Introduction

Sometimes, people who are opposed to changing ritual and liturgical practices to be more in line with contemporary values say things like, “Well, if you’re going to change one thing, why not change everything you don’t like?” And the obvious rejoinder to that is yeah, actually, why not change everything you don’t like?
— Rabbi Steven Philp over Shabbat lunch one day at CBST

What this Siddur Is

This siddur is at once a practical prayerbook and a piece of art. Which is to say that it is both a siddur like any other and also an attempt to imagine a fragment of another world.

This project began in 2020 with an idle thought that it would be convenient to have a siddur that could be freely distributed online with no copyright restrictions so that friends putting together livestreamed Shabbat services unaffiliated with any synagogue or official movement could still have a text to use. But, of course, different movements of Judaism have made different decisions about the content and layout of the siddur over the years, to say nothing of various independent synagogues (especially those centering queer Jews), so this immediately raised the question of what kind of siddur I wanted to put together.

I had been aware for some time of Lior Gross and Eyal Rivlin’s Nonbinary Hebrew Project, and it occurred to me that it might be worth putting it to use here. Most contemporary siddurim I know use de-gendered liturgy in the English translations, but their Hebrew remains firmly grammatically masculine, and putting together a siddur from scratch seemed like an excellent opportunity to explore a de-gendered Hebrew liturgy. I am deeply indebted to Lior and Eyal; this project could not have gotten off the ground without the crucial foundation of their prior work.

But as I began to work on the project, it quickly became apparent that I wanted to change much more than the grammatical gender of references to G-d. Because in addition to assuming that all worshipers are men, the traditional liturgy also makes a number of other assumptions ripe for challenge. Not all worshipers can see or hear. Not all worshipers can stand, kneel, and bow. Not all worshipers yearn for the rebuilding of the Temple and the resumption of animal sacrifice there, nor is Judaism inherently superior to other faith traditions. Weren’t these things worth addressing alongside the grammatical gender of G-d?

To be Jewish is to believe in the importance of language. G-d created the world using words; two of the Ten Commandments enjoin us to be scrupulous with our language; a quarter of the sins in the Yom Kippur confessional concern misused speech — over and over our tradition teaches that the words we use matter tremendously. Having passages that give us moral pause in our liturgy is no small matter, and it’s not a viable solution to suggest we merely skate over them as tho we don’t really mean our prayers.

And so the scope of the project broadened. Instead of producing a merely de-gendered liturgy, I started trying to craft a fully de-stigmatized one. What would a fully inclusive liturgy be like? This siddur is an attempt to imagine one possible answer.

What This Siddur Is Not

A de-stigmatized liturgy, however, is not the same as a de-stigmatized Judaism. This siddur is a collection of prayer texts in Hebrew, Aramaic, and English; it is not a how-to guide for practicing Judaism in a way that fully includes all who wish to participate.

Indeed, I’m not sure such a thing is even possible. At the most basic level, conflicting access needs are an unavoidable fact of life: The very same direct overhead lights that one congregant needs to read may cause another’s debilitating migraines. The fidget toy that one congregant needs to stay grounded may be a severe distraction to another congregant. A small, tight-knit shul can feel like a cozy spiritual home to insiders, but may feel alienating when a stranger attends for the first time; a large, expansive shul may feel welcoming to new members but less personalized in the long run. In some cases, creative thinking can lead to a solution that works for everyone, but in others these circles cannot be squared, and a choice to include one group will inevitably mean excluding another. The world is, bitterly, imperfect.

And all this, of course, is to say nothing about the variety of Jewish practices and preferences that have grown up thruout the millennia of Jewish existence. Reform and Orthodox services differ, just as Ashkenazi and Mizraḥi customs and traditions differ, but these different cultures and worship styles are all vibrant and vital, and it would be a great loss if all this diversity were swept away in favor of some hyperstandardized One True Way Of Doing Judaism.

As such, inclusive Jewish practices will vary from community to community. The ideal, in this as in so many things, is multiplicity: a wide array of synagogues all doing Judaism in their own way such that every Jew has access to congregations that meet their needs and preferences.

This little book, obviously, cannot tell you how to do that. It is a collection of texts, nothing more, nothing less.

About the Text

In assembling this siddur, I’ve relied on the following primary reference points:

• the Reconstructionist Kol Haneshamah siddur
• the Conservative Lev Shalem siddur
• the Koren Shalem siddur (Ashkenazi rite)

At times, however, I have also referred to the following:

• the Reform Mishkan T’filah siddur
• Congregation Beit Simchat Torah’s B’chol L’vav’cha siddur
• Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook
• Adam Zagoria-Moffet and Isaac Treuherz’s Siddur Masorti
• the PDF scan of a 1963 printing of the Sa’adiah Ga’on’s siddur hosted at www.hebrewbooks.org
• the Siddur Ashkenaz text hosted under the “Liturgy” section of www.sefaria.org
• various prayerbooks and prayer texts available thru the Open Siddur Project (www.opensiddur.org)

For psalms and other Biblical passages, I have relied on the Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh for the Hebrew text, referencing both the hard copy I own and the digital edition hosted by Sefaria.

