Events

A Feminist Approach to the High Holy Days

August 5, 2015 By zwalsh 1 Comment

by Amy Sessler Powell

Fresh Ideas, Editor, Amy Sessler Powell, interviewed Marcia Falk about her book, The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season and her journey into writing new liturgies.

Marcia Falk

Poet and scholar, Marcia Falk, acclaimed author of the groundbreaking Book of Blessings, last summer, published The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season. Why did she choose to focus on the High Holidays? For the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. That’s where the Jews are.

The High Holidays are the days when religious, as well as nonaffiliated Jews, attend synagogue services in unparalleled numbers. Yet much of what they find there can be unwelcoming in its patriarchal imagery, leaving many worshipers unsatisfied. For those seeking to connect more deeply with their Judaism, and for all readers in search of a contemplative approach to the themes of the season, Falk has re-created key prayers and rituals from an inclusive perspective.

But the story of Falk’s engagement with writing prayer began several decades earlier.

“The words of prayer have always mattered to me, “ said Falk. “As a Jewish feminist in the 1970s and ‘80s, I thought it was important not just where and how we participate in synagogue life, but what we actually pray there. I had been a regular davener for years; I belonged to synagogues and attended services every Shabbat. I participated, gave drashot (talks about the Torah portion). But in the early 1980s, the liturgy was becoming more and more disturbing to me as a Jew and a feminist trying to live with integrity.

“I was in crisis. The liturgy wasn’t speaking for me, and in many ways I found it hurtful. But I didn’t want to give up my relationship to my community; I was attached to being a Jew in the Jewish world. “

Falk started to silently change the language, sometimes while on her feet during the Amidah (the prayer recited silently, while standing). She was often the last one to sit back down, because she lost track of time as she struggled to adapt the Hebrew words, changing the patriarchal image of God as the Lord and King to other, gender-neutral metaphors. She was not yet writing her new prayers down or sharing them publicly.

The Days Between

A turning point came in 1983, while she was a teacher at the Havurah Institute in Princeton. Rabbi Arthur Waskow was in charge of the Havdalah service to take place on Saturday night, and on Friday afternoon he asked Falk to provide akavanah, meditation, for each of the blessings.

“I told Art I just couldn’t do that, and when he asked why, I blurted out that I didn’t say those blessings any more. That was the first time I said aloud that I no longer prayed with the traditional words. Without missing a beat, Art said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, ‘So write your own blessings.’ I told him I thought they’d stone me. ‘Marcia,’ he said in a booming voice, ‘they won’t stone you.’

So I sat down that afternoon and wrote my first four blessings, and the next night, full of trepidation, I recited them before a community of 300 Jews, ranging in affiliation from atheist to Orthodox. I recited the new words without introduction, as though they had been written a couple of millennia ago by the rabbis, rather than the day before, by me. I offered no apology or explanation (I didn’t dare to), and, to my puzzlement and disbelief, the community said, Amen.”

In March of 1985, Falk published an essay in Moment Magazine, in which she presented some of her new blessings, which would eventually become part of her path-breaking Book of Blessings, published in 1996. The article engendered strong and voluminous reactions across the spectrum; Falk received fan mail as well as attack mail. While there were many Jews, especially Jewish women, who had been waiting for an alternative to the patriarchal imagery of the prayer book and who were thrilled that Falk had met the challenge, there were also people who insisted that she did not have the right to make changes, especially to the Hebrew. But, Falk says, Jewish liturgy has always changed over time. “If it doesn’t evolve, it ossifies.” And Falk believes it is not enough to change the English. Her work is unique in that it offers new prayer in Hebrew poetic language.

“Many Jews want a liturgy that expresses their values and concerns. Keeping it alive in a fresh way has always been part of Jewish tradition,” she says.

It has been eighteen years since the publication of The Book of Blessings, and Falk’s readers have waited long for its sequel. In The Days Between, Falk offers Hebrew and English blessings for festive meals, prayers for synagogue services, and poems and meditations for quiet reflection. The Rosh Hashanah section of the book includes a blessing for apples and honey, a re-creation of the Un’taneh Tokef prayer, and a new tashlikh (waterside ritual). Among the Yom Kippur prayers are a Viduy (confession) and a new Kol Nidrey. “Window, Bird, Sky,” a series of ten poems and meditations (one for each of the Ten Days of T’shuvah) bridges the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur sections.

