NEW YORK (Press Release)– America’s Reform rabbis are making a major effort to change worship to match the needs and desires of today’s Reform Jews. In alignment with trends highlighted by the recent Pew study on American Jews, Reform rabbis are creating a new High Holiday service that makes all prayers LGBT friendly, adds references to God as “she” and as “compassionate mother,” adds different prayers for the disabled that don’t reference physically standing up, and makes room for religious doubt and intermarriage.
All of this is captured in a new machzor (prayer book for the High Holidays) – to be released soon – that addresses the spiritual needs and personal beliefs of Reform Jews, who tend to be increasingly progressive, questioning, and intermarried.
- Traditional prayers are included, but the entire book is filled with “countertexts” that push back on the patriarchy, xenophobia or God-centric nature of many traditional texts. One countertext starts “My lord is not a shepherd and I am not his sheep…” another talks about the lack of scientific evidence for the story of creation.
- Women and LGBT people are valued. God is sometimes referred to as a “she,” or as “compassionate mother,” and a prayer that traditionally referred to a “bride a groom” now names “couples celebrating under the chuppah.”
- The emotional complexities of a holiday steeped in judgment and repentance are embraced. One section lays out a prayer “in memory of a parent who was hurtful,” while another begins “a prayer for those who struggle with prayer.”
- Contemporary voices, like Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsburg, and Pablo Neruda will sit next to ancient Torah texts. All Hebrew will be fully transliterated and fully translated, and the entire book will be laid out and footnoted in a way that will invite a personal spiritual journey, and not just the rote call-and-response of traditional worship.
The Central Conference of American Rabbis, which is publishing this new machzor in March, has gone through an exhaustive process of both scholarly research and emotional feedback from Reform congregations across the nation.
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