we used because none of it would be familiar, but she didn't respond. She seemed to be saying that she wants a Gates of Prayer -style siddur, with various services made up of various subsets, so neither the congregant nor the leader has to do any work like announcing page changes. But I dislike GoP because the price paid for that is a bunch of incomplete services; I would like the siddur to at least support the option of doing a complete service in Hebrew or English, without having to jump around all over the place. Skipping stuff is much easier than assembling a service out of multiple subsets. Fortunately, I don't think they're going to change the format of Mishkan T'fillah in such a fundamental way.

One person ranted at some length about the "Orthodox" (his word) insertions into the book, like the extra paragraphs of the Shema and the word "meitim" into the Amidah. This same person likes some of the newer, fluffier English readings. So I asked him: why is it appropriate to include optional English readings that some people want to skip, but not ok to include optional paragraphs in the Shema that some people want to skip? Either way, the book supports usage with or without those parts, so what's the problem? His answer: we're Reform, and that means that text is wrong and doesn't belong there. Um, right. Completely missed the point. I don't think he realizes how much of a whacked-out fundamentalist he was coming off as. (Ironically, he joined this congregation after leaving a Conservative one. Did he object to those texts there?)

I don't know if this discussion helped in broad strokes, but after it broke up I noticed that several smaller clumps of people were discussing things, and I think that did some good. The person sitting next to me hadn't understood one of the objections that someone else had had and I was able to show it to her; I was also able to explain to someone a point I'd been trying to make about transliteration. And we probably wouldn't have had those discussions without the larger discussion to frame it.

We don't yet know if the rabbi is going to continue to use this book between the end of the evaluation and the actual publication.

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