Emphasizing introspection as well as relationship to others, Falk evokes her vision of the High Holidays as “ten days of striving to keep the heart open to change.” Her new book promises to open her readers’ hearts and minds.

Marcia Falk is the author of The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season. Amy Sessler Powell is HBI’s Communications Director.

Filed Under: Art, Events

On Bonna Haberman

June 19, 2015 By aspowell Leave a Comment

By Shulamit S. Magnus

Bonna Haberman created and ran Women of the Wall (WOW) for years and remained active in our core mission literally, to the day she died.

The idea for a religiously diverse group of Jewish women to pray together in a group service with Torah reading, came from Rivka Haut, z’l, an Orthodox Talmud scholar from Brooklyn. She was in Jerusalem in December 1988, along with about 1,000 other women for the first International Conference of Jewish Feminists when she suggested the idea. You can read about the background and experience of participants in the book Rivka co-edited with another founder of WOW, Phyllis Chesler: Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site.

Bonna, who lived in Jerusalem, asked herself why it took women coming from the Diaspora to have and execute this idea, when the Kotel, as she said, is in our backyard. Bonna being Bonna, then launched Women of the Wall as an Israeli group, going regularly, on various days of the week, when the Torah is read and days it is not. I was in Israel that year (1988-89). I was at the planning meeting for the first women’s tefilla at the Kotel, with Rivka Haut, and I read Torah there that first incredible time. I was a member of WOW during that first year with Bonna.

We experienced appalling violence for months. Haredi men charged through the mehitsa to attack us, even attempted to overturn the table with the Sefer Torah, an unimaginable sacrilege. Bonna, then hugely pregnant, caught the Sefer Torah against her belly lest, God forbid, it fall to the ground. When the police stopped men from coming through to attack us, Haredi women turned on us with stunning violence, sending several of us to the hospital.

In that year, the Ministry of Religion issued rulings criminalizing a woman’s voice in the Kotel precincts, and having a Sefer Torah. We risked fines and imprisonment. We sued before the Supreme Court of Israel. By this time, an international group of supporters, called the International Committee for Women of the Wall, Inc. (ICWOW), had formed. That group raised consciousness abroad about the cause. They raised funds. We commissioned and purchased a Sefer Torah for the women of Jerusalem and, in order to gain standing in the Supreme Court case, brought the Sefer Torah to Jerusalem, inaugurated it in festivities (details, in Chesler and Haut, eds.), and then brought it to the Kotel area, where we were blocked from bringing it to the Wall.

Bonna led the many years-long dealings with lawyers, commissions and court hearings, while continuing to lead tefillot, group prayers and the Torah readings at a nearby archeological site.

The Supreme Court ruled on our case in 2003, stating that in principle, our demands were legal. It cited political considerations and gave the government one year to prepare an alternate site, another nearby archeological site, Robinson’s Arch, to be able to accommodate prayer services. If that were not done within that time frame, the Court said we had every right to be at the Kotel in the manner we wished

The Government did not make Robinson’s suitable within that time frame. In any case, WOW, and ICWOW, resolutely rejected any suggestion of an alternate site and continued to insist on the same full religious expression at the Kotel that men have enjoyed since 1967. We continued to hold women’s services at the Kotel, departing to Robinson’s Arch for a number of years in order to read Torah, but never accepting the legitimacy of that arrangement and continuing to press for the rights we call “t-4”: women’s group tefilla (prayer) with voice, tallit, tefillin, and Torah.

