WORSHIP | STUDY

Exploring Mishkan T’filah-A Reform Siddur: January 2008

From the study of Rabbi Robbins
Mishkan T’filah gives us the opportunity to cherish memories and create new ones

Editor’s note: From time to time throughout the year, in addition to Rabbi David Stern’s columns, other members of our clergy will be contributing columns in this space.

Our new prayer books, Mishkan T’filah arrived the week before Thanksgiving. We eagerly open the boxes to examine the slim solid well bound books. The gold lettering across the front and down the spine is beautiful on the navy fabric cover. We pull them from the cartons hold them in our hands. They feel lighter and more textured than Gates of Prayer. They are bigger than and not as bumpy as the compact Union Prayer Book. They feel solid and substantial after the paperbound drafts we have been using for nearly five years. We open the books. The layout is clean and clear, the pages are full but uncluttered. There is Hebrew text, transliteration and faithful translations on the right side of each page. Poetic passages are on the left. History, choreography, and insights about the prayer stretch along the bottom. As we unload the books clergy and staff ask, “Where is my favorite prayer?” Friday night in the Olan Sanctuary and Saturday morning in Lefkowitz Chapel, when we use them for the first time, congregants ask the same question, “Where is my favorite prayer?”

Over Thanksgiving I visited my family. They were in the midst of moving out of the 100 year old house our family has lived in for 26 years. This is not the house I grew up in, but it is the place I have gone home to for a quarter century. There were lots of cartons. There was an excitement about the move to a new place with smooth walls, updated electricity and plumbing, a modern layout that offered new opportunities for larger Shabbat dinners, better space for being together. Walking from room to room I wonder, where is my favorite mug, my favorite book, my favorite photograph? Will I find my memories of new babies coming home and shiva minyans, wedding weekend celebrations, late night conversations and early morning arguments in the new place? Will this new place be a place of shelter and comfort, of joy and celebration, of surprise and sacred encounter?

Changing prayer books and moving to a new house have more in common than the cartons. They share the mixed emotions of enthusiasm and anxiety. They prod us to ask, “Where is my favorite prayer, where is my favorite mug, will this house, will this prayer book, support me in difficult times, help me celebrate the joy in my life, challenge me and comfort me for years to come?”

The title Mishkan T’filah provides the answer. Rabbi Elise Frishman, editor of Mishkan T’filah and Rabbi Peter Knobel, Chair of the Editorial Committee, write in the introduction, “The title Mishkan T’filah is drawn from Exodus 25:8 where God commands us to build a portable sanctuary that can accompany us on our wanderings. ‘And let them build Me a sanctuary that I may dwell among them.’ Mishkan T’filah is a dwelling place for prayer, one that moves us wherever we might be physically or spiritually. It offers the opportunity for God, the individual and community to meet…May all who enter find joy, solace and meaning.”

Where are our favorite prayers? They are waiting to be unpacked. Our classical favorite “Grant Us Peace” shares the page with a verse from the Prophet Isaiah and a soon to be new favorite by Israeli Nobel prize winning poet, Yehuda Amichai in the prayer for peace on Friday night (pages 60-61). Ten meditations frame the kaddish prayer—Walt Whitman, the Union Prayer Book, Hannah Senesh, and great Reform movement thinkers prepare us for moments of memory (pages 288-295). We take our memories with us in the move to this new and beautiful prayer book. Mishkan T’filah brings us the opportunity for new experiences and opportunities to create memories as we encounter God, ourselves and each other, on the pages, from our seats in the congregation and at the oneg shabbat. The books are all unloaded and on the shelves, come unpack one and find joy, solace and meaning.

Download a pdf of this article >>