{"id":130,"date":"2006-09-06T12:26:00","date_gmt":"2006-09-06T12:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/09\/yes-but.html"},"modified":"2006-09-06T12:26:00","modified_gmt":"2006-09-06T12:26:00","slug":"yes-but","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/09\/yes-but.html","title":{"rendered":"Yes, but&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Rabbi Stern raises some very legitimate points about how disenfranchising it can be when prayers are in Hebrew if you don\u2019t understand the language. That being said, I don\u2019t agree with his solution of abandoning the siddur (the Hebrew prayer book) altogether. A couple of other possibilities: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>find a better siddur<\/strong> \u2013 Rabbi Stern\u2019s point about the dry, uninspiring English translations and readings is well taken. This is especially the case for the old-style siddurs many of us grew up with: \u201cWe thank Thee for the tasks we shared together, and for the hours we communed with Thee\u201d! Fortunately, there are some fabulous, modern prayer books out there. &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.jrf.org\/pub\/cat-kh.html\">Kol Haneshamah<\/a>,&#8221; the prayer book of the Reconstructionist movement, used a Hebrew scholar and poet to translate the prayers into English that maintains much of the imagery and power of the original. It also contains many additional moving and thought-provoking supplemental readings, as do a variety of other more recent prayer books. <\/li>\n<li><strong>supplement, don\u2019t remove<\/strong> \u2013 enrich services with elements besides the Hebrew prayers. Guided meditation, additional readings, chanting, movement\u2013all of these are ways to get at the power behind the words, even if we can\u2019t understand them.<\/li>\n<li><strong>praying is about more than just understanding the words<\/strong> \u2013 at times we tend to get very intellectual about prayer which is, after all, not fundamentally an intellectual enterprise. Understanding is good, but the ancient (and modern!) words have a power that goes beyond just comprehension. Whether it\u2019s knowing that these words have been spoken by countless generations, or trigger a childhood memory, or simply keep our minds busy so our souls may truly pray, there is a value to using the Hebrew even if we don\u2019t understand every word. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Bottom line: the Hebrew of the prayer book is poetry. More to the point, it\u2019s our people\u2019s poetry. We should add to it, adapt it, update imagery for modern sensibilities, certainly skip sections, and use plenty of English as well\u2013but we ignore it at our peril. As poetry, the prayers contain much more than we understand on first\u2013or second, or hundredth\u2013reading, and there is much that gets lost in the translation. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rabbi Stern raises some very legitimate points about how disenfranchising it can be when prayers are in Hebrew if you don\u2019t understand the language. That being said, I don\u2019t agree with his solution of abandoning the siddur (the Hebrew prayer book) altogether. A couple of other possibilities: find a better siddur \u2013 Rabbi Stern\u2019s point&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":100,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Yes, but... - Virtual Talmud<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/09\/yes-but.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Yes, but... - Virtual Talmud\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Rabbi Stern raises some very legitimate points about how disenfranchising it can be when prayers are in Hebrew if you don\u2019t understand the language. That being said, I don\u2019t agree with his solution of abandoning the siddur (the Hebrew prayer book) altogether. 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That being said, I don\u2019t agree with his solution of abandoning the siddur (the Hebrew prayer book) altogether. A couple of other possibilities: find a better siddur \u2013 Rabbi Stern\u2019s point&hellip;","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/09\/yes-but.html","og_site_name":"Virtual Talmud","article_published_time":"2006-09-06T12:26:00+00:00","author":"Rabbi Joshua Waxman","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/09\/yes-but.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/09\/yes-but.html","name":"Yes, but... - Virtual Talmud","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/#website"},"datePublished":"2006-09-06T12:26:00+00:00","dateModified":"2006-09-06T12:26:00+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/#\/schema\/person\/b2c907457be70b05b78f556cde42041f"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/09\/yes-but.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/09\/yes-but.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/2006\/09\/yes-but.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Yes, but&#8230;"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/","name":"Virtual Talmud","description":"Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, where politics and pop culture meet 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/#\/schema\/person\/b2c907457be70b05b78f556cde42041f","name":"Rabbi Joshua Waxman","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/6ea\/6eaad0ba16ec89046c9580c3b08d2e4cx96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/6ea\/6eaad0ba16ec89046c9580c3b08d2e4cx96.jpg","caption":"Rabbi Joshua Waxman"},"url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/author\/jwaxman"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/100"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/virtualtalmud\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}