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.

Are you interested?

UPDATE Sept. 19, 2011 - 20 Elul 5771: I have one more round of edits to execute before going to press; I now expect to aim for Jan. 2012.

If you're interested, please take this brief survey to sign up, and I'll send out email when we're ready to go!