Between all these sources, I believe I have settled on an Ashkenazic rite that is defensible, tho not necessarily definitive.

note I have assembled an Ashkenazic rite because that is the practice I am familiar with; I did not think it was my place to attempt to create a liturgy for a community that I am not a member of.

Where the sources I consulted have not been in unanimity on the text of a prayer or the order of prayers in the service, I have generally followed the majority of the siddurim available or, when there’s no clear consensus, followed the siddur that most closely matches the services I have attended. Absent the possibility of creating a preternatural, psychic text that shifts in advance to suit the preferences of every given reader in turn, this seemed the best path available.

Within reason, I have tried to produce a full liturgy, including prayers that may not be familiar to everyone who opens this book. I have done this because my goal with this project is to make de-stigmatized versions of this liturgy as broadly available as possible, and that means, necessarily, making de-stigmatized versions of said liturgy to begin with. These prayers are included for those who wish to use them, but their inclusion is emphatically not meant to be normative; if it is not your practice to include a certain text or section that is included here, its inclusion should not be taken as implying that your practice is in any way wrong or lesser than a practice that uses it. It would break my heart if the wordiness of this text were ever taken to imply that a Jewish practice of few (or even zero) words is in any way less Holy than a wordy one.

Indeed, more generally, the fact that something is fixed in specific words here should not be taken as implying any absolute certainty. I wish I could show you my doubts, my drafts, my hemming and hawing. I wish I could highlight all the places I dithered endlessly about changing something, where I’m still not sure I got it right, where I want second, third, fourth opinions on what I’ve tried to do. Take the texts in this siddur not as dicta handed down from on high but as suggestions, hypotheses, proposals, explorations: Perhaps it could be something like this? What do you think?

About the Translation

While the siddurim listed above were useful in seeing how others had approached the various challenges of translating the liturgy, and while I also made occasional use of Robert Alter’s translation when tackling Biblical passages, the translations in this volume are all my own and not specifically based on one particular extant translation or another. The Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew-English Lexicon was invaluable in picking out the nuances of Biblical texts, as was Marcus Jastrow’s Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Bavli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature for later Rabbinic Hebrew. The Gesenius-Kautzsch-Cowley Hebrew Grammar and Joüon-Muraoka Grammar of Biblical Hebrew were useful reference guides for untangling some of the more puzzling syntactical snarls. For the psalms specifically, I occasionally made reference to the commentaries in the Hermeneia and Yale Anchor Bible series.

It is my profound belief that all languages are holy, and that the English versions of our prayers should be as vital and soul-stirring as the Hebrew. Above all else, then, I have tried to make the translations prayerful. I have tried to work in the joy I feel for English, the poetry I find in it in my non-liturgical work as a playwright and lyricist. I have tried to give the translations a force and urgency, tried to make them pulse with life in a way that offers layers of meaning to sit with and dig into. Sometimes I have reached for the holiness of elevated language and sometimes for the holiness of workaday words — I hope there is one turn of phrase here, at least, that catches your attention and opens a new way of engaging with the Divine.

In addition to prayerfulness, I have tried to keep the translations close to the Hebrew. Much of my earliest Hebrew education came from simply comparing the Hebrew text of a prayer to its translation and trying to figure out which words meant what. So to that end, I have tried, wherever possible, to translate the same Hebrew word with the same English word — especially within the confines of a single prayer — and to keep the English syntax at least within spitting distance of the Hebrew. This means the English sometimes pulls away from idiomatic contemporary usage, but to me this unfamiliar lilt enhances the prayerfulness, pulling me away from the speech of my secular life and towards a special language of worship.

This desire for a closeness to the Hebrew also extends to structural features of the language.

note And also to names. I dislike the practice of Anglicizing the names of Biblical figures. A name is a Holy thing, and it should not be lightly altered. Accordingly, the names of Biblical figures will be transliterated instead of given in their more familiar English equivalents: Mosheh, not Moses; Yəshayáhu, not Isaiah.

Where the Hebrew rhymes, the English rhymes. Where the Hebrew has a tightly constrained number of words, the English does as well. When the Hebrew has an alphabetical acrostic, the English does too.

This presents something of a difficulty, as the Hebrew and English writing systems have different numbers of letters. There’s no really good solution here, but what I’ve done is to ditch all the vowels in English other than the letter A. Conveniently, this brings English down to the same number of letters as Hebrew, and thus the two languages can be alphabetized in parallel. For the letter X, I’ve allowed myself the liberty of using words that begin with “ex-”, as precious few prayers discuss X-rays, xylem, or xenobiology.

In several places, the Hebrew deploys acrostics that spell individual words instead of the full alphabet. These are somewhat trickier to accommodate, as English words are built very differently than Hebrew ones. To make these acrostics work, I have freely availed myself of all the letters of the words in the English translation, not just their initial ones, and that has allowed me to weave equivalents thru the English translation.

