The Movement for Reform Judaism

I chose this title as an allusion to one of the concluding verses of the book of Kohelet, Ecclesiates, ‘Of the making of books there is no end’. My allotted time could be used up in just skimming the surface of commentaries on that verse: did Kohelet feel he has said it all, so there was no need to add to it? Did he feel that perhaps books were a substitute for life? Was there a reluctance, surprising as it may sound for the people of the Book, from wanting people to go beyond Torah texts?

But perhaps it is clear to us here, that, of the making of Siddurim, prayer books, there should be no end, but the process of changing, of getting used to a new one, is extremely difficult. Our world is so full of dramatic changes, we all live busy lives, and perhaps there is the reassurance of Shabbat morning services being the ‘same’, whether we go every week or rather less often. But, we too change, and our prayer books need to try to address who we are and some of the issues with which we and our world struggle, aware that they are in some ways different from a generation ago, and will be different a generation hence.

And while we have the feeling that traditional Siddurim are ‘always the same’, and such changes that are made, as with the new edition of Singer’s are largely in matters of notes and directions rather than with regard to the content of the prayers, we tend to forget that there is a whole history of change. A principal purpose of the Singer’s prayer book when it came out was actually the English translation, and the hope that it would help immigrants to speak English rather than Yiddish.

In a couple of weeks, the Leo Baeck College is holding an evening to celebrate the launch of lecturer Dr. Jeremy Schonfield’s new book, ‘Undercurrents of Jewish Prayer’, and I quote from the opening of the cover blurb:

“Traditional Jews encounter the prayer-book, the Siddur, more often in their daily lives than any other text, yet it is mysteriously absent from their otherwise nearly comprehensive curriculum of study. In addition, they tend to recite it mantrically, more for its sound than its meaning. The neglect of meaning is so complete that no edition of the prayer-book has yet appeared with a comprehensive range of commentaries. The present work, the first to examine this paradox, explains it as a reluctance to engage with the intellectual and emotional questions that lie just beneath the surface of the text”.

Rabbi Tony Bayfield also addressed this issue at the Movement Leadership Day, when he referred to these ‘intellectual and emotional questions’, which we too are often reluctant to address, as ‘the elephant in the room’. I hope the lecture will have a wide circulation.