Page:Philip Birnbaum - ha-Siddur ha-Shalem (The Daily Prayer Book,1949).pdf/20

Rh said that the editions that have included the available English translation of the Hoshanoth have not been enhanced by it. The Hoshanoth can be appreciated only in the Hebrew.

The present edition of the complete Siddur abides by the wise counsel of Rabbi Judah of Regensburg, who wrote in the twelfth century: “He who copies a prayerbook... ought to copy every recurrent passage to the end, thereby dispensing with the worshiper’s need of searching for it...” In this volume each of the services is arranged as a completely integrated unit so that the worshiper is not called upon to search from page to page and to commute from reference to reference. The directions are explicit, brief and to the point. The traditional text is left intact, carefully vocalized, and divided into sentences and clauses by the use of modern punctuation marks.

Festival services such as Tal and Geshem, Akdamuth and Hoshanoth, have been included in this edition in view of the fact that copies of the special prayerbooks for Pesaḥ, Shavuoth and Sukkoth are not always available in sufficient numbers. On the other hand, portions of the High Holyday services have not been made part of this edition. Their inclusion is unwise and even misleading; because of their wide range and variety, the prayers recited on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are properly situated in the Maḥzor and should not be embodied in the regular daily Siddur.

Obvious errors found in current editions of the Siddur have been removed. Instead of, the variant has been adopted as the correct reading in the fifth verse of Yigdal. This verse is the poetic counterpart of Maimonides’ fifth principle that the Creator is the only one to whom it is proper to address our prayers; hence,