In several places, the Hebrew deploys acrostics that spell individual words instead of the full alphabet. These are somewhat trickier to accommodate, as English words are built very differently than Hebrew ones. To make these acrostics work, I have freely availed myself of all the letters of the words in the English translation, not just their initial ones, and that has allowed me to weave equivalents thru the English translation. In the PDF and HTML versions, all such acrostic devices, both full alphabets and isolated words, are marked by bold text in the translation and by a different font in the Hebrew.

There is no running commentary on the translation, but Appendix B does provide a few notes on specific moments that I think warrant special attention.

About the Changes

The changes in this siddur are both minimal and maximal. They are minimal in that I’ve tried to preserve as much of the traditional liturgy as possible: I have not, by and large, gone thru ditching entire prayers or even sections of prayers, nor have I sought to reshape the architecture of the prayer service. There are many people doing such work, and it holds great potential for teaching us new ways of approaching our traditions, but it is not the work I am engaged with here. Here, I am staying as traditional as possible.

I am doing this because I think it is useful to not cede traditional ways of doing Judaism to those who would exclude us from them. I do not want to leave behind the inherited liturgy as not worth making ours, not worth carrying with us into the second fifth of the twenty-first century. These traditional texts do not belong only to those who do not wish to make room for queerness, for disability, for feminism or mental illness or decolonization or race or anything else I’m trying to address with this work. They belong to all of us. How much of them can we carry forward intact?

The changes are minimal in another sense, too: Even when changing things, I’ve striven to preserve as much of the original as I can, in terms not only of the underlying intent behind the literal words, but also in terms of the structural features of the text. I have striven to preserve alphabetical acrostics, rhyme schemes, syntactical parallelism, even syllable counts when replacing, rather than merely re-gendering, words in strictly metered contexts.

note I was a little laxer about this in prose contexts, but hopefully not egregiously so. In a few psalms, I could not find a way to preserve the exact syllable count, but I did the best I could.

It is my hope that this will allow these new words to be used in place of the old ones with minimal disruption to familiar routines. I want these changes to be easy to adopt.

The changes are maximal in that when I have been on the fence about whether something needs to be changed or not, I have erred on the side of changing it. I have striven to always answer the question “OK, but if I did ultimately want to change it, what could I change it to?” As such, this siddur is a deliberate, self-conscious overcorrection; there are almost certainly things I have changed that do not, in fact, need to be changed.

To provide detailed notes thruout the siddur on all these changes would produce a running commentary longer than the text itself, which seems neither practical nor desirable. Rather than a detailed blow-by-blow, then, here is general overview of the kinds of changes I have made and the reasons for them.

1: Gender. First and foremost, all references to G-d have been changed to be grammatically gender neutral instead of grammatically masculine, following the nonbinary Hebrew system created by Lior and Eyal. This is far and away the most sweeping and omnipresent change from the traditional text in this siddur.

I have also rendered references to angels and generic human beings in the same way, altho here I have made one slight deviation from Lior and Eyal’s work. Specifically, in the plural: Lior and Eyal propose a plural ending system built around ימוֹת ִ- | -imot. While I have nothing but respect for Lior and Eyal, this system proved unworkable in the siddur due to the number of extra syllables involved. As noted above, preserving syllable counts was important to me in this siddur, and it proved impossible to do so with the plural endings of their original system.

Instead, I have used a plural ending system built around וֹל- | -ol, derived from the word כֹּל | kol | “all”. The ending may feel a little strange at first, but it ultimately allows for a much smoother substitution of de-gendered words for their gendered equivalents, and has the added side benefit of subtly moving away from implying that all nonbinary genders are a mixture of male and female.

note For a fuller accounting of the grammatical system used in this siddur, see Appendix C.

I understand this third gender to be either specifically nonbinary or generically unmarked depending on the context. Which is to say it can be used for both specific people (or deities) who do not use grammatically masculine or feminine pronouns, or it may be used to refer to people whose gender is unknown or irrelevant. As such, I will frequently refer to it as the “common” gender, to distinguish it from the “masculine” and “feminine”.

While less omnipresent, I have also tried to find ways to include more of the women of our collective myth and history in our liturgy, breaking up some of the texts that only list men with (roughly) equivalent women and being sure to always list all the matriarchs (including Bilhah and Zilpah) along with the patriarchs where pertinent.

2: Ableism. Passages of the liturgy that call for worshipers to stand or bow or look or do some other physical action have been replaced with more generic verbs of prayer: worship, be humble, pay attention, and the like. Passages that assume that the worshiper has a specific bodily configuration that not all people have (eg Psalm 90:17, “and establish the work of our hands!”) have been altered to accommodate all bodies (“and establish the work of our lives!”).

