“OPENING THE BLUE OF HEAVEN TO US”: READING ANEW THE PIONEERS OF WOMEN'S ORDINATION

Abstract

In their landmark volume, Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality, Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton gathered scores of Jewish women's reflections.3 Recognizing and seeking to fathom the deep wellsprings of Jewish women's spirituality have propelled much of the research of the pioneering generation of Jewish feminist scholars. For example, Chava Weissler saw in the tkhines, the private prayers of early modern Ashkenazi Jewish women, directness of passionately emotional personal prayer, mostly absent from the more collective and formalized male worship experience.4 Anthropologist Susan Starr Sered opened up the deep, non-textually based piety of the religious lives . . . of the illiterate, uneducated, but spiritually attuned elderly Jewish women of the East.5 Umansky, Ashton, Weissler, Sered, and other scholars have established unequivocally that spirituality is as central a rubric for understanding the lived experiences of Jewish women of the past as it is for comprehending the history of Jewish men, whose prayer and sacred study lay so visibly at the heart of Jewish communal life for millennia.6 Yet this theme of Jewish women's spirituality is one I ignored for the cohort I called Women Who Would be Rabbis (1988). In that book, I wrote of women like Ray Frank, the girl rabbi of the golden West; Martha Neumark, the rabbinical school student who thought she should have a high holiday pulpit; and Irma Levy Lindheim, the Zionist leader and friend of Jewish Institute