My People's Prayer Book, Vol. 2: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries--The Amidah

Rating:
Summary: well done
Review: A good guide to the Amidah from varying perspectives. Unlike another reviewer, I liked the fact that the book had some "outside the mainstream" views as well as more traditional views. I hope that the authors of the next generation of Conservative and Reform prayerbooks take a hint from this book and put in more commentary to explain what our prayers are all about; a recent set of Orthodox prayerbooks, the Artscroll series, have already done so.

Rating:
Summary: well done
Review: A good guide to the Amidah from varying perspectives. Unlike another reviewer, I liked the fact that the book had some "outside the mainstream" views as well as more traditional views. I hope that the authors of the next generation of Conservative and Reform prayerbooks take a hint from this book and put in more commentary to explain what our prayers are all about; a recent set of Orthodox prayerbooks, the Artscroll series, have already done so.

Rating:
Summary: A very nice compendium of commentaries on "the" prayer.
Review: This book is the second in a series on the Jewish prayer book. It makes the intricacies of the history and meaning of the most important Jewish prayers accesible to people with little prior knowledge and interesting to people with previous experience in the area. All the comments are very good, except maybe for Ms. Falk's, who sounds to me extremely removed from Jewish mainstream. The book has an interesting presentation, Talmud-like, with commentaries around the prayer being studied; once you get used to it it's alright. The Hebrew font is very easy to read, and the translation is indeed beautiful and faithful to the original. The only "minus" is that the book contains a few "typos" which one careful reading before the actual printing could have detected.