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, […]
Earlier this year I met with two people from the Career Center at Yeshiva University. We were discussing my firm’s campus hiring programs and how YU could channel more graduates to us. They wanted to know what we were looking for in students: Was it specific coursework? Work experience in finance? A certain GPA? “Well,
“Leaning In” to Our Religious and Spiritual Lives Read More »
I have been dancing since I was a very young child. However, because I attended a Jewish day school, my dancing was an extracurricular pursuit at first. After graduating, I was accepted into the Joffrey Ballet Summer School. Following that summer, I went to a seminary in Israel. After a day of learning, I would
Dancing for Women: JeWTA Promotes Talent Within the Orthodox Community Read More »
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
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
What is the first step in coming up with a new ritual? It seems that the need always arises from a hole, an emptiness, a sense that something is missing. Sometimes it is a hole in the order of the tefillah itself, as in the time that our Women’s Tefillah Group of Raritan Valley, now
New Rituals for Women’s Tefillah Groups Read More »
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
Filling in the Traditional Blanks: Creating Rituals for Miscarriage and Weaning Read More »
When I was a young girl, I would stand next to my father while he was davening and mimic him. I would wrap myself in a blanket, trying to emulate his tallit, hold a Dr. Seuss story book close to my face in the manner that he held his siddur, and shuckle beside him. That
Judging a Book by Its Cover: On Valuing the External Dimensions of Tefillah Read More »
A little more than a year ago I was approached by a former congregant who wanted advice on how to create a greater sense of ritual for his daughter’s upcoming bat mitzvah. The bat mitzvah was going to be held on a Sunday, and he wanted to go beyond the conventional dvar Torah to create
A New Bat Mitzvah Ritual: Kos Shel Berakhah Read More »
I held up the etrog, inspecting it not only for the black spots that my father taught me would render it unkosher, but also for an overall esthetic appearance that would appeal to me personally. (Bumpy, hourglass shaped, green, and pitomless are my preferences.) And so it went with the branches of the lulav, the
Doing Hoshanot from the Women’s Side of the Mehitzah Read More »
