If you’re tired of consulting a thick brochure of kosher-for-Passover brands—this year’s edition of the popular OU guide is 92 pages long—free apps from the OU and the OK let you to browse lists of kosher-for-Passover products by manufacturer or product category. A third app, from the Chicago Rabbinical Council, gives the rule rather than the product name (unflavored, caffeinated coffee beans do not require certification) and helpfully incorporates a guide to kashering methods and a directory of hechshers. The search function is a sticking point: Only the OU app makes it easy to find, say, all kosher brands of cream cheese.

When it’s time to search for hametz, the No Chametz (free) app not only gives you the relevant laws and blessings but makes a checklist of hiding places and simulates a candle with your LED flash.

Can your smartphone help you plan the festival meal? Passover Food Street ($0.99) provides 50 recipes in six categories, but you may prefer dishes more modern than chicken in dill sauce (made from nondairy sour cream) and raspberry relish (canned cranberry sauce mixed with raspberry gelatin dessert). The app’s best feature is that it lets you take a photo of your dish to clip to the recipe. Cooking With the Bible: A Passover Meal ($0.99) is extracted from a larger book about how people cooked in biblical times, but its menu is unlikely to surprise: It includes matzoh-ball soup, spinach salad with “bitter herbs,” and coconut macaroons.

Haggadah apps provide an array of multimedia page-turning effects, along with basic blessings and instructions, but sadly little in the way of commentary. Hadar Porat’s haggadah ($2.99) is unusual in combining Hebrew blessings with English instructions and transliterations. Zebrapps’s haggadah ($0.99) and Inbal Geffen’s haggadah ($0.99) can switch between all-English and all-Hebrew modes, but it takes a few clicks. Geffen’s haggadah comes with a bonus feature: synthesized instrumental recordings of nine Passover songs that will take you back to the glory days of the Casio keyboard. Outsite’s haggadah (free with ads) is entirely in Hebrew, with little more than the basic text, but it’s multicolored and has a few illustrations and a memory game to cheer it up.

The Union Haggadah (at $3.99, the most expensive of the group), revives the Reform movement’s 1923 haggadah in digital form, and though it is short on new-media features, it contains the widest-ranging discussion of the Seder and its significance, albeit in archaic terms: “Among the ceremonials which nurtured the Jewish idealism of generations, a place of peculiar charm is held by the Seder.” As a free alternative, you could download the 1907 first edition from Google Books.

The gold standard in the limited field of kids’ Passover apps is the modest-looking iMahNishtanah ($0.99). Kids can read the Four Questions in Hebrew, touching any word to hear it spoken, or listen to a complete rendition in a child’s voice. Flash cards and a matching game reinforce pronunciation and meaning, and you can even record yourself and play it back. Parents will no doubt tire of the app’s voices and noises, but it gets the job done. Masochists should encourage their children to download Plague Audio (free), which turns an iPhone into a 10-sound noisemaker, alternately terrifying (the sound of rushing blood accompanied by a woman’s scream), harmless (serenely croaking frogs), and bizarre (ominous crescendo of TV-style soundtrack to signify darkness). Younger children might enjoy Passover—The Journey to Freedom StoryChimes ($0.99 or free with ads), an illustrated Passover storybook with an orchestral soundtrack and a voice that can read the story aloud. Unlike the haggadah, this story is all about Moses: his appearance among the bulrushes, his discovery of the burning bush, his negotiations with Pharaoh. If your kids prefer writing in books to reading them, Jewish Coloring ($0.99) offers a Seder-plate tableau, among other images, and a box of virtual crayons.

As for pure games, M.A.S.H. Passover (free), the only Passover app with an age restriction, is a version of the classic “mansion, apartment, shack, house” preteen prognostication game, restyled as “matzo, afikomen, salt, haroset.” Answer a series of questions and get a Mad Libs–influenced solution: “At the Seder, Luke Skywalker will find the Afikomen and get Justin Bieber tickets as the prize.” Satisfying only the shortest attention spans, Passover Trucks Game ($0.99) asks players to sort boxes of food coming off a conveyer belt onto two flatbed trucks, one for Passover, the other not. The maker of this game appears to be a mad entrepreneurial genius of the Jewish iPhone app, having also created Kippa Game, in which you move around a boy’s head so that yarmulkes land on it, Kosher Fishing Game, in which you sit in a wooden boat with a fishing pole and try to catch only the kosher fish, and Judaica Store Game, in which you fetch tallises for Japanimated avatars.

