Shalom, everybody. Welcome to the Light Lab Podcast, where we play with prayer and hold the gems of our sacred liturgy to the light. My name is Eliana, and I'm so glad to be with you today. I'm recording this from a hotel room in Los Angeles. We're near the airport. So if you hear any Shwoosh sounds, it's probably an airplane. I'm here for a couple of things. My friend Alexander Nemser and I are doing this Siddur translation project with a bunch of artists. It's an experiment that we've been thinking about for some time, bringing together six artists of a variety of different mediums and having them translate through their art. We're using the line Adonai s'fatai tiftach u'fi yagid tehilatecha, which we have an episode about, by the way, the opening line to the Amidah. It's an opening, it's a prayer for help praying, there's all sorts of juicy stuff in there. And we're gonna gather at this amazing place in LA called Der Nister on Sunday, and see what happens. By the time this episode airs, the event will have happened so maybe we'll get to update you on how it went. The second reason I'm here is for Kol T'fillah. Y'all might know the word T'fillah, if your're a regular, means prayer and liturgy. Kol means all and it also means voice. And it's a conference and gathering around T'fillah that Temple Beth Am in LA puts on every year. And I often happen to be in LA while it's going on. So I'm really excited to get to pray and sing with some really incredible people. And I'm really excited to bring you this episode today. Our interview with Rabbi Josh Cahan, I can't remember exactly when I met Rabbi Josh, I think our paths cross in and out. But we connected this year because he's an incredible T'fillah educator and wanted to collaborate to what we were doing in the Light Lab. I said, of course, I love nerding out on T'fillah and T'fillah education. And it was such a joy to do that with Rabbi Josh Cahan today. So a little bit more about him. He's a T'fillah educator in New York City, and he has compiled and edited the Yedid Nefesh bencher, and is introducing the new Yedid Nefesh Hagadah this spring. A bencher is a little book, I mean, they're usually kind of small, That includes prayer songs and blessings for the home. So Friday night at home, Shabbat morning, songs to sing around the table, other sorts of blessings. I have a bunch of Yedid Nefesh benchers in my house right now. It's a really, really beautiful book. He's going to talk a lot more about that. He spent 11 years teaching Talmud and T'fillah at the Lefell School in New York and was the founder and director of the Northwoods Kollel at Camp Ramah in Wisconsin. He holds rabbinical ordination and a PhD in Talmud from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and I hope you enjoy my conversation with Rabbi Josh Cahan.
Welcome to the Light Lab, Josh. It's so good to have you!
It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
I was so excited when you reached out to connect a couple of months ago. You are - is it correct for me to say a T'fillah nerd? As am I?
I am and it is. I will say I have, I have been a T'fillah nerd for longer than I have acknowledged myself that I am such.
So we're wearing the manta with pride today, I think.
Today, today we are, yeah.
Certainly. Well, I'd like to start by taking a look back as we usually ask our guests and I'm wondering what your relationship was to T'fillah when you were a kid, as you were growing up?
It's funny, I was the - My father was a pulpit rabbi. I was, I'm the youngest of four. And my, none of my siblings really had stayed connected to, were so interested in showing up or stayed connected thereafter. I was always the the shul nerd, I was I was a 14 year old who would raise his hand during the Torah discussions. So I feel like that's always been kind of a piece of, like my, it's always been a comfort space for me. I will say that somebody recently said it feels like people who care about T'fillah, break, often break, seem to break down into those who are really primarily personal T'fillah people and those who are community T'fillah people. Now I've always, always been a community T'fillah person. I find it challenging to sort of, like the daven by myself at home is that challenge and like when I'm in a communal space with a real, kind of shared experience, that's when I kind of really feel it. So I think that's that was that's been true, forever.
Wow. And so even as a kid, do you think you could have articulated at the time, what was meaningful and powerful about it? Or looking back, do you have a sense of what that was?
I think that part of it to noon I was a kid was that I was good at it. And I felt comfortable with it. And so whether I was leading or even just as a participant, I felt I had something to contribute and to offer to the other people in that space. And that was always a feeling I liked. And, and I think that the models of sort of meaningful experience were communal, were communal models, right? I never related to the people who would sit by, to even ensure would like stand by themselves and have the right some people watch the the rabbi or whoever, who was has this very personal internal thing, the people who, whose voices and presences I remember, the people who brought people in and made people want to be a part of it.
