Elana Sztokman

Revolutionary ideas in Boston
Shulamit Reinharz

As usual, the Boston Jewish community has been bursting with cultural offerings this fall, from the New Center for the Arts, to the Jewish Theater of New England, to the Boston Jewish Film Festival, not to mention the various institutions of higher education and synagogues. Because of the plethora of events, one can easily lose sight of how important each one is.  

This idea came to mind after I moderated a National Jewish Book Month panel before a packed house at the Leventhal- Sidman Jewish Community Center. Both of the panelists - Aliza Lavie, a lecturer in the Political Studies Department at Bar-Ilan University and a research associate at The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, and Solomon (Sol) Schimmel, a professor of education and psychology at Hebrew College - recently published an important book.

Although both individuals are methodical scholars, their books - Lavie’s “A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book” and Schimmel’s “The Tenacity of Unreasonable Beliefs: Fundamentalism and the Fear of Truth” - were sparked by unusual events.
The genesis of Lavie’s book occurred on Erev Yom Kippur 2002, when she read an interview with Hen Keinana, an Israeli woman who had lost both her mother (Ruthi Peled) and her baby daughter (Sinai) in a terrorist attack at a shopping center in Petah Tikva. After the attack, Hen and her husband moved to the U.S. so she could remove herself from reminders of her loss.

Distraught at the woman’s plight, Lavie thought that she (Lavie) would find comfort when she went to synagogue for Kol Nidre services that evening. Standing among her fellow Jews, she wondered whether the prayers could also provide comfort for the bereaved woman, wherever she was.

Moreover, Lavie wondered if there were any specific Jewish prayers that would help Hen realize she was not alone, but rather was part of a tradition of other Jewish women who have responded to unspeakable loss. Despite her training in religious texts, Lavie could not think of any sources specific to women that could help.

A gnawing concern stayed with her for several years, until one Shabbat morning she found herself in the main synagogue in Rome. Much to her surprise, included among the prayers was a special blessing for women and their strength, written by an Italian woman about five centuries earlier in Hebrew! Thus began Lavie’s fruitful search for prayers written by Jewish women.

Why do I call this discovery “revolutionary?” Because Jewish women’s prayers are not included in the traditional siddur; because Jewish women were often thought not to have a real place in the synagogue or in communication with the deity; and because Jewish women were even wrongly thought to be illiterate (in contrast to Jewish men) or, at the very least, did not know Hebrew.

In her beautifully produced and annotated book, so much of Jewish history, in particular Jewish women’s history, is turned on its head. No wonder that in its Hebrew version this book has already sold 100,000 copies, and no wonder that Costco has decided to sell the English version.

Schimmel’s book, featuring a cover photograph of an ostrich with its head in the sand, is a tour de force that will probably raise some hackles. He, too, started with an “aha” experience described in chapter one: “Why this book? Autobiographical reflections.”

Raised as a scholarly Yeshiva student who accepted Jewish tenets such as the idea that the Torah was “handed down by God on Mount Sinai,” Schimmel began to question as early as his teen years how that tenet could possibly be true and whether it was necessary to believe it.

One day in his mid-20s, Schimmel found himself in Jerusalem and “lightning struck.” He lost his faith - not in Judaism but in many ideas within Judaism. He wanted to approach life from the perspective of rationality and science, not fundamentalism. But then he wondered why so many people continue to adhere to unreasonable beliefs.

Much of the answer, he suggests, lies in a variety of fears. Thus was born his revolutionary book that puts some aspects of modern Jewish Orthodoxy in the same camp as Christian and Islamic fundam alism. Surely, Schimmel’s ideas are both intriguing and incendiary.

If we are open-minded, we have much to be grateful for when our cultural institutions present opportunities to learn from scholars such as Lavie and Schimmel. Ultimately, however, it is not just what we choose to go to hear, but what we take away from these events that make our community strong. 

Shulamit Reinharz is the Jacob Potofsky Professor of Sociology at Brandeis University, where she founded the Women’s Studies Research Center and The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute (hbi@brandeis.edu).