How you decide to use your iPhone on Passover is between you, your rabbi, and your conscience. But once you’ve started, you may not want to stop. To carry the holiday feeling into the weeks to come, download an omer-counting app, which automatically updates it with the latest numbered day. The apps are largely alike apart from the backdrop: Sefirat HaOmer (free) has wood grain. CountingTheOmer ($0.99) has burnt-edged parchment and also includes information about the history and rules of omer-counting borrowed from Wikipedia—the Shulchan Aruch of our time. Ultimate Omer 2 ($0.99) claims to be the only app that shifts to the next day at sunset, according to your location. Omer Count (free) is the most colorful, structured around the kabbalistic sefirot. With the help of these, you’ll be downloading Shavuot apps in no time. And perhaps next year—l’shana haba’ah—we’ll get all the Passover apps we deserve.

But while walls are usually solid, eruvs are elusive in form and meaning. During the Sabbath, their integrity is so vital that community members must inspect each segment regularly. But at the end of that 25-hour day, only the eruv’s physical form remains—and hardly that. My third-story windows look out directly at an eruv at eye level, and from time to time as the day passes, I search for it. It takes concentration and patience, just as one’s eyes must adjust to see stars in the night sky. It vanishes and reappears as the light changes.

The eruv’s elusiveness intrigued the artist Ben Schachter, who three years ago decided to create a series of artworks based on the eruv and in the process discovered a set of ideas that have animated his work ever since. Schachter’s eruv series consists of blue thread stitched into paper, filled in with white acrylic paint: outlines of the eruv-bounded neighborhoods that Schachter has passed through. The form is simple, but when we look at the work, we contemplate the nature of boundaries in our lives, the ways we translate our ideals and goals into the material, the limits of community, the size of our personal universe.

Just as these large concerns can be embodied in a single pure line, the eruv is also the final result of a substantial, complex body of rabbinic rulings. This imbalance between process and product is one of the chief characteristics that drew Schachter to the eruv, because it would link his work with that of his intellectual and aesthetic forebears, the conceptual artists of the 1960s, who used rules and instructions to set an idea in motion and let it run its course.

“The idea becomes a machine that makes the art,” Sol LeWitt wrote in 1967. For LeWitt, whose work particularly inspires Schachter, this concept flowed in part from an interest in the working process of architects, who rely on draftsmen and builders to carry out their visions. LeWitt, who as a young man worked for the architect I.M. Pei, tried to recreate that indirect style of art-making, drafting intricate but ambiguous instructions for wall drawings that his assistants would assemble. Schachter hoped to follow this model, but he felt that his work would be enriched if he based it on a set of existing rules, with its own external significance. What better culture to borrow from than his own—Judaism—with its meticulously elaborated rabbinical guidelines for the minutest aspects of everyday life?

In 2007, Schachter went to a local Judaica store and bought a bilingual edition of Tractate Eruvin—the volume of the Talmud devoted to eruvs. He studied the extensive discussions of walls and entryways, measurements and contingencies. He felt immediately that he had found what he was looking for: “Tractate Eruvin is like a 2,000-page Sol LeWitt book,” he says.

Ever since Schachter began working on his eruv series, he has been discovering other artists who are importing Jewish ideas into contemporary art in clever ways, and he had the chance to showcase some of his favorites earlier this year when he curated an exhibition called “Tzit Tzit: Fiber Art and Jewish Identity” for St. Vincent College, in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he teaches.

The range of artworks in the exhibit reflects a variety of Jewish experience and artistic approach, the common thread being the translation of Jewish law and Jewish experience into the material. Carol Es’s compositions consist of words and images drawn on sewing patterns; for her, the material was a reminder of her (non-Jewish) family’s labor in Los Angeles garment factories. Maya Escobar’s Shomer Negiah Panties tweaks the prohibition against touching a non-family member of the opposite sex by emblazoning the phrase “shomer negiah” across the backs of brightly colored women’s underwear; for Escobar, the fabric represents a boundary that tempts and repels.