And what are some other, you know, we're talking about your home synagogue, as you grew, as you grew into adolescence, young adulthood, where else were you experiencing those communal, powerful, positive experiences?
I went to USY, I was part of USY as a as a kid. And there was always one of the nice things about USY especially growing up in a Conservative synagogue, where there was a pretty small circle of involved teenagers, it was to just kind of come together with other like-minded folks. And I enjoyed that. And then when I got to, I got to Israel, I spent a year in Israel junior year studying in yeshiva, and, and being part of this kind of whole religious community in, in Israel. And there was really a different, a different kind of living level of like, spiritual engagement with the davening, especially with singing. And I feel like I really brought back that like, that sense that, actually, what I grew up with is only a small, is only, is only a shadow of what can be.
Of what can be. Taking kind of a different tack as we look backwards. I'm wondering what your idea or understanding or relationship with G?d was like, when you were in services as a kid, kind of feeling proud, feeling mastery over the prayers, feeling comfortable, and community, was G?d part of that equation at all?
In a general way? I don't think that I had some definite shaped ideas about what G?d is or are sort of, I didn't have a theology in that sense. And I think that that's been sort of a consistent thing for me, throughout my learning, and my teaching, is that it always feels like a mistake. When people feel like we should be talking about G?d and like, and what we believe about G?d and having these, we don't need to come to any consensus about what G?d is. What we really need is to figure out how to experience connection connection with G?d. And that's a very, that's a much easier thing to talk about, I think, an easier thing to agree that we're striving for.
I think for me, and I've, I don't know if I've talked about this on the pod before, but I really resonate with that, that for me, the Divine is experienced. And so it's more about experience than belief. I find belief to be an unhelpful binary as most binaries are. And again, I'm like taking what you said and thinking back on my own life. I was also a kid that loved going to shul and I, you know, I felt something communal. I don't know if I could have articulated but that kind of buzzy feeling of togetherness and connection. Perhaps that was an experience of the Divine I just, you know, didn't have the words to put to it then.
You know, I used to have in the year especially that my first year in yeshiva where I was in an orthodox Yeshiva. And it was an article of faith in that people that my fellow students they were certain that they believed in G?d and therefore felt commanded to do, I'll do mitzvot and participate and learn Torah and participate in this community. And I was always totally, totally convinced that they had it all backwards, that they found meaning and structure and belonging and inspiration in being a part of this community of practice, all those different pieces of practice. And that led them to want to embrace the set of beliefs that were the the sort of entry ticket to it. I just felt like that, that relationship is is opposite because it's the, it's the, you know, you know when people become Ba'al teshuva, right, they don't start by realizing, in this abstract away, I believe such and such about G?d, they find a community that they feel at home in and that inspires and that moves them that makes them gives them something that they've been lacking.
That's a really interesting way to put it, it makes it makes a lot of sense to me, though, you know, is it is it tactful to try to, you know, say actually, it's not because you believe in G?d. But I think it also adds an important dimension of why Jewish communal practice and why taking on more mitzvot might be something that someone wants to do. And that gives them a lot of structure and community, whereby from the outside looking in, one might only think of them as, you know, more strictures and more control and not kind of the beautiful aspects of that.
Right.
When you said, it was interesting, that when you experienced prayer in Israel, you realized that what you had grown up with as lovely as it was, was only a shadow of what it could be. Do you have memories of other prayer experiences, kind of through your young adulthood? That were like, Oh, it could be so much more x, like, and what you think that x would be?
In terms of earlier than that? Well, I will say that.
Or later.
Well, so the first thing is, when I. when I think about where does my own style of davening and of leading davening really sort of come from, I learned it from a guy named Steve White, he'd grown up in, in our shul. And he would, he wasn't he was then an old guy, which meant he was 20 probably at the time, and he would, but he would come back and lead kind of the overflow service for the High Holidays. And he was just, he was one of those like, beautiful Neshama Ba'alei T'fillah, who just, you just you felt you felt inspired just kind of being brought, sort of led by him, had that, that presence, and a lovely voice, but not an overpowering one. But, but not only did he practically to teach me the nusach, certainly for the holidays, but I often find myself kind of channeling that and trying to emulate that sense of humble, but yet energized kind of presence.
