PREFACE
The desire for a new name for the prayerbook came up relatively early in the process and many names were suggested, most of which have already been used for new prayerbooks of other movements. We first chose the name Iyyun T’fillah , ‘Devotion in Prayer’, because of its presence in the passage within our existing Siddur (from Shabbat 127a) where it is listed as ‘one of the things whose interest we enjoy in this world, while the capital remains for us in the world to come’. The term is not without some controversy, as rabbinic texts understand it either positively, as devotion, or negatively, as attempting to calculate the reward to be obtained from God from our prayers. We felt that these two aspects of the term rightly reflect the tension that is often present within our prayer life, as people struggle to find the holy within a highly secular world. In the end the decision was made to retain the name ‘Forms of Prayer’, Seder ha–t’fillot , from the previous editions. However we have used the term Iyyun T’fillah , now translated as ‘Engaging with Prayer’, as the designation of the page notes, introductions and reflective passages. It is an appropriate term for a Jewish tradition that understands the root meaning of the verb l’hitpallel , ‘to pray’, as meaning to judge, and hence ‘to judge oneself’, when we stand before God. The previous edition included illustrations of synagogues, many of which were destroyed in the Second World War, as a memorial to the victims of the Shoah . In looking for illustrations for this new edition two ideas were followed. Because of the desire to encourage a greater engagement with Hebrew the aim has been to use Hebrew calligraphy in most cases as the basis of artistic designs. Secondly, in seeking artists, priority was given to those associated with congregations rebuilt or newly created since the war, as a way of looking towards the Jewish future in Europe. We were fortunate in finding artists from Belgium, France, Germany, Holland, Russia, Spain and Switzerland, as well as the UK, Israel and the USA. Of particular help in following the structure of the individual services and the different sections of the book are a series of graphical headings created by Marc Michaels, whose remarkable design skills throughout the Siddur have made a complex layout clear and accessible. It was asked why the traditional first paragraph of the Amidah says: ‘God of Abraham, God of Isaac and God of Jacob’, and not simply ‘God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob’. The answer: that each of the patriarchs had to discover God in his own way, based on the tradition he had inherited but also on his own experience in his own time and place. That is our challenge today – and equally a quest to find the ‘God of Sarah, God of Rebecca, God of Rachel and God of Leah’. It is our hope that this new Siddur as a whole will provide both a synagogue resource and a companion in the home, just as the current volume has managed to do for the past thirty years. Jonathan Magonet, Editor
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