Future

The fact that any congregation will shortly --- even if they cannot already --- be able to create liturgy that is indistinguishable in form from the CCAR's publications raises profound issues for the future role of the CCAR as the clearinghouse of Reform prayer.

To the extent that the CCAR wants to remain arbiter of Jewish prayer --- and so to the extent that our movement will have a standard liturgy --- it seems clear that that CCAR must accept the new methods some congregations are using to create prayer, and help introduce its own liturgy through those methods. For example, Davka currently sells the complete Orthodox liturgy on disk, in a format that can be used by their Hebrew word processor (see Section 4.6.2 below), for less than $100 dollars. Private companies already offer one version of the Reform liturgy in Hebrew (see Section 4.6.3). Yet the CCAR currently plans only a more limited software release of its liturgy.

One major area is which some current software falls short is quality control. While many congregations are currently creating their own worship services, the CCAR has not produced systemic guidelines to help them.

Future options for the CCAR are discussed in Section 5.