In the spirit of maximal change, I have also altered some of the imagery of the psalms. There are long stretches where the only senses activated are vision and hearing, and I have tried to find ways to break some of these stretches up with interjections of touch and smell as well. Many of these passages involve anthropomorphizing the natural world, and while I certainly don’t think we need to take these passages literally, I do think there’s value in questioning why, when we imagine a tree or a mountain as being like a person, we imagine them being like an able-bodied person specifically. What if the earth cannot see or hear the lightning, but only feel it? I have made some alterations in this spirit.

3: Jewish Supremacy. I have taken various approaches to passages of the liturgy that state that all non-Jewish religions are inherently inferior to ours. In some cases, I have changed particularist yearnings for a world where everyone worships Jewishly and to yearn for a world where all are devoted to the task of building a world of Justice. Elsewhere, I have opted to keep the Jewish particularism and instead alter the surrounding text to avoid denigrating other groups and ways of life.

Often this entails a certain strategic use of silence and vagueness: HASHEIM is our only G-d; other groups may have other g-ds, and we are saying nothing about them other than that they are not for us. The whole world may not be joining together to praise haSheim, but we all are. Who comprises that “we”? Everyone who wants to be included by it and no one who doesn’t. The repeated invocation of “all living things” worshiping the Jewish G-d have been qualified to say that only haSheim’s living things worship haSheim — a category that I think can include all the plants and fungi and animals and bacteria...

note Certainly, other religions claim the worship of the living beings of the natural world, but until pine trees start being persecuted for their religious practices or lack thereof, I think we can safely ignore these overlapping claims. Leave the monotheism of the marmosets to their own marmostatic theologicians.

...without inadvertently also sweeping up human beings who do not and do not wish to worship Jewishly.

In a few places, I’ve tried to bring the particular and the universal a little closer together, changing requests that haSheim judge the earth to requests that G-d heal the earth or bring it peace. It seems hard to go astray in praying for the unconditional well-being of strangers.

An Aside on Idolatry: Given the above, it might at first seem odd that references to idolatry have been left in place thruout this siddur. To be sure, thruout Jewish history, one can certainly find that term being used to mean any non-Jewish form of worship, but that is not the only way to understand it. It is common to define the mistake of idolatry as the elevation of things made by humans to a transcendent, eternal plane where they do not belong. These things might be relatively concrete — money, for example — or they may be larger and more abstract — systems like capitalism or an entire nation-state, say — but in any case, they are finite constructs with no existence outside their material reality, and to elevate them beyond what they are is idolatrous.

So when this prayerbook refers to idolatry, it does not mean non-Jewish ways of connecting with the Divine. Instead, it means things like white supremacy, apartheid, nationalism, xenophobia, classism — all the brutal immiserating ways that humans have invented for wreaking harm and elevating power over human flourishing.

As long as this sort of idolatry persists, we, as Jews, are obligated to strive for its end.

4: Zionism. Prayers that yearn for a return to Zion have been rewritten to yearn for a full decolonization of the world instead. In addition, there are several places where I have explicitly included the Palestinian people in prayers for healing and peace as a gesture towards reminding us to be accountable for the ways many of our communities have actively contributed and still contribute to their oppression. It is not enough, but it is perhaps a beginning.

5: The Promise of the Land. The same anti-Zionist spirit requires grappling with the Biblical promise of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea to Avraham, Sarah, and their descendants, which wends its way thru the liturgy in various guises. Without being revisionist about history, myth, or legend, I’ve tried to alter these passages so they don’t play into tropes that encourage present-day settler colonialism. The story of Nó’aḥ has been a useful resource here, and I have borrowed some language from that passage of Bəreishit to shift the liturgy from “this specific tract of land that haSheim promised to us as Jews” to “this good and bountiful planet Earth that haSheim preserved from destruction for all of us as humans”.

6: Monarchy. References to haSheim’s kingship have been replaced with a variety of other metaphors depending on the context of the prayer in question. Sometimes, these changes have been lead by meaning, and sometimes, they have been led by wordplay and acrostics; as such, when the same biblical passage is quoted in different contexts, a different word may be substituted in each case.

7: The Temple and the World to Come. Passages yearning for a Third Temple have been rewritten to yearn for G-d’s presence in our lives and hearts. References to a world to come have been left in, with the attendant ambiguity as to whether this refers to an afterlife or simply a new political reality that has yet to be built. References to a specific messiah, however, have been removed. The work of liberation is not work that will be accomplished by one singular savior, and certainly not by a savior marked out for this destiny by dint of being born to a particular bloodline. It is work that will be accomplished by all of us, working together in concert. It is the work of solidarity, of painstaking organizing for collective action. Passages referring to the messiah have been altered to reflect this viewpoint.

8: Genocide. Passages that celebrate the genocide of the Egyptian firstborn have been altered to more generally refer to throwing the whole of Egyptian society into disarray. Sometimes, establishing Justice certainly requires unsettling the established order of things, and I don’t mean to soften the difficulty of that truth, but I feel quite strongly that nothing that requires genocide can ever be Just, and I hope this ambiguous phrasing manages to acknowledge the difficulties and costs of revolutionary struggle without celebrating the mass-murder of civilians based on their ethnicity.