And, you know, it's a podcast, so not everybody can see, but I even saw it in your body language, when you were describing it, your eyes closed, and there was a little smile on your face and your hands went up, like this particular posture. And, you know, part of it might be, oh, the person who is the shaliach tzibur, the kind of emissary of the community is having a meaningful experience here, and like inviting me in and along for the ride, which I think makes a big difference.
Yeah. And like that combination of this person is having their own meaningful T'fillah experience, but they also they care that we're there. Right, they are, they're holding us by the hand and saying and leading us there as opposed to someone who is emotive and so invested that you're, that, you know, you that it's hard to connect with them.
Right, because sometimes it kind of flips over into the other direction that the person who's leading is having is in their own world having their own experience and the rest of us are just kind of there, or we're like keeping them from doing, you know, from feeling as deeply as they might want to and it feels like a burden. It's like, Oh, why are we here? So that kind of, that balance is is really crucial. I know you have a relationship with Camp Ramah, did you go there as a camper?
No, I had one sleepaway experience when I was a little too young to have it, and swore it off for the rest of childhood and went back only as a staff member, but my senior year of college, I went for the first time to Ramah Wisconsin. And that turned into, you know, 10 years of, of really amazing, amazing building that I was able to do.
Yeah, I'd love for you to tell us about that as well as what you found meaningful and/or challenging about T'fillah at camp.
So I think the, it was primarily, my friend Aryeh and I, Aryeh Bernstein and I were building this Beit Midrash program, a study program for some of the campers. And then we were able to bring in a Kollel, a small group of college students who came to really came to Camp to sort of learn full-time, many of those students are people that I'm still close with, and who have become great teachers in their own right. And the first thing I will say is that it was an amazing opportunity for me as a 25 year old sort of starting rabbinical school to be able to teach Gemara courses on a high level to really motivated students for nine intensive weeks, and all the other pieces of that. It was also kind of, I still think back in amazement that the director of the camp, David Soloff, who really, really was not, had no experience with the kind of yeshiva world culture, it was really not his world. And yet, he bought the notion that it was good for the camp to kind of bring that, bring that into them, into that space. And he really, he both invested in us and was not threatened by our doing something that was not in his, in his comfort zone. So I I'm always kind of grateful to him for that. T'fillah was always a challenge. I don't I don't know that in the years that I was at camp I was, I wasn't so focused on T'fillah, I think the place that I almost, almost accidentally had the biggest impact, or that was the biggest long term thing for me was actually that both, we had Thursday night and Shabbos afternoon singing, which was kind of part of the yeshiva culture piece that we were bringing in. And that grew from a little niche thing into sort of a major thing at camp and spread to other camps and kind of spread into USY, kind of something that really had been, it was a piece of the culture that had been really missing in the 80s and 90s Conservative institutions really held anything that felt Orthodox at arm's length. And in some of the summers of getting, packing the camp, how to cope with 200, 250 campers and seeing these angsty, emotive, Seudah Shlishit songs, those are things, I've had more people, I've run to more people over the years who sort of look back and remember that those experiences than almost anything else that that I did at camp. And people who went to rabbinical school and sort of trace, trace that engagement back to, to those those evenings kind of singing and just like feeling swept up in, in the, in the music and the emotion and even when they didn't have words for what they were and for what they were feeling or what they needed like that, it was something that they really felt reached them in a way that nothing else did. And I think that when I look back at it, sort of that's that was the beginning of my kind of transitioning from a Talmud person to a T'fillah person. In that like, looking back, I was like, that's where I was able to have the biggest impact and the thing that kids needed that they weren't necessarily getting, and we're in where I felt like camp could have so much potential.
Absolutely. For those, those connective experiences. It seems like that is a theme that is showing up in your in your life, in your T'fillah life. How beautiful, that, you know, collective effervescence, I think that's that kind of thing we can't necessarily name that's powerful. As someone who has memories of those things from my own days at camp, thank you. And I'm wondering.
Which camp?
Ramah Darom, and also on staff at Wisconsin and Nyack and other camps. That, that was definitely a big part of, of our experience, in my experience. This flip to becoming a T'fillah person, a T'fillah Rabbi, how did that play itself out as you were ordained and went into the field?
