I stepped away for a long time. 

I’m now back at the very syn­a­gogue in which I grew up, and can hap­pi­ly say that it became egal­i­tar­i­an; not only is there a female rab­bi as the direc­tor of the reli­gious school, but we also have a female haz­zan. It is com­mon­place to see women wear­ing kip­pot, tal­li­tot, and tefill­in, as well as on the bimah read­ing Torah and receiv­ing aliy­ot. See­ing how things have changed was a large fac­tor in my son and I join­ing the syn­a­gogue, inspir­ing me to dive back into Jew­ish learn­ing, and becom­ing more obser­vant. I still love see­ing women read Torah, and lis­ten­ing to our Haz­zan on the bimah nev­er gets old for me. The first time I got an aliyah since day school — just a lit­tle over a year and a half ago — I was ter­ri­fied, but thrilled. It was a reminder of how far we’ve come. 

My return to Jew­ish learn­ing and prayer is no small thing, con­sid­er­ing how I felt and my expe­ri­ences grow­ing up. Now I active­ly seek out books on prayer and litur­gy, Jew­ish thought, and fem­i­nist the­ol­o­gy. In my prac­tice, I do use some Koren sid­durim — sid­durim which con­tain the unchanged ver­sions of the prayers — but I am grate­ful for the evo­lu­tion of cer­tain prayers. There are two books, espe­cial­ly, that I’ve been return­ing to lately. 

Shi­ra Lankin Sheps, Rachel Sha­ran­sky Danziger, and Anne Gordon’s Az Nashir (We Will Sing Again): Women’s Prayers For Our Time of Need, felt like exact­ly what I was look­ing for in a post-Octo­ber 7 world. It’s a col­lec­tion of prayers, poems, and art­work cre­at­ed by Israeli women. Each prayer, each draw­ing, is com­plex and lay­ered; this is a book you sit with and return to again and again, giv­ing your­self time to absorb and process each page. In the intro­duc­tion, the edi­tors write about how our sages mod­eled our dai­ly prayers after the way Han­nah prayed to G‑d for a child: show­ing up bro­ken­heart­ed and vul­ner­a­ble — authen­tic. They go on to explain that, after the rock­et attacks of Octo­ber 7, ​“Prayer became more than a per­son­al prac­tice. It became a way to grasp for hope. Prayer implies faith in the pos­si­bil­i­ty of some­thing better.” 

And that’s exact­ly what this book does. It doesn’t pro­vide any answers or expla­na­tions— I would even say it might pro­voke more ques­tions. The pieces give voice to ideas and hopes unsaid; they help me to hold space for all these ques­tions. Sec­tions of the book include: Prayers for Prayer, Prayers for Dai­ly Life, Real­i­ties of War, Par­ent­ing in War, Women’s Life Cycle, Whis­pered Words, Shab­bat, and much more. Pain and vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty spill evoca­tive­ly onto the page, as do tenac­i­ty and hope. 

Com­ple­ment­ing the lay­ered emo­tion­al­i­ty of Az Nashir (We Will Sing Again) is In Her Voice: An Illu­mi­nat­ed Book of Prayers for Jew­ish Women by Enya Tamar Keshet. It’s a beau­ti­ful over­sized book with full-col­or pic­tures of illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­scripts fea­tur­ing Jew­ish prayers, par­tic­u­lar­ly prayers that may res­onate with women. The book fea­tures gor­geous depic­tions of all the women men­tioned in the Bible, along with illus­tra­tions of rit­u­als paired with Eng­lish text of the prayer, includ­ing its his­to­ry and back­ground. Some of these rit­u­als include the prayers before going to the mik­vah, the prayer before can­dle light­ing, the prayer for a child, a woman’s prayer before Torah study, and many more. The illus­tra­tions are stun­ning, and made even more so by the accom­pa­ny­ing text which can help sit­u­ate the prayers and prac­tice in our mod­ern lives. 

These two books use artis­tic expres­sion to give us anoth­er avenue to con­nect deeply with prayer. Per­haps even more impor­tant­ly, they show me that prayer can take on many forms, and that even with tra­di­tion­al prayers, there are always new ways of see­ing the liturgy.