With All Your Heart: The New CBST Siddur Bchol Lvavcha for Friday Night

by Sharon Kleinbaum (Editor)

Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) is proud to publish Siddur B’chol L’vav’cha, (With All Your Heart), a new edition of the community’s long-standing Friday night prayer book. Created for individuals coming from a broad spectrum of Jewish practice and tradition, this siddur introduces numerous liturgical innovations that expand definitions of Jewish family and community to explicitly embrace lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) families. “B’chol L’vav’cha publicly affirms the pride GLBT Jews possess today, and provides a message of tolerance, inclusion, and inspiration that will facilitate meaningful moments of communal and personal devotion and joy for all Jews,” said Rabbi David Ellenson, President of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. “It roots itself firmly in the soil of Jewish liturgical tradition and draws creatively upon a whole variety of Jewish sources while providing a host of innovative and imaginative poems and prayers.” With All Your Heart is a meaningful and important addition to a congregation’s liturgical collection, and is an important resource for LGBT-friendly synagogues. “This siddur represents and embraces all of us in our beautiful and God-given diversity,” said the book’s editor in chief, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, Senior Rabbi of New York City’s Congregation Beth Simchat Torah (CBST) since 1992. “It represents a key facet of CBST’s mission of creating a kehilla kedosha, a sacred community, built on a love of the Jewish people, a passion for social justice, prayer, and study. Our hope is that this prayer book finds its way to synagogues and into homes across the nation.”

318 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Daniel Ricken · Rating 5 out of 5]

For years, I have used this Siddur for overwhelmingly most of my prayer practice, but never really took the time to read it thoroughly and understand what the words meant. Most of the prayers were learned a long time ago by rote so while I knew roughly what they all were about and could read the Hebrew if I tried, so much was muscle memory coming back that I hadn't really read the text itself. I had a goal to change that this year and little by little, month by month, I got through it. Reading every Hebrew word/page until I could read every prayer fluidly, reading all of the English translations to understand what each prayer actually meant, reading each poem/kavanah passage to center my headspace on the focus of each particular one, reading each change that CBST made to the traditional text to help make everything more accessible and relevant to contemporary time. The work, care, and love that went into this was remarkable and I am really proud to more fully appreciate it.