One of the things that now that I'm gonna talk about T'fillah that I find myself saying often certainly was true for me is that schools, hire subject teachers, they don't hire T'fillah educators. They hire subject subject teachers, and then so to draft them to work with T'fillah. When I started at Lefell school after I finished my doctorate, there were lots of people who had T'fillah responsibilities, and very few people who wanted to be leading T'fillah. So I kind of immediately as someone who was comfortable as a T'fillah leader, as Shaliach tzbibur, etc, kind of naturally kind of moved into that, into the role of one of the sort of like lead T'fillah people because most people just didn't want to be doing it. A big piece of it was, I was part of the first cohort of the Pardes Aleinu Leshabeach, this prayer education project, which really kind of ran sort of seriously for a number of years. And then as things go, their focus shifted, but, but that was a really kind of eye opening experience, both because it was just a really well done program, but also bringing together like, if you, if you think about the landscape of day schools, and you bring together the 30, or whatever, people who think T'fillah is important enough in school to come to a conference like this, you get, you, you, you get to meet the people who get it in there, who, who see it in the way that you see it. And that in itself is powerful, but also that every one of us find ourselves in context where the people around us didn't quite get it. And we're asking not only what do we do in our, in our minyan to make it better? Or what can we add? What can - But how do we help our colleagues to both embrace the role and to, and to be T'fillah educators. Right, because that's a term and then we talked with a bunch even in then, and I've had the conversation multiple times, that even the notion of describing oneself as a T'fillah educator is something that many so many of my school colleagues are resistant to?
Where do you think that resistance or that challenge comes from? What makes it so hard, I'm thinking not just for people to take on the mantle of T'fillah educator, but to do T'fillah, in a school setting like that?
There are a few things that I found. One is that people are just, people take a, take a job in an area that they feel confident in, they feel like they have command of, they know what they're doing. And, and they often feel that they're, they don't have expert, expertise in T'fillah the way that they do in their subject area. Also leading T'fillah well, it's a very different kind of thing than teaching a course well. And if you are a classroom teacher, you have a clear map of what needs to happen in your classroom, to, you know, to in order to engage students in material to, to teach the material in a, in a at the level, you want to assess whether they've learned it, and you don't have those same structures in T'fillah. A lot of people talk about, well, T'fillah it's such a personal thing, whether it's, it's personal for me, and therefore I don't want to have to be putting my spirituality on display. Or it's personal for everyone, so who am I to be telling you how to be spiritual? Or how to connect with G?d? And the fourth thing, I think that's fourth thing, is, there is this frustrating assumption that is locked in to someone for so many people that school or camp T'fillah, certainly school T'fillah and I think you have to go to a certain thing also, that there's the ceiling is halfway halfway decent as big as as good as you can strive for, and getting kids to behave is basically the, the only, the only thing that, not only the only job of someone who has Tefillah class, the only thing that's even have a hope of achieving. And that is also, makes it feel like something you're not going to invest a lot in.
Right. And it also seems with a bar that, well, like why are we doing it if it's going to feel like pulling teeth and a challenge. So let's take it kind of on the flip side. What are the opportunities of T'fillah? And we might see a camp, a Ramah camp or a day school setting, I'm thinking in particular about the challenge and opportunity of regularity, of doing something every day or multiple times a week. Why? You know, if someone was going to say, well, why should we even bother? Why are we doing T'fillah here? Like, what might you say?
So, a bunch of things but to start with camps and Jewish day schools exist to cultivate, to give Jewish education, to cultivate a sense of connectedness, to Jewish experience and Jewish ritual, and Jewish practice, and T'fillah is the place where that happens most intensively. But because academic classes are still gonna feel like academic classes, even if they're on a Judaics subject, whereas T'fillah is entirely sort of Judaic, so at camp, you think about the Jewish experiences at Cam, classes are those like, Yeah, dude, classes are often an afterthought, certainly for the kids, if not for the staff. Whereas T'fillah is happening all the time. And like T'fillah is a huge, a huge proportion of their camp experience. And I will say that when kids look when former campers look back on their camp experiences and have real really positive associations, Judaic associations with camp, they almost always include or focus on T'fillah experiences. And just to kind of add on to that, T'fillah is also the thing that is most, but that is most likely to bring them, to bring those kids to active participation in a Jewish community when they're at in college or young adults. Right, what when people come to shul what draws them to shul? Right, if they have some sort of positive association with Tefillah spaces. That's one kind of big piece. The other big piece is that T'fillah is the space where we have the chance to kind of nourish them emotionally and spiritually, to energize them, to help them to fly in a way that we just don't, it's, it's really hard to do in other in other contexts. In school oft feel like it's the space in school, certainly that doesn't feel like school. And so if you use that space, well, you can get an emotional and spiritual places that you otherwise can't access. And great, like, really meaningful T'fillah can shape how they feel about their whole school experience, and their whole Judaic experience.
