A new prayer book for the New Year

The Koren Sacks Rosh Hashana Mahzor, with a commentary by UK Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, is an uplifting augmentation to the High Holy Day prayer experience.

By DAVID GEFFEN
Shofar 521 (photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
Shofar 521
(photo credit: Marc Israel Sellem)
When attending synagogue on Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, we seek a spiritual uplift through the words we chant from the mahzor.
Because we live in an age in which not all of us know Hebrew well enough to appreciate the High Holy Day text, it is important in the world of Orthodox, Englishspeaking Jews to have access to a translation that will captivate the soul as it raises the individual to new heights in his or her personal world of Judaism.
Recently, Prof. Jonathan Sarna, the preeminent historian of American Judaism, wrote, “The Koren Sacks siddur (weekday, Shabbat) set a new standard for American siddurim. Its translation is lucid and written in beautiful English and its commentary reflects modern scholarship and sensitivities. The siddur demonstrated that there was an alternative to the ArtScroll siddur that was still within the Orthodox fold. Of course, the existence of two rival siddurim with rather different Jewish outlooks has also served to divide the Englishspeaking Orthodox community: more Modern Orthodox synagogues use Koren Sacks; others use ArtScroll. One can, today, know the hashkafa of a synagogue immediately upon entry by seeing which siddur the synagogue uses.”
Sarna is certainly accurate in his description of the siddur. The Rosh Hashana mahzor in this series has come out just in time for the coming New Year, 5772. The Yom Kippur mahzor is set to be completed next year.
This new Rosh Hashana mahzor includes text and notes that have the potential to provide a meaningful prayer experience. In his introduction, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks identifies nine “life lessons” that can be found in the text. They are: life is short; life is a gift from God; life is not to be taken for granted; life is meaningful; life is not easy; life is both difficult and sweet; life is a great work of art; our lives are shaped by our ancestors; and Torah is the center of Jewish life.
In addition to the content, this new volume also finds resonance in its graphic design. The Hebrew is printed in the clear, easy-to-read Koren typeface, which I encountered in the Koren Tanach (Bible) almost 50 years ago and have liked ever since. The Hebrew and its English translation are laid out on opposite pages so you can readily see what is prose and what is poetry. This is helpful with one’s own personal flow of prayer during services.
The author has explicated the multifaceted texts inserted in the mahzor through the ages in a way that allows each congregant to soar to new heights as he prays, using words he can truly understand and appreciate.
Take, for example, part of the grand finale of the prayer Unetaneh Tokef. I have always shuddered upon reaching this critical point in the Yom Kippur musaf prayer. Sacks places the prayer in its proper context as a courtroom scene, followed in both languages by the litany of “who shall live and who shall die?” We are expected to act in order to avert a negative decree, but we often we forget the theological statement pinpointing what we truly feel God seeks from human beings.
On pages 570-573 is this text: “For You [God] do not desire the condemned man’s death, but that he may come back from his ways, and live. To the very day he dies, You wait for him; and if he comes back: You welcome him at once... Man is found in dust/ and ends in dust. He lays down his soul to bring home bread./ He is like a broken shard, like grass dried up, like a faded flower, like a fleeting shadow, like a passing cloud, like a breath of wind, like whirling dust, like a dream that slips away.”
Each of these descriptions of human frailty, powerfully stated in this prayer, touches us deeply as we read from a mahzor whose language permits us to rise with the words being recited. Just below the text is an extensive explanation by Sacks.
At our fingertips is a new approach to helping us appreciate the High Holy Day liturgy.
In my early years in the USA, tashlich (the prayer said near a body of water between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, in which we symbolically cast away the sins of the past year) was not a ceremony that many people observed. Since then, in my experiences in the US military in the ’60s, in American synagogues in the ’70s and then in Israel, I (as well as many other Jews around the world) have discovered great meaning in tashlich, be it at the Shiloah spring in Jerusalem or at the Brandywine River in Wilmington Delaware. As a result, the lengthy description of the history of tashlich in this volume is an eye-opener. Rabbi Sacks places tashlich in its proper perspective as a real act of repentance.
He explains that after all our prayers, “feelings of stigma, shame, self-reproach, dishonor, disgrace, even defilement, may remain, trapping us in the past and barring our way to a new beginning. If a symbolic act [scapegoat] was needed in Biblical times, might it not be needed even now, for though the world has changed, human psychology remains?”
Sacks writes that tashlich is “a gesture of breaking with the past and letting it be carried away on the river of time while we set out on a new journey in a different direction.” At tashlich I can really feel a change in myself, and I hope this mahzor will help many people to experience that same sensation. Leshana Tova Tikatevu – may we all be inscribed for a good year on the river of change.