In 2013, after women had been detained by police for donning talitot at the Kotel, claiming this disturbed the peace and violated custom, WOW won a stunning victory in the District Court of Judge Moshe Sobel. Sobel ruled sweepingly, on the basis of the 2003 Supreme Court ruling and on evidence presented in Court that Jewish women praying in our manner in no way disturbs the peace. He ruled that it was the protesters against us who did that while overwhelming evidence established that we, like other worshipers, only of the male variety, were just praying. But Sobel also ruled that, after a quarter of a century, our minhag, custom, was as much a part of the custom of the place as any other, and that we violated no custom, either. He said explicitly that all we seek to do there, t4, is legal and not to be barred.

From that point on, the police, who had been harassing us at the behest of the rabbinical administrator of the Kotel, Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz, started protecting us instead. It was a remarkable turnaround and testimony to the rule of law. Bonna was in Moshe Sobel’s court the day he heard the case; she participated in parsing the ruling that swiftly came, and in acting on it, by continuing to participate in women’s tefilla at the Kotel.

Rabbi Rabinowitz, however, issued a nohal, a pronouncement, stating that no one can bring a Torah scroll to the Kotel. Since he also refuses to allow women to use any of the dozens of Torah scrolls held on the men’s side, this effectively bars Jewish women from reading Torah at the Wall, a restriction we have gotten around several times, including most recently when I organized a service to pray for Bonna’s health and we got a Torah scroll in, and read from it at the Kotel. (See the details on our Facebook page. However, we cannot do this easily, in the open, because it is a violation of the court rulings on this matter.

Bonna has been an active member of Original Women of the Wall (OWOW), established by original founders of Women of the Wall in Oct., 2013, when the current leadership of WOW made a decision we are challenging. WOW is negotiating with the Government, along with the Reform and Conservative movements, to ban women’s tefilla at the Kotel and turn the Kotel officially into a synagogue under Haredi control– a status it does not now and never has had– in return for official recognition of those movements and preparation of Robinson’s Arch as a grand new plaza for egalitarian tefilla. Recognition of religious pluralism and proliferation of prayer sites and styles are worthy goals, which some of us may support individually, but absolutely not at the cost of giving up the whole purpose of Women at the Wall and the historic gains we have made.

Bonna was adamantly opposed to this and resolutely continued to support and promote our original goals. She participated in every step of our challenge to the scheme to give up women’s inclusive, pluralistic tefilla at the Kotel. She wrote about it, published about it, spoke about it, and strategized actively with us, coming to planning meetings even when weak from her illness and its treatment, in typical Bonna heroic manner; speaking with our lawyers, consulting with us, here in Israel, and in North America, who run OWOW. Bonna was utterly committed to egalitarianism in all aspects of life and in religion in particular, yet like all of us in OWOW, she understood the importance of and need for women’s tefilla, that is, of the need for feminism, as well as egalitarianism, in Judaism.

She was enormously buoyed by our tefilla at the Kotel, with Torah reading, in her honor just last week. This is what she wrote to me after I emailed that we had succeeded in getting a Torah in, and reading from it at the Kotel:

“Shulamit! OWOW!! Words cannot express how grateful I am to you all for this tefilla. I learned of your success when I returned from the hospital in the early eve after a grueling day. You made my heart soar! Much love and brakha -B”

Shulamit S. Magnus

Shulamit S. Magnus is Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Oberlin College, author of four books,including the winner of a National Jewish Book Award and Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Translation Award for her two-volume translation and critical edition of Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother (Stanford University Press, 2010, 2014). She was a founder of Women the Wall and is now living in Israel.

Filed Under: Events, News Tagged With: Bonna Haberman, Haredi, Jerusalem, Kotel, OWOW, Phyllis Chesler, Rivka Haut, WOW

We are Responsible for Each Other

June 1, 2015 By aspowell 12 Comments

By Shulamit Reinharz

HBI Director Shulamit Reinharz accepted an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters on May 31 from Hebrew College. Here are her acceptance remarks:

Several years ago, I had the privilege of meeting and speaking with the Dalai Lama. At one point he asked me, “Shula, the Jewish people were exiled from their homeland 2,000 years ago, yet they never have forgotten where they came from. My people were exiled from Tibet in 1950 and I fear most of them have already forgotten their origins. How were the Jews able to remember?”

