Siddur
The earliest parts of Jewish prayer books are the Shema Yisrael ("Hear O Israel") (Deuteronomy 6:4 et seq) and the Priestly Blessing (Numbers 6:24-26), which are in the Torah.
A set of eighteen (currently nineteen) blessings called the Shemoneh Esreh or the Amidah (Hebrew, "standing [prayer]"), is traditionally ascribed to the Great Assembly in the time of Ezra, at the end of the biblical period.
[citation needed] According to the Talmud, soon after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem a formal version of the Amidah was adopted at a rabbinical council in Yavne, under the leadership of Gamaliel II and his colleagues.
The earliest existing codification of the prayerbook was drawn up by Amram ben Sheshna of Sura Academy in Sawad, the Abbasid Caliphate, an area known as "Babylonia" in Jewish texts, about 850 CE (Seder Rav ʿAmram).
Another formulation of the prayers was that appended by Maimonides to the Book of Love in his Mishneh Torah: this forms the basis of the Yemenite liturgy, and has had some influence on other rites.
There are differences among, amongst others, the Sephardic (including Spanish and Portuguese and Mizrachim), Teimani (Yemenite), Hasidic, Ashkenazic (divided into German, Polish and other European and eastern-European rites), Bené Roma or Italkim, Romaniote (Greek, once extending to Turkey, Crimea and the southern Italian peninsula) and also Persian, Kurdish, Bukharian, Georgian, Mountain Jewish, Ethiopian and Cochin-Jewish liturgies.
Most of these are slight differences in the wording of the prayers; for instance, Oriental Sephardic and some Hasidic prayer books state "חננו מאתך חכמה בינה ודעת", "Graciously bestow upon us from You wisdom (ḥochmah), understanding (binah) and knowledge (daat)", in allusion to the Kabbalistic sefirot of those names, while the Nusach Ashkenaz, as well as Western Sephardic and other Hasidic versions retain the older wording "חננו מאתך דעה בינה והשכל", "Graciously bestow upon us from You knowledge, understanding, and reason".
Some forms of the Sephardic rite are considered to be very overtly kabbalistic, depending on how far they reflect the ritual of Isaac Luria (see Lurianic Kabbalah).
While the Ashkenazic rite does contain some kabbalistic elements, such as acrostics and allusions to the sefirot ("To You, God, is the greatness [gedullah], and the might [gevurah], and the glory [tiferet], longevity [netzach],..." etc.
For this reason, many Hasidim (such Belz and Viznitz) recite many piyyutim on Yom Tov and the sabbaths of the four special portions preceding Passover in accordance with the practice of the Ari.
These siddurim follow the halakha of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef (1920–2013)[13] a Talmudic scholar, and authority on Jewish religious law, and spiritual leader of Israel's ultra-orthodox Shas party.
This prayer book makes very few additions or changes and substantially follows the older Yemenite tradition as it had existed prior to this conflict.
David Teutsch: Siddur Nashim, by Margaret Wenig and Naomi Janowitz in 1976, was the first Jewish prayer book to refer to God using female pronouns and imagery.
[19] Reconstructionist Rabbi Rebecca Alpert (Reform Judaism, Winter 1991) commented: The experience of praying with Siddur Nashim... transformed my relationship with God.
[22] Yoreh writes about his work: "I think prayer is communal and private expression of hopes, fears, an appreciation of aesthetic beauty, good attributes.
