Last week I had the pleasure of meeting Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks at a New York luncheon celebrating the publication of the new Koren Sacks Siddur (link). R. Shaul Robinson of Lincoln Square Synagogue arranged for me to have a few words with the Chief Rabbi, who said that he has read this blog on occasion(!). He also inscribed my copy of the new siddur.
Let’s talk about this siddur. You might recall my review of the British version of the siddur (link). The new Koren-Sacks siddur is by far the best siddur I have ever used and has set a new standard in scholarship, usability and esthetics. This edition has all the benefits of the British siddur with many additional features. These include:
All the parts of the service that I complained were "missing," e.g. full korbanos.
Mi-she-beirakh blessings that are commonly said in the US, including those for the US government and US army.
Excellent section of laws, including a month-by-month lu’ach a la Ezras Torah.
Even more commentary from the Chief Rabbi than the British edition.
Vowelization of the Hebrew is based on the Koren text, which is grammatically precise but more familiar than the British version, which was based on the Baer siddur.
And, of course, there is the unique typesetting. Koren considers typesetting to be an art, and you can tell. I’m not the most esthetically conscious person, so I’m sure that much of this is lost on me. Nevertheless, I still see the beauty in how they arranged the page. It isn’t only beauty but the way they set the page adds to your prayers. The crisp Hebrew text is in bite-size portions to help you focus on the meaning of the words.
And the Hebrew and English are reversed, with the Hebrew pages on the left and the English on the right. It took me about two minutes to get used to it but now I’m convinced that this is the way it should always be. Your eyes naturally land on the Hebrew first so you save a little time but, more importantly, it just feels natural.
If you are going to buy it online, please buy it from this link because I get a commission from this sale: link. I strongly recommend the siddur and already have two copies of my own.
Here’s a run-down of reviews in the media and a video about the siddur by Rabbi Sacks. You can also get a good preview of the siddur on the Koren website: link.
Really? Only a single store west of Chicago? And in Seattle, of all place. What, they never heard that there are Jews in California?
GIL POSTS: The siddur just arrived in the US about 2 weeks ago. It takes time. The publisher is smart enough to know that the key is getting shuls to buy copies.
I personally can’t stand the Artscroll siddur because the paper is so thick that the siddur is overly heavy.
JOEY POSTS: Prediction: Only those who are the anti-charedi type will buy this so they can feel like they are sticking it to the yeshiva/Artscroll crowd.
Only real anti-charedi rabbis will buy it for their shuls. Otherwise, why would shul boards shell out $ when they already have hundreds of Artscrolls on the shelf.
I’ve seen the siddur and I’m not all that impressed. I will take a second look now though after your praise (even if you are $ biased).
HONESTLY FRUM POSTS: I bought the siddur on Friday and began to use it over shabbos and it was a new experience in tefilah. The introductions to the individual tefilot were great and so were the introductions to the siddur. I found the typeset to be much easier on the eyes than Artscroll. I am in am going to be posting shortly about my opinion on how this siddur is going to take it to Artscroll. Yaasher Koach.
JOE COOL POSTS: Heavy paper will last longer under constant use. Artsroll’s real failure is the binding which has trouble standing up to the regular use. To me using the so called "Bible paper" is a HUGE downside. It might work in a chumash where any given page is used once a year, but it won’t stand up to daily use.
The publisher is smart enough to know that the key is getting shuls to buy copies.
That’s what people thought before Artscroll arrived on the scene. Artscroll’s success is partially due to the fact that they chose to make their product available in as many channels as possible. And really, if they wanted to entice shuls to pitch their existing siddurim for something new AND radically different, they would have priced the large size version and something less than $150!
People complain about Artscroll (and many complaints are justified), but you can’t beat really good and aggressive marketing with a marketing plan that appears to be designed by drunken raccoons.
OU Press Hires Rabbi Gil Student to be Managing Editor
May 26, 2009
He’s a student of the publishing industry with hands-on experience running his own book company; he’s a knowledgeable businessman with years of experience in finance; he’s a mathematician comfortable with probability and statistics; he’s a blogger on the Internet and a published writer; and he’s an Orthodox rabbi, with expertise in many areas of Torah, including the intricate laws of kosher.
