Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook (rev. ed.)

This volume, revised and expanded from the first edition published in 1992, is a valuable window into the spiritual lives of women, past and present. With a broad definition of spirituality, it sets out to present selections from the prayers, personal letters, memoirs, poems and other writings by Jewish women through the ages, who sought God’s presence in their lives. Edited meticulously, the volume is arranged chronologically, and opens with a petition found in the Geniza, dating from 14th century Cairo, addressed to the head of the Egyptian Jewish community from a woman who fears that her husband is abandoning her and traditional Jewish life for Sufiism. The extracts are preceded by introductions putting them in context and showing the influence of social and economic factors and the literary culture of the surrounding society. The volume includes: contemporary prayers penned in Israel and America; a mikvah ceremony conducted in 1989 for a woman who has been raped; translations of Malayalam Jewish folk songs by women in Kerala, India; public addresses such as Blu Greenberg’s to JOFA’s second international conference in 1998; and the script of Mierle Ukeles’ performance piece, “Mikva Dreams.” Over the centuries, the extracts become both more personal and revealing of the interior lives of the writers, and delineate the public and communal arenas in which many Jewish women express their spiritual yearnings. Not all the extracts in the volume are by Orthodox or traditional women, and the variety, particularly in the modern period, shows the diversity of contemporary Jewish religious life and the wide range of spiritual paths being taken by Jewish women.