By Wendy I. Zierler
The Jewish Publication Society, 2025 ($32.95)
One of the envisioned outcomes of having female rabbis and scholars was to have women who were educated in the tradition view its texts differently, with a lens that has not been used in the past, to yield new insights. Wendy Zierler’s memoir, Going Out With Knots: My Two Kaddish Years with Hebrew Poetry, fulfills and extends that hope beautifully, through analysis of Hebrew poems, mostly by women, enabling readers—as well as mourners—to see texts in a new way through grief and interpretation.
A crisis in Rabbi Dr. Zierler’s life led to the writing of this book: the deaths of her father, who was run over as he was walking in a parking lot, and then of her mother a year later from illness, giving her barely a pause between the obligation of saying Kaddish separately for each parent. Zierler is explicit about both her mourning and her project in penning the book.
At her shul, different congregants speak each day of the week after morning minyan. Looking to add a woman’s voice to the service, she chose to teach a weekly analysis of different Hebrew poems as her contribution. She called it Shir Ḥadash shel Yom (new song of the day), patterned after the Shir shel Yom (daily psalm) recited as part of the morning liturgy. These talks are woven together with her personal reflections to form the basis of this book. Lea Goldberg, Rachel Morpurgo, Ruhama Weiss, and Rachel Bluwstein are among the poets she discusses, teaching those of us who are not expert in modern Hebrew poetry about this female lineage in the holy tongue.
In the course of discussing the poem “I Am Still Praying” by Ruhama Weiss, Zierler reflects on attending an Orthodox synagogue—sitting on the women’s side of the meḥitzah and not being able to lead the prayers—and what it means to “count” in a public forum for prayer: “Though I wasn’t counted in the minyan in a ritual or halakhic/legal sense,” she writes, “if I didn’t make it to shul on a given morning, I would get texts and emails from regulars, both men and women, asking me if everything was okay. If that isn’t ‘counting’ what is?” Though the answer may not satisfy all readers, it is important to see a woman of her erudition grapple with the issue and come to a response that satisfies her and enables her to be a full agent, participating as fully as possible.
In the chapter on “Searching for Female Liturgical Voices: Mourning and Studying with Rachel Morpurgo,” Zierler writes about her Maharat ordination in spring 2021 as the “first academic or career milestone I would be celebrating without my parents there in any way to cheer me on.” This occasions fresh grief, yet she finds a model for coping in Rachel Morpurgo of Trieste (born 1790)—in Zierler’s words, “a devout Orthodox woman scholar and the first modern Hebrew poet” and a descendant of Rabbi Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto (1706-46), author of Mesilat Yesharim (Path of the Just).
Zierler writes about teaching Morpurgo:
No traditional Jewish prayers speak in a woman’s voice. We often ignore the plain fact that the prayers in the siddur had authors and editors, and they were all men. Teaching ‘Behold the Letter’ served a potent testament to the fact that claiming a voice for women in traditional Jewish prayer was a task still yet to be accomplished, and that my Maharat studies and the Shir Ḥadash were furthering that cause.
Toward the end of the chapter on Morpurgo, Zierler writes:
Reading and teaching this poem during this lead-up to my ordination, when I was studying for exams and missing my parents especially acutely, offered needed comfort and strength. It reminded me of my own privilege to be one of a cohort of women trying to change the face of Jewish leadership and Jewish ritual life. And it encouraged me to imagine how poems such as these might make their way, one day, into mainstream, traditional siddurim, where they deserve to be.
Zierler herself has provided us with a guide to poetry and mourning, making space for women in the synagogue and its liturgy as well as widening what sacred texts can be.