9: The Flourishing of the Wicked. People who hurt other people sometimes lead long, full lives, even growing rich from the harm they wreak. This is a problem for the Biblical worldview that posits a tidy relationship wherein those who do good are rewarded and those who do evil are punished. To deal with this conundrum, some texts assure the faithful that the wicked are only being allowed to flourish temporarily, so that haSheim can, ultimately, make a show of power by dramatically sending them their comeuppance.

This is, I suppose, comforting in its way, but, as someone who has been hurt, repeatedly, by people in positions of power who will likely never see any meaningful repercussions for their behavior, I find no comfort in imagining a G-d who lets the innocent suffer solely to create opportunities for Divine grandstanding.

And so I have bent these passages in the direction of Qohélet. The wicked may flourish, but in the end, they will die. No earthly reward can ever be truly permanent. Aligning ourselves with The Eternal One may not bring material rewards, but it is still the right thing to do, and sometimes that simply has to be enough.

10: Rhymes. These are the only changes I really feel bad about. Many of the piyyutim that adorn our liturgy rhyme, and in some cases, changing forms from masculine to common ruins the rhyme scheme. In such cases — extremely begrudgingly — I have usually had to re-write the line in question from the ground up to preserve the rhyme. Since the originals were unproblematic, their replacements are largely arbitrary, and I wish there were some way to change the Hebrew forms without changing the endings. But alas! No such luck. Language is hard.

The above-outlined changes may seem like a lot, but there are, I promise, many lines where nothing has been changed, and even more where the only change is a tweaking of grammatical gender. While there will be much that is strange and new here no matter your Jewish background, I hope there will be much that is familiar as well.

As it Is Written?

The above changes extend to verses of Torah that are included in the siddur, and so the versions quoted here won’t perfectly match the originals in your favorite Tanakh. But then, strictly speaking, your favorite Tanakh does’t have the originals either. Any honest reckoning with the textual history of the Tanakh invariably leads to the conclusion that these texts have been altered, edited, and rearranged over the years — sometimes even garbled in transmission to the point of incomprehensibility. These texts, some of which may have begun as oral traditions in the distant past, coalesced gradually, and changed continuously until they were fixed in their current form by the Masoretes thousands of years later. The Tanakh in its current form is an altered copy of an altered copy of which there is no original.

And indeed, Jewish tradition has often had a flexible relationship with these texts. The Rabbis of the Talmud occasionally cite verses of Tanakh that don’t actually exist. The liturgists who composed our prayers freely edited Tanakh for ideological purposes, as when they changed Yəshayáhu 45:7 — “Fashioner of light and Creator of darkness, Maker of peace and Creator of evil” — into the opening of a blessing by replacing “evil” with the more anodyne “everything”. Rewriting Jewish holy texts to suit the ideology of the moment is a practice that goes back to the Deuteronomistic Redactor, if not well before. I am merely carrying on in that spirit.

Roads Not Taken

When I first was beginning this project, I sometimes described it as a siddur for trans leftist Jews. Trans people, leftists, and Jews are each individually stereotypically fractious groups, resistant to consensus, so a project aimed at the intersection of the three of them might seem doomed to failure from the get-go.

And indeed, I’m under no illusions that my work will be uniformly pleasing to all. Every choice I made here, I could have made differently, and in many cases the deciding factor was not any kind of rational argument but pure personal preference. In the spirit of pluralistic neighborliness, then, I’d like to outline some of the more arbitrary choices and gesture towards alternatives that others may wish to avail themselves of.

First and foremost, I have chosen to retain “אֱלֹקִים| eloqim”...

note I am substituting a ק for ה here out of respect for the Divine Name, as is common practice in many circles. The main text uses the regular spelling.

... as a name of G-d instead of altering it to “אֱלֹקוֹל | eloqol”, despite the former being grammatically masculine. I did this because I felt that this word had the status of a formal Name of G-d, and if that is how G-d wants to be addressed, I don’t think it’s my place to alter that. In an informal poll of my Twitter and Mastodon followers, several other nonbinary Jewish people independently commented that the changed version felt like it drew too much attention to the fact that this word is also grammatically plural, which they felt conflicts with the Infinite Unity of haSheim. Opinion was not unanimous, unsurprisingly, but a sizable majority voted to leave that Name unaltered, and so I left it (and derived forms) as-is.

Similarly, when transcribing the Tetragrammaton, I have sometimes used “Ad*nai”, despite altering other references to “l-rdship” elsewhere in the siddur. I haven’t translated this Name, instead treating it like a pure collection of sounds with no meaning beyond referring to haSheim. I have used a few other Names in other places — and have altered any prefixes attached accordingly — but there are many other equally good Names that I have not availed myself of; feel free to pronounce and translate the Tetragrammaton however you see fit.

