Biblical Hebrew, Tanakh tabs, etc.

Aside from the Biblical Hebrew independent study, I'm also taking Digital Photography, so let's hope the quality of these photos starts improving.

I’m doing an independent study this semester in Biblical Hebrew with an adjunct from the Theological School, our United Methodist seminary here at Drew. Her name is Suzanne Horn. She’s a Christian, so I think we’ll end up learning plenty from each other.

Anyway, for the independent study, I ordered a Koren Tanakh–the Hebrew-only variety. Above, you can see it on the left. Next to it is my JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh. I bought that trusty little volume before I went to Israel for the fall semester of my senior year of high school, which means I’ve been toting it around in my bag for four and half years now. It’s looking, as you can see, a little worse for the wear.

When it was about a year old, I bought the Bible tabs you can see lolling about on the edges of the pages. They’re one of the most useful little investments I’ve ever made. At the Chavurah (hit mute on your computer if you click on this link!), when we’re all flipping about trying to find the Haftarah, I’m always the first one there.

But I’d really like to get Hebrew tabs for my new Koren Tanakh. As far as I can tell, no one makes them. It seems like JPS should, but they don’t. And it seems like Koren could, but they don’t either.

I could make my own by buying some binder tab things from an office supply store and then printing them out on my computer, but they wouldn’t be small or durable enough.

So, does anyone know if someone makes them? And does anyone have any thoughts on fabricating them nicely?

PS–That’s my Moshe Rabbeinu non-piggy bank to the right of the monitor in the picture above. He has a slot in his back where you can put coins. And on the base it says INVESTS, but Jesus may save, but Moses… well, you know.

Indie Yeshiva Pocket Siddur: a review

I’m about to be not very complimentary toward this siddur. You can read a defense of it by one of its creators here.

Crossposted to Jewschool.

Before I get to the actual review of the Indie Yeshiva Pocket Siddur, it bears outlining some basic of my basic beliefs about Jewish prayer and how to make Jewish prayer accessible.

What is beautiful about Jewish prayer is the structure-poetry. There is the micro-poetry of the words, which is all well and good, but what’s so amazing, is the coherent structure of Jewish prayer, the macro-poetry. If you teach a Jew the structure, you can hang whatever you want on it and they will see the beauty in any service in any synagogue in the world.

PunkTorah, the organization responsible for this new entry into the siddur market, the Indie Yeshiva Pocket Siddur, begins from a different premise. Apparently, they believe that what is needed to make the siddur comprehensible to Jews in the pews is a punkification. They have punkified the siddur in two detectable ways. First, they have put a silly punk-looking cover on it. Second, they have stated in the introduction that they are punkifying it:

Who Are We?

Indie Yeshiva is a project of PunkTorah, a force for change by creating open source Jewish education…

Let’s dispense with the notion that this siddur is truly “punk”  right from the start. If it were punk, it would be open source. Despite the above quote, the previous page says, “ALL TEXT © PunkTorah, Inc. 2010.”

The Koren Siddur. Thank God.

Crossposted to Jewschool

Koren, Israeli publishers renowned for Eliyahu Koren’s gorgeous fonts and refreshing layouts, have finally given us a sidur for the English-speaking world. And it’s everything I hoped it would be.

I’ll start with my personal impressions of this siddur and move on to it’s significance on the world’s liturgical stage second.

I’ve never opened a new sidur before and immediately felt its beauty above all else. As a font nerd, I’m still going nuts for Koren’s two similar fonts, used throughout the siddur for the Hebrew text. Parts of the liturgy that are direct biblical quotes are in Koren’s original tanach font and the rest of the text is presented in the similar, but sublty different sidur font. Both are elegant and totally readable.

Better than just having great fonts, the sidur is laid out with all the elegance we expect from Koren. See this opening page from Minchah for example. Rather than having Hebrew on the right and English on the left, with lines of text terminating in the center of the spread, the Hebrew is on the left and the English is on the right, with lines of text originating in the middle of the page.

Combine this with Koren’s sensical and elegant line breaks and blocks of text, and each two-page spread of the sidur is symmetrical, with the blocks of English and the blocks of Hebrew mirroring each other in shape like a rorschach ink blot test.

As part of their attempt to keep the page as uncrowded as possible, rather than frequent stage directions, this sidur has an innivative way of telling you when to bow and when the rise, etc. Next to words on which one is supposed to bow, there is a small equilateral triangle pointing down. In K’dushah, each instance of the word Kadosh gets a similar triangle pointing up to indicate that one should rise up on one’s toes.

According to one of the sidur’s several prefaces, “The prayers are presented in a style that does not spur habit and hurry, but rather encourages the worshiper to engross his mind and heart in prayer.” They have done that.

Now on to the significance of this sidur in the wider world. For all of my lifetime, the most popular orthodox sidur has been the family of ArtScroll sidurim. This is a family of sidurim with a very conservative agenda to push. They are ornate, over-designed and full of crowded pages, excessive instructions, and suggestive translations. (For more on ArtScroll and its agenda, see What’s Bothering ArtScroll?) Further, ArtScroll is under the impression that women need a seperate sidur.

At every turn, The Koren Siddur is ArtScroll’s opposite. Rather than being ornate and gilded, Koren is subdued. ArtScroll has crowded pages, where Koren has elegant pages without wasting any paper with excessive white space. Where ArtScroll beats you over the head with stage directions and choreography, Koren makes subtle suggestion with its innovative triangles. And where ArtScroll believes women need their own sidur, Koren offers, in an equal font, the word Modah alongside the word Modeh. The sidur has even been endorsed by JOFA, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance.

The Orthodox Union gets it and they like this sidur, which even has a little OU stamp of approval on the spine. There have also been reports of large Modern Orthodox congregation placing orders for complete sets of the Koren Siddur.

Goodbye, ArtScroll sidurim. Welcome, Koren. You’ve been a long time coming.

Shabos Zmiros – Y-Love raps in Aramaic!

He raps in English, Yiddish, Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic. He’s Y-Love.

As Daniel “Mobius” Sieradski put it, “With each word he spits in the tongue of the Talmud, Y-Love breathes new life into Hasidism, and hip-hop, one beat at a time.”

YouTube – Introducing Y-Love