When Yael Buechler was growing up, her Conservative synagogue in Dix Hills, New York celebrated Simchat Torah by taking out a Torah scroll and unfurling it around the entire perimeter of the sanctuary. All the adults—her father was the rabbi—would spread out around the edge of the room, clasping the parchment, while the children ran ...

Publishers of prayer books—siddurim—have long struggled to engage American Jews, to heighten their alertness at synagogue, to encourage them to see prayers not as mere echoes of the past but as vital supplications whose meaning is renewed daily. One way of doing this is to flood the page with commentaries, explications, instructions, and supplementary readings; this approach, exemplified by the ArtScroll siddur, has been the dominant mode for the past 25 years. Yet too much additional reading risks turning a prayer book into a tutorial rather than a conduit to sustained reflection.