“Teach Your Daughters to Wail and One Another to Lament”: Jewish Prayers and Liturgical Texts for Female Victims of Sexual Assault

Elazar Ben-Lulu

doi:10.1515/opth-2020-0184

Abstract

AbstractThroughout generations, various prayers have been composed to express religious and cultural experiences of the Jewish community, such as holidays life-cycle and national tragedies. However, some social issues, such as sexual assault, have been excluded from this canon. This article uncovers Jewish prayers and liturgical texts dedicated to female victims of sexual assault. Drawing on a qualitative inquiry based on content analysis and interviews with the prayers’ authors, I demonstrate how these texts (re)position sexual assault victims in Jewish liturgy by including new phrasings and references to God; by removing masculine violence related to God; by mentioning biblical female characters who experienced sexual harassment; by denouncing of patriarchal abuse; or by sanctifying the woman’s painful body, which is incorporated as an important agent in the ritual’s structure. Therefore, I suggest considering these texts a political mean to voice women’s traumas and to incorporate them into the religious sphere, thereby rectifying a long-silenced discourse.

Highlights

Since October 2017, when The New York Times published the Harvey Weinstein story, the hashtag #MeToo became a popular way to express solidarity with girls and women who experienced sexual assault
This study examines some of the Jewish responses to domestic violence and abuse by analyzing a pioneer type of prayers and liturgical texts that are dedicated to female victims of sexual assault
In the Sacred Calling: Four Decades of Women in the Rabbinate, female rabbis emphasize that the intersection between their Jewish and gender identities encouraged them to create particular liturgies.[38]. This anthology demonstrates how feminine liturgy expresses new tendencies of contemporary religious leadership which may strengthen sisterhood and gender empowerment. This current study focuses on prayer and liturgy created by feminine rabbis and leaders for female victims of sexual assault

Summary

Introduction

Since October 2017, when The New York Times published the Harvey Weinstein story, the hashtag #MeToo became a popular way to express solidarity with girls and women who experienced sexual assault. “while this venue is not necessarily subversive in essence, the climate it helps foster is potentially critical, in the basic sense that these discussions expose and unpack unchallenged, taken for-granted, unchallenged or opaque structures of rabbinic power and authority.”[14] In addition, Spiegel suggests in Spirituality for Survival: Jewish women healing themselves that “it is not the community’s shame when an individual fails Rather, it is the responsibility of the community to recognize the problems, to reach out to the victims and encourage those who are suffering to seek help when they are in pain and in need of healing, and to provide a safe environment for that healing to take place.”[15]. This exposes how the authors view the texts as a political and cultural product used in the religious-communal space to voice women’s traumatic experiences and memories

Gendering Jewish liturgy

Methods

Purifying the painful body

Mentioning biblical female characters and reframing the ethnonational mythos

Findings

Conclusion