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Fixed Prayers but Flexible Services - Page 3

Written by Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet Saturday, 01 May 2004

A Prayer Book in the Making

Clearly these options, and this flexibility, place a burden on whoever leads the service, which has to be constructed afresh each time, though the building elements remain the same. In this way the opening two sections provide an opportunity for providing something fresh and creative, while the sections from the Bar’chu through the Shema and Amidah, which are the formal core of the service, the ‘motor’ at the heart of it, are more constant, and provide the necessary feeling of familiarity and security that are also essential parts of regular worship.

Clearly this shifts the responsibility for the actual service itself from the prayer book onto the congregation, always a Jewish priority. It allows also a deal of experimenting with ways of making the service more accessible, helped by the presence of transliterations, but also with the option of new melodies or ways of reading in the early sections.

Interestingly, this final structure was not an ideological position with which we began our work as an editorial board. Rather it evolved out of the different views that emerged once the work was underway: to offer something that was familiar and ‘traditional reform’ for some, but also to offer something for different sizes and kinds of worshipping congregations, and particularly for a younger generation influenced by the ‘dovenning ‘ they had experience in Israel, or at Limmud, or other places in a changing and to some extent more integrated Jewish community.

All of which is not to say that there are elements that do not work or that need to be improved. The focus on more traditional forms and ensuring that the classical structure of the service is more clearly indicated, has meant that relatively little in the way of new prayers has been introduced. This is a real challenge because those composed for the existing book have largely stood the test of time. But this is also a task that needs to be undertaken if the book is truly to address our realities as a Jewish community in the twenty-first century. The revised study anthology will provide a greater background to the prayers, but we welcome contributions that help us explore the world of today’s society and the role of religion and of prayer.