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INTRODUCING SIDDUR LEV CHADASH Charles H Middleburgh on Behalf of John D Rayner

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INTRODUCING SIDDUR LEV CHADASH Charles H Middleburgh on Behalf of John D Rayner 33¢, INTRODUCING SIDDUR LEV CHADASH Charles H Middleburgh on behalf of John D Rayner On this momentous day in our movement’s history I stand here to perform a function that all of us would have liked John Rayner to have been able to carry out. John is recovering well from his heart surgery and we send him our sincere good wishes for a refitah sh ’lemah, a speedy return to full health and vigour. In his unavoidable absence, and based almost totally on the text he would have delivered to you all, it therefore gives me great pleasure(although the phrase has rarely seemed less adequate) to present to this conference, and to the Union of Liberal and Progressive Synagogues, the long-awaited Siddur Lev Chadash. I do so on behalf of the Editorial Committee and all who have been involved in the compilation and production of the book. It has been said that objectivity is a fine quality that each of us should develop, and I dare say that there are many who would approach the presentation of Siddur Lev Chadash with far greater objectivity than do I; my excuse then for being here, in spite of my irrcdeemably subjective approach to my present task is that I do, at least, have the advantage of - knowing the new book rather well just as a parent knows its child; r‘ if. except, of course, that this particular child is biologically unusual in that its gestation has taken several years, and that it has a plurality of COLLEG mothers and fathers, otherwise known as the Editorial Committee. ‘ g V‘AuEEI‘j‘Zi‘I I want now to pay tribute to our Co-Editors; first, Rabbi Chaim Stem BAECK 7 who joined the production process after it had commenced and who has not only played a very large part in shaping the book but performed LEO miracles in computerising it, and expended unimaginable quantities of time and energy in doing so. Second, to John Rayner, Co-editor with Chaim Stern of Service of the Heart and Gate of Repentance, without whom Siddur Lev Chadash would never have happened at all, and without whom it would certainly not be the text that it is. John has brought to his work on the Siddur the diligence, devotion and determination that are his hallmarks, as well as intellectual rigour, theological clarity, a sense of poetry and style, and a commitment to excellence that is withOut parallel Siddur Lev Chadash is his greatest gift to our movement, but it is only one of the many from which we all benefit. Next I turn to the other members of our Committee; abundant thanks are due to Rabbi Andrew Goldstein, who, as Chairperson of the Committee, in addition to his significant contribution to the text itself, has also chivvied us all along with just the right mixture of urgency and good humour; to Ann Kirk, who, as Technical Editor has raised to a new level of meaning the words professionalism, meticulousness and dedication, and to the other members of the team, Rabbi Dr Albert Friedlander, Rabbi David Goldberg, Rabbi Pete Tobias and Rabbi Alexandra Wright. In addition to mothers and fathers the new baby has a number of uncles and aunts. They include Rabbi Julia Neuberger and her Anthology Committee; the Consultancy Panel, drawn from the memberships of most of our congregations; and the Production Committee, chaired by Louise Freedman, whose combination of computer wizardry and unflappability at one particularly frustrating stage saved at least two of us from committing suicide. To all of them, as well as Jeremy 165561 and his Marketing Committee, and all members of congregations who made helpful criticisms and suggestions in response to the Experimental Edition, our thanks are due. My task, which, as I have already indicated, I shall perform with the objectivity of a Jewish parent talking about a child, falls into two parts: first, to place the new Siddur in its historical context, and secondly, to explain some of its principal features. 