Machzor Lev Hadash
When a High Holy Day Prayerbook is much more than just a Prayerbook
Every New Year brings with it not only changes and challenges but also blessings and sweetness. One of our natural tendencies as human beings is to look too deeply into the difficult things that have happened and overlook the daily blessings that we encounter in life. Too often our thoughts are directed to things that we have no power to change and we spend a tremendous amount of energy trying to fix the unfixable. So, what do we do? How do we change things that we don’t like? How do we face adversity when we know the chances of beating it are slim?
The Conservative Movement as a whole has faced tremendous adversity in the past years. In many cities throughout North America our rates of affiliation have diminished considerably. Our movement has gone through changes in the leadership of all of its major organizations and institutions, and yet, even as we continue to walk through this journey, we have understood that we need to “fix” and reinvent certain things if we are to be here to experience a brighter future.
This year I want to draw inspiration from something very unusual: The publishing of Machzor Lev Shalem, the new High Holy Day prayerbook of The Conservative Movement. The story of how this new Machzor came about can really teach us how to understand our weaknesses and turn them into opportunities for growth.
It was close to four decades ago that The High Holy Day Machzor that we used up to last year was introduced in our Synagogue. For close to 40 years we have come to Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur Services and we have sought to find inspiration and insight from the prayers on its pages. Now, it is time to sanctify the new, it is time to understand why a change was necessary. Machzor Lev Hadash was 10 years in the making. Every one of its pages is imbued with love, wisdom and insight. When you open our new Machzor, you will notice that there is an explanation for every single one of the prayers that we have been reciting for thousands of years, the translations of the prayers and the many inspirational readings are also unique.
When The Editorial Committee got together for the first time, they seized the opportunity to gift the Jewish World with something magnificent. For many Rabbis, Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur are days when they complain about how Jews only come to Synagogue two times a year. Machzor Lev Hadash understands this reality in a very different way. If this is the only time of year many of us hold a prayerbook in our hands, why not make that experience a powerful one? Why not use all the tools that we have at our disposal to inspire and motivate people. Machzor Lev Hadash is not only a prayerbook, it is an educational marvel.
Many of the innovations that you will find throughout its pages are the result of an intensive process of soul searching as a movement. For example: Our new Machzor includes transliterations of all the prayers The Cantor recites out loud. For many years we believed that if we transliterated the Hebrew, people would never become motivated to learn Hebrew. We understand now what was not clear 40 years ago. Whether people become motivated to learn Hebrew or not, we can’t miss an opportunity to have people feel included, to have them participate and not to feel left out of our services. What I just said sounds simple, but believe it or not, we refused to come to terms with that reality for many years. The High Holy Days must be about inclusion! When people leave our services they should feel uplifted and changed and although we can not leave that entirely to the prayerbook we use, this time it will become a tool that will help us tremendously.
Machzor Lev Hadash is a perfect example of the new direction our Conservative Movement must choose to take if it is to survive in the decades ahead. Its editorial committee made bold and brave choices when it came to the selection of what would be in its pages. For at least the next three decades we will be coming back to our Machzor year after year. Every time we open it up the texts that spoke to our ancestors should renew themselves for us because that in and by itself is also a sign of our own personal renewal. Machzor Lev Hadash will be our guide as we together seek to return to the core of our being.
Please join us this Rosh Hashannah as we together open the pages of this brand new Machzor for the first time. May each one of its pages inspire us to be better, to dream more and to act so that we can turn our dreams into reality.
L’Shannah Tova Tikatevu
Rabbi Felipe Goodman