A Reform rabbi tells the story of a man who came into synagogue on the day of his son’s Bar Mitzvah and saw shelves full of an unfamiliar blue prayer book. Before the rabbi could say so much as “Shabbat Shalom,” the man asked, “Rabbi, what is this book? Where’s the red one?” The “red one” he was referring to was the congregation’s machzor, used only on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
New siddurim, however unfamiliar they may have been to the man in the story, are a dime a dozen. They come out every year, ranging from unique ones that record the practice of one individual congregation to new editions from one of the large movements meant for widespread use.
Machzorim–those heavy, byzantine volumes full of unfamiliar and evocative liturgy, and used only twice a year–are another story. The birth and publication of a new machzor is a rare event indeed. This year is twice blessed, then: both the Conservative movement’s Mahzor Lev Shalem and Joseph G. Rosenstein’s Machzor Eit Ratzon–a companion to his 2003 Siddur Eit Ratzon–are out in time for the High Holy Days. While some Conservative ideology may be familiar to many, Eit Ratzon’s traditional egalitarian approach will be new to most. The cover reads: “A traditional prayerbook for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with new meditations, commentaries, translations, and prayers.”
These new machzorim are as remarkable for their similarities as they are for their differences. Both are the products of their creators. Lev Shalem is a Conservative book through and through and Eit Ratzon is a product of an independent chavurah in New Jersey–and is as eccentric as you would expect a chavurah machzor to be. Both have hefty commentaries, as different as they are enlightening. Lev Shalem has a surprising visual beauty to it, while Eit Ratzon’s design has a rigid utility. Lev Shalem was created by a committee of the Conservative movement’s top scholars, while Eit Ratzon is a labor of love from a single lay-person. Rosenstein, a Rutgers math professor by trade, got started in the liturgy racket to create a Shabbat morning siddur for his chavurah. Most of what he knows about liturgy–and his knowledge is now extensive–he learned while creating the first edition of his siddur.
Design
Physically, they could not make more different first impressions. Lev Shalem’s beauty is stunning. It is a rectangular volume, bound in a creamy brown faux leather that makes it comfortable to hold., its title impressed in gold and metallic red. Lev Shalem’s inside also does not disappoint. Scott-Martin Kosofsky designed it and even created a brand new Hebrew font for the siddur.
It seems, on the other hand, that Rosenstein designed Eit Ratzon by himself. Its outside is square–a hard cover bound in a coarse blue cloth, its title impressed in a rougher reflective gold than Lev Shalem’s. The font is nothing special but what makes the internal layout of Eit Ratzon great is its unique format. The machzor is a companion to Rosenstein’s 2003 Siddur Eit Ratzon, a Shabbat morning siddur with a strict four-column layout for every spread, a feature carried forth into the machzor. The central columns of the spread include the Hebrew text of the prayers on the left of the spine and the English translation on the right, so that both the Hebrew and the English seem to flow out from the center of the page. This feature may have seemed revelatory when the recent Orthodox Koren Sacks Siddur employed it, but the model predated Koren by several years.
On the left edge of the Eit Ratzon page, a third column has a full transliteration for every single prayer in the entire machzor. On the far right edge, the fourth column is a robust running commentary. This layout holds true on every single page, though it is occasionally interrupted by shaded boxes across the bottom of the page that include meditations written by Rosenstein. There is rarely any of the white space here that has typified recent prayer books from the Orthodox Koren to the Reform Mishkan T’filah. This does not mean that the pages are cluttered, but that Rosenstein has found an orderly way to keep any space from going to waste.
Lev Shalem takes its layout cues from its recent Conservative predecessors, as well as from Koren, to a lesser extent. Like Koren, Lev Shalem indicates points at which users should bow through a special typographical character. In this case, it is a a bent, looping line with a firm base that is suggestive of the profile of a bowing person. Also like Koren, Lev Shalem’s creators rendered some prayers with a subtle, artful differentiation of spacing and size around key words or phrases.
The right side of each spread of Lev Shalem features the Hebrew text of the prayers in the middle two thirds of the page, extending on most pages to and inch or two from the bottom. Surrounding the Hebrew on the right edge of the page and in the extra space between the Hebrew and the bottom of the page is a system of commentary at least as robust as Eit Ratzon’s.
The left side of the spread in Lev Shalem, despite being just as elegantly designed as the right, is somewhat disappointing. An English translation, occasionally interrupted by a transliteration, dominates the page–which also includes some commentary. In this way, Lev Shalem inherited one of its forbears’ worst features–a penchant for telling you what you need to know and what you do not. The argument that excluding transliterations encourages worshippers to learn Hebrew makes sense. Nevertheless, Conservative liturgists are fooling themselves if they think their two-day-a-year customers are going to learn Hebrew if there are few transliterations in the machzor (as opposed to Eit Ratzon, which has a full transliteration to every prayer). The Conservative movement’s shrinking market share can be partially attributed to the elitist attitude reflected in these decisions about transliterations.
