Prayer Type
How Eliyahu Koren used typography to encourage a new way to pray
| 7:00 AM Jun 30, 2009
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.
