Atheists daven too…

The Forward’s got an article this week about an atheist siddur.

My knee-jerk reaction to that is “eww, what?!” but I know myself for a liturgical conservative, so when the nice Forward people asked for an illustration, I got out my special Mental Crowbar I use for inducing open-mindedness, and came up with the piece you see here.

See how it works? It’s a well-known phrase from the liturgy, both expressing the idea that every living thing has the urge to commune with the divine, and leaving the viewer to contemplate just what that means.

Note, by the way, that we say “every living being,” not “every living person,” or similar. This surely consciously includes living beings who don’t have theology, like fish, say, or deer, and why not atheists? The idea of non-theistic beings seeking spiritual communion is hard-coded into theistic liturgy, so really an atheist siddur is not such a bizarre idea as all that.

You can’t really see from the picture, but the pen-flourished decoration is an old manuscript adornment done in a très modern ice-blue metallic ink, a visual echo of what the siddur is attempting.

It’s for sale, make me an offer :)

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.