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Spirituality
'Opening The Gates'
Prayer books revive forgotten liturgy.
End Game
The fruit of that resolution was Tefillat
Nashim, published in Israel in 2005 and
New York
which became, by the country's stan-
dards, a runaway bestseller.
n the evening of May 27, 2002, a
Fervently Orthodox women, unable to
Palestinian terrorist walked into
find her prayer book in religious shops,
an ice cream parlor in the cen-
found it elsewhere and photocopied it for
tral Israeli city of Petach Tikvah and deto- their friends, Lavie said. Secular women
nated the explosives strapped to his chest. brought it to the hospital when they gave
More than 30 Israelis were wounded in
birth.
the attack. Two lives were claimed: 18-
Israeli Arab women soon followed suit.
month-old Sinai Keinan and her 56-year-
Musicians set the verses to music. And it
old grandmother, Ruti Peled.
resurrected an array of prayers of which
Even in a country numbed to the
few Jews, even among the scholarly and
brutality of terrorist violence, Israelis
devout, were aware.
were captivated by the story of how
"Aliza opened the gate, the gates of
one woman, Hen Keinan, had been ren-
prayer:' said Yisrael Lau, the former chief
dered both childless and an orphan by
rabbi of Israel, upon the prayer book's
the attack. Months later, she was still a
release in Israel.
figure of public interest. On the eve of
To the extent that a prayer book pro-
Yom Kippur, a newspaper interview with
vides the stage direction for a choreo-
Keinan and her husband described their
graphed synagogue service, Lavie's book
decision to move to the United States in
— released in English this month by
the aftermath of the attack.
Spiegel & Grau under the title A Jewish
Women's Prayer Book — is
improperly named. Rather, Lavie
has unearthed prayers from an
expanse of Jewish history and
geography that give liturgical
expression to moments in a
woman's life often overlooked by
- Aliza Lavie, Bar-Ilan professor the traditional synagogue ser-
vice: a prayer for a first period,
for childbirth, for a sick husband
and for a son going off to war.
Ben Harris
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
0
"It's a kind of window on
the lives of Jewish women."
In synagogue that evening, Aliza Lavie,
a professor of communications and
political science at Bar-Ilan University,
found herself unable to banish thoughts
of Keinan from her mind and draw com-
fort from the liturgy of Judaism's holiest
day. She wished she could tell Keinan of
the long tradition of brave Jewish women
who had faced down adversity — among
them her own grandmother, a Bukharian
immigrant who lost three of her nine
children and yet remained steadfast in
her faith.
"I stood there in the synagogue Lavie
has written, "grappling with Hen's ques-
tions and sensing that the prayer book in
front of me could not provide the answers.
I resolved to seek out the secret of my
grandmother's legacy; to explore the eter-
nal, powerful faith of Jewish women."
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February 19. 2009
Momentous Shift
"We're correcting history:' said Shulamit
Reinharz, a sociology professor and the
director of the Women's Studies Research
Center at Brandeis University. "We're cor-
recting a misperception that women did
not write prayers. And I think when you
correct a misperception like that, you
change history."
Lavie's book also has helped resurrect
a tradition known as techines, or sup-
plications, a genre of devotional prayers
recited principally by women who were
either uneducated in Hebrew or barred
from participating in public worship.
Such private prayers reflect the personal
longings of women throughout the ages
and, Lavie believes, explain a large part of
their appeal to contemporary Israelis.
Dinah Berland's version of Hours of
Devotion, a collection of prayers for
Jewish women, is the first English
edition of the book to appear in more
than a century.
"It's a kind of window on the lives of
Jewish women;' Lavie told JTA. "It brings
back to the Israeli society the personal
prayers. The fact that you can pray with-
out being part of the synagogue, because
in Israel many people belong to no com-
munity — suddenly people felt that they
can pray, that they can touch without any
fear."
The prayers in A Jewish Women's
Prayer Book cover a broad historical and
geographic territory, incorporating con-
temporary authors responding to mod-
ern concerns — such as the discomfort
many feel with the traditional blessing
thanking God for making women in his
image, an alternative to the blessing for
men that thanks God for not making
them women. Others are ancient prayers
and of unknown origin.
A number of the prayers were written by
Fanny Neuda, a 19th century Moravian Jew
who authored a popular book of techines
in 1855. Lavie's discovery of Neuda in the
national library in Jerusalem prompted a
flurry of questions. "Who was she? And why
I didn't know about her? How come she got
permission to write such an amazing book
like this?" Lavie recalled asking. "I had a lot
of imaginary conversations with her!'
Coming Of Age
Lavie is not the first contemporary writer
to be amazed by the discovery of Neuda,
nor is she the first to try to revive her
work for a contemporary audience. Last
year, the Los Angeles poet Dinah Berland
published Hours of Devotion, the first
English edition of Neuda's landmark work
in more than a century.
Like Lavie, Berland's discovery of
Neuda was prompted by a deep emotion-
al disturbance. After her divorce, Berland
writes in the introduction, her son Adam
"disappeared from my life for more than
11 years." A client encouraged her to
pray, but she was at a loss until happen-
ing upon an old version of Neuda's book
and its prayer for a mother whose child
is abroad.
"They're very personal, and they're very
concrete," Berland said of Neuda's compo-
sitions.
"And they're very emotional and direct.
Rather than talking about God, they're
talking in an intimate voice to God as a
friend or as a parent!"
According to Berland, Hours of
Devotion was once enormously popular,
published in 28 editions between 1855
and 1918. The first English edition came
out in 1866 and the book was still in
print in Switzerland as late as 1968. But
over the years Neuda and, more generally,
the tradition of techines have fallen into
obscurity.
"I've been told that just about every
Jewish woman who read German had a
copy of this book," Berland said.
Berland's and Lavie's recent books,
and other similar volumes, including
the recently published A Women's Torah
Commentary, may augur a revival of
prayers for women, particularly as a
growing number of women assume lead-
ership roles, even in the Orthodox com-
munity. A conference on Jewish Women's
Prayer, sponsored by women's organiza-
tions from across the denominational
spectrum, is scheduled for March in New
York City.
"They are not new for people Lavie
says of the prayers in her book.
"Even though the people didn't hear
them, they had them in the back of
their memory. They have them in their
blood!"
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