Yismach Moshe
June 17, 2007 - 8:32am — Rabbi Shai Gluskin
Above is Dan's revised, color-coded text he of Yismach Moshe using James Greene's Davka version of Kol Haneshamah as a starting point.
The green is text inserted by Kol Haneshamah. The blue is text omitted from KN but that Dan would lean toward putting back in.
The veshamru paragraph is not controversial. The "velo netato" he has put in red as the text we likely would leave out but that in his dream of a fully contexualized siddur he leave in with the "warning" so to speak.
What do you all think?
NY/NJ Eve of Celebration
Darfur
Comments
Red letters
Not sure I see the point of giving a "warning" about problematic statements. For any reader likely to find a statement problematic the warning will be superfluous, and for any reader who doesn't find the statement problematic - or doesn't mind its being problematic - the warning will merely be an irritation. Is it meant to suggest "If you find this statement problematic you're not alone?" Or "If you don't find this statement problematic, you should?" Or "If you kind of like problematic statements, this is not the siddur for you?"
Something I keep hearing about KH at my shul (quietly, one person at a time) is how much people resent being told what to think. For a siddur that intends to be egalitarian and addresses people who already think about current social issues, KH is terribly directive - what you might call "soft authoritarian," never issuing anything so gauche as a commandment but never letting people alone to make up their own minds. My own preference would be to challenge or ironize the liturgical statement with a pointed below-the-line quote, but leave the statement in its traditional form with no further "contextualizing." Davvening is sometimes an intellectual argument, but often it's not, and while giving the intellect its due you don't want to let it take over in an insistent or haranguing way.
Red letters
Thanks, Catherine. Please keep in mind that the consensus of the Task Force seems to be that my color-coded mark-up will be useful for us but would not work in an actual siddur. More broadly, the consensus seems to be that we will need to make some difficult choices about restoring certain parts of the traditional liturgy, rather than offering multiple choices, with or without warnings. So think of my red coding not as a warning (to anyone) but simply as my take on which traditional liturgical passages are most problematic from a Reconstructionist perspective.
Yismach Moshe
I probably missed this part of our early June phone conference, but I wonder why the consensus is that color-coding is not useful. I have recently used the polychrome hagaddah with great interest and have also looked at Richard Elliott Friedman's THE BIBLE WITH SOURCES REVEALED. Though I don't necessarily agree with all his conclusions, there is something very valuable about helping our communities understand the historical development of the traditional siddur and in teaching about our Reconstructionist (and traditional) choices. I agree with Catherine that "davvening is sometimes an intellectual argument, but often it's not. . . " and that our purpose is not to offer a textbook on prayer. Nonetheless, our communities often don't get a sense of the historical growth and development of our prayer life, and some (if not extensive) color-coding might actually help in this regard.
As for our commentaries, like Catherine (and obviously others at her shul and elsewhere), I too have from time to time felt that some of the commentaries are too directive. I'm not sure how to completely avoid this when a commentator wants to say something substantive and important about a piece of liturgy (without being didactic). Where do we cross the line between personal perspective/directive/telling people what to think and offering a fresh new perspective? Certainly a conversation I think we should share.
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