Many communities face Days of Awe this year that will be streamed / Zoom-based, rather than in person. This will be a High Holiday season like no other we’ve known. I knew I would need to adapt Days of Awe for Zoom / screensharing. I’m sharing the new digital machzor via Bayit: Building Jewish, an organization I co-founded that creates, refines, and uplifts meaningful tools for “building Jewish.”

Holy at Home is an editable set of machzor slide decks available in return for a donation to Bayit. (Information on that below.) We titled the slide decks Holy at Home because that’s the work of this time: sanctifying the place where we are, wherever we are.

This is the first slide in the first slide deck.

Holy at Home is a set of six powerpoint slide decks:

• Erev Rosh Hashanah (interweaving Ma’ariv / the evening service with the Sefardic custom of a seder for Rosh Hashanah),
• Rosh Hashanah morning,
• Kol Nidre,
• Yom Kippur morning with Yizkor,
• Yom Kippur afternoon (Avodah and Mincha), and
• Ne’ilah.

All are editable, so each community can customize in ways that will meet their needs.

Much of what’s in these six slide decks comes from Days of Awe, the machzor that I curated and released some years ago via my blog Velveteen Rabbi. If you’ve been using Days of Awe, you’ll recognize a lot of what’s here — Hebrew and English, readings and prayers, tradition and creative riffs on tradition, poetry and artwork, translations and transliterations. That said, the original material from Days of Awe has also been adapted and improved for these slide decks in a variety of ways:

• We’ve made many typo fixes;
• Every word of Hebrew is now transliterated and translated;
• There are full-color images adorning most slides, because that’s possible via slides in a way it was not possible in print;
• I’ve steered away from prayer variations or settings that are rounds, or that work primarily because of harmony (given that it’s not possible to sing simultaneously over Zoom);
• And there are also a lot of new things added to these slide decks — new liturgies, new poems, new illustrations, new approaches to Haftarah — that aren’t in the book.

You can preview the slide decks as PDF files. If they meet your needs (or could be edited / adapted to meet your needs), we ask a donation to Bayit: Building Jewish (sliding scale: $360 and up, unless you truly can’t afford the $360). Once you donate, we’ll send you an email containing download information for the six slide decks. Learn all about the project, preview the PDF files, and donate to receive the slide decks here at the Bayit website.