Likewise, in the opening formula for blessings, I have consistently used “חֵי הָעוֹלָמִים | ḥei ha’olamim | Life of endless worlds” despite there being an overwhelming number of excellent and well-established alternatives. If there is another introductory phrase that you like better, by all means, substitute at will.

I have seen it repeated to the point of cliché that “G-d’s pronouns are ‘G-d’”, and while I appreciate the sentiment — that G-d has no gender and thus cannot be pronouned with any English pronoun set — it is not the approach I have taken here. For starters, since “G-d” is already a noun that gets used frequently in the context of a prayerbook, it doesn’t quite register as a distinct, separate pronoun, and it obscures when the English is translating a pronoun vs a Hebrew word for “G-d”. Some siddurim, allergic to neopronouns or the epicene they, take refuge in the second person, but my desire to keep close to the Hebrew original and preserve its sometimes surprising switches between second and third person forecloses this possibility for me.

I wanted to avoid using an extant neopronoun, and so I have invented a neopronoun for G-d. This pronoun set is built off of, and pronounced like, the word “void”, playfully referencing the idea that, where some people have gender, G-d has nothing at all:

• Voi is our G-d.
• Let us worship Void.
• Voix Name is Holy. [The final “x” here pronounced like the last letter of onyx.]
• As a people, we are Voix.
• G-d made the Heavens and the Earth all by Voidself.

Rather than use one pronoun set to refer to generic worshipers in the third person when one is called for in the translation, I have switched freely between a wide array of pronoun sets in the hope of emphasizing that, where G-d is Singular, humans are Many, and all of us, in all our Multitudes, are welcome under the shelter of G-d’s wings.

Others, doubtless, would prefer other choices in these and other matters. Here I can say only that I have tried to do what I think best according to the values that ground me and the dialogues I see unfolding in the communities I am woven into. If you would rather this book be otherwise, I encourage you to take it and make it yours.

This Siddur Is Yours

I am very serious about the above. I was able to do this work because our core liturgy is in the public domain, unrestricted by copyright; I want others to be just as free to pick up where I have left off.

And so I am releasing this work into the public domain. The only exceptions are a few poems and study passages commissioned specifically for this siddur, which are indicated clearly when they occur. These may be included unaltered in any version of this siddur you make, but are otherwise owned by their respective authors. Other than that, this entire siddur has no copyright restrictions on its use for any purpose in any medium in any region of the world. Rework the Hebrew alterations I’ve made, tweak the translations to be more to your liking, add or remove prayers, print out hard copies, share the PDF with all your friends, set things to music, turn them into interpretive dance, make them into major motion pictures — you can do anything with this siddur that you could do with any other public domain text, for free, without asking permission first. I’m even releasing the source files to help you along.

I fully believe that Judaism belongs to all of us who practice it, and that must surely include the texts we pray. I undertook making this siddur as an act of service to a community that I love and want to see flourish. I intend it as a gift. Like all gifts, it is yours to do with as you will.

On Qohélet 1:9–10

In the course of working on this siddur, I have had occasion to talk about my progress with a variety of friends, colleagues, and fellow travelers in the world of inclusive Judaism. The doubts and uncertainties that I mentioned in passing above were a regular topic of conversation here, and more than one person reassured me by saying that the fact that I was even considering their needs up front meant so much, that whatever I did would surely be good.

I am honored by their trust, but my heart is heavy when I think back on these exchanges. I am just one person, one trans, disabled, mentally ill Jew picking away at this project a little at a time in spare moments here and there. I have no special training in inclusive language, liturgical creation, or theology. I’ve never even formally studied Hebrew — I am self-taught, out of books, with the occasional pestering question directed towards my friends in rabbinical school.

You deserve more than this. You deserve more than me.

You deserve a liturgy crafted by rabbis with deeper knowledges of Hebrew, Judaism, and inclusion than mine. You deserve siddurim published by organizations with the budgets to secure the rights to illuminating contemporary commentaries, poems, and artworks to inspire deeper reflection and prayer. You deserve books put together by people who know things about layout and graphic design. You deserve the best and the richest things the Jewish world has to offer, and you deserve to have them not only as contemporary documents but as deep wellsprings backed by long tradition, stretching back to the earliest moments of the Jewish past.

I titled this project — Siddur Davar Ḥadash, the New Thing Prayerbook — after Qohéhlet 1:9–10 because none of this is truly new. It has all been before our time. People leading lives that do not fit the gender binary are not a new phenomenon of the last ten years. Disabled people did not spring into existence out of nowhere in the later decades of the 5700s. Women are not a recent invention. Sometimes, when I read the Talmud’s discussion of deaf and blind Jews, I shake with rage and sorrow at the thought of what could have been if our predecessors has chosen to build a different world.

Because it very much was a choice to build Judaism the way that they did. No law of physics dictates that gender-neutral Hebrew had to remain uninvented until the twenty-first century. Ableism is not an inevitable result of the motion of the cosmos. No cascade of reacting chemicals inexorably forces powerful men to declare women their inferiors. It did not have to be this way.

