Spirituality and Ritual

Tradition and Equality in Jewish Marriage: Beyond the Sanctification of Subordination

Jewish marriage resides at the confluence of two ideologically oppositional commitments that modern Jewish women and men struggle to navigate in their everyday lives, and will not readily abandon: exclusionary religious practices and modern ethical systems, such as feminism. Gender inequalities embedded in religious authority, practice, and marriage per se further present a moral problem, […]

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Emerging Voices: Leyning Out of Love: How Learning to Leyn Deepened My Connection to Torah

My bat mitzvah was a glorified birthday party with little religious significance. It was an opportunity for me to show that my gown could be as pretty as my friends’ gowns. The closest I got to the bimah was on the needlepoint of a girl reading from the Torah, which my grandmother stitched for me,

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La’ad Dance

When asked what Torah commentary looks like, most people would open a book and point to Rashi, Ramban, or other classic works. Similarly, if asked about Talmudic commentary, they would mention Tosafot, Rashba, and Ran. By scrutinizing phrases from a source text and then reading the corresponding glosses, we Jews have built a strong tradition

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Chanah’s Voice: A Rabbi Wrestles with Gender, Commandment, and the Women’s Rituals of Baking, Bathing, and Brightening

The “Chanah” in the title of this book is a double entendre, referring both to an acronym for the three special women’s commandments of challah, nidah, and hadlakat nerot—taking dough in baking challah, immersing in the mikveh, and lighting Shabbat candles—and to the biblical woman who serves as our model for how to pray to

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Filling in the Traditional Blanks: Creating Rituals for Miscarriage and Weaning

Some other societies have paid much more attention to transition than we have, and in doing so they prepared people much more effectively for the experience of being in transition than our society has prepared us. Those societies typically had rituals (we call them “rites of passage”) to help individuals let go of their outlived

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