Siddur Hiddur Tefillah

A prayer book to beautify our prayers

The goal of this project

This started off as a personal project, to create a siddur that would help me to make my tefillot more accurate and more beautiful. Several friends have encouraged me to make it available to others, and the price of short-run printing has now decreased to the point where that's practical.

The features of this siddur

  • To assist in correct pronounciation, the siddur distinguishes sh'va na from sh'va nach, and qamatz katan from qamatz stam.
  • To help in using the correct nusach, musical "cues" are placed throughout the siddur.
  • Additional musical "cues" serve as reminders of melodies for various special points in the liturgy. When possible, the composers of these melodies are given proper credit for their work
  • The layout is designed to accentuate proper phrasing of the words: in part by including the taamei himiqra/taamei emet on pesukim, and in part by careful selection of line and page breaks.
  • The layout also provides visual beauty to inspire deeper kavanah.
  • To reduce the weight of the siddur, the tefillot are organized in a non-standard configuration. (See next section.)

The organization of this siddur

The siddur is organized to reduce unnecessary redunancy. For example, a traditional siddur has shacharit l'chol, and then a separate section for shacharit l'Shabbat v'Yom Tov --- yet the latter requires a second copy of Sh'ma uvirchoteha from shacharit l'chol. My siddur, on the other hand, simply has shacharit, with appropriate divisi parts where needed. Similarly, I have a single Amidah with the necessary variations in the middle berachot

In the other direction, while a traditional siddur does not require a lot of "jumps," when it does require them, they tend to be "far". This siddur goes in the other direction --- there are often jumps of one or two pages, but rarely are there significant jumps.

To accommodate this condensed organization, color is used to distinguish chol (black) from Shabbat (purple = royalty for Shabbat ha-Malka), Yom Tov (green = agriculture), Shabbat and Yom Tov (blue = the common primary color of purple and green). Things that are said sometimes or by some traditions are in grey.

FAQs

Several excellent questions have come in since I launched this page --- too many to be included here, in fact, so they are on an FAQ page.

Sample pages

A revised set of sample pages, reflecting feedback from the current round of peer review, will be coming soon, bli neder. (Today is 30-Nov-09)

Are you interested?

UPDATE Nov 15, 2009 - 28 Cheshvan 5770: Galley proofs are on their way!

UPDATE Oct 27, 2009 - 9 Cheshvan 5770: Galley proofs have been ordered.

UPDATE Oct 18, 2009 - 1 Cheshvan 5770: I've found a printer who, I think, can produce these for under $20 apiece. I'm going to order ten as galley proofs and I hope to be able to do the real order in early January. If you're interested, please continue to use the survey link below to sign up, and I'll send out email when we're ready to go!

So: Please take this brief survey. Thanks!