n a few short years my daughter Sophie will take her place on the bima and stand on the brink of young womanhood as a Bat Mitzvah, a daughter of the commandments. When life cycle events unfold as they should they are cause for both celebration and contemplation. A baby is named, a girl becomes a woman, two individuals dedicate themselves to a shared life. A threshold is reached, and a new day begins, spawning challenging, even difficult questions. The questions Kathy and I have begun to consider in preparing for our daughters’ Bat Mitzvah have nothing to do with caterers and everything to do with content. We are committed to working with our daughters to create a ceremony that is meaningful, a rite of passage made beautiful through song, spirituality and text.

One question I have been turning over like a ball of clay is simple and straightforward: How can we best honour Sophie? How will we honour her sister Molly on the day she is ready to take her place in our community, one foot planted in the past, the other poised to take a step forward? What does it mean to honour a young Jewish woman, whether I am bound to her by blood or community? Just as the Talmud tells us that when we save one life, we save the world entire, surely it can be said that when we honour one Jewish woman, we honour all women.

Women, of course, know first-hand where they stand, what they have withstood, and where they want to go. And while my thoughts are meant for one and all, I’m tugging twice on the ears of the men in our midst.

Where to begin? We can begin by sifting through the sands of Jewish history, sand that smothered women’s voices. Women were excluded from participating in a minyan, from attending Bet Hamidrash, the Jewish house of study. Denied an education, Jewish women were denied the tools that would have allowed them the opportunity to record their own stories, to shape liturgy, to have a say in services that purportedly spoke to everyone. In other words, women were silenced.

I hadn’t yet reached the first page of Women Speak to God: The Prayers and Poems of Jewish Women when I was hit with a cold truth trumpeted in the editors’ dedication: “This book is dedicated to all of the women who never prayed because they felt their prayers would not be heard.”

That is how it works, slowly, over generations, all in the name of tradition, God’s word, the status quo, don’t-question-it: women are devalued, then diminished. Self-worth shrivels into self-doubt. Despite the odds, despite the oppression, women left their mark on Jewish history. We owe it to our mothers and daughters to lift the stones of time that have covered women’s contributions and unearth the riches beneath. We can begin by learning their names, digging up their stories until we ache. A name recited is a name restored. When we speak of Abraham, let’s speak of Sarah. When we speak of Moses, let us ask what his sister Miriam has to say. If we mention Aaron in one breath, save the next one for Yocheved. Deborah. Dinah. Hannah. As Sophie and Molly write their stories with each passing day, may they discover ancient stories they have not yet heard but deserve to know.

We honour women when history is reclaimed and the truth is revealed.

Slowly, sometimes glacially, oppression dissolves as societies evolve. Once women were no longer shackled by illiteracy their voices began to surface. The zogerke was a communal institution where women who could read Hebrew led services for women who could not. By the 17th century Ashkenazic women began to recite tkhines, Yiddish supplicatory prayers that were mostly written by men but are said to have been written by women as well. Memoirs were recorded, letters were preserved.

We honour women when we listen to their words, when we hear their songs.

Once voiceless and marginalized, women are changing liturgical language, transforming the words that come out of our mouths, reshaping our relationship to Judaism. When we speak of God as King, the image is immutable. Language is light as air yet carries an enormous weight. The words we use profoundly shape our sense of self, our sense of others, our sense of the world. And so Marsha Falk, whose work appears in our prayer books, rewrote a blessing that now reads: N’varech et eyn hachayim (“Let us bless the source of life….). To talk of the source of life, to speak of a Creator instead of a King is to use language as a door into a room in which everyone can find a place.

Women songwriters like Debbie Friedman have revisited old texts and given them new life through new lyrics. Friedman wrote the music and co-wrote the lyrics for L’chi Lach, a gorgeous melody based on Genesis, Chapter 12, verses 1-2, in which God tells Abraham he will lead him “to a place you do not know”. In Friedman’s beautiful version, God effectively addresses Sarah as well. “I shall make your name great…,” go the words, “and all shall praise your name.”

