Why This Non-Orthodox Jew Is Sticking With His Orthodox Prayer Book

About a year ago, a new siddur—prayer book—called “Siddur Davar Hadash,” began making the rounds in certain progressive Jewish corners of the internet. Created by trans Jew brin solomon (who uses it/its pronouns and, for some reason, lowercase letters), Davar Hadash reimagines Jewish prayer for a radically diverse world.

To this end, the siddur uses nonbinary pronouns for God; replaces all prayers that yearn for Zion with prayers that “yearn for a full decolonization of the world;” replaces “ableist” directives to “stand or bow or look” with words like “worship, be humble, [and] pay attention;” along with countless other alterations to bring Jewish tradition in line with modern notions of gender, politics, and theology.

Even passages from the Torah, such as the Shema, have been reworked to fit the political/social agenda of the siddur’s architect.

While the Davar Hadash project is extreme, it isn’t unique. It is essentially just a more dramatic version of the approach that the Reform and Conservative movements have taken with the siddur, which is to rewrite prayers with modern political and social considerations in mind.

For the Reform and Conservative movements, this means mentioning the matriarchs along with the patriarchs, removing prayers that express longing for the return of the Temple and the sacrificial service, universalizing prayers that express ideas of chosenness or Jewish particularity, and softening prayers that express longing for our enemies to be crushed or whatnot.

In nine cases out of ten, I find these updates to be needless, pollyannaish, and uninspiring. For this reason, I remain a non-Orthodox Jew who uses an Orthodox siddur.

I’m not here to condemn this practice of updating prayer for modern sensibilities. Jewish prayer wasn’t handed down at Sinai. The siddur evolved over millennia and has undergone changes throughout the years for all kinds of reasons. I find nothing inherently objectionable about this fact, and I myself add the names of the matriarchs to the first blessing of the amidah.

That said, if the Orthodox world is stuck on the notion that prayers can never change, the non-Orthodox world seems obsessed with the idea that our prayers should have an asymptotic relationship with our political ideology.

It’s this idea—that prayer should primarily be a vehicle for ideology—that I take issue with.

The brilliant historian of religion Karen Armstrong makes the case that humans apprehend the world in one of two modes. The mode of logos—logic—is what allows us to think rationally, objectively, and strategically. The mode of mythos—myth—is what allows us to think creatively, analogically, and associatively. Logos gives us science and history. Mythos gives us art and religion.

One is not superior to the other. “Logos was essential to the survival of our species,” Armstrong writes, “But it had its limitations: it could not assuage human grief or find ultimate meaning in life’s struggles.  For that people turned to mythos or ‘myth.’”

In Armstrong’s analysis, we live in an era of logos. Our mythic minds have atrophied, and we have come to view even matters of the spirit through the lens of hard logic. The result has been increasing atheism on the one hand, and the rise of fundamentalism on the other—both phenomena having a flat, literalist interpretation of religion in common.

It seems to me that a certain fundamentalism of this kind is at work when we try to make our liturgy align perfectly with our politics. I find the very notion to be noxiously literalist. Prayer is a matter of mythos. Like poetry, it speaks in the language of metaphor and symbol. To try and make it suit our modern sensibilities about gender and geopolitics is, in my opinion, as absurd as erasing all references to the “corners of the earth” from the Torah because we now know that the world is round.

Prayer emerges from murmuring deep of the mythopoetic imagination. It is not a matter of studied, inoffensive, political sloganeering.

If we want to create a new liturgy that stands a chance of becoming a lasting, vital contribution to Jewish spiritual life, we will not achieve this by going through the siddur (or the Torah) with a red pen. This officious impulse would scrub our tradition clean of all that is lurid, mysterious, outrageous, challenging, vivid, and beautiful. Rather, we will achieve this by diving into the mythic deep as our ancestors did. Only then will we find new realms of spiritual expression and utter at last a new word.

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.