“Designed by committee” has come to be seen as a pejorative shorthand for a project that had too many cooks spoiling the broth, with lots of meetings but little or underwhelming results. The saying “A camel is a horse designed by committee” says it all.

But I have had a different experience. In 2011, after spending 20 years doing Jewish adult education in Toronto, I polled my students and, together with them, created a synagogue “by committee.” At a series of invitation-only parlor meetings, each with a designated audience (e.g., singles, families with tots, families with bnei mitzvah-aged kids, empty nesters and more), we envisioned a shul guided by high lay involvement and deep lay commitment, a covenantal community where every member was expected and trained to take an active role. Thirteen years later, City Shul has over 200 active member units and is recognized as a thriving force in the downtown Toronto Jewish community, and I recently retired from my role as City Shul’s founding rabbi.

A couple of years ago, when some members of the congregation began asking for a prayerbook that would reflect our own traditions, values and unique “traditional-Reform, davening-singing vibe,” I was faced with a dilemma. As the rabbi, I could surely take the task on myself: I could evaluate the many prayer books on the market and then make a suggestion to the leadership on which one to buy; or I could take a stab at creating a siddur myself. But my more aspirational hope was to generate some true ownership of the siddur by the full community, and the only way to do that was by ensuring that its users — the synagogue members — had a voice in the creative process. 

This is how we came to design a siddur by committee.

The process of creating the City Shul prayer book began with a meeting, open to any interested shul members. We wanted to hear the needs, wishes and concerns for a new siddur for our community. What did “the people” want? A small task force was also created to start exploring existing prayer books as well as the possibility of writing our own from scratch. Over the course of a full year, we experimented with many different siddurim, Reform, Conservative and independent. As a Reform congregation, we wanted to be part of the movement-wide use of Mishkan Tefilah, the official prayer book created by the Reform movement, but we felt that it was not imbued with the unique nature of both Canadian and City Shul worship.

Our process shifted when, after consulting with the Union for Reform Judaism and the Central Conference of American Rabbis, we discovered that Mishkan Tefilah could be adapted to individual congregational styles while retaining its translations and commentary. We based our adaptations on the Australian version of Mishkan Tefilah, which uses traditional phraseology and retains much more of the traditional liturgy and uses British — and thus Canadian— spelling. This adaptation process was done over the course of a second year, section by section, by the committee. 

After another congregation-wide meeting to ask crucial questions about liturgy — what traditional phrases did we want to add, what additions or deletions or formulaic changes to the Reform liturgy did we want to incorporate— we formed a liturgy task force to investigate and study sources and make those decisions. A commentary task force was created to ensure that our prayer book would be as educational as it was spiritual. Another small group took responsibility for the siddur’s introduction — to vet the opening material for the first moment a user “meets” the book. 

Yet another small group was tasked to work with our professional siddur designer, Baruch Sienna. While Baruch happens to be my husband, he applied and interviewed for the job and was chosen because of his talents as a Jewish educator, graphic designer and Hebrew typesetter who had already designed other prayer books for the Canadian Jewish community. Laypeople took responsibility for securing permissions for all the poetry and artwork we wanted to use from other sources. 

Finally, it was at yet another community-wide meeting that we decided on the name of our new prayer book. 

Each task force engaged different people, representing the widest possible spectrum of ages, observance levels, needs and perspectives possible. Our participants included founding members and new members; those with traditional backgrounds and those with Reform backgrounds; those very familiar with liturgy and those unfamiliar with it; people born Jewish or converts to Judaism, and people who are neither; those who read Hebrew very well and those who use transliteration all the time; and those who grew up going to services and those who are new to it.

All in all, between task forces and congregational meetings, proofreading both Hebrew and English and beta-testing pages at services, over 100 congregants participated in the creation of our siddur.

Because of this diversity, we had our share of disagreements. For example, there were challenging conversations around the Prayer for Israel, as some participants felt disengaged or even hostile to having such a prayer; they felt it would “politicize” our spiritual siddur. Then we wrestled with whether to add a Canadian tribal land acknowledgment to the Prayer for Our Country. We wondered: Would that be superficial and too “politically correct”? These concerns prompted deep communal introspection, which might not have happened if I had created or chosen a siddur unilaterally as the rabbi. In the end, we wrote our own version of both, which went through many iterations and caused printing delays. And there were moments when my ego was bruised, like when the Introduction Committee returned my painstakingly crafted draft with a full-blown rejection, sending me back to the drawing board for a complete rewrite. Their critique was justified and the intro was better because of that — but it still stung. 

There were also moments of sheer beauty, such as when the congregational meeting to determine a name for the siddur took hours to define what our congregation was actually like, how we pray and why we pray. The process of coming up with a name was as meaningful as the name they chose: Shirat HaLev (Song of the Heart).

I learned three important lessons from this process. First, do not dismiss the holy work of committees. When tasked properly and driven by a vision, a committee with a limited time frame and a clear objective can mutually invigorate all of its members. Second, do not underestimate the value of laypeople having a voice in the vehicles used for their own spiritual and prayer lives. Creating our own lovingly crafted and somewhat idiosyncratic siddur has led to increased attendance and increased participation at our services. And third, do not assume that standard siddurim will work for all congregations. They have been written by others, for others. Taking the time to research and choose our own prayer book gave us the impetus to define ourselves as a congregation in a deeper way than we imagined it would.

In our case, creation by committee did not produce a camel instead of a horse. For us, it was a blessing that allowed our community to stretch itself in beautiful and spiritual ways. 

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein is the rabbi emerita of City Shul in Toronto and the author of four books on women and Judaism. She is a member of the National Mentor Team for the Clergy Leadership Incubator (CLI), a two-year rabbinic fellowship program directed by Rabbi Sid Schwarz.