Just as words are doors that let us in, symbols are the touchstones that line the wall. The very symbols of Passover are changing, thanks to women who are insisting they have a seat at the table. The seder plate in our home includes all the usual symbols, as well as an orange. Why an orange? There is a story that tells of a Jewish scholar who was asked for his opinion about including women on the bima during Jewish religious ceremonies. He replied, “A woman on the bima is as out of place as an orange on a Seder plate.”

New symbols are added. Old holidays are revived. Rosh Hodesh is a celebration of the New Moon that has been known as a woman’s holy day for over three thousand years. Rabbinic law dictated that women be granted a half-day holiday because they stood their ground when they didn’t help create the Golden Calf. Today, Rosh Hodesh has become an opportunity for women to gather in an all-female setting to discuss the links between feminism and Judaism, to learn about Jewish history, to forge bonds between themselves.

We honour women when we respect their choices and affirm their needs.

“Women need a new situation,” writes Lynn Gottlieb in She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of a Renewed Judaism. “In a Jewish context, we need to transform the way we talk Torah, the way we practice ceremony and ritual, the way we tell and pass on stories, the way we codify laws, the way we organize our communities, and the way we envision sacred mysteries…We cannot be expected to abide by norms we did not help to create.”

‘She who dwells within’ is a poetic translation of Shekinah, a Hebrew phrase that refers to the feminine aspect of the divine, the feminine Presence of God [of God’s imminence]. Shekinah has been a part of Jewish text and tradition for thousands of years but, typically, has been interpreted by men. As women bring a different perspective to Shekinah, their experience of the divine will infuse our collective interpretation of God’s word with new shadings and hues.

We honour women when we open our hearts to change.

Next Passover will see a new symbol added to our Seder table. There, beside Elijah’s cup, will be a glass of water. Miriam’s cup symbolizes Miriam’s well, which followed the Jews on our 40-year wandering through the desert, sustaining us as we walked toward the Holy Land. How fitting for a cup of water to represent Jewish women. Water, like women, is as a source of life. And when waters are calm and the conditions are right, you can look into water and see your reflection. An apt time to reflect on the women in our lives—our mothers, our sisters, our daughters—and ask, “Do we honour them in our actions, in our words? We dishonour women when we dismiss their concerns, when we belittle their contributions, when we cut them off in mid-sentence. We dishonour women when we fail to pay tribute to the women who have come before us: our mothers, our mothers’ mothers and the mothers before them who quietly preserved traditions, who preserved families in the face of great odds and, not so long ago, an unspeakable tragedy. If home is where the heart is, then women own our hearts. They have fed us, clothed us, swathed us in rituals that have been passed down through the ages.

Traditionally, Jewish women were responsible for niddah (biblically based rabbinic laws regulating sexual relations), challah and hadlaqat ha-ner (kindling the Sabbath lights). Men had the obligation to study. Today, women and men should seize the opportunity to do both. As women take their place on the bima, men can learn lessons of Talmudic proportions by bathing a newborn, or spending time in the kitchen, baking bread (and cleaning up afterwards).

The day when true equality is the norm is on the horizon, within sight but not within our reach. Boys continue to be raised with a sense of entitlement that many girls are still expected to earn. Walls are tumbling, glass ceilings are shattering, but imbalances remain. True, we have come a long way since Eliazer Ben Hyrcanus was quoted in the Talmud as saying, “It is better to burn the Torah than to teach it to your daughter.” Still, there is work to be done. There are blessings that have yet to be written, ceremonies that have yet to be ritualized, needs that have not yet been met. If Judaism is to continue to thrive it must evolve and not remain static. Rest assured, many of the changes to come, the changes that enrich Judaism will be spearheaded by women. The daughters who are with us today, the daughters who have yet to arrive, will largely define Judaism tomorrow.

The first chapter in Lynn Gottlieb’s She Who Dwells Within begins with a poem titled Yehudim: Unifications. I dedicate it to my two beautiful daughters as they inch their way toward their Bat Mitzvahs, toward young womanhood and beyond. I offer the words to all women and men who are committed to Judaism but not afraid to question it, women and men prepared to share the same prayer shawl as we stand side by side as equals, as we consider how this shared Judaism can be applied to mending a world that is forever torn. And so to Sophie and Molly, I say:

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