Praying with a whole heart: Editor of new Conservative machzor in Bloomfield Aug. 30
By Cindy Mindell

When Rabbi Gary Atkins and Cantor Paul L. DuBro lead High Holiday services at Beth Hillel Synagogue this year, they’ll be using a new machzor, published in May by the Rabbinical Assembly.

“Lev Shalem,” translated as “complete heart” or “whole heart,” is a High Holiday prayer book project 12 years in the making, led by editor-in-chief Rabbi Edward Feld, who will speak at Beth Hillel about the endeavor on Aug. 30.
The new machzor is the first-ever overhaul of the Rabbinical Assembly’s 1972 “Mahzor for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur,” which was edited by founding RA editor Jules Harlow and was the first RA High Holiday publication to include contemporary texts.
“The executive director of the assembly asked if we could do ‘Lev Shalem’ in seven years,” Feld says. “I told him it would take 10. The process turned out to be so much more elaborate than I could have imagined, and now I know more about book production than I ever imagined I would.”
The machzor was composed and edited by a committee of Conservative rabbis and cantors to appeal to Jewish worshippers of diverse backgrounds, Hebrew and synagogue skill levels, and expectations.
“We began each meeting with the Mishnaic prayer, ‘May no error be caused by what we do,'” Feld says, “and we left each session having learned something, especially in the process of translation, where you’re forced to confront what a prayer really means and think through what you want to convey about it. We felt that sense of responsibility, because many Jews will be praying only from the English translation and we have to convey truly what the prayer is saying. I think it may be the first successful committee translation since the King James Bible.”
The machzor’s content is a combination of conventional High Holiday liturgy – including centuries-old traditional prayers recently rediscovered and reconstructed – and a variety of new elements such as contemporary Israeli poetry, quotations from contemporary Conservative rabbinical leaders, meditations written by 20th-century rabbis, and new prayers such as “Service of Brokenness and Wholeness” to be recited before the blowing of the shofar.
“The effort was to be both very traditional and very contemporary,” Feld says. “We tried to immerse ourselves in a variety of traditions, including the Ashkenazi, Spanish, and Italian rites. We had a deep consciousness of the varieties of people who would be there on the High Holidays – people who are in synagogue only a few times a year and are unfamiliar with the liturgy; people who are regular shul-goers; people who know a little Hebrew and who want to go back and forth between the Hebrew and English translation.”
So far, some 121,000 copies have been purchased by congregations throughout the country.
Feld is author of “Spirit of Renewal: Faith after the Holocaust” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 1991), and has published essays on theological, halachic, and ethical issues. As educational director of Rabbis for Human Rights-North America, Feld developed a curriculum for teaching human rights. He has served as director of Hillel at Princeton University, rabbi of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism, and rabbi-in-residence at the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was an advisor and mentor to rabbinical students. He left that position to work fulltime on the machzor, and now works as a rabbinic mentor and editor.
Feld’s book on biblical philosophies of law, “The Book of Revolutions: The Bible and the Formation of Judaism,” will be published by Aviv Press. He is writing a new book, “Gateways to Jewish Practice,” meant to appeal both to those new to Judaism and to those further along in their Jewish journey.
Rabbi Feld will speak about “Mahzor Lev Shalem” on Monday, Aug. 30 at 7:30 p.m., following evening minyan, at Beth Hillel Synagogue, 160 Wintonbury Ave., Bloomfield. Info: (860) 242-5561
To sample the new machzor: www.rabbinicalassembly.org/mahzor.html

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