In terms of physical elegance and artful layout, Lev Shalem is clearly the superior machzor. However, the rigid four-column layout of Eit Ratzon is useful and easy to follow. In terms of density of material ease of use, Eit Ratzon clearly wins out.
Liturgy
As we have come to expect from liberal siddurim, there are some changes in the wording of some prayers, especially regarding gender. Eit Ratzon, like its companion siddur, goes further than that. It also offers alternatives to some lines that may be troubling to progressive Jews, such as passages dealing with worldly punishments for sin, a personal messiah, the chosen nature of the Jewish people and the resurrection of the dead. Most of these alternatives come in brackets alongside the older version of the text. The first blessing of the Amidah is the exception, transformed here into its Reform counterpart so that it includes Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah in addition to the patriarchs.
Surprisingly, Lev Shalem, like its more recent Conservative predecessors, still does not make the addition of the matriarchs standard, instead offering a version with them and a version without in parallel.
One of the most difficult sections of the liturgy of the season for modern audiences is the avodah service. Toward the end of the morning in Yom Kippur, this piece of the liturgy is an extensive account of what went on in \\the Temple on Yom Kippur, including a detailed explanation of sacrificial procedure. Both of these machzorim deal with this trying section in new ways. Eit Ratzon features a long, original first-person narrative in English, written as though the speaker had been present in the Temple, telling the congregation what he had witnessed there on Yom Kippur. The approach of Lev Shalem is typical of the Conservative tradition, in that it attempts to make the unpalatable more palatable through commentary and proper framing. In this case, the Avodah service is preceded by a sermon from the play The Dybbuk, by Yiddish playwright and ethnographer Saul Ansky. The sermon is a well-chosen Chasidic teaching on the nature of what went on in the Temple on Yom Kippur. The text of the avodah service itself is bracketed by commentary that explains what is going on. It notes that every geographically distinct Jewish community in the world has different words for this section. In an effort to reflect that, Lev Shalem’s version of this part of Yom Kippur is comprised of three sections, from different time periods and diverse communities.
Translation and commentary
As with Eit Ratzon’s approach to the Avodah service, its approach to translation is more poetic than Lev Shalem’s. The best way to demonstrate this is to show their approaches to a few lines of the most well-known piece of liturgy for this season, Kol Nidrei.
Eit Ratzon translates it like this:
All the vows, all the commitments, all the oaths that we take upon ourselves between this Yom Kippur and the next Yom Kippur… we express our regrets in advance for making any such vows, and we announce that they are null and void. They cannot be upheld or enforced. These vows are not vows. These commitments are not commitments. These oaths are not oaths.
Lev Shalem’s version is less poetic and far wordier:
All vows, renunciations, bans, oaths, formulas of obligation, pledges, and promises that we vow or promise to ourselves and to God from this Yom Kippur to the next–may it approach us for good–we hereby retract. […] Our vows shall not be considered vows; our renunciations shall not be considered renunciations…
As with the translations, the commentary in Eit Ratzon focuses more on poetry than that of Lev Shalem. Rosenstein is not only a poetic translator, but excellent at explaining liturgical poetry, from the grand sweep of the service to cryptic lines. His explanations are enlightening and do a lot to recommend Eit Ratzon. He strikes a hard balance between accessibility for those unfamiliar with the liturgy and insights that will be of interest to those who know the prayers by heart. The only shortcoming is that almost all of the commentary is from Rosenstein alone.
Lev Shalem, by contrast, offers an incredibly diverse selection of commentators, including everyone from Chasidic masters to Abraham Joshua Heschel. However, far less of the commentary in Lev Shalem will be as accessible as the commentary in Eit Ratzon because of Lev Shalem’s extreme erudition. Another way in which Eit Ratzon surpasses Lev Shalem is in its introductory essays to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, which give full histories of how both holidays have been perceived and observed throughout history.
For the connoisseur of siddur design, Lev Shalem may be the best choice, though Eit Ratzon will still be quite intriguing. For the user already highly literate in Jewish liturgy, both will provide good commentaries, though Lev Shalem’s is more erudite. The diverse contemporary synagogue will find more points of access for more members in Eit Ratzon.
Machzor Eit Ratzon, without the support of a large movement, will certainly go the way of its companion, Siddur Eit Ratzon, being adopted by a surprising if small number of synagogues and groups. Rosenstein’s websitelists about 60 groups using his siddur. On the other end of the spectrum, 150,000 copies of Lev Shalem have already been ordered, “representing orders from nearly 130 of some 650 [Conservative] affiliated congregations,” according to the JTA. There is no doubt that it will become the most influential new machzor in many years. The Reform movement, a bellwether of liturgical change, began work this year on a new machzor, tentatively titled Mishkan T’shuvah. It will be interesting to see how these machzorim influence it. Both Eith Ratzon and Lev Shalem are excellent entries into the market for their own reasons, and both well worth a look as we prepare for the High Holy Day season.
