The Siddur Is a Battlefield

The casual reader of the siddur, the Jewish prayer book, does not exist—it’s not a book you’re likely to pick up at the airport, read halfway through, and then abandon because you’ve lost interest in the plot or sympathy with the leading character. Even if you wander into a strange synagogue for a bar mitzvah, your relationship to the siddur that comes to your hand is intensely practical and intimate as you find your way through it to the passage the people around you are reciting. It is a book with a public face and a private face, a sort of literary equivalent to Dr. Who’s Tardis, the time machine that looks small from the outside but contains infinite space within.

But at least the casual reader who doesn’t exist can reasonably expect the siddur to be a stable entity: aside from minor concessions to denominational variations, editorial caprice, or ideological bent, the siddur seems a done deal, a fixed canon, a slice of daily bread whose nutritional content is beyond debate and wholly constant—the one part of the religion you can regularly lay your hands on and breathe from.

Or is it? As I started investigating particular prayers and how they came to be included in the siddur, I was struck by the extent to which this supposedly canonical work is actually a battleground, marked with the imprints of wave upon wave of Jewish sects, movements, and constituencies, some of which have long since faded away. The ancient priesthood, the Pharisees, the kabbalists, the Ḥasidim—each has made a stand in those pages for what it thinks Judaism should be, often in the face of what Judaism had been until that point; in the process, the contribution of each has been partly absorbed and partly neutralized.