Mission Statement
From the Open Siddur Project Development Wiki
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Our Mission Statement
The mission of the Open Siddur Project is to create and maintain an accessible online resource for crafting, publishing, and printing Jewish prayer books. The development of our free web-based siddur workshop and digital library of liturgical texts (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) is intended to preserve the diversity of Jewish traditions worldwide, to encourage creative engagement and understanding in Jewish spiritual practice, and to provide an urgently needed resource for Jews sharing and crafting new siddurim.
The Project Team
The Open Siddur Project invites participation without prejudice towards race, color, nationality, religious belief, or any other consideration except for an intellectually honest commitment to the principles and sensibilities preserved in this document.
The Open Siddur Project is a volunteer driven collaboration between folk passionate about the Siddur in all of its many variations. Some are interested in its long history as a format preserving Jewish prayer rites and sacred poetry. Others are energized by its use for personal or communal spiritual practice. All of us see its potential for Jewish educators and practitioners -- once it is digitized and free.
Free Culture, Open Source, and Open Standards
By "free," we mean that the content of the Siddur become accessible according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works. Setting aside contemporary translations and commentary, most of the source texts of the siddur, authored hundreds or thousands of years ago, reside in the Public Domain. Unfortunately, too many projects until now have imposed restrictions on the widespread dissemination of texts that are the common heritage of the Jewish people. In order to provide an online workspace for individuals and groups to craft, publish, and print Jewish prayer books without the onerous restrictions imposed by proprietary license agreements, all of the texts produced and disseminated though our efforts are shared under the framework of free culture licenses.
Since the texts that we are digitizing and the technology we are inventing are so valuable, we see the potential of our work extending far beyond the scope of this project. We want our efforts to benefit from and add value to other existing and yet-to-be-imagined projects. To this end, our project is an open source project. All the source code we produce is provided for download, and you are free to use it, share it, study how it works, and modify it to your needs. The free software commons also allows our project to leverage the efforts of other complementary free culture and open source projects operating under similar terms.
Keeping our effort maintainable and sustainable in concert with other active projects means that our effort relies on adherence to open standards. Where necessary we have authored extensions to these standards to accommodate the particular needs of this project and specifically, Jewish liturgy. These extensions are intended to conform to the defined methods for extending the standard. We actively seek to engage and cooperate with other projects using open standards and generating free content.
Diversity
Fundamentally, the Siddur is a tool for engaging in an intimate, spiritual relationship through the traditions of Jewish liturgy recorded therein. Over the course of the evolution of Jewish liturgy in manuscripts and books in Jewish communities across Europe and Asia (and more recently, in the Americas), a number of variations of the Siddur were innovated. The inclusion and exclusion of vowels, letters, words, phrases, sacred poetry and prose represent most of the differences between regional customs and philosophies that can be seen in printed text. (Melodies and the performance of prayer represent other differences that are sometimes reflected in instructional text and the layout of siddurim.)
Traditionally, Jews engaged in spiritual practice are enjoined to accept their family's custom and to thereby help ensure that lineage. A respect for diversity between Jewish communal custom was thus encouraged and emphasized. The Open Siddur is inspired by the respect accorded to communal custom in the values of Medieval Jewry.
Some of these regional traditions are well known and widespread, such as Nusaḥ Ashkenaz. Others, like the Nusaḥ Roma are more obscure due to the misery and depredation its practicing communities endured. Other traditions, such as the liturgy of the Bucharian Jews, were almost eliminated due to the efforts of some Jews who asserted during the Middle Ages the authority of Spanish-Portuguese tradition over that of Central Asia. Other prayers, especially those by or for women, have only made a reappearance recently in translation and have yet to be incorporated into contemporary siddurim.
The Open Siddur seeks to create the first digital library of all of these prayers and historic variations of the Siddur by digitizing them. The Open Siddur's online workspace would thus create for the first time an educational opportunity to see these traditions displayed side by side. For practitioners, the Open Siddur also presents an excellent opportunity for the preservation of community (and family) traditions that are in jeopardy of being overshadowed and lost amidst those of larger communities.
Creativity
In the last 100 years, many communities have created their own siddurim based on one or more historic Nusḥaot. By excluding some liturgical texts and incorporating others, these creative siddur editors innovated new models for Jewish prayer books. These modern siddurim reflect the identity and sensibility of their particular synagogue, ḥavurah, kibbutz, and independent minyan. However, put together with scissors, glue, and copy machines, they were notoriously difficult to maintain and update for new generations. Wrestling with the complicated issues arising out of copyright, meant that these interesting siddurim remained in extremely limited distribution. The Open Siddur provides a resource to preserve and share these modern traditions as well, so long as communal work is contributed with our selection of compatible free culture licenses.
Many Jews lacking family traditions have adopted the tradition of their community. However, they remain curious about the traditions of other communities. Whether it's a disappointment with a translation or with the exclusion of a particularly beautiful prayer, the best one could do was to try the difficult but rewarding process of creating one's own siddur. The Open Siddur wants to make this process much easier by not having each individual reinvent the wheel.
Privacy
For individuals engaging in this process, the Open Siddur is non-prescriptive. We respect that the Siddur can be a tool for engaging and improving one's individual, and thus intimate, spiritual relationship. For this reason, our project and the online, collaborative workspace that we're developing, respects individual privacy. Although we encourage reciprocity in the sharing of content included in siddurim, we understand that some will want to include personal poetry or other content reflecting and requiring a safe private space.
Craft
Jewish tradition emphasizes the beautification of the performance of mitzvot (commandments in the Torah). The Open Siddur providing individuals and groups with the resources to craft their own beautiful customized siddurim. But a siddur is more than text. The siddur is also typography, layout, paper, ink, glue, thread, end pages, cover, and spine. The Open Siddur seeks to provide an avenue for the application of font design and master crafted book artistry in this project.
Currently there is one open source font supporting the Unicode 5.0 standard that the Open Siddur relies on. Meanwhile, there are other fonts that could be updated to this standard and still more fontfaces to be designed.
Meanwhile, siddurim provide an amazing opportunity for book crafters to collaborate with Open Siddur users on the making of unique and solidly bound siddurim destined to last generations of use. Why have your siddur mass-produced when you can craft your own?
To Sum Up, With Bullet Points
The Open Siddur Project cooperates on the development and maintenance of:
- free culture/open source siddur texts and supplemental material that may be accessed, shared, adapted, and improved on by the entire Jewish community,
- open standards by which that material may be stored and interchanged,
- a collaborative publishing platform for crafting customized, multilingual Jewish prayer books that include our texts and supplemental material,
- and the software required to support these activities.
The Open Siddur Project is committed to the following principles and movements guiding its vision:
- the free culture movement for the sake of Jewish cultural vibrancy,
- open source software so that the entire community can cooperate on essential projects,
- open standards so that raw linked data may flow between our projects and within the broader community,
- awareness of the historical development of Jewish culture in general, and the text and traditions of the siddur in particular,
- a non-prescriptive attitude towards the manner in which individuals and communities engage tradition,
- pluralism that reflects the multiplicity of creative expressions possible,
- awareness of historical, geographical, and philosophical diversity in Jewish communities,
- respect for individual freedom and privacy in our user's creative expression,
- the revival of book artistry & binding in the crafting of custom tailored Jewish books.
