Aliza Lavie - A Jewish Womans Prayer Book

It is possible to live without hope; perhaps even without truthbut not without prayer, which is the quest for both If art is mans way of saying no,prayer is his way of saying yes. Yes to the universe and its Creator, yes to life and its meaning, yes to faith, to hope, to joy. A torch for the wanderer who has lost his way, a ladder for Jacob, who seeks dreams, a window onto the soul

On the eve of Yom Kippur in 2002 I read a newspaper interview with Hen Keinan, a woman who had lost her baby daughter, Sinai, and her mother, Ruthi Peled, in a terrorist attack in a shopping center in Petah Tikva, Israel. In an instant, Hen had become both a bereaved mother and an orphan. After the attack, Hen and her husband, Lior, left Israel and moved to the United States. This interview, I sensed, was a farewell to Israeli society. Hen was unable to contain her pain; staying in the country where she had sustained the loss of that which was most precious to her had become too difficult for her to bear.

The article shook me and stirred up a storm of emotions. Hens pain and despair, her cry from the heart cut through me, leaving me bewildered and burdened with questions. I wanted to embrace her; I wanted to offer words of comfort, to strengthen her spirit. When I stood in the synagogue later that evening for the Kol Nidrei service, I could not pray. The words in the prayer book escaped me. The little that I read was blurred by my tears. Thoughts raced through my head and carried me beyond the synagogue walls and across the boundaries of time. I thought of the many Jewish women throughout history who had suffered losses similar to Hens and had remained strong. I wanted to tell Hen about those women, whose merits are preserved forever by the Creator; women like our matriarchs, Sarah and Rachel. I wanted to tell her about Elisheva, daughter of Aminadab, who lost her sons Nadab and Abihu; about Ruth, the Moabite; and about Glckel of Hameln. I wanted to convey to her the strength and fortitude of Jewish women in Italy; to tell her about my own grandmother, Hannah Mashiah, who emigrated from Bukhara as a respected, wealthy woman and then endured bereavement and impoverishment in the Promised Land: she bore nine children, but by the age of thirty-six she had lost three of them and was a widow. I would whisper to Hen that my grandmothers steadfast and knowledgeable faith and her attendance at prayer services three times a day, every day, all year round, were the foundations of my own strong connection to Judaism.

As I stood there in the synagogue, grappling with Hens questions and sensing that the prayer book in front of me could not provide the answers, I resolved to seek out the secret of my grandmothers legacy; to explore the eternal, powerful faith of Jewish women. At that moment I undertook a quest that could be fulfilled only with the publication of this collection in Hebrew and, now, in English.

I am sitting in Jerusalem, not far from the synagogue where this adventure began. My thoughts carry me to the prayers I have come to know, the life stories to which I have been exposed, the women I have met, and the imaginary conversations I have held with women long deceased. The publication of this book marks the culmination of a six-year journey that exposed me to a spiritual world that had nearly been lost to time. This collection reviews prayers that were passed down from mother to daughter and from daughter to granddaughter; they were whispered throughout the generations, in Israel and around the world, in Hebrew and in the many languages of the Jewish Diaspora, only rarely being set down in print. Here are prayers that were written three thousand years ago alongside prayers composed in the third millennium. The world I discovered, the age-old code of Jewish women that opened up before me, is preserved here in a single volume.

Significantly, Judaisms entire conception of prayer originated with a woman. After the destruction of the Temple, a fixed prayer formula was set down to replace the daily Temple sacrifices. Many of the laws and details pertaining to this prayer formula were derived from the biblical account of the supplication of Hannah, the mother of the prophet Samuel, for a son. Out of all the instances of prayer in the Bible, the rabbis chose this womans heartfelt, personal appeal to God as the paradigm for the individual, whispered prayer that is at the heart of every public prayer service. In tribute to the importance of her contribution, the prayer books of many Jewish communities around the world open with the words, Hannah prayed and she said.