I took a deep breath and answered, “Your Holiness, our secret is that we don’t have a Dalai Lama. Instead, each Jew is responsible for all the other Jews.”

For me, the operative word here is responsible. In my opinion, an important yet typically unstated aspect of an honorary degree is to confer responsibility upon its recipient. Receiving this honor from Hebrew College led me to think about another familiar message about responsibility: “You are not obligated to complete the task, but neither are you free to desist from it.”

This famous saying from Pirkei Avot led me to the question, “Which tasks have I begun that I am responsible to continue?” Here is my one-and-one-half minute answer.

First, I feel responsible to follow the suggestion of Natan Sharansky who said that we should never ask someone to make aliyah, but rather we should make Israel so wonderful that Jews will want to flock there. Through the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, we have created countless opportunities for researchers, activists and artists to work in Israel.

What else? I feel responsible to remember what Blu Greenberg said when I asked her if there would ever be a female orthodox rabbi. She said, “Where there is a will, there is a halachic way.” Anything is possible. I have devoted much of my energy to understanding Jewish women and gender relations in history and to advancing the options for women in Judaism. I am committed to continuing this work for women in general.

And what other task do I need to continue? I remember what my father – a Holocaust survivor – told me, when I asked him shortly before he died, “What is the most important thing you want me to remember about the Holocaust?” He responded, “Remember that there are good people in the world.” What he was referring to was the fact that for each person who survived – as he and my mother did – there was at least one good person who helped. In their case, there were many good people who risked their lives to save my parents. I view it as my responsibility to write a book about my father, sharing this message. And I have started.

And what’s the final item on my current to-do list? Both my mother and father received graduate degrees in Hebrew language and literature. Their love of the Hebrew language is something they passed on to me. As my friend and chavruta partner, Chabad Shaliach Peretz Chein told me, “If Hebrew withers, we will lose touch with the Torah, and it will be difficult to sustain ourselves as the Jewish people.” I have tried hard to master the language, to give my children a Hebrew education, and through various initiatives to encourage American Jews to learn Hebrew.

So, I thank Hebrew College, and particularly its president, Rabbi Danny Lehman and the Hebrew College board, for this honor with its implicit message – I may have taken the first steps, but my work is not done. Todah rabah.

Shulamit Reinharz, founder and director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, is the Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology and director of the Women’s Studies Research Center.

Filed Under: Events Tagged With: HBI, Hebrew College, Jews, responsibility, Shulamit Reinharz

Good Morning Heartache: International Law and the Global Challenges Facing Women

October 30, 2014 By aspowell 1 Comment

By Amy Sessler Powell

In the torch song, Good Morning Heartache, Billie Holiday sings, “Good morning heartache thought we said goodbye last night,
I turned and tossed ’til it seemed you had gone, But here you are with the dawn.”

Some say the lyrics refer to a lover and others believe they relate to her struggle with heroin addiction, but Law Professor Fareda Banda sees the lyrics as a metaphor for the “two steps forward – one step back” pace of the global struggle for women’s rights.

“You think things are getting settled. Huge progress is being made. Then you wake up, hear the news and learn that 493 million women still can’t read,” she said.

Prof. Banda studies the role that international human rights law can play in reducing discrimination against women around the world. She is the author of “Women, Law and Human Rights: An African Perspective,” the leading text on the struggle for gender equality in Africa. She will address the tug-of-war that represents global women’s rights when she delivers Good Morning Heartache: International Law and the Global Challenges Facing Women, the Fifth Annual Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture on Gender and Human Rights, Sunday, November 9 at 7:30 p.m., Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library, Brandeis University.

Fareda Banda

Uniquely qualified to speak on these topics, Banda is a leading international scholar on human rights and a professor of law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Currently a Hauser Global visiting professor at New York University School of Law, she has consulted to the United Nations and taught on three continents.

“There is no region in world where women enjoy de facto equality, but in most they do have de jure equality,” Banda said.

What actually happens in every region of the world is quite a bit different than what the law promises. The gulf between the two relates in part to gender stereotyping and in part to a need to move toward transformative equality, to look beyond the law and focus on attitudinal change.

