When Molly Moses graduated from Harvard University in 2011, she wanted to pray each day wearing tefillin. But she couldn’t afford the several hundred dollar investment required to buy a pair of the leather-covered boxes, which contain tiny parchments with handwritten Torah verses. Moses had borrowed tefillin from friends in the past; now she wanted…
Cursing The Christians? A History of the Birkat Haminim By Ruth Langer Oxford University Press, 388 pages, $74 During a year studying medieval liturgical manuscripts, Ruth Langer found herself drawn to places where words, phrases and even a whole paragraph had been erased or, as she explained in an email to the Forward, “literally blacked…
Equality for Jewish women is not a 20th century invention. A siddur, or prayerbook, from the year 1471 contains an alternative text to the much abhorred “shelo asani isha” blessing that thanks God for “not making me a woman,” a text that is not only misogynistic in content but assumes that the person holding the…
“His/her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and dismay.” This emotional phrase describes a “parent who was hurtful.” Now it appears in a groundbreaking new High Holidays machzor whose prayers aim to include lesbian and gay Jews, for whom the words might carry even more of an emotional charge. The…
Kirtan, a Sanskrit call-and-response form of worship from India, and Rabbi, are two words not often found in the same sentence. Rabbi Andrew Hahn, better known as the “Kirtan Rabbi,” is on track to change that. Hahn’s spiritual innovation was on display at the Jewish Heritage Museum in New York’s Battery Park last week, as…
PunkTorah, creators of the Indie Yeshiva Pocket Siddur, have taken a do-it-yourself approach to daily prayer. The non-profit organization has just launched the website 3xdaily, which aims to explain the traditional three daily prayers (Shacharit, Mincha, Ma’ariv) along with other information related to Jewish prayer. On the site, PunkTorah explains that they created 3xdaily in…
Praying by the graves of long-deceased holy men is a time-honored Jewish practice, especially on the recent holiday of Lag b’Omer, when thousands flock to the resting place of R’ Shimon Bar Yochai in Meron. But what about kohanim, who are not allowed to come into contact with the dead, or even enter a cemetery?…
The Wailing Wall. It’s considered a very spiritual place where you’re supposed to pray/wail (as the name implies) to God. It’s supposed to be a very moving experience — I mean, people come from all over the globe to see the Wall’s wonders. But after praying there with Women of the Wall, I now have…
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