'A radical position'
Orthodox Judaism meets feminism at Minyan Tehillah
CAMBRIDGE -- Sunlight pours into the sanctuary of the rented synagogue and through the gray semi-sheer curtain that separates the men's seating from the women's. The Sabbath morning service begins when Alanna Cooper, wearing a purple hat and long-sleeved black dress and black boots, stands on the women's side of the table in the front of the room and, chanting in rapid-fire Hebrew, leads introductory psalms.
To anyone familiar with the demarcations in Orthodox Jewish life, this is an incongruous sight -- a woman leading prayers at a service so traditional that men and women sit in distinct sections segregated by a ''mehitzah." Yet the independent Minyan Tehillah, modeled on a 3½-year-old worship community in Jerusalem that draws almost 400 people to its weekly services, is part of a small -- and controversial -- movement to push the boundaries of women's participation in traditional Jewish worship. Founded as a nondenominational prayer group in late 2003 by a group of young adults, most of whom grew up Orthodox, Minyan Tehillah is part of the latest effort to address the decades-long tension between Jewish orthodoxy and feminism.
Some modern Orthodox synagogues have for years sponsored women-only prayer groups where women read Torah, although that is still a controversial practice. However, no established synagogue within either the modern Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox movements has accepted what Minyan Tehillah and like-minded groups do. This new approach permits women to lead preliminary prayers and the Torah service and to read from the holy scroll in a mixed setting, but bars them from leading portions of the liturgy that require a quorum of 10 men. The issue is the subject of such intense debate that three separate sessions were devoted to it at the recent conference of the modern Orthodox umbrella organization Edah.
''We're taking a radical position on what is flexible. We're doing it self-consciously and in terms of looking within the system," says Cooper, a 37-year-old cultural anthropologist. ''Then there's the weight of tradition," she says. ''Even if we find a niggly section of the law that says this is permitted, who are we to go off and do it? That's the tension."
Minyan Tehillah is a do-it-yourself community that meets one Saturday morning and one Friday night a month, not a conventional synagogue headed by a rabbi. Cooper, swaying from side to side, leads the congregation in singing ''Ki L'olam Hasdo" from Psalm 136. Cooper's husband, Moshe Shapiro, a 39-year-old software engineer, sits among men wrapped in prayer shawls, and, on the other side of the mehitzah, a woman holds their 7-month-old daughter, Rebecca. When Cooper finishes chanting the psalms, Will Lennon takes over for the morning prayers that women do not lead. He stands on the men's side of the table that serves as a makeshift ''bimah," from which the service is conducted.
The room has gradually filled with more than 60 men and women, most in their 20s and 30s, and a handful of young children. Among them are members who come from a more liberal background and find in Minyan Tehillah a spiritual component missing from the intellectual and community-oriented Judaism of their childhoods. ''What I care about is a community committed to observance without being consumed by closed-minded ideologies," says co-founder Sacha Litman, a 31-year-old management consultant. Among them are highly educated women, both religiously and secularly, buffeted between their fierce attachment to the Orthodox tradition in which they were raised and an increasing alienation from it. ''I was not ready to leave orthodoxy, but I was ready to stop going to services," says cofounder Rachel Milner Gillers, a 28-year-old graduate student.
Their grandmothers, who probably never had the opportunities these women had to study the oral law compiled in the Talmud or to earn advanced university degrees, may have been comfortable praying from a balcony or the back of the sanctuary, but here the women's and men's sections stand side by side.
Their mothers' generation -- ''They paved the way," Gillers says -- may have founded women's prayer groups, but that's no longer enough for these women. To the law requiring a quorum, or minyan, of 10 men before starting some parts of the service, Minyan Tehillah adds the custom of also needing 10 women.
A grass-roots effort Cooper and Shapiro, pushing Rebecca in a stroller, walked 50 minutes from their apartment in Porter Square to Congregation Eitz Chaim in Cambridgeport, where Minyan Tehillah holds its Saturday service. As observant Jews, they create a weekly day of rest by not driving on the Sabbath or writing or using electricity or shopping or doing work of any kind. They eat only kosher food, all part of following detailed religious rules designed to imbue the mundane with the sacred.
''I feel like the world today is a free-for-all. You could do anything and be anything," Cooper says. ''Maybe one area of my life I want circumscribed. I want a right way and a wrong way. It gives some order in my life. It makes me feel I'm not out there alone figuring out how to make a life and how to have a family. I'm part of a centuries-old community that's giving me rules about how I live my life."
It is in this context that Cooper, who has a PhD from Boston University along with a Jewish day school education and a semester studying at a women's yeshiva in Israel, wrestled with the contradictions of being modern, Orthodox, and female. Where other Jewish denominations have long allowed equal participation of men and women, in orthodoxy those spheres remain distinct. ''As I came into myself as an adult woman," she says, ''I felt a cognitive dissonance between my place in the synagogue and my place in the rest of the world. The divisions stopped making sense to me."
The minyan Cooper helped found is modeled after similar groups in Jerusalem and Manhattan that are practical applications of ideas presented in a controversial 2001 article that questioned the legal basis for prohibiting women from leading parts of the synagogue service or being called to the Torah. Tova Hartman, the 47-year-old Hebrew University lecturer who founded Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem in late 2001 and recently visited Brandeis University for a conference of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, estimates about a dozen similar minyanim have been formed in places as varied as Chicago and Australia and Teaneck, N.J.
Jewish law, or ''halacha," applies the principles of the Torah to daily life. Men and women sit separately in Orthodox synagogues, for instance, because of halachic demands that prayer be conducted without distraction. The less stringent legal basis for excluding women from reading the Torah, argues Rabbi Mendel Shapiro in his 2001 article in the Edah Journal, is a concern for the ''dignity of the community."
The debate about Shapiro's article continues to swirl in modern Orthodox circles, focusing on everything from the validity of his halachic arguments to concerns that, even if his legal interpretation is correct, to act on them would further fragment an already fragmented Orthodox community and undermine the very aspect of orthodoxy that clearly distinguishes it from branches that allow the full participation of women. ''There's no sense in the Orthodox community that those steps increased the spiritual and religious strength of those communities," says Rabbi Saul Berman, director of Edah, whose goals include finding ''halachically appropriate opportunities" for women to participate in ritual and communal life.
A prayerful atmosphere The time comes for Minyan Tehillah's Torah service, for Gillers to carry the scroll through the women's section, giving worshipers a chance to touch it as the congregation sings, then pass the Torah to a man who carries it through his section. Men and women alike chant from the Torah as Gillers and Meir Lakein, both raised Orthodox, monitor the reading from opposite ends of the bimah table. For them, creating a prayerful atmosphere and spirited participation is as important as providing opportunities for women.
''I couldn't not be a religious Jew and still be who I am," says Lakein, a community organizer. ''When I pray there my concentration level is pretty high. I'm able to be the Jew I want to be and call out to my God the way I want to."
''I feel really cheesy, but Shabbat is really a spiritual renewal," says Gillers. ''I want to be able to both be lifted and lift myself at the same time."
In a congregation of young people in Cambridge, that critical mass constantly shifts as faculty positions or post-docs in other cities or houses in the suburbs beckon. ''It's unfortunate that this doesn't have the backing of any real rabbinic authority. It makes it marginal in that sense in the Orthodox world. But people like me couldn't wait any longer for the 'hechsher,' the approval of rabbinic authorities," says Cooper. ''Part of me feels like Jewishly there's a large possibility I'm not going to find myself fulfilled in a suburban community. I'm not going to find what I have here religiously. It's sad. I often think if I moved somewhere without a Minyan Tehillah, would I be able to start one?" 