“What happens now is that people think we need law, but in most jurisdictions we have enough law guaranteeing women rights. On some issues, we need to stop making law and start practicing, enforcing and implementing laws we have,” Banda said.

The laws give a starting point so women can make complaints, but law is not the only answer. Her lecture will look at normative gains – the body of important international legal work done in the last 20 years that protects women’s rights and equates women’s rights with human rights. But, she will also detail egregious violations in every region of the world. For example, the World Health Organization, in the 2013 report, noted that one in three women would experience violence in her lifetime.

The lecture will offer a “balance sheet, a state-of-the-union” showing examples such as progress in violence prevention and in greater participation by women in education, but areas where women are still being held back such as reproductive rights.

Dr. Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, director of the HBI Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law said, “Professor Banda brings to bear a deep understanding of the operation of domestic and international law and the practical challenges in implementing these rights. She also has a complex understanding, based on her study of law reform efforts across Africa, of the ways in which culture and tradition can be involved, to enable as well as to impede, legal change that will benefit women.”

The Markowicz Lecture Series was created by the HBI Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law by Project Founder Sylvia Neil and her husband Dan Fischel in memory of Sylvia’s late sister, Diane, to honor her commitment to gender, equality and social justice. The series features internationally renowned scholars, judges, and activists discussing ways of negotiating the tensions between gender, equality and religious or cultural norms.

Amy Powell is the HBI Communications Director.

RSVP to attend The 5th Annual Diane Markowicz Memorial Lecture on Gender and Human Rights, “Good Morning Heartache: International Law and the Global Challenges Facing Women” presentation by Prof. Fareda Banda, SOAS London.

Free and open to the public, dessert reception.
Sunday, Nov. 9, 7:30 p.m.
Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library, Brandeis University, 415 South St., Waltham, MA 02454

Filed Under: Events, Research, Scholars-in-Residence, Social Issues Tagged With: Banda, Brandeis, Fareda Banda, global, human rights, rights, women, women's rights

A Feminist Journey into Prayer

August 26, 2014 By bwolfe 1 Comment

by Amy Sessler Powell

Marcia Falk will discuss and read from her new book The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season, on Thursday, Sept. 11, at 7 p.m. in the Rapaporte Treasure Hall of the Goldfarb Library, Brandeis. Professor Jonathan Sarna will deliver introductory remarks. Fresh Ideas Editor, Amy Sessler Powell, interviewed Falk about her new book and her journey into writing new liturgies.

Marcia Falk

Poet and scholar Marcia Falk, acclaimed author of the groundbreaking Book of Blessings, has just published a new book, The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season. Why did she choose to focus on the High Holidays? For the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks. That’s where the Jews are.

The High Holidays are the days when religious as well as nonaffiliated Jews attend synagogue services in unparalleled numbers. Yet much of what they find there can be unwelcoming in its patriarchal imagery, leaving many worshipers unsatisfied. For those seeking to connect more deeply with their Judaism, and for all readers in search of a contemplative approach to the themes of the season, Falk has re-created key prayers and rituals from an inclusive perspective.

But the story of Falk’s engagement with writing prayer began several decades earlier.

The Days Between

So I sat down that afternoon and wrote my first four blessings, and the next night, full of trepidation, I recited them before a community of 300 Jews ranging in affiliation from atheist to Orthodox. I recited the new words without introduction, as though they had been written a couple of millennia ago by the rabbis, rather than the day before, by me. I offered no apology or explanation (I didn’t dare to), and, to my puzzlement and disbelief, the community said, Amen.”

“Many Jews want a liturgy that expresses their values and concerns. Keeping it alive in a fresh way has always been part of Jewish tradition,” she says.

Marcia Falk is the author of The Days Between: Blessings, Poems, and Directions of the Heart for the Jewish High Holiday Season. Amy Sessler Powell is HBI Communications Director.

Filed Under: Art, Events

A Feminist Approach to the High Holy Days

On Bonna Haberman

We are Responsible for Each Other

A Feminist Journey into Prayer

Follow Us

Subscribe

Archives

Blogs We Follow