9952 The history of the Jewish liturgy goes back some 3,000 years to the biblical age, from which we have the Shema, the Priestly Benediction, and the Psalms. The history of the Synagogue liturgy goes back some 2,100 years to the age of the Pharisees, who composed the benedictions of the Shema and of the Tefillah as well as Kiddush, Havdalah, and Birkat ha—Mazon. The history of Jewish prayer books goes back a little over 1,100 years to Amram ben Sheshna, Gaon of the academy of Sura in Babylonia, whose reply to an inquiry from Spain became Judaism’s first manuscript prayer book. The history of Jewish printed prayer books goes back about 500 years to the city of Soncino in Italy where Machzor Roma was published in 1485. The history of Progressive prayer books goes back rather less than 200 years to the Hamburg Temple, which issued the first edition of its liturgy in 1819. It was the first of two or three hundred Progressive prayer books produced in Germany, America, England and other countries in the 19th and 20th centuries. About these two points need to be made. The first is that they are broadly classifiable into two types: conservative and radical. The conservative ones are essentially abridgements of the traditional liturgy with little change or addition; the radical ones both modify and supplement the traditional liturgy substantially. And the second point is that most of these prayer books were produced by individual rabbis for their own communities; only a few were compiled for, or adopted by, national synagogue federations. Of these few, the first was the Union Prayer Book, adopted by the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1894 and representing the radical tendency. The third was the Einheitsgebetbuch, adopted by the Liberal communities of Germany in 1929, representing the conservative tendency. Chronologically sandwiched between these two, but ideologically even more radical than the Union Prayer Book, was the early liturgy of our own Movement. It began with an anthology, put out by the Jewish Religious Union in 1902 under the title A Selection of Prayers, Psalms and Other Scriptural Passages, and Hymns. That was eventually replaced by the liturgy which Rabbi Israel Mattuck compiled for the Liberal Jewish Synagogue. It comprised a volume of Services and Prayers for Jewish Homes, dating from 1918, and the three Volumes of the Liberal Jewish Prayer Book, dating from 1923 and 1926, revised in 1937. That is the liturgy with which many of us grew up. In retrospect, I think we may describe it as bold, universalistic, spiritual - and idiosyncratic. It satisfied the generation for which it was written. But after the Second World War, the Shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel, many of our members wanted to identify themselves more deeply with their people, past and present, and therefore felt a need for a more traditional liturgy. It was this situation which prompted Rabbi Rayner, in 1957, to submit a plan for a revised prayer book to what was then the Ministers’ Conference, and in 1961 he startpd the work which, with the collaboration of Rabbi Chaim Stern and an editorial committee chaired at first by Rabbi Bernard Hooker and later by Rabbi Sidney Brichto, ultimately led to the publication of Avodat ha-Lev or Service of the Heart in 1967. The aim then was to combine tradition with modernity in a way which we hoped would satisfy the conservatives without alienating the radicals, and so re-unite the two wings of our constituency, which were in danger of drifting apart; and to a large extent this aim was achieved. There was indeed strong opposition from some quarters to a feature of Avodat ha-Lev which was quite incidental to our main purpose, namely the switch from Victorian to contemporary English, so that God was no longer addressed as ’Thou’ but as ’You’; but this stylistic change soon came to be accepted as either positively desirable or at least tolerable. It is interesting, by the way, that in this respect our example was soon followed by the British Reform and American Conservative movements, as it has been more recently by the Orthodox and even the ultra- Orthodox as well. In general, Avodat ha-Lev was well received. It even won approval from the late Professor of Jewish Liturgy at the Hebrew Union College, Jakob Petuchowski, who, in a review-article about it, wrote: ’While American Reform Judaism is talking about prayer book revision, engaging in market-research to determine what sort of liturgy people would like to have, and pondering the theological foundations of prayer, our English colleagues have quietly gone ahead and produced a revised prayer book which - with all the reservations one might have about details - must be pronounced the best liturgy currently in use among the world’s Liberal and Reform J ews’(CCAR Journal, June 1968, p.94). Whether future historians will concur with that view, I don’t know; but as we prepare to bury Avodat ha-Lev, metaphorically if not literally, I think we may permit ourselves to reflect that, on the whole, it has served us well for the last twenty-nine years. However, as the years passed, and the pages got tattered, we became aware that the text, too, was flawed. It included much that proved ephemeral, and lacked much that was to be desired. By the 19805 we knew that we must try again. An anthology committee was established, plans were submitted and discussed, and towards the end of the ’eighties the work of compilation began.
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