[Avodah] Artscroll Question

Akiva Miller via Avodah avodah at lists.aishdas.org
Mon Sep 12 04:31:57 PDT 2016


R' Joel Rich asked:

> Anyone know why in the standard daily Artscroll siddur they
> moved the "chazan's stop" right after kriat shma from before
> l'dor v'dor to after it by al avoteinu, while leaving it
> there in the all Hebrew version (Tifferet Yaakov)?

I am looking at my "First edition - First impression - August 1984" of
their Hebrew-English version. This is the one that is so old that Duchaning
begins with "V'se'erav Alecha", and ArtScroll had not yet changed it to
"V'say'arev L'fanecha". In this edition, they have BOTH of the Chazan Stops
that you are asking about.

So you might be mistaken that they *moved* it. They might simply have
*removed* the first one. In any case, I do not know their reasons, and I
really wish that they would publish a siddur which would explain these
things. (But such a volume would probably invite even more questions and
complaints than they get now.)

But I will say this: I have noticed many differences between the
Hebrew-English and All-Hebrew versions, and I cannot help but suspect that
they are tailoring the editions towards what they think the customer wants
and expects. At the risk of generalizing, the Hebrew-English version seems
tailored for the "balabatish" crowd, and the All-Hebrew seems more
"yeshivish". I will give just two examples:

1) On Shabbos morning, after Yekum Purkan, all editions of the
Hebrew-English version has a short instruction that reads "In many
congregations, a prayer for the welfare of the State is recited by the
Rabbi, chazzan, or gabbai at this point." Now, please consider: The siddur
does not specify a text for this prayer. It does not say "all"
congregations. It does not even specify which "State" it is referring to!
Yet even such an instruction is omitted from every All-Hebrew edition. Why?

2) Here's a less political example: In their Hebrew-English siddur, the
text for each night's Sefirah counting ends with "La'omer", though recent
editions include a note that some say "Ba'omer". The All-Hebrew version is
reversed: The main text ends with "Ba'omer", and there is a note that some
say "La'omer". Why the reversal?

(After writing the above, I saw that the Schottenstein Interlinear version
for Shabbos and Yom Tov has Baomer withOUT any note about other minhagim,
which fits neither of the two patterns I listed above, leaving me even more
puzzled.)

Akiva Miller
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