My mother, Judith Kaufman Hurwich, would often say, “There are two kinds of Jews—those who are serious, and those who are not” What she meant by “serious Jews” were those whose Jewishness is not a separate thread of their existence, but, rather, is central to their identity and a significant facet of all they do. Serious Jews insist on consistency between their Jewish and secular values and actions, as it is written: “וחי בהם” (“… and he shall live by them”, Leviticus, 18:5). And serious Jews do not merely go through the motions of observance, but also ponder the why and wherefore of what they practice and the meaning of what they pray.
Both my grandmothers, Leah Konowitz Hurwich and Rita Skidelsky Kaufman, were born in Europe and raised in the US, and both of them were Jewishly well-educated and could read Hebrew fluently. So while most of their companions in the ezrat nashim (women’s section) could do little more than strain to hear the sounds of the men’s davening wafting over the mechitzah—they could daven themselves, and probably understood the content of their prayers better than most of the men. Out of such understanding, Savta Leah chose to skip over
״רצה…והשב את העבודה לדביר בתיך״
(“Be favorable … and restore the service to your holy Temple”) in the amidah, and Nana would leave out the passage
״נער הייתי גם זקנתי, ולא ראיתי צדיק נעזב וזרעו מבקש לחם״
(“I was a youth and also have aged, and I have not seen a righteous man forsaken, with his children begging for bread”) at the end of birkhat hamazon.
Savta Leah did not live to see the blossoming of women’s learning and tefillah groups—though she had herself instituted these sixty years ago at Camp Yavneh, which she founded in 1944. Nana, though, did participate in her granddaughters’ and several of her great-granddaughters’ ground-breaking bat mitzvah celebrations. She also davened in women’s tefillah groups and attended classes at New York’s Drisha Institute and Jerusalem’s MaTaN, which her daughters were instrumental in founding. Infused with learning and knowledge, both my grandmothers brought these to bear on their Jewishness, and as such were role models—for both women and men—of serious Jews.
“”“Serious Jews insist on consistency between their Jewish and secular values and actions.”””
Just as there are serious Jews, so too, are there serious Jewish congregations. To me, Jerusalem’s Kehillat Shira Hadasha—in which my and my sister Ariel’s families are active members— and the process by which Shira Hadasha was established and fashioned, exemplifies a serious Jewish congregation. Shira Hadasha is an Orthodox congregation in which the mechitzah runs down the center aisle, separating the men’s and women’s sections to either side of it. The congregants are Shabbat-observant and include a dozen or so Orthodox rabbis, numerous Orthodox Jewish educators and teachers in religious schools. But unlike normative Orthodox congregations, women and men serve on every committee; women get aliyot, lain, lead the parts of the service that do not halakhically require the presence of ten men—Kabbalat Shabbat, Pesukei de-Zimra and the removal and replacing of the Torah in the Aron Kodesh—and the women of course deliver divrei Torah. A bride is just as likely as a groom to read the haftarah before her wedding. Little girls lead the singing of An’im Zemirot—so many Orthodox women’s first childhood memory of discrimination—and a girl celebrating her bat mitzvah is given equal status to a boy celebrating his bar mitzvah.
My daughter, Ronni, celebrated her bat mitzvah on (Shushan) Purim two years ago, by laining all of Megillat Esther and delivering a shiur based on her study of Tractate Megillah. She is now a very talented and very lovely ba’alat keriah, and I get a kick out of splitting the laining of a parsha with her. My wife, Abby, had marked her bat mitzvah some twenty-seven years ago with a birthday party, as was then the custom. Last year, she set things right by marking her birthday with a celebration of her being a bat mitzvah; Abby lained a few aliyot from her wouldhave-been bat mitzvah parsha—Shemot (Ronni and I split the rest of the laining)—and went on to deliver a beautiful, thoughtful d’var Torah.
Women’s expanded participation is certainly the most striking feature of Shira Hadasha, but it was not really the point of the Shira Hadasha initiative. Rather, the congregation was founded in pursuit of a truer, more meaningful tefillah, and women’s expanded participation was a necessary corollary of that design. In other words, “it is not about the women,” rather it is about the entire congregation and its practice of halakhic Judaism. The process by which Shira Hadasha pushed the halakhic envelope of women’s participation in leading the tefillah was itself a mark of seriousness, as it was one of autonomous communal study and consent 1 —representing a serious regard for understanding and interpreting the halakha, and a refreshing, revived “meta-halakhic” process too-long absent in the Orthodox world.2
What I find particularly exciting about Shira Hadasha, is the prospect that it will become a model for change in modern Orthodoxy in general. As in Shira Hadasha, modern Orthodoxy’s approach to women and women’s issues should not be viewed as being about women; it is about the entire modern Orthodox community—its ethic and its interpretation and practice of halakha. The modern Orthodox establishment’s tackling of the many women’s issues now brought to light could similarly wake up the too-long-dormant meta-halakhic process, and forge the way to a newly attuned and relevant rabbinic leadership.
Our awakening to the place of women in our ritual and community has made us take a closer look at what we have been mechanically doing and saying for centuries past. And as serious Jews, we have finally noted and taken umbrage at “ברוך אתה… שלא עשני אשה” (“Blessed are You… for not having made me a woman”); we have “rediscovered” our mothers in being called to the Torah; we’ve dispensed with “ישקצונו כטומאת הנידה…” (“… and they have detested us as the defilement of niddah”) in tahanun, and “על שלוש עבירות נשים מתות בשעת לידתן” (“For three transgressions women die in childbirth”) in ba’me madlikin in the Friday night service; and we have recognized our women (and children) as members of our congregations in the Mi she’berakh for the congregation after the Shabbat Torah reading, i.e., we recite “יברך את כל הקהל הקדוש הזה…הם וכל אשר להם” (“…shall bless this entire congregation… them and all of theirs”) rather than “הם, ונשיהם ובניהם…” (“them, their wives and children…”).
It was taking what we pray seriously that led my mother to recognize the dissonance implicit in her ever-repeating prayers that God return us to Israel, when she was entirely free to do so. In explaining their decision to make aliyah in more universal terms, she and my father would quote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:
If life is action and passion, then one who has not lived the action and passion of his times cannot be said to have lived at all.
There is no question that the status of women is one of the critical issues in modern Orthodoxy, and that no Orthodox Jew can be said to have seriously lived these times if he or she has not lived the action and passion that is Jewish Orthodox feminism. I hope, though, that as an added blessing of the Jewish Orthodox feminist movement, a growing number of its members and supporters appreciate, as my parents did, that the very same sensibilities underlying their pro-feminism motivate them to live the ultimate action and passion of our times—here in Israel.