Schachter has also played with disobedience in his own work, as in Kosher/Treif, in which he translates kashrut into the realm of the painter. Paints, after all, have for centuries been made from natural materials that sometimes double as foodstuffs. For one panel, Schachter bought certified-kosher milk and mixed his own milk paint—a rustic, ancient finish that he sees on barns in Pennsylvania, where he lives. He painted the panel white and stamped the bottom “O-U D”—the emblem of the Union of Orthodox Rabbis and the abbreviation for “dairy.” For a treif (non-kosher) meat panel, Schachter used the pigment cochineal red, a scarlet dye made from crushed insects. (Schachter is also experimenting with a series based on shatnes, the prohibition against combining linen and wool.)

But eruv art has remained at the center of Schachter’s work, in part because it allows him to explore not just one common project of contemporary art—generating art from rules—but a second: creating a line in space. Various artists, taking drawing as their starting point, have tried to lift the line from the page and bring it into the world. The minimalist sculptor Fred Sandback, who created spare three-dimensional forms by stretching strands of yarn from wall to wall and floor to ceiling, described his creations as “something both existing and not existing at the same time … a volume of air and light above the surface of the floor.” Schachter experimented with different sorts of lines in space during graduate school at the Pratt Institute in New York. He had been creating works from electrical hardware—a wall of more than 200 motion-sensing nightlights, a light-bulb chess set with each square a socket—when he hit upon the idea of making shapes out of electric cables—coiling them, looping them. An eruv was a cable whose shape was governed by rules.

Last weekend Schachter opened a new installation at the Mattress Factory, a contemporary-art museum in Pittsburgh. “The Residents of Chelm Visit the Mexican War Streets” extends Schachter’s eruv explorations into a new environment and in the process changes their meaning. Using a single continuous blue line, Schachter has drawn a cityscape of the museum’s own neighborhood (whose streets are named for the battles and generals of the Mexican-American War), tracing it onto the gallery’s windows and resin panels suspended in front of them by blue wire. This line is not a boundary but a meandering gesture that encompasses the neighborhood in all its detail—an inclusive, humanist line replacing the exclusive, rule-bound one.

This evolution was already evident in a work called Fences that Schachter displayed at the American Jewish Museum in Pittsburgh last year. Visitors to that exhibit were asked to write down words and phrases that defined how they understood their home, community, and neighborhood. Over time, Schachter added these to the exhibit by stitching borrowed words and scenes into paper. People also wrote down local places and routes that meant something to them, which Schachter would add to a rough map in colored tape that he had created on the gallery’s floor. Schachter’s impulse to involve other people in his art-making is quite different from LeWitt’s: Schachter is looking for collaborators rather than instruments. Perhaps the best example of Schachter’s humanism is his “Instant Eruv”—eruv achshav—nothing more than a coil of hot-pink thread in a plastic bag with a price tag, as if to say, go out and make your own art and your own community. Instructions are not included.

To honor the haggadah’s spirit of collage, we offer an interactive guide to learn about the origins of this Passover text. Click on the words and icons to learn more about the origins of the elements of the haggadah; their explanations appear underneath the graphic.

When Jews observed Pesach in the Second Temple period, roughly from the mid-sixth century B.C.E. to the first century C.E., there was no seder and no haggadah. Those who could make the journey would travel to the Temple in Jerusalem, bringing the paschal lamb as a sacrifice, and afterward take the whole roasted animal back to their homes across the city to eat with their families. Wine, matzo, maror, and charoset would accompany the festival meal, as would a recitation of Hallel, but without any substantial discussion of the Exodus. Only after the Temple’s destruction in 70 C.E. were the rabbis of the Tannaitic era, which lasted until 220 C.E., forced either to re-imagine Passover observance or to lose it altogether. In that moment, they reoriented the holiday toward study and reflection, setting forth in the text of the Mishna a list of rituals and readings that still form the core of today’s celebration: the search for chametz, the four cups of wine, the four questions, the story of the Exodus told “from disgrace to praise.” It is at that moment that we see Rabban Gamaliel, standing on the threshold between the Pesach observance of the Second Temple era and what would come, declaring the haggadah into being by telling us: You are obligated to explain these symbols.