Yeah, and, you know, a good experience can lead to more and seeking that out, and a bad experience can lead to the opposite.
Right.
So yeah, and I love this idea of T'fillah being a place where students can be nurtured. And the kind of socio emotional spiritual side can be engaged in a way that it isn't always, if a Day School teacher or a camp counselor, were to approach you and say, I want T'fillah to be that, what are a couple of things that I can do to make either the T'fillah spaces I'm leaning in, or the T'fillah spaces that I'm a participant in ore like that, now that I've said it, I wonder if those are different answers for the camp counselor, and the, and the school teacher? But maybe they're the same? I don't know. What do you think
There are certainly, it's both I mean, there's certainly significant differences. And, and, and a lot of overlap. I think of the answer to that question on a few different levels, right? There are sort of what are the sort of simple concrete changes in how we go about things that we could just try and see how they see their, their impact. Things like doing more things out loud, because especially kids who aren't sort of otherwise immersed in and fluent in T'fillah, you know, silent, silent reading can tend to lose them. But one of the things that I really focused on with the teachers I worked with, at my school was really shifting the balance of positive and negative interactions getting into this space where we're constantly like we were constantly shushing and disciplining, and that's the primary way we interact with kids. I would always be moving around the room having sort of nonverbal just like smiling a kid giving kid high five, or, you know, standing next to a kid and like, singing them and getting them to like, even if it's silly, like getting them to be part of that experience. Variation is a is one that I think people are, are very locked into what we have Eimat Beah, what's that? What is them, what is, this is the order of things that we do and gets boring pretty easily, pretty quickly, being willing to say, hey, you know what, we're going to have a little variation. We're going to some days spend a little more time in this piece. Other days, spend more time that piece days we're going to do it briefing in days when we're gonna, like, cut back and really dwell on one piece for a longer time. And developmentally, like really thinking about this, and this gets a little bit more at the sort of bigger picture, and kind of that second level of making sure that our fifth grade T'fillah is different than our sixth grade T'fillah, and our seventh grade T'fillah, not only are we how can we say, oh, here are our goals for fifth grade T'fillah. But based on those goals, Sixth grade T'fillah is then going to like, have progressed to doing something more complex, and build on what we've done. So that's the second piece is really thinking across not only across a whole summer or a school year, but across multiple years. And the third level, which is, which is in a sense, more of a long, more of a sort of an investment kind of thing is that the faculty who are leading T'fillah need to kind of spend time exploring what it means to them, what what it means to them to be prayers, this is one of those those like prayer days words that I have kind of always held that like a prayer or as a place of prayer to as opposed to a prayer leader, right? What it means to them to be a pray-er, what they imagined it means to me, it could mean to the their students to be pray-ers, and then what what strengths they bring to, to being prayer educators, and that that perfection isn't meant to be one. that they can have, that we all have things that we lack and things that we're not good at, but that we, but really, if we focus and remind ourselves that there are even in our imperfection, there are gifts that we have, they're things that we bring, there are things that we can model in a genuine way, and we don't feel like releasing people from feeling like frauds.
You know, Ellen says, you know, that's why it's called a spiritual practice. It's not a spiritual, perfect. It's a spiritual practice. These are great ideas. And I hope -
And that's and the fact true, that's true for the, for the adults, right, hopefully, is is creating a permission for the kids not to have to open up to this without having all the answers.
Right. Because even if you have been praying from a Siddur all your life, there are ways in which we're all beginners, and that it is a practice for all of us. And that's really important to remind and also to model for ourselves. Yeah, I hope people can take some of these ideas. And yeah, if you're in a place where you're leading T'fillah, kind of see what happens. I want to pivot now to talking about one of your projects that I certainly have benefited from, which is the bemcher that you made, a bencher being, one might, I don't know, I'm trying to describe it. One might call it like the Liturgy of the Jewish home, like liturgy for home life, including Friday night at home, Shabbat blessings. We're actually on this Shabbat at home journey, right now, in the in the roundtable episode. So it's kind of perfect. I'm wondering what like, what was the journey from idea to creation? What got you started thinking, Oh, out of all of the little books that I've seen, I think there's room for a new one. And I have some ideas of what to do about it.
