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 and seek God. Like the title, this book works at several levels, exploring these mitzvot in depth and at the same time tracing the spiritual journey of the author as she studies, grows, and revises her opinion with regard to these mitzvot. It is a fascinating but bumpy ride, as she is constantly questioning and wrestling with her beliefs.
Inspired by a teaching of the Sefat Emet and the example of a women’s group she has joined, she begins to make challah on a weekly basis. When she is away from home just before Shabbat, her children and her husband step in to bake the challah. But soon she is questioning, insisting that “the traditional assignment of roles along gender lines no longer makes sense” and wanting to encourage everyone to try out all the mitzvot, regardless of gender. This “message of total equality,” which she believes will lead to “a new paradigm of balance,” comes very close to a notion of voluntary covenant.
In the section on nidah, Ner-David shows great erudition, having examined in depth the development of these laws in her rabbinical studies. But here too she questions, deciding for herself to revert to the biblical pattern of nidah and eliminating the seven clean days, because as one ages this can create a situation of “halakhic infertility.” She uses the mikveh in some unconventional and creative ways, as in the ritual she develops for miscarriage (see article, p. 17), and she sometimes shares her immersions with her husband in natural mikveh mayim settings.
In the section on lighting candles, she struggles with her need to swim daily and to eat only one meal a day due to a medical condition, and how to accommodate these health needs with the pattern of Shabbat. In trying to find her own way to live within the halakhah, she “felt that my voice was still being stifled, or more accurately, that I was silencing my own voice in order to earn social acceptability.”
As is clear from these examples, this is a deeply personal book. As Ner-David traverses her own spiritual arc, she comes to listen more and more to her own inner voice—which she identifies with the voice of Chanah in prayer. Along that trajectory, though, she also pushes beyond the boundaries of Orthodoxy on a number of “hotbutton” issues. For example, she endorses for marriage a “brit ahuvim,” a partnership agreement in which couples pledge mutual support, monogamy, and fidelity, instead of the unequal arrangement inherent in any kinyan-based ceremony. She counts women for a minyan at a private family service, and she encourages a woman to say Kaddish with the Women of the Wall.
Her motivations are of the highest order—“to open myself up to and grow to cherish a whole world of transformative ritual that I once devalued as feminine” and to give “Chanah and other powerful-in-their-ownway Jewish women throughout the centuries a voice.” For myself, as a Jewish feminist who has struggled with many of the issues that she raises, her explorations and ruminations are both inspiring and challenging, promising and provocative. One does not have to agree with all of her resolutions to appreciate the seriousness of her religious search.