Well of Living Insight: Comments on the Siddur

Green’s Well or Be’er is a contemporary and personal commentary on the traditional Hebrew prayerbook.

Contemporary Jews, including those who attend synagogue regularly, are well aware of the wide gap between the text of the siddur, composed over the course of many centuries, and their own beliefs. Over the course of the past century, there have been many attempts to alter the language of the prayerbook in order to “update” it.

But that is not the way of Jewish tradition. The Jewish path has always been that of maintaining the ancient forms, with their deep echo-chamber of antiquity, and updating their meaning by the ongoing process of reinterpretation.

That is the purpose of this volume. It works with the traditional Hasidic prayerbook, skipping nothing. Green is a scholar of Hasidism and Jewish mysticism, but also an open-minded and inquiring seeker. His own faith is deeply shaped by monism, the belief that all is one within God, that we exist as part of an ever-flowing divine universe, manifest in the natural world and alive in each human soul.

But how do we pray to such a God? How do we do so while reading from a book written by biblical psalmists, ancient and medieval poets, philosophers and kabbalists, all of whom belonged to another age? Following an introduction that deals with all these questions, Green’s commentary goes through the entire liturgy, offering comments meant to inspire and to stimulate thought.

The book begins with the daily liturgy and will be especially helpful to those who engage with it regularly. It is meant to be used as a companion to the prayerbook itself. It then goes on to deal with the prayer services for shabbat, for holidays (including sections on the hallel psalms and the Passover haggadah) and the High Holy Days.

Well of Living Insight is a must for rabbis, cantors, and other leaders of Jewish prayer. But it is really written for seekers, within the Jewish community and beyond, who long to mine the ancient wisdom of Judaism to shape a contemporary spirituality that is both intellectually rigorous and religiously inspiring.