In the centuries that followed, the haggadah evolved as Jews migrated from Roman-ruled Palestine to Babylonia, to Europe, to Modern Israel, and the United States. In the Amoraic era (the time of the Talmudic rabbis, between 220 and 550 C.E.), the haggadah was formalized as liturgy and as a public occasion, with a leader and a script. In the Geonic era, between 589 and 1038, the text was consolidated and additional passages added. For centuries the haggadah was not written down: The seder leader would know the elements by heart and, at a crucial moment, give a substantial drash, or interpretation of biblical passages. In the Middle Ages, as Jews spread across Europe, and as Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 1440s, printed haggadahs finally emerged, filled with illustrations and, to enhance the festivities, lively songs like Chad Gadya. The haggadah became one of the most common Jewish printed books, found wherever Jews have settled across the world.

(Sources include Shmuel and Ze’ev Safrai’s Haggadah of the Sages (1998), Joseph Tabory’s JPS Commentary on the Haggadah (2008), and Joshua Kulp and David Golinkin’s Schechter Haggadah (2009).

This early insight into the Torah’s visual aspect stayed with Buechler as she grew older, attended high school and college, traveled to Israel, and entered rabbinical school, at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York—and has culminated in an unusual practice. Each week, usually on Friday morning, Buechler reads the weekly parasha, or Torah portion, in Hebrew. Then she studies ancient commentaries, followed by modern ones. In the process, a particular image or scene, or occasionally a phrase, will emerge as a visual distillation of the reading that she paints on her fingernails. “This becomes a nice way of ending my study period for the morning,” Buechler says. “And this way I have something to look at and think about over Shabbat.”

Nearly every week for 10 years, she has painted iconic scenes (the great flood), powerful phrases (u’vcharta b’chaim—“choose life”), and holiday symbols (dreidels, sukkahs) on her nails. She invests small choices with great creativity and thought. When she paints the first Passover plague, rivers filled with blood, should a small fish be swimming around as a reminder that the river is a source of life? She associates her nail-painting with midrash, a type of commentary that fills in narrative and logical gaps in the Torah. Midrashic stories, often imaginative, are tools for thought. “This is not written midrash,” Buechler says, “but this is artistic midrash.”

Her current practice evolved from something much simpler. In middle school, inspired by teachers who got their nails done, she began to paint her nails each week, in solid colors according to the season: browns for the fall, mulberry and maroon for the winter, whites for the spring. In high school, she found that giving herself a manicure was a way to relieve stress, unwinding Thursday nights while watching television, sometimes with friends. She started by painting smiley faces, then seasonal icons—snowflakes for winter, turkeys for Thanksgiving. “And suddenly it hit me that I could make this something more meaningful,” she says.

Not only Buechler but the people around her find meaning in her nail-painting. Rabbinical-school classmates approach her with their own ideas for images and phrases, which means that somehow her practice has crept into their study sessions. And they ask questions. For Hanukkah this year, will she paint one menorah or one candle on each finger? (Undecided). Has she ever done the splitting of the Red Sea? (Yes.) She also gets noticed in the wider world. Curious shop owners get a crash course in parasha study. Buechler’s bat mitzvah student has negotiated a deal where after they finish studying the parasha together, Buechler will paint her nails with an image from it.

I visited Buechler last month, just before Rosh Hashanah and a few weeks before Simchat Torah, when congregations celebrate the completion of the year’s Torah cycle and prepare to begin reading it anew, starting from Genesis. She took a break from writing sermons to paint her nails with several favorite designs. For a brush, she used an unusual kind of toothpick that looks like a thin, flat rectangle, and which she buys whenever she comes across them. (She once used the point of a paper clip, until it started to hurt.) She worked quickly but precisely, using each hand with equal skill. In front of her sat more than 50 bottles of polish, which she picks with a particular subject in mind (“I was running low on brown, and I wanted it for my shofars,” she explained).

As we talked, Buechler interjected reflections about small details. Working on an intricate Sukkot design, she said, “I have to leave room for the schach” (the sukkah’s thatch roof). And later: “I’m not doing bamboo. Sorry.” Toward the end, she said, “I’m putting oranges in right now.” And the brush darted into the bottle of bright orange polish and dabbed each nail. “I think we’re going to do oranges and cherries. Or grapes. I’ll do grapes.”

