What Page Are We On?

By: Benjamin Maron

Many of our communities start off meeting in a living room or other non-synagogue space. While this provides a level of intimacy and comfort for community members, patient it also often means that we are scrambling for resources. A common phenomenon is the “BYOS” (bring your own siddur (prayer book)) service, price where participants are encouraged to show up for services with their own prayerbooks, sildenafil and havurah or minyan organizers who have extras bring those too.

The resulting hodgepodge selection of siddurim (prayer books) means that people will participate in services with a familiar siddur, but this can provide some unwanted confusion in calling out pages. “We’ll start with Yedid Nefesh on page… uh….” One solution is to make a grid for siddurim (prayer books), listing prayers or other liturgical markers down one side, the various siddurim across the top, and filling in all of the page numbers in the grid. It can be a lot of work to compile these. Luckily, much of the work has already been done for you.

For Friday night services, Kol Zimrah has prepared this grid [doc] showing ten different siddurim.

For Saturday morning services, Minyan Tikvah and Segulah have similar grids to hand out. You can find the former here [xls] and the latter here [xls].

Tremont Street Shul has their grids for both Friday nights and Saturday mornings on their website.

Feel free to use these as examples for your own minyan or havurah. You can add any additional siddurim to them, or remove any that are not used in your community.

Benjamin Maron attended his first NHC Summer Institute as an Everett Fellow in 2006. He is on the NHC Board of Directors. He is chairing the 2010 Chesapeake Retreat.