About this edition
The Meta-Siddur, renewed
Rabbi David Wolfe-Blank (Reb David, z"l) taught Jewish Renewal davvenen in Seattle and at the Aquarian Minyan in Berkeley. He died in 1998, at 47. The Meta-Siddur grew out of a basic Judaism class he taught in the early 1990s. His students asked him to collect the handouts, and the collection kept growing, page by page, through a mail subscription. This site is built from version 5.0, which he called the Compleat Meta-Siddur.
Meta, in Aramaic, means "to reach towards". This collection of teachings, arranged loosely according to the four worlds of the Siddur (Jewish prayerbook), is intended as a "reaching" towards a more evolved Siddur.
His page at the center
Every page appears as Reb David made it, with his lettering, borders and drawings. Tap a page to zoom in. Nothing in his text has been changed. Some pages are also typed below the scan, so they can be read large, copied, or heard by a screen reader.
When a teaching runs across several pages, it has one address and the pages sit together. On a wide screen, Two-up shows them side by side, and Focus folds the margins away.
The margins
The left margin places the page in the book and in the morning service. It also holds search and a filter for the list of pages. The right margin holds:
- Try it: small interactive ways into a page.
- Reb David’s note: what he wrote about the page in the notes he mailed with his subscription packets.
- Illumination, Practice, Listen & watch: new commentary, practices, recordings and video, added over time.
- Sources: the texts he drew on. The classical ones open from Sefaria in Hebrew and English, beside his version.
- Elsewhere on shir.earth: the same prayer to sing in the Contemplative Siddur, the psalm in Shir Shel Yom, the mishnah in Blessings.
- Words, Threads, Subjects: a glossary, related pages, and the page’s place in the subject index.
The numbers
Every page keeps Reb David’s number, and the number works as an address: metasiddur.shir.earth/60.4 opens Enjoy Being. He explained the decimals himself:
The model for this type of growth may be considered fractal (a combination of fractured and fractionated) and is exemplified by the cauliflower in which little florets emerge in the space between other complete florets. So too, new Meta-Siddur pages are placed in between existing pages creating new associations and an alternative line of idea development.
The colors
Reb David mailed his later pages on colored paper:
Lately I have been sending them in different colors so that the latest subscription pages are easier to find after they have been collated into the MetaSiddur. It makes for an interesting color scheme over time, as well.
Here, color marks the world a page belongs to, in the same colors as the Contemplative Siddur:
- Assiyah · earth, body
- Yetzirah · water, heart
- B’riah · air, mind
- Atzilut · fire, being
- Four Worlds
- Hassidut study
- Torah service
- Kaddish
- Sefirot, Shabbat, festivals
- Tikkun Hatzot
- Kheshbon Hanefesh
- Songs
Finding your way
- Search (/) covers every page. Untyped pages are searched through a machine reading of the scan, so an odd spelling may help.
- ← → step through the book in Reb David’s order. Z zooms; M opens the map on smaller screens.
- ✦ marks pages also typed.
The edition is being made by Rabbi Shir Meira Feit, page by page.