The way I got into the sort of space of book creation, my father, Zichrono Livracha, was the editor of the Shabbat and Festivals Sim Shalom, which he finished 1998. And then the weekday one was finished in 2001. And that's when he started talking about, well, the next installment should be bencher. And because the only Conservative bencher at the time was the USY B'kol Echad, and I had just come back from discovering this whole world of song and spirituality in Israel, that I also hadn't grown up with, and I knew he hadn't. And then I felt that I have actually learned to sing and to have and learn the world of Zemirot that, that you don't know what like, let me sort of like give it you know, take a shot at at laying out and thinking and planning and planning out that book. So it really started from from the sense that his his initial sense that that ought to happen. And my kind of saying, let me take that up. But the other piece was as at the same time, we were starting to get to the age where our friends were getting married and, and there were and everyone had that like, well, what bencher are going to use for our wedding? And there were some, you know, there were significant kind of shortcomings to any, to all of the available options. And so that sort of convinced me that beyond the like, the Conservative movement as an unofficial thing, that there was my own world of people who were looking for a thing that they weren't finding. And the most, the biggest sort of misconception that I found was, people assumed they weren't finding it, because everyone was, was idiosyncratic and one of them being different. And it turned out not to be true in sort of, for the most part I did. But like, for the most part, the people that I knew were most looking for very similar things. And they just had never been put in the book. So I kind of set out to make that - a bencher that had all of the Zemirot that might be my sort of liberal yeshiva friends wanted to sing and weren't in any of the egalitarian, egalitarian benchers that had the transliterations that, you know, if you if you look at benchers, so many, so many either don't have transliteration, or they're hard to read, and hard to use, and translations that would really invite people to participate. Just a book that was felt complete, felt like it was accessible for different for different kinds of people. And that would be egalitarian without being sort of defined by that. Right, I mean, I think one of the things that was the big, I think it became more important to me as I was working on it, and talking to people who were in this kind of space between the Conservative and Orthodox worlds, the, you know, the kind of space that Hadar has grown in and have a in some of these, in some of these other institutions was a book that was sort of careful to be egalitarian, but that there are that your Orthodox friends would pick up and be like, and be like, This feels like a bencher. And, and then I got to do and I had been where I was working on a doctorate at the time. And we're you have to, like, really close, so, so deeply into such narrow things and a bencher, I could take a text and find one nugget of wisdom, that and like give you a paragraph of commentary that just something to think about, and like touch on something and move on. I really, I really, I really liked that kind of writing. I'm the kind of person who, when I'm always the person who writes the greeting cards in our family, the Mazel Tov cards for B'nai Mitzvah and weddings. And you know, and because I take 45 minutes to write three sentences, but they're three good sentences.
Right, it's, it can be hard to write compactly like that. That's a great skill.
And it came out, I didn't know we printed, we I promised my wife that we would sell out the first, we would eventually sell the first printing and so we wouldn't actually lose money on it. But it's been 15 years, and people are still buying it. So it feels like it met a need.
Certainly, certainly, I definitely have a bunch of them in my house right now. When I talk about the Siddur, I often talk about the Siddur as a series of choices. First of all, the choice of the person who originally set, prayed the prayer or remixed different lines of Tanakh, to call out to the universe in some way. But it also is a series of choices with regard to how the Siddur was put together, not just certain things in the morning, and certain things in the afternoon and certain things in the evening. But like, how big the font should be and what the translations are like. So I'd love for you to talk us through some of the choices that you had to make to put the bencher together and how you made those.
