For six years, Devon A. Sojourner Spier kept hearing a voice buzzing inside the daily and weekly liturgical rhythms of Jewish prayer, “Witness me, let me out.” Turns out, that voice was tugging at her sleeve, crying out to be born. “Refracted: The Jewish Anti-Fascist Liturgical Playbook for the Prismatic Shifting of Global Jewish Life” is her attempt to answer it.

The opening quote by Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, “Peace is achieved through the effort to make peace between two opposites, just as God makes peace in His high places between Fire and Water, which are two opposites. The way to achieve peace is through complete self-sacrifice to sanctify the name of God. Then it is possible to pray with genuine devotion,” sets the bar high for what genuine prayer requires. And the bar is this: Fire and Water do not mix. And so it is with the seemingly irreconcilable realities of Jews and Palestinians. But Spier demands the effort to hold them together in one room, because only then is genuine devotion possible.

Spier isn’t writing essays about peace. Rather, she is writing and reframing actual Jewish prayers. She wants prayer to stop being something you say and become something you do. This she does by literally taking the ancient structure of the Jewish prayers and asking what the words require of us, and what they would become if, when we mumble them, we also mean them in our hearts.

Spier carries a broken heart, a heart that sees people trapped inside the very prayers she prays. That’s rare. Most people find comfort in the words of their prayers. They protect their prayer lives from the horrors of the world. Spier does the opposite. She lets the horrors sit inside the Barchu, Kaddish, and the Shema, among others. She is broken, but still praying. That’s what makes the reader want to keep reading, not because the author has the answers, but because she refuses to look away from the brokenness before her.

“Refracted: The Jewish Anti-Fascist Liturgical Playbook for the Prismatic Shifting of Global Jewish Life” uses a white and black palette. It’s a choice that refuses to comfort the reader, confronting them instead. The palette mirrors the themes of fire and water, life and death, as well as despair and hope. The book’s language is stark, absolute and uncoloured. The palette matches that tone. But it also uses red sparingly. It is a color that disrupts, and its incorporation makes you sit up so you don’t miss what matters most. The book requires it. Remove it, and you remove the book’s ability to do what it came to do.

Every page of this book is a refraction. Its title doesn’t over-promise. Instead it under-promises by calling itself a “playbook,” then delivering a radical reimagining of prayer. At the end, it emerges as a mirror that every Jew as well as every other human being can look into, and see who they’ve been praying over instead of praying for.