www.reformjudaism.org.uk

The Shabbat Morning Service - Page 2

Written by Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet Saturday, 01 March 2003

A Prayer Book in the Making

One expressed hope was that a new prayerbook would be able to accommodate such different ‘minyanim’.  This led initially to the suggestion of totally different services bound together in the same book.  The first drafts of the Friday evening service did this, but it became clear that there was a lot of repetition of common materials, which took up a lot of space.   So what has emerged instead is something a little different and a little more challenging.  To understand it we need to look at one of the weaknesses of the 1977 edition, its failure to differentiate the two distinct sections of the early part of the morning service – the Birchot Ha-Shachar (the morning blessings) and the Pesukei D’Zimra, (the ‘Verses of Song’).  These are the sections before the ‘Bar’chu’.  The first is related to our waking moments and preparing for a new day.  The second begins to focus our attention on the role which God plays in our lives, individually and as Israel.  Both sections offer the greatest opportunity for flexibility within the service as they are made up of ‘individual’ voices before we formally come together as a ‘collective’ voice with the ‘Bar’chu’.  So how best take advantage of this flexibility and the different moods of the two sections? 

One answer is to ensure that the sections are clearly demarcated and that a lot of different materials are made available in them so that a variety of services can be created from them.  But that leads to a real challenge.  Unless people are sufficiently secure in their knowledge of the service, particularly in congregations without a rabbi, there is a feeling that all parts of the service are of equal importance and authority.  This may translate into the idea that anything that is printed in the book ought to be included!  But this also bumps into that other problematic tendency within Reform services – that they are becoming increasingly lengthy!  If everything in the book is of equally significance, then nothing can be cut!   So if more materials are included so that different kinds of service or ‘minyanim’ can be accommodated, then we have to educate ourselves sufficiently to feel comfortable with choosing out of the totality in any given section the particular pieces we wish to use for any given service.  This in turn means a greater degree of preparation and indeed thinking through what we wish to focus on or experience on that particular occasion.  Ironically, the Reform movement has always asserted that its decisions were based on ‘informed choice’.  This new kind of prayerbook will make the necessity of ‘informed choice’ quite tangible.