The Shabbat Morning Service
Written by Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet Saturday, 01 March 2003
A Prayer Book in the Making
| Article Index |
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| The Shabbat Morning Service |
| Different Minyanim |
| Two Kinds of Services |
| All Pages |
With the draft Shabbat morning service we begin to see more clearly some of the challenges and opportunities facing us as we attempt to create a new prayerbook for the movement. The 1935 volume of Forms of Prayer was a very much scaled down version of the traditional siddur. Because of its origins it contained a mixture of Ashkenazi and Sephardi elements that are retained in the current volume and the new draft. What was seen as a problem with the 1935 edition in the seventies, apart from the archaic language, was the absence of variety or alternative possibilities. The only option for changing the Shabbat morning service was to introduce a psalm from the psalm anthology at the back, which took up exactly half of the book.
The 1977 edition consciously attempted to address the issue of providing variety by offering different introductions to the Friday evening and Shabbat morning services, as well as slots within the services where new materials could be introduced – alternative 2nd and 3rd paragraphs for the Shema, a study passage, a responsive reading, etc. One of the problems raised by this approach is that traditional materials tended to be distributed through the different introductions, and many were not included. This means that for those who want a more ‘conservative’ style service, it is a messy exercise moving around the book. However, such a structure risks becoming somewhat mechanical - ‘today we do service number 3’. Of course the same prayerbook can be used in very different ways – a visit to a number of different synagogues will show just how varied the same service can be. Indeed today we are seeing the emergence of quite different ‘minyanim’, within the same synagogue – ‘classical British Reform organ and choir’ alongside a ‘Shlomo Carlebach’ chanted traditional style one, alongside a guitar-led contemporary song service, and mixtures of all three at once!
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