YouTube Video Siddur: Coming Soon? Coming Never?

Several years ago, a few of us here at PunkTorah bounced around the idea of a video siddur. Jeremiah, aka @circlepitbimah, was one of them.

The idea is pretty simple: a series of YouTube videos that played each portion of a siddur. Instead of opening a book, you would pop a DVD in (or go to a YouTube channel) and start your davvening. You could skip the parts you don’t do by pressing the forward button, in the same way you might flip over a few pages.

This is already somewhat possible through the power of YouTube playlists. While sitting next to my friend and colleague Don Kramer, I combed through the Shabbat service, picking videos and dropping them into the playlist below. Feel free to suggest better/different videos, as I did this in about 15 minutes.

The big questions are:

• Do you like the idea of a video siddur?
• What would you want in it? What would you want to exclude?
• If we did this project as a community, how would you want to put it together?
• Everything has a price: time, money, etc. What would you pay for a video siddur? How much time would you commit to making this project possible?

Or, if its all too much, just make your own playlists and post them below! We’re happy to share them.

Written by Rabbi Patrick