Scandalous.
somehow i assume that Artscroll considers the idea of women knowing how to lein much more scandalous
someone did recently tell me that in her RW elementary school the girls were taught trop. i can't remember which one.
iirc the rav's mahzor, printed by artscroll, does not have trop.
isn't there a mahloket somewhere if shema has to be read from a torah (in which case it makes more sense to require trop?)
i taught my son to lein the first paragraph of shema, but it's a struggle because it's so different from how he does it in daycare.
What would a woman need trop for? Fishes and bicycles, man.
A more important question is, what are you doing with an artscroll siddur? ;)
"Nevertheless, the grammatically-inclined are stringent in this matter"
I didn't look into this, but perhaps "medakdikim" in the Shulchan Aruch means those who are careful/machmir(m'dakdikim b'mitzvos"), rather than "grammatically inclined"? Be that as it may, there are indeed spaces between words in the Woman's siddur, which is what I believe is what "lo dikdeik b'osiyaseha" refers to, and there also symbols for shva na's.
I would make your point a little differently(speaking of m'dakdikim) that Artscroll in this case apparently makes a difference in men and women being careful/stringent, presumably because the latter are unfamiliar with cantillation, although technically, I doubt there is a source for such a distinction in Krias Shma. As an aside, as far as grammer is concerned, in some communities women might be bigger m'dakdikim than men!
"there are indeed spaces between words" should be "lines between word".
"A more important question is, what are you doing with an artscroll siddur? ;)"
A more important question is, what are you doing with an artscroll women's siddur? ;)
Cosidering that women are really exempt from the obligation of reading Shema, since it is a time bound Mitzvah, it would be a an excessive Chumroh for them to be Medakdek to read it with the Trop.
Cosidering that women are really exempt from the obligation of reading Shema, since it is a time bound Mitzvah, it would be a an excessive Chumroh for them to be Medakdek to read it with the Trop.
Printing the trop would give women an option, not compel them. 96.4% of non-Yekke, non-Sefardi Jews ignore the trop, too. (OK, 82.2% of Yekkes, too, I suppose.)
Cheap shot! It's not that Artscroll feels women can't be medakdek, but rather, Artscroll feels most women don't know trop, and thus did not feel it necessary to include it in a sidur marketed exclusively for women. Hard to argue with that.
(Of course, women who use artscroll siddurim dont know yiddish either, but I'll bet they put gott fun avruham in there . . . nu, yesh liyashev)
As an aside, as far as grammer is concerned, in some communities women might be bigger m'dakdikim than men!
M'dakdekot
Or "ois," I guess.
I was just ranting to my wife about this aspect of the Women's Siddur last week, and about the related fact that they leave out the weekday leinings found in the back of Artscroll's other siddurim. Which is odd, considering that they include other components of public prayer in the Women's Siddur, such as kaddish and kedushah.
It's actually a big problem.
Without the cantillation marks you will pronounce v'ahavta wrong and it will change from the future tense to the past tense and you may not be yotzei for that.
why do women need a special siddur in the first place? other than marketing an additional siddur that is.
What would it have hurt for them to have left the trop in? Most women, just as most men, would have just ignored it. The fact that the editors went to the trouble of deleting it from their existing format does say something, albeit subtly: women can't be trusted with trop because if they learn it, they will agitate to lein in public. But I think everyone should learn trop to understand the punctuation value that it adds.
Moishe Potemkin,
I stand corrected.
What about the title of this post("Can A Woman Be Medakdeik")? I assume it's used similar to the Hebrew infinitive where there is no gender.
"Without the cantillation marks you will pronounce v'ahavta wrong"
perhaps they assume that people will pronounce everything milera, except where there is a meteg saying to pronounce it mile'eil. And they print the meteg, e.g. on haEileh. So there is enough info for people to know how to pronounce it. (Not that I think one would not fulfill if it were pronounced incorrectly...)
I think Dan Klein is right on the mark. First, you include the trop of keriat Shema in the Ohel Sarah siddur, and the next thing you know the women will be leining at Shirah Hadashah!
i think the fact that feminists who complained so much about this siddur overlooked the missing trop says something about how peripheral trop is to women in general.
