Tefillah is an issue that Orthodox feminists have discussed endlessly. Here I make a distinction between tefillah and the synagogue experience. The latter is being addressed with some success in several communities. Mechitzah specifications, placement of the ark that holds the Torah, placement of the podium, women’s voices being heard during kaddish, the calling up of women to the Torah—all of these and other matters are being slowly resolved. While these changes have yet to travel to many, probably the majority, of communities, it is likely that eventually a comfortable number of synagogues will offer a more welcoming structure to women. The slow transition will feel endless and frustrating to many of us, but that seems to be the way that change works in our world. The progress of women’s Torah scholarship, which is a success story, was, and continues to be, much the same.
However, when it comes to tefillah itself, to the words on the page—there be dragons. Despite the expressions of dissatisfaction that women have shared with each other regarding certain tefillot, we have not clearly determined what features we are looking for in a new system. We know what we do not want. We know that we are disturbed, hurt and insulted by the negative treatment of women in some tefillot.We know that we are frustrated and angered by a liturgy that reads in places as if women do not even exist. We know that our experience of tefillah is far from optimal because these matters distract us even as we try to pray with our hearts open to God. The classic examples, of course, are the blessing in the morning service in which men thank God for not having made them women, and the repeated mention of our forefathers with no reference to our foremothers. Particularly in the former case, apologetics abound, but we have long since dismissed such glib, inadequate answers. With what shall we replace them? What developments in tefillah will meet our needs? Is there an agenda we can agree upon? Conversation with many friends has revealed that a large number of women are mentally changing the words as they pray to avoid some of the conflict they experience. Others have simply decided they can live with the cognitive dissonance of reciting tefillot that clash with their view of themselves. And sadly, as we know, many women opt out of the discussion altogether and simply avoid praying, at home, falling back often inaccurately, on the dispensation that prayer is a time dependent command ment and therefore not binding upon them, and at shul, standing outside and chatting.
Part of the difficulty in answering these questions is that the purpose of prayer in the Jewish tradition is not often clearly articulated. I have been taught variously that we pray to emulate our forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; that we pray because it is something we need, not something God needs; that we pray because of the halakhic obligation to recite certain prayers at certain times. None of these answer the question of what prayer accomplishes and what role it plays in our lives.
I have sometimes accompanied my husband to the early morning Shabbat minyan that he favors. It is a quiet, serious service that begins at 7:00 am. There is rarely more than one other woman present. I enjoy this service for several reasons, even though it is the antithesis of the feminist experience. It takes place in a stately old synagogue that feels as if it could easily have been transported to Brooklyn from a shtetl in Eastern Europe. The traditional architecture, the elderly men chanting nearly unintelligibly, the very dust wafting from the pages of my prayer book make me feel richly connected to my past. And, I have the opportunity to be an observer rather than a participant. Many women will exclaim that we have always been observers and that this is exactly what we seek to remedy. I agree. But because we have been striving to become participants, for me, at least, it had been a long time since I had taken a good look at the male experience of prayer. Clearly it is a bonding experience, something very necessary to the perpetuation of community. It is something of a Jewish football field as well, where men have the opportunity to play out power struggles, enhance their self esteem and determine where in the structure of their society they fit. All of these have, right or wrong, have been the basis of stable Jewish communities. While similar activities occur in the workplace and in other situations, it is only in the synagogue that they play out in Jewish life. Though I hesitate to say so, the actual tefillot seem largely subordinate to this purpose.
Another observation that I have made while at this synagogue, is the manner in which the tefillot are recited. While women have been conditioned to pray quietly, prayer on the male side of the mechitzah is, to say the least, an interactive experience. From a soothing mumbling that washes over me, to random gesticulations and exclamations, to the draping of a tallit over the head, to the repetition time after time of exactly the same syllables in the same way, the manner of prayer employed seems to have been designed to create a state of meditation, a state in which the mind empties and God may enter. While this has been the hallmark of Eastern religion, it is difficult to observe Orthodox Jewish men at prayer and not see some similarity.
This is the male experience of prayer (at least from my observations as an outsider). Is this what we too, as Orthodox feminists, want from prayer? Are we looking for a powerful communal bonding within a Jewish context? If that is the case, it is not tefillah that we need to address; it is more likely the synagogue innovations we are making that we need to reexamine. Are we looking for an experience of God? Are we yearning to connect with our foremothers? The answers to these questions and others will allow us to set an agenda and begin the painstakingly slow process of change.