A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book

As readers of this Journal know, increasing work has been done in recent years to make prayers recited by Jewish women accessible to a wider audience. Aliza Lavie, a lecturer in political science at Bar-Ilan University, makes a major contribution to this endeavor. The original Hebrew version has been a huge bestseller in Israel since it was published in 2005. Lavie was inspired to start researching and collecting Jewish prayers from different periods and different societies when she felt that the standard prayer book did not contain any prayer to comfort an Israeli woman who had lost both her baby daughter and her mother in a terrorist attack. She assiduously collected prayers from Yiddish tekhines, siddurim, Midrash and other rabbinic literature, and a host of other sources. The English version contains the Hebrew text of much of the original volume with an accompanying English translation on facing pages. It is beautifully laid out and can be held like a prayer book. Arranged in categories, it includes special prayers for Shabbat and the holiday cycle; different times in a woman’s life cycle; prayers that relate to the specific women’s mitzvot; prayers relating to fertility and pregnancy; and prayers for mothers. From the volume, readers will understand that women’s prayers are generally more personal and more concrete than standard liturgy. In the context of the Shabbat theme of this Journal issue, one particularly moving prayer is the simple one recorded in the name of Perl, wife of Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev, who prayed when she prepared her hallot that, when her husband would make the berakha over the hallot, he should have the same feelings in his heart as she has while kneading and baking them. Particularly valuable is Lavie’s inclusion of many prayers from Persian, Ladino, and Arabic sources. Also included are the prayers and poems of many contemporary Orthodox women in Israel, and elsewhere, such as writer Yael Levine. One modern prayer expresses a mother’s feelings at the onset of her daughter’s first period. The English volume of Lavie’s book was the winner of the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women’s Studies in the 2008 National Jewish Book Awards.