It does not take a multi-wingèd seraph pressing a coal of heavenly fire to your lips to notice that women are people. It does not take a cloud-rending visit from fractally nested wheels to figure out how to communicate with someone who is deaf or hard of hearing. It does not take smashing pottery in front of the highest religious leaders of the land to invent a few new endings for verbs. It just takes paying attention to the people around you, treating them as fully human beings that are absolutely and without qualification your moral equal, and not dismissing their needs as you might dismiss a Voice from heaven.

Those who built this tradition could have chosen differently. They did not. And so here we are today, doing work that could have been, should have been done millennia ago. As I send this work out into the world, I am only ever more keenly aware of my inadequacies. If what I have done is good, let the proof be in the Jews who find a spiritual home amidst these prayers. Where I have fallen short, let my mistakes prove useful case studies to teach future liturgists what pitfalls to avoid. The rest I leave to G-d and the Jewish people. What comes next is whatever we, collectively, make it be.

וֶֽרֶד מִבֵּית הַצִּפֳּרִים [הֶא]
véred mibeit hatziporim [he]
brin rose solomon [it/itself]
27 Nisan, 5781 — revised 28 Nisan, 5783

How to Use this Siddur (HTML)

In general, I have tried to keep the layout of this siddur open and uncluttered, tho the nature of certain passages of the liturgy works against that goal at times. I have kept a running commentary to a minimum, confining my remarks to structural junctures or other points of particular interest.

In recognition of the broad array of Jewish practice and also the broad array of bodies different worshipers have, most of these instructions are descriptive statements, rather than imperatives — “Some stand here” instead of “Stand here”, for example. In addition to instructions for moving thru a full prayer service, there are instructions for what to do if praying without a minyan.

The line breaks are meant to facilitate jumping back and forth between languages: Wherever there is a line break in the Hebrew, there is almost always a line break in the transliteration and translation as well. The only exceptions are large blocks of prose like the three paragraphs of the Shəma or the Ḥanukah “Al haNisim” insertion, which have been allowed to find their own line breaks out of practical necessity. Nevertheless, I hope it will still be possible to find your way between the two languages with a little searching as needed.

All Hebrew in this siddur is transliterated for the convenience of those who are not fluent in reading Hebrew. That said, there are many different ways of pronouncing Hebrew, and it is sadly not possible to present all of them in a single transliteration. I only know the pronunciation I have been taught, which is fairly widespread at mainstream non-Orthodox Ashkenazi shuls in New York City and elsewhere in the United States, but by using this transliteration, I do not mean to imply that it shows the “right” or “correct” way to pronounce Hebrew; if you know another way of pronouncing this language, your way is just as good and excellent, and I wish, again, that I could produce some kind of hypertextual siddur that changed its text to suit your style in advance.

Academic systems of transliteration exist that pin down the pronunciation of Hebrew with exacting specificity. These systems are beautiful and useful for their own ends, but they can be hard to follow for those outside academe. Unsurprisingly, there’s also a prolific array of less precise but more lay-friendly transliteration schemata, all with their advantages and drawbacks. Lacking any perfect consensus, I’ve tried to split the difference between precision — transliterating different Hebrew consonants with different English consonants where possible — and user-friendliness — keeping special characters to a minimal set of those generally in wide use — according to the following system:

• Consonants:

• א

  silent, either not transliterated or represented by an apostrophe

• בּ

  b as in bisexual

• ב

  v as in vegan

• גּ and ג

  g as in gay

• דּ and ד

  d as in disabled

• ה

  h as in hedonism

• ו

  v as in vegan

• ז

  z as in zine

• ח

  ḥ, not a US English sound, like the ch in German Bach

• ט

  t as in trans

• י

  y as in yearning

• כּ (word-ending form: ךּ)

  k as in kink

• כ (word-ending form: ך)

  kh, not a US English sound, like the ch in German Bach

• ל

  l as in lesbian

• מ (word-ending form: ם)

  m as in mantis

• נ (word-ending form: ן)

  n as in null

• ס

  s as in snake

• ע

  silent, either not transliterated or represented by an apostrophe

• פּ

  p as in plural

• פ (word-ending form: ף)

  f as in fat

• צ (word-ending form: ץ)

  tz as in quartz

• ק

  q as in Iraq

• ר

  r as in robot

• שׁ

  sh as in shadow

• שׂ

  s as in snake

• תּ and ת

  t as in trans

• Vowels:

• אֲ, אַ, אָ

  a as in spa

• אַי

  ai as in Cairo

• אֱ, אֶ

  e as in pet

• אֵ, אֶי, אֵי

  ei as in neighbor

• אִ

  i as in zine

• אֳ, אׇ, אֹ, אוֹ

  o as in aromantic

• אֻ, אוּ

  u as in futon

• אוּי

  ui as in gluing

• אְ

  either silent or ə, a quick, unstressed, indeterminate vowel sound

Regarding the last of these vowels, the shəva, it must be said that on-the-ground practice does not always match textbook theories about when this vowel “should” be pronounced. I have heard impeccably trained rabbis with decades of experience elide a shəva that “should” be pronounced and pronounce another that “should” be silent, and the pronunciation is sometimes a rather different vowel than what I have described above. Language is a living thing, and I don’t believe any system of putting marks on paper can fully capture the nuances of how it sounds when used by people in real life. I have transliterated mechanically according to the “rules”, but please understand that, as with English, the finer points of pronunciation you encounter out there in the world may not exactly match what is here on the page.

