Time for a newsiddur?

LAST NIGHT, I went to shul in Tel Aviv. You might expect this to be the most familiar place for a British Jew to go in the white city of shakshuka and jungly trees. And of course, superficially, the old, old routine is the same. But, glancing at those around me, I noticed something was hugely, massively different. The Hebrew speakers, unlike most British Jews, can actually use the prayer book. It struck me as absurd that almost all British synagogues still use Hebrew-English prayer books that are not only straight translations, but straight Victorian translations of the siddur. Let’s face it: very few of us attending non-Charedi synagogues in the UK actually speak Hebrew. Most can barely read it. Our Jewish knowledge is choppy. How many of us really know which prayers are which, what stories they tell, and where they come from?

Let’s be honest: very few. A core can follow it all. But the rest of us are clueless. We haven’t been to yeshiva. We haven’t been schooled in Talmud. Most of what we know is passed down at home. Some learn a lot, some learn a little. So we just hum along, try to follow the service the best we can and listen to the sermon.

The Victorian translations are worse than useless. The now utterly verbose, archaic language actively undermines the Hebrew. You can’t refer to God as “Awesome” in 2016. “Awesome” may have translated the majesty of the Hebrew word in 1896. Today it just sounds silly. God? Awesome? What, like a chocolate bar or thumbs up?

We are a people that value knowledge, a community of doctors, accountants and lawyers. But when it comes to something so precious to us, we are ignorant, and the prayer book is not helping. Straight Hebrew-English translations keep up the veneer of Orthodoxy but they don’t help Jews connect.

We are supposed to be a religion that asks questions, thinks, probes, and argues. But our traditional Victorian prayer book does anything but that. It offers bland translations of ritual prayer, which are blandly recited and repeated by the congregation.

Inside the synagogue, there is a real need to do something new. And this is exactly what American Jews are doing. This year, the Conservative movement has launched a new prayer book, This is a thing of beauty. Every page looks like a page of Talmud: the prayers ringed with guidance, commentary, history and poems.

This is a siddur that holds your hand, showing you not only how each and every prayer flows, but where they come from, and what they are questing after. Strange words are unpacked. The tales and mysteries behind blessings are told, from Poland to Yemen. Every page has been translated out of Victorian into living English. Those traditionally sung out loud have Hebrew transliterations underneath so everyone in the shul can sing along.

It is a Jewish guide, history and prayer book rolled into one. This makes a much more Jewish book than the straight translation, as it fills in the holes we all have in our Jewish knowledge, that a few hours here and there at synagogue cannot fill. Unlike the prayer books we know: this is a siddur you can learn from.

This revolution is not just an American thing. Most prayer books for the non-Charedi are printed with commentary in Israel; where this is not considered Reform but Orthodoxy living up to its proper intellectual and discursive content.

We need to bring the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — the — to Britain. Why would we not do this?

How many of us really know which prayers are which?