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.

There is another way: to sweep the page clean and then reconstitute it using only the poetry of prayer and the tacit language of design. This is the quiet revolution being mounted by Koren Publishers Jerusalem, which has outfitted its popular all-Hebrew Israeli siddur with a new English translation and pared-down commentary by Britain’s Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (adapted from his new British authorized siddur) and brought it to America. Indeed, when you open the siddur, you may feel a kind of liberation. Prayers that have traditionally been printed as long undifferentiated paragraphs, margin to margin, are parceled out like poetry. Different type sizes and indentations create a visual rhythm that signals structural shifts in the liturgy. The design itself instructs the reader in the shape of the service, without distracting from the words on the page.

The Koren Bible aleph on the left, and the siddur aleph on the right.

Book design’s building block is the letter. The Hebrew letters of the Koren siddur were designed specially for the original Israeli edition. If you look closely, you will find a second Hebrew typeface, designed years earlier for the Koren Bible and used here for setting longer biblical quotations. Look at the alephs to distinguish the two. The Koren Bible aleph is majestic, with three bold diagonal strokes. The Koren siddur aleph is playful, with a central bold stroke framed by two small flags, waving from thin stems. Both typefaces are beautiful without calling attention to themselves, like a well-crafted chair.

Perhaps it is not surprising that the creator of these letters is also the founder of Koren Publishers. Eliyahu Koren, who was in his 70s when he published the original all-Hebrew siddur, in 1981, described his design philosophy in its preface: “From a visual standpoint, the contents of the prayers are presented in a style that does not spur habit and hurry, but rather encourages the worshiper to engross his mind and heart in prayer.” The care and deliberation that Koren hoped to enable in others were values that defined his artistic practice and shaped his career. They would lead him to found his company and to craft both the Koren siddur and the Koren Bible, one of the all-time icons of Hebrew design.

Decades before any of these accomplishments, Eliyahu Koren was already one of the most influential designers in Israel. Born Eliyahu Korngold in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1907, he immigrated to Palestine in 1933 and set about looking for work. Koren had excelled in art school, but in Palestine he found an underdeveloped graphic-design industry that largely amounted to sign-painting. His break came when the Jewish National Fund hired him to lead its first graphics department. In this position, which he kept for 21 years, Koren oversaw the creation of many of Israel’s most prominent symbols, including its first postage stamp and, in his own design, the seal of the city of Jerusalem—a lion rampant in front of the Wailing Wall, framed by olive branches—still in use today.

His greatest project got underway in the early 1940s, when Judah Magnes, the president of Hebrew University, asked Koren to create a new typeface for the first original edition of the Hebrew Bible to be published in Israel. Koren’s art would complement the ambitious scholarly effort of Umberto Cassuto, a rabbi and Hebrew University professor who was searching for the most accurate ancient source manuscripts. But unexpectedly, and within a few years of each other, Magnes and Cassuto both died, leaving the project to founder. The Hebrew University Press, having already waited 10 years for its new Bible, simply reprinted a 19th-century edition with a few of Cassuto’s emendations.

Eliyahu Koren, working on the Koren Bible typeface

Koren decided to carry out the original effort on his own. He formed his own small publishing house and immersed himself in Hebrew manuscripts and early typefaces, looking for inspiration. He based his letter on medieval Sephardi script, while giving it a modern touch. He consulted an ophthalmologist and learned about early research into the legibility of Latin types. In every aspect of his work Koren was meticulous. When he received the cast metal type from the illustrious Deberny and Peignot foundry in France, Koren immediately spotted imperfections and sent it back. The foundry calculated the imprecision at three hundredths of a millimeter and recast the letter at its own expense. “In the final Koren design,” writes the late Israeli book historian Leila Avrin, “the letters are sharp, almost never rounded, with balanced contrasts, faintly serifed, with its few diagonals always parallel to one another. The beauty of the letter never detracts from its readability.”