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"someone did recently tell me that in her RW elementary school the girls were taught trop. i can't remember which one."
it is bais yaakov of baltimore
DF:
"It's not that Artscroll feels women can't be medakdek, but rather, Artscroll feels most women don't know trop, and thus did not feel it necessary to include it in a sidur marketed exclusively for women. Hard to argue with that."
i'm not so sure. the question is whether the standard artscroll text was used and the trop was actually removed, or if the text was reset for the edition and the trop was just never put in (as you would have it).
another possibility is that the trop disappeared during the layout (such things happen with unusual characters) and was not noticed by proofreaders.
consider also that the text of mahzor ha-rav, printed by artscrolls, has mistakes, and also omits the trop. (or was this a comment on the Moderns' need for trop)
(i know i owe you an email.)
This is the first I have heard of this siddur. Never mind the trop. Why is there a separate woman's siddur? As near as I can tell the men's and women's davening differ by three words in b'rachot, one word in bentching, and not at all anywhere else. Certainly my wife and daughters have done perfectly well with the same siddurim my son and I use, and vice versa. If (from what I can tell from the advertising) the folks at Art Scroll wanted to add some halacha more applicable to women, why didn't they just expand the section in all their siddurim?
>(or was this a comment on the Moderns' need for trop)
Doubt it. In theory, then - if this were correct - only the Hebrew-only siddurim would have trope.
As far as whether they omited trope from an already existing template. It would seem like it on the face of it, but we must bear in mind that these days there is no bachur hazetzer. The formatting and their templates probably can be changed by a proverbial click of a mouse.
In terms of whether women can or should know or use trope - this decision may bespeak a sadder phenomenon: the apparent lack of recognition that the trope is important for understanding the text itself. Note that in Artscroll's Tanakh commentaries themselves there is little to no recognition of the trope.
Upon further review, even if most women don't know troppe, there would be no reason to conspicuously omit it. As Dan says, they could have left it in and women, like most men, would have ignored it. Perhaps the editors felt women needed a less cluttered siddur, cleaned of all but the most essential of instructions and additions?
There are two types of possible women's siddurim (to simplify things a lot).
1) A women's siddur with a feminist orientation.
2) A women's siddur with the opposite orientation.
Obviously A's is the latter. I would guess that many of the decisions had in mind not only that the siddur is for women, but also that it is not to be a feminist-oriented siddur. But bearing this in mind, Ari is absolutely correct to note that in various criticisms from more feminist-leaning circles, this was not pointed out. And along with other anecdotal and circumstantial evidence, it does seem like the few dikduk nerds there are tend to be male.
As for the matter of clutter, it should be noted that almost no Chumashim are printed without te'amim, and women can read them and follow along with leining just fine.
Anyone remember the old TV commercials for Virginia Slims? They made a point of distinguishing them from "the fat cigarettes men smoke." Seems to me that ArtScroll decided to target a new niche market by producing a siddur with a "prettier" cover and a few cosmetic changes (and who would miss the trop). Can anyone verify that this edition also weighs less? "You've come a long way, baby."
Does the siddur have any of the tefilos related to Krias HaTorah at all?
As a woman who tries to always say Krias Shema with the troppe, I'm glad that I use the Yitzchak Yair Artscroll as opposed to the women's edition.
ומ"מ יד המדקדקים
Speaking of medakdekim,I note that you incoporated the (י"ד)of the shaarei teshuva into the text of the remah :-)
Dan Klein,
Ours is in Wedgewood White.
Is it possible it's cheaper to print this way? Also I do not know how to lein but am careful about pronunciation, such as ve'ahavta... S-For Sephardic women, Hassiddur levath Yisrael alwasy spells out Go'd name w/o kabbalistic ideas-compare it to YeHaWweH Da'ath. ;)
fascinating! Have we come to any maskana on the matter?
My wife is a bigger dikduk nerd than me, but we both tend to lein the v'ahavta. In Avery-Binder style, no less.
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