But above all, he’s a student – Rabbi Gil Student, the newly hired Managing Editor at OU Press, the Orthodox Union’s foray into book publishing, which got off to a big start this year with “The Seder Night: An Exalted Evening,” the Haggadah which was found on thousands of seder tables this past Passover. The Haggadah is based on the teachings of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, the Rav, whose commentaries have so far been the focus of OU Press’ activities.
HOW WILL THIS AFFECT HIRHURIM?
Rabbi Student says: I never wrote exposes of any organization and don’t plan on doing so. At most, I announced my disappointment with Agudah. That’s about as hard-hitting this blog has been. Keep in mind that this is NOT a news blog. Also, that I’ve been interacting with communal leaders for a long time and have always tried hard to be fair and not personally antagonize anyone.
If anything, my interaction on a regular basis with talmidei chachamim of a high caliber will improve the blog.
I love the insights into body use in this quote from Cheever: “In an upper-class gathering I suddenly think of myself as a pariah—a small and dirty fraud, a deserved outcast, a spiritual and sexual impostor, a loathsome thing. Then I take a deep breath, stand up straight, and the loathsome image falls away."
Cheever, a bisexual, was deeply worried about his son Ben’s masculinity. Bailey writes: "Ben…zestfully took up a lot of manly chores, like felling trees and splitting wood, for which his grateful father paid him fifty cents an hour. Somestimes after these exertions the boy would reward himself with a bubble bath — until one day his father found him reclining among the suds. "Who do you think you are?" he roared. "Some kind of STARLET?"
In 1954 Cheever got a job teaching writing. "One woman liked to write erotica, and Cheever would listen to her stories with a polite poker-face — evidently finding them distasteful, but willing to be patient. He raised one mild objection, however, when she described a man abruptly withdrawing his penis and thus forgoing climax: "There is no recorded instance in history when a man was able to do this," he said."
This Krikorian guy has enraged me. Is this really an issue? Isn’t it normally a matter of basic manners that you pronounce people’s names the way they want it? Does this have to be made an issue of the culture wars? And his reasoning is simply ignorant. There is no "proper" American way to pronounce these names. "ie" is not pronounced like "french fries" in all English words. In words of French origin (like "Piedmont" or "siege") it’s pronounced the way the Germans pronounce it. As for Cathy’s last name, I presume she was less interested in making a cultural statement than in simply pronouncing it, again, the German way. Not the American way, the German way. Speaking of which, I suppose by Krikorian’s standards, I’m not properly assimilated, because "Deutsch" isn’t pronounced like "Feud" or "eunuch" (don’t say a thing, I had to find comparison words). Can you imagine, the way I disrespect American by refusing to pronounce my name the American way?
But how can there be an "American" way of pronouncing names of foreign origin, and virtually all names are of foreign origin? (and look at that–the "ei" in foreign is pronounced differently than "Seipp." Or in "reign" or "feign" or "deign"–Cathy must have hated America.). Now, Krikorian might argue that "Sotomayor" is different because there is no comparable sound in English. But what about a Jew with a name like "Chaim?" That’s a twofer. That guy must really hate our culture.
Ultimately, it really is just manners. I’ve never insisted that somebody’s name be pronounced the way I think it should be pronounced, and never conceded a mispronunciation of my name. But if this is the kind of argument that the NR is reduced to, I think Sotomayor should have no trouble being approved.
I realized on my way to work today that the final punchline to the Sotomayor business is, of course, that as a Puerto Rican, there’s nothing to which she can assimilate–she was born a US citizen in the US, her parents were born US citizens in US Territory, and her grandparents may not have been born US citizens in US territory, but according to US law, they were made US citizens in US territory. To what extent is a Puerto Rican "obligated"–if anyone is–to assimilate to America, seeing as how they’ve been American citizens for nearly a hundred years, and US subjects for even longer?
Jaded Topaz writes to Hirhurim: "Nat, I havent looked at your "awareness" link, but Luke Ford is the only blogger that I can think of, that I would trust to write an objective/ fair and perceptive write up of a given scandal. I found his write ups and essays to be very perceptive and well written…"
Luke says: I’m doing much of my blogging here these days.
Chaim Amalek emails: If even a dirt poor country like North Korea can get the Bomb, then so too can an oil rich country like Iran. Iran will go nuclear, and there likely will be nothing that the Obama or Israel will do to stop them.
