Jewish Prayer Book Reflects a Dual-Gender God

Innovative prayers that avoid the traditional masculine emphasis of Jewish worship language have been circulated for years in mimeographed form. Now, just in time for Judaism’s High Holy Days, the new prayers have been published in book form.

Rabbi Richard N. Levy, the editor and translator of the prayers, said the book is aimed particularly at growing numbers of small groups who “wish to address God as a Being who created women as well as men in the divine image.” Levy said the prayers also convey an egalitarian view of men and women in the worship settings.

“Ma-aley Tefillot: On Wings of Awe” was not intended, according to the publisher, B’nai B’rith Hillel Foundations, to supplant any prayer books for the High Holy Days, which begin with Rosh Hashanah on Monday.

The reflective period, which coincides with the start of the Jewish New Year, culminates with the most solemn date on the Jewish calendar--Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement--to be observed Sept. 25.

A Dozen Years

Prayers and meditations from “On Wings of Awe” have been used--in one form or another--for a dozen years in High Holy Day services by the Los Angeles Hillel Council at UCLA, where Levy is executive director. Hillel groups at USC and California State University, Northridge, began using them in 1977 and they eventually spread to several other campus groups.

The book features “inclusive language” introduced increasingly in liberal Christian and Jewish circles. The female and male pronoun is used alternately to refer to God or aspects of God described in the Hebrew Scriptures, such as Adonai, “Lord,” and Shechina, “Divine Presence,” masculine and feminine nouns respectively in Hebrew.

One portion reads as follows:

Adonay and Shechina, Lord and Presence,

Are separate names for an indivisible God.

In the One God sometimes we encounter Him,

In the One God sometimes we are addressed by Her.

Adonay is our God, transcending gender,

The world is God’s court, transcending place.

Remember that the covenant with us is forever,

Commanded through our mothers and fathers for a thousand generations.

It was made first with Abraham and Sarah,

In blessings secured by Rebecca and Isaac,

Through the children of Israel and Leah and Rachel.

Levy said “On Wings of Awe” will be used by Temple Beth Hillel of North Hollywood, whose Rabbi James Kaufman called it both “reverent and relevant.”

Rabbi Harold Schulweis of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino has praised the book as useful for Jewish worshipers from various branches of the faith. “English is not dismissed as un-Jewish,” he said, noting that the introduction suggests chanting the English prayers to traditional melodies. Schulweis added that the choices of wording for male/female references are reasonable rather than radical.

Besides its appeal to Jewish students and college faculty, the book has received interest from close-knit units called havurot , multipurpose associations with or without synagogue affiliations, and prayer-study groups called minyanim .

Mixed-Gender Groups

The minyan is traditionally a quorum of at least 10 Jewish males required for certain prayers to be said. But some all-female minyanim and mixed-gender minyanim have cropped up in Jewish communities, a development opposed by Orthodox rabbis.

Egalitarian minyanim of women and men are increasing in numbers in the New York City and Los Angeles areas, says Trude Weiss-Rosmarin of Santa Monica, editor of the Jewish Spectator.

Not by ‘Functionaries’

In the summer issue of her quarterly magazine, she said the prayer groups tend to be offshoots from the havurot movement and the leaders want their services to be conducted not by “religious functionaries” (rabbis, cantors and choirs) but by themselves in intimate numbers.

Weiss-Rosmarin’s editorial did not mention the new Hillel prayer book but she did strike similar themes. While unhappy with exclusive women’s groups and Jewish “women’s theology,” she said she was not offended by efforts to introduce more feminine references in prayers.

“The Torah is feminine in Hebrew linguistic gender and in Jewish life,” she wrote. “The Torah is ‘the bride’ of Israel, whom we honor and adorn with silver and velvet and silk, whom we tenderly enfold in our arms.”

She said she “is insulted by the Jewish custom of naming the child only as son or daughter ‘of the father’ and by those prayer texts which appeal to the God of our fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” Like the Hillel prayer book that incorporates the names of the patriarchs’ wives, Weiss-Rosmarin said, “It is here where I want to see inclusive language, acknowledging that mothers have a share in the child and a claim to the recognition of this share.”