Published: 13 September 2021
Last updated: 4 March 2024
JUDITH ROSENBAUM: We are only just starting to expand the Jewish story to include women’s voices and value their essential contributions
For the past 18 years, I have chanted the haftarah for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, which tells the story of Hannah. Barren and bereft, despite the love of her husband, she prays so fervently that the high priest, Eli, mistakes her for a drunkard. Her wish for a son is granted and Samuel is born.
The haftarah does not end with this happy fulfillment but goes on to detail her weaning of Samuel and delivery of the young boy to Temple service – the “deal” she made in her desperate negotiation with God.
To the rabbis, Hannah becomes the paradigm of spontaneous prayer. To me, she’s an exceptional case of a woman’s story centered in our liturgy, her spiritual life held up as a model and the transitions of her motherhood acknowledged as essential human experiences.
The liturgy of the High Holidays focuses, in part, on failures – ours and those of our ancestors – to remind us that we all miss the mark, and that we must try to do better. The texts at the center of the holidays, like the story of Hannah, highlight the challenges inherent to the human experience: jealousy, judgment, loss, misunderstanding.
That women play a central role in these texts also serves as an invitation. If the rabbis assembling our liturgy centuries ago could perceive and lift up the lessons of women’s lives, we, too, must expand our perspective by listening to the stories that are not generally centered in our narratives, such as the stories of women.
As an historian of women’s lives, and the CEO of the Jewish Women’s Archive (JWA), I am acutely aware of how rare it is for women’s lives to be recognised as touchstones of power and leadership.
Twenty-five years into JWA’s work, with thousands of Jewish women’s stories documented and made accessible to people all over the world, we are only at the beginning of expanding and transforming the Jewish story to include women’s voices and to value their essential historical contributions.