Right, so one thing, one piece was transliteration. I was very big on having a consistent transliteration system, I have to say, all of my sort of Jewish academic friends when they when when they pick it up, they're like the first thing like, oh, there's a transliteration guide at the beginning, right. This feels like a good I'm at home. But - But I did a lot of of like testing, like bringing different spellings and transliterations to people who don't know Hebrew and figuring out which versions enabled them to get closest to decoding what the Hebrew is supposed to sound like. So that was one one big piece. You sort of make the decision when you're translating whether like what your purpose is. For me the purpose was to have English that someone could read and feel like I understand that, understand that text as a whole. So I was always translating for meaning idiomatic for, for the sense and not in a sort of word for word kind of way. Sort of reading and translation where you're assuming that people are reading the Hebrew and are gonna want to check what does this word mean? You need to be much more precise. And that sense, right, as opposed to an English text that's readable. And one of the big advantages for me, I couldn't, I wouldn't have known this when I started working on it. But that distinguished what I was able to do from Anim Zemirot, from B'kol Echad, and other benchers, NCSY bencher, and other benchers that had come out previously, is in design. The graphic design program had just come out with their Middle East version. And so we were able to sort of really design and craft beautiful pages in a way that was like, for instance, I mean, when Leah Solomon did Anim Zemirot, which was maybe six or eight years before I started working on this. She was working with text box, with tables and text boxes in Microsoft Word. And I had someone really been able to craft the look of a page so that it felt like an elegant and and crafted book. You know, I just finished this Haggadah, which is in, sort of shipping boxes on the way here and as we as we speak, and and it was even more true with that, that you have a book where people are going to sit with for however many hours sitting at the Seder working through texts they are not familiar with, it needs to feel easy to look at, and just pleasant. And, and honestly, like the difference between a lovely text and sort of opening up that old Ktav, or one of these sort of old Hagadot is a real difference in what that what you expect to that ritual. I really think about that a lot that what it looks like, creates expectations about what the experience is going to be like.
Do you have, and maybe you don't. but do you have an example, whether from the bencher or the Haggadah of something that you were thinking about including and then ended up not including because it didn't fit the goals or the values that you wanted to be guiding in that instance? Or the opposite? Is there something that you weren't sure about, including that you ended up doing because it felt more aligned with the mission?
I will say that, with the Haggadah. In my original plan for the Haggadah, one of the first things that I kind of really realized more fully in sort of really sitting with the Haggadah is the extent to which and the reasons why the story that we sort of expect to be there isn't there. And so I had this idea of having an appendix with like, four or five different, like different styles of retellings of the story. And actually had a few several friends lined up who were like, I was like somebody who's a young adult writer, someone who is a poet, someone who kind of writes more kind of mystical stuff, right? Each we're gonna write, like, their three or four page version of a telling of the story. And I was really into that idea. And then, but I kept, but I kept coming back to me. And as peoplee asked me, Well, the first question I always get asked about the Haggadah is, well, what's your take? Or what's your shtick, right? And what had, the point is actually not to have a shtik. The point is, to figure out, what's the text that you find yourself frustrated? Like, why doesn't this exist, and create that. Right, create a base text that you can feel like this is just the Haggadah, but like in a in a in a form that I really want to use it. So as I kind of defined it in that way, those that those extras felt like they didn't have a place at least in the printed book. Fantasies about, you know, a website with all these sort of sort of additional resources and stuff. And that's one of the things that I kind of, I still hold on to, but certainly in terms of the printed book, it didn't make it in but an example of the reverse is, I have five pages in the bencher of the brachot and songs for Hanukkah. Because a I figured that it's easier to pull a benchr off and find the brachot for Hanukkah than to like take down a Siddur and to figure out what section it's in, but also because books get printed in like these large sheets that you really need, you really need to think in terms of units of eight pages, and I had 139 pages and five pages leftover. I was like what am I going to put on those five pages? And so Hannukah got in.
that's great, it is very handy to have to have everything for the home together. I want to ask you about the title of the bencher and also what I'm assuming is also going to be the title of the Haggadah potentially, Yedid Nefesh which has become the the moniker, maybe the brand. Were you thinking about other titles? And why did you end up going with Yedid Nefesh? And how would you even translate Yedid Nefesh?
I did have like a list of titls, betta pull brainstorming of different title ideas. This, there wasn't another one that I was seriously considering this one kind of jumped out at me. I think the thing that made it obvious once I hit on it is that it actually turns out that Yedid Nefesh is the poem that begins and ends Shabbat, and kind of like, captures that, that sense of that the goal of Shabbat is connectedness, a feeling of, of Yedidut, of closeness. So, to the extent that the bencher's sort of after, after Birkat Hamazon, sort of goes from candle lighting and rituals through Zemirot through the songs that I think of as Seudah Shlishit even though there are many other there are more songs than that now, but and then it was obvious no matter how no matter what else was in the book, that Havdallah would be the last page of the last couple pages of the book, because Havdallah is at the end. So I think that envelope of beginning and end made it feel natural. I did think for the Haggadah about Pesach appropriate titles, because Yedid Nefesh is obviously very much a Shabbat, poem of Shabbat, sort of there for a Shabbat phrase. But at some point I realize like the hopefully, you know, the reason I think people will look at really take a serious look at this book in the first place is because they've, because, because people have seen the bencher and therefore I wouldn't make any sense to call it anything other than Yedid Nefesh. So in that sense, the Haggadah is the Yedid Nefesh Haggadah because, because of the brand.