Proper nouns with prefixes are capitalized using mid-word capitals (so baShabat, not bashabat), but otherwise interventions have been kept to a minimum. I have not added apostrophes except to separate vowels or consonants that would otherwise confusingly run together. Usually this is due to the presence of an alef or an ayin, but sometimes it is due to a final guttural consonant (as in the case of, for example, rú’aḥ) or merely an unfortunate coincidence of transliterative orthography (separating a transliterated s and h to avoid accidentally describing a sh sound, for example). I have tried to use this system consistently and uniformly, not mixing in transliterations from other systems, even when those may be more familiar, as I think it is confusing to have multiple transliteration systems deployed at once, especially when the cutoff for “familiarity” is arbitrary.

Most words in Hebrew are stressed on the final syllable; the stress is not marked for such words. All other words are stressed on the penultimate syllable. This is shown with a small vertical mark (אָֽ) in the Hebrew and an accent (á) in the transliteration.

The noun “prayer” is used fairly indiscriminately to refer to a variety of different kinds of texts that one will encounter, and similarly the verb “pray” is used to encompass any manner of engaging with a text as an act of worship. Where a prayer includes language that changes based on gender, alternatives will be surrounded by angled brackets and separated by vertical lines: “May G-d bless my ⟨child | daughter | son⟩ today”, for example. In the PDF, there are a variety of special symbols — arrows, boxes, and the like — that show up here and there to indicate where a particular prayer event may happen; the HTML and plaintext versions replace some of these symbols with brief explanatory text, and replace others with non-graphic equivalents. To aid in navigation version, cross references will be hyperlinked directly to the pertinent passage.

Acknowledgements

No book is ever really the product of just one mind, and that is even more true for a book like this. I could not have done this work without the work and support of so many others, to whom I offer thanks from the deepest places of my heart. To Lior Gross and Eyal Rivlin, for their Nonbinary Hebrew Project, without which I would not have been able to get off the ground. To Ze’evi Tovlev, for cracking open a door I would only step thru later. To Mayim, for encouraging me to begin even when I was full of doubt. To Alexandra Stein, for fielding a truly ridiculous number of questions about liturgy, history, theology, and grammar with endless grace and enthusiasm. To ada morse, rhiannon morris, and Mariyama Scott for helping with a wide array of computer struggles. To Juliet, for her English-major expertise, and Poe, for everything. To everyone who answered one of my Twitter or Mastodon polls or who otherwise offered input, for helping me get out of my head and for making me feel like there was at least a little bit of collective endeavor going on. You all have a part in this work.

My profoundest thanks also go out to my sensitivity readers and editors J. S. K. Starr, Robert Kingett (www.blindjournalist.wordpress.com), Marques Hollie, Jonathon Adler, Ori J. Clemons, Mariyama Scott, Batyah Selis, and Alexandra Stein (among others), without whom this work would be infinitely worse. They all fixed many things; any flaws that remain are mine and mine alone.

More broadly I am indebted to those who created the resources I relied upon to do this work, from the philologists whose work went into the dictionaries I consulted to the coders who keep Sefaria and Stack Exchange online; from the designers of the fonts I used to the people who made all the programs necessary to take the letters on their journey from my keyboard to your experience of them, in whatever medium. I am indebted also to the labor, the built environment, the land, the infrastructure in all its forms that kept me fed and housed and met my other needs while working on this project. I do not mean this in a glib way: I am only able to do this work because others are working and have worked to create a world where I do not have to spend all my energy every day eking sustenance out of the land. This is a gift, and it is also an obligation, and I try not to carry it lightly.

I say that I have “assembled” this siddur rather than “written” it because I do not feel I can claim these words are mine alone. I may have been the one to put them down on the page, but in doing so, I have been channeling an ethos, a community, a zeitgeist. The way of thinking that led to this work is not my own invention; my mind has been shaped and reshaped by countless interlocutors across the span of my entire life. My thoughts have been sharpened, and softened, by friends, teachers, colleagues, strangers on the internet, lovers, rabbis, books, essays, poems, and beyond. If there is Justice in my work, it is because others have shown me how to bring Justice into the world. If there is Kindness in my work, it is because others have shown me how to put Kindness at the heart of what I do. I have tried to take the best things I have gleaned from those around me and put them together into this work.