Koren was as diligent as Cassuto in striving for textual accuracy. He took great care with vowels and cantillation marks, which were drawn by hand and added to the typeset page. When the Bible was finally published, in 1962, it was celebrated in public ceremonies. “Israel is redeemed from shame,” wrote Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. “This is the first Jewish Bible in the last 400 years.” Presidents of Israel would be sworn into office on it. A commemorative book published years later includes photos of the celebrations, plus two of Koren inspecting manuscripts and proofs at the start of the project, with his sleeves rolled up and his expression grave. His hair is dark. By the time the Koren Bible was published, 20 years later, it was mostly silver.

It would take until the 1970s for Koren to begin work on his siddur. His central task was the same: to create beautiful, legible letters and pages to accentuate a sacred text. But unlike the Bible, the siddur is an anthology, pieced together from Torah verses and rabbinic writings. Koren therefore set out to design a new page layout that would differentiate the text, highlighting its source material and keeping the reader alert. Koren also developed a distinct but related siddur typeface, since he felt that the one he had developed for the Bible was too sacred to reuse, except for biblical quotations. This typeface was even more legible than the first, with similar letter pairs distinguished by their shape: dalet, for instance, extends its arm horizontally, while resh angles its arm upward.

“Eliyahu Koren was a perfectionist,” Esther Be’er wrote in an email. She went to work for him as a typographer 30 years ago and remains at his company today. “He didn’t care if a project took a long time (he wasn’t business-minded) as long as he was satisfied with the outcome.” Koren died in 2001, but his methods and philosophy are still alive. To produce the Hebrew-English Koren siddur, the editor, Raphael Freeman, would lay out a section of the book—30 or 40 two-page spreads—and then sit down with Be’er, who would review them to ensure that each had the authentic Koren feel. “Nothing in Koren goes without Esther first making sure that the layout is ‘Koren-y,’” says Freeman. The font chosen for the English, Arno Pro, is contemporary but distinguished, much like the siddur’s English translation. Unlike virtually every other Hebrew-English siddur, the Koren siddur prints the Hebrew on the left-hand pages and the English on the right. This strategy, which Koren advocated during his lifetime, is both aesthetic and practical: it means that no matter which language you are reading, you start from the center and read outward.

Conservative and Reform Jews are used to coming to synagogue and seeing shelves filled with copies of Siddur Sim Shalom or Gates of Prayer—siddurim published respectively by those movements. The shelves of an Orthodox synagogue have long held a variety of prayer books, reflecting the movement’s divergent streams. But since the 1980s, the ArtScroll siddur has dominated the market, and even extended itself beyond the Orthodox world, with its commentary, glosses, and instructions; it is an ideal introductory text for the newly religious and a reference for those without access to knowledgable Jewish leaders. But scholars and rabbis have long criticized its publisher, Brooklyn-based Mesorah, for its permeating ideology: its exclusion of modern scholarship and rabbinics, its incorporation of interpretation into “translations,” its silence on the existence of the modern state of Israel, its approach toward women, its archaisms. For years some members of the Modern Orthodox community have been using the ArtScroll siddur while wishing it could be more modern.

Is the Koren siddur the answer? It does feel modern, without straying from tradition. Jonathan Sacks’s substantial introductory essay quotes Rav Joseph Soloveitchik, not to mention Auden and Blake. In his translation, Sacks dusts off the familiar prayer-book language and spurs the passive Jew to action. “Listen, Israel,” he translates the opening words of the Shema. Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, an influential Modern Orthodox rabbi on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, has bought 500 copies of the Koren siddur for his synagogue. “I love it. I love the translation. This is English at its best,” Lookstein says. It may be years before Koren’s success can be gauged, since buying new siddurim is an expensive decision that synagogues put off as long as possible.

Everyone has an opinion about translations, but the language of design is more obscure. Does design really matter? Last October, Koren sent out 1,800 advance proofs to American rabbis and lay leaders for feedback. “The most common e-mail,” says Raphael Freeman, “was that of people telling us how for the first time in 30 years they had actually read the translation and it had transformed their davening experience. Their eyes couldn’t help but glance over to the English and they found themselves, whilst davening in Hebrew and scanning the lines of English, having a deeper understanding of their prayers.”

Joshua J. Friedman, a former editor of The Atlantic and Boston Review, is a writer in New York City.