So what is the probability of nuclear war between Israel and Iran? Don’t know. But soon, the first condition for such a war will have been met.
Khunrum emails: "I heard a bit on CNN where scientists have determined the older the man (and his sperm) the lower the I.Q. of his offspring. For instance, at my age, if I were to impregnate my dear wife, our kid could possibly be as dense as George Dubya Bush."
Chaim Amalek emails: “I’ve seen these studies, which feminists have seized upon to demonstrate some sort of rough equivalency between the genders, and also seen critiques of them that suggest they are quite a bit overblown. Which is not to say that older men should become fathers, only that the consequences are not quite of the type or magnitude that feminists would have others believe.”
I’m over 200 pages into this book. It is densely packed, filled with action, reflection, and wisdom. Buy it if you want to get inside a criminal mind who lived the life most of us only dream about in our most demented moments.
From page 171: "I always thought the recruitment and brainwashing techniques porn uses to convince girls to do unthinkable things on camera paralleled the tactics the military uses to recruit and train people to do the unthinkable. The scam is the same: a talent scout zeroes in on a generally ill-educated civilian from a broken home; caters to their longing for stability and approval; blitzes them with a Hell Week of work to establish a brutal, unthinking routine; alienates them from reality by giving them a new identity and disassociates them from their gruesome work using jargon; and keeps them going with meaningless trophies and awards that glamorize the day-to-day realities of their profession."
This also sounds like the methods used on vulnerable girls by such as Orthodox rabbis as Abner Weiss and Yaakov "Kenny the Shark" Menken. They find vulnerable young women, separate them from friends and family, and then f— them.
From page 186 about Mafia associate, con artist and pornographer Jerry Zimmerman: "I always wondered if Jerry ingratiated himself with the Italians by playing up his Jewishness to cartoonish levels. Jerry acted like the classic stereotype of a New York Jewish racketeer: the charmer who peppers his ever sentence with Yiddish, gets a tension headache whenever he has to pay for anything, considers it an epic triumph whenever he scams his way into free merchandise or services — and, of course, dies of old age an exponentially richer and freer man than his imprisoned Italian "bosses.""
From page 196: "Since I no longer dealt with cutthroat drug dealers, Jerry painstakingly recalibrated my moral compass. "You don’t got to be like that, bubeleh," was his admonition whenever I thought with my primitive , ultraviolent mind-set. His point was not just that violence was counterproductive but also that it was morally and spiritually damaging to me.
"…The code of honor among old-school carnies, grifters, scammers, confidence men, and bunko artists was that, while it was kosher to "work" a mark out of his money, a real con should refrain from stealing his dignity."
From page 225: "That is one of the great structural evils of the porn business: girls who get used to making money and getting everything they want thanks to their looks become obsolete by the age of thirty. With no other professional skills, they turn to full-time prostitution… Those revenue streams rely on novelty and run dry quickly, usually leaving the porn girls spoiled, deepy in credit-card debt, too surgically altered to mix with normal society, and progressively reliant on alcohol and narcotics to cope."
On page 257, Kenny writes that the feds must’ve laughed when they caught Mafia capo Louie Gelfuso crying "at a tender scene in his favorite soap opera."
Kenny says he got threatening calls from some thug who threatened him if he ever referred to Peter North as anything less than entirely masculine and heterosexual.
Because they rarely killed people, the Los Angeles Mafia was known as faggy.
Kenny tells about the time he was sent to beat up the dwarf actor who played R2-DS in Star Wars.
I played an unscrupulous writer for Shawn Ricks in his 1997 movie The Trickle Effect. I made $250.
Seven years later, I dated an ex-actress Hayley Rivers who said that Shawn was her worst experience in the industry.
Kenny writes: "Shawn was completely incapable of performing without following a set diet and routine: before every scene, Shawn had to smoke a joint, drink a cap of "date-rape drug" GHB, and listen to "I’ve Got the Power" by Snap! and "Stranglehold" by Ted Nugent while shadow-boxing and psyching himself up, and then taking another hit of pot." (Pg. 269)
"This guy knows all the gossip, the ins and outs, the lashon hara of the Orthodox world. He’s an [expert] in... all the inner workings of the Orthodox world." (Rabbi Aaron Rakeffet-Rothkoff)