Right, it's all, it all gets to the end of the day, Yedid Nefesh Haggadah umbrella. I love that idea of bookending. We love an inclusio, right, something that connects it from the beginning to the end. And I'm I'm wondering, you know, as we kind of wrap up this conversation, what your hopes might be for someone who is utilizing your bencher, usually utilizing your Haggadah, what do you hope for them?
I think what I hope for a user of the books is what I hope for students and for my students in the school, which is and we're always trying to sort of figure out this balance between training kids into building their literacy, and giving them sort of different kinds of ways to access the kind of spiritual experience and what's the relationship between those. And my goal has always been to a need to teach them, the, give them the literacy so that they're comfortable enough with the rituals, so that they can use it as a canvas to paint their own their own spiritual landscape. And I don't presume to sort of an that presuming to sort of tell them what that landscape should look like. I want to give them materials to be able to craft it. And I think what the bencher and the Haggadah, I think the same like what I wanted, from what I want from the Secretary is for to it for it to feel like a base text that you can have a pile of you can pass it on the table, everyone can kind of be on the same page, everyone can feel like they can access the text and feel comfortable with it and keep track of where they are and what's going on. And use that as a springboard. And then all of the different ways that we turn Shabbat, Shabbat rituals, turn the Seder ritual into deep meaningful experience kind of leaps off from that, right. And all of the all of the activities and readings and poems and, and other things become possible once you feel like the text is welcoming you. So I hope I hope that like my hope, my hope is that they are they're a canvas that all types of people feel they can draw.
Amen, wow, I am envisioning that canvas. What a beautiful metaphor. And I'm also just feeling so have like the warm and fuzzies thinking about your journey from experiencing powerful communal moments of song and prayer to creating those and bringing people in, and then making a bencher and a haggadah, so that even more people can have more access to those connective quality moments. So thank you. Thank you for, for sharing that gift with us.
Thank you.
And where can people find your books? And is your haggadah available currently?
So I had the good fortune of starting in with the bencher working with a designer who also has this great website and is a distributor. So it's called Haggadahs-R-Us, and he's the one who has sold the venture since it was first in print, and I am so grateful that I do not ever have to deal with orders and distribution, G?d forbid. And the the Haggadah will also be is will also be sold through Hagaddahs-R-Us, it is, the preorder is available for pre order now, it will be ready to be sent out sometime in early February. But it's it's open for for orders now. It you know, it's I don't know I'm excited, I'm excited to use it. Look, you know, I, I printed a beta version, this past for this for this past Pesach to give a few families a chance to try it out. And I got all sorts of feedback, and corrections and suggestion. But the most important thing was people, knowledgeable families who said, Oh, we can look forward to using the real thing. This feels like a book we could use. So I'm really I'm really hopeful that people embrace it. And I look forward to that. And I will say like, one of the things about being classroom teachers, it's a very, it's a very sort of insular environment, not a lot of people outside of your classroom, see what's going on with it. It's always been a precious thing to me, and that I have had this one thing out there that people across a wide range of communities and places encountered little pieces of my Torah, I've always really sort of appreciated that. And so I hope that this will be the same.
Amen, and now listeners, if and when you buy or come across these books out in the wild, you can feel a little more connected. We don't always know the people we often don't know the people who are making the decisions about what our siddurim and our benchers and our haggadot look like, but but now you know one. And I hope that that can help you connect to those experiences even more. So thank you so so much Josh, for joining us today.
Thank you so much for having me. This has been great.
And thank you so much for listening! Our editor is Christy Dodge, our show notes are done by Yaffa Englander, please check out our amazing shownotes. Our podcast producer is Rachel Kaplan. Take a look at light lab.co for show notes and transcripts and all sorts of cool things coming up. Follow us on social media. We hope that you have a beautiful and blessed day wherever it is that you are and we will see you again real soon.
