Shacharit: For the Twilight People
A downloadable siddur
In Judaism, trans people are often represented by twilight due to its liminal properties. This siddur focuses in on poetry about transness, divinity, and love for G!d. Shacharit is "dawn", the prayers for when a Jew wakes up every morning. This is specifically for weekday and having no minyan. Alongside beautiful traditional liturgy, is original poetry by me, and all photography is mine as well. Liberties were taken with translation of Psalms, ancient poems, to give a more gender-expansive role to G!d. I hope this could aid someone in their prayers, or at least speak to the sense of connection to the Divine.
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Install instructions
A PDF or plain .txt document. The PDF is the full document and the .txt document is only the poetry - no images, liturgy, and formatting. It is really meant to be viewed alongside the liturgy.
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Thank you for making this !!!! It's exactly what I needed !
I’m so glad it is helpful!
"Shacharit: For the Twilight People" by Ezra Saville (tumblr). Ezra explains "This is a siddur for shacharit, or dawn/morning prayers, centered around transness and divinity. If you're Jewish, you will understand. Alongside traditional liturgy, there is my own poetry and photography. In Judaism, trans people are often represented by twilight due to its liminal properties. This siddur focuses in on poetry about transness, divinity, and love for G!d. Shacharit is "dawn", the prayers for when a Jew wakes up every morning. This is specifically for weekday and having no minyan." This is the largest submission I've received so far and I really love the clear dedication, thought, and love that went into compiling these translations of prayers. The photos taken by Ezra as well are also very beautiful and just look amazing with the formatting and separation within the design of this book. I'm not Jewish myself, so I can't claim to appreciate nor understand this from a personal place, or firsthand experience. I can however tell you I find spirituality and listening and learning about all different spiritual experiences and how faith intersects with marginalization to be something that is deeply important to me and a lot of people I care about.
There are many spiritual ways trans people can have a relationship with religion, and often those relationships involve their transness or experiences with gender. It's important that we recognize this and welcome, encourage, and respect the many different ways faith, politics, and marginalization can play a symbiotic role in peoples lives. This was a really great chapbook to read, and as I've said before, I think translations are the future of poetry and writing in general. Combating the supremacy of English as the "primary language" forced upon so many people in complete disrespect of their cultures and history. I will absolutely be recommending this chapbook to any of my Jewish trans friends who might be interested, and I'm very grateful to have had all of these beautiful prayers shared with me and the jam.
"G!d is the bearer of many names, just like you. G!d is He, She, Ze, They, Em, Xe, Fae, It, and All. G!d knows what is it like to take on role of Parent, Sibling, Caretaker, Mourner, Lover, Friend, Leader, and Healer. G!d shares the Divine Image with you, so do best to take care of it and affirm it as yours for it is Their body, too."