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My mother picked me up from Columbus International Airport on Wednesday afternoon, both of us relieved that my flight was on time and I’d made it to Columbus. I’d spent the past few chagim fantasizing about being home. Columbus’ leaves are just turning, its greenery punctuated with sharp bursts of maroon and traced about with more common amber and bronze. We stopped to pick up our Communist-Socialist-Agriculture basket and headed home to cook.

The first night we ate in the sukkah, a family minhag on Shemini Atzeret. My father has rigged it up with Christmas lights and wind chimes that turn it into a delicate autumnal wonderland. The young couple we’d invited, a professor of Israel Studies and a professor of Talmud, as well as his British parents, a judge and a businessman, made fascinating conversation. The judge (who seemed a proper British lady but turned out hilarious) informed us that, “you meet the most wonderful people when you run them over.” The businessman waxed poetic about a production of Macbeth he’d seen in Polish. The Israel Studies professor answered my question by saying that he does “theoretical, not applied,” Israel Studies. And the Professor of Talmud, well, she had the most incredible take on women in Judaism, one that made me want to mimic my kids with a  “preach!” after every word. I kept thinking about how far I was culturally from my school’s milieu.

The next day, my rabbi sat down across from me at kiddush. “So you decided to come home for Simchat Torah, huh?”

“Yes! Rabbi, here the men make sure the women have a Torah to dance with, and there’s a women’s Torah reading, and the children have such a beautiful role, and it’s home…” He smiled, and I broke off. I was too shy to say all the rest, that the Columbus community glows with ineffable warmth—strangers were brought into the dancing, which slowed patiently for the plucky older woman who wanted to dance, while children raced beneath the outstretched arms of the adults. The shul is full not only of women seeking an active role for themselves and their daughters in Judaism, but with men who check that the women have a Torah to dance with and a space set up for leining, men who insist that their daughters feel valued, and a rabbi who carefully balances his more conservative community members’ needs with these vibrantly seeking congregants’ yearnings. How can I begin to explain that, though I would probably choose a partnership minyan over my parents’ style shul, the fact that it is full of people seeking a halachic, communally-engaging, morally upright Judaism makes it wonderful?

 

Later that morning, the women gathered upstairs in two rooms for the women’s reading of the Torah. Women who are used to more, politely read the single brachah the rabbi had mandated; women who had never received an aliyah before summoned up the courage to work their way through the brachah. I felt the familiar gush of belonging at being a part of tefillah, and an even stronger pride watching my mother introduce and arrange the reading.

On the last round of reading, my high school gemara Rav’s wife received shlishi, which I was leining. I couldn’t exactly explain to her why it mattered so much to me that I got to read for her. I’ll never be able to read for him, and connect to him through ritual, not just learning, and so being able to read for her somehow made a difference. Then, at the end, we crowded into the other room to share a misheberach, and I heard the most enchanting thing. A young girl who had listened to her mother practicing leining over and over had learned the first pasuk of her mother’s aliyah, and stood at the low table in front of her, reading the first pasuk with her. The two voices, one piping and one deep, blended harmoniously.

This is a particularly bright young girl, fluent in Hebrew and English both, who several months back approached her mother, saying, “Ima, I think I’m ready. I know anim zmirot. Let’s tell the rabbi.” It hadn’t occurred to the child that only boys were going up to the bimah to lead anim zmirot; she saw only engagement in Judaism and her personal ability and readiness to give to the community.

The rest of the weekend, I thought about it and talked about it with my parents, old friends, the young mothers of the congregation, and the Talmud professor. Simchat Torah is always a particularly fraught time for Orthodox women. The amazing changes at my parents’ shul were done in joy and respect, without the slightest negativity. Yet even after being in such a safe space, the chag leaves me wondering about women’s role in Judaism. Will the little girl who read Torah with her mom grow up, as I first imagined in a surge of happiness, with a feeling of value and a wholehearted commitment to her Judaism? Or will she run away like me and so many of my more thoughtful/high-powered female friends, giving all of her leadership ability, her bright intelligence, her desire to perfect the world, to the secular society that can appreciate it so much more, and maintain Judaism in a solely personal sphere because the community cannot value what she can bring to it? I look at the shul in which she’s growing up and I know that’s not true. She will lein on Simchat Torah, read megillah on Purim, give shiurim and lead her peers in Torah study. Perhaps she will grow up without any bitterness.

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And the thing is, I grew up without bitterness. It took two years of midrasha, three years in college, and a lot of investigation into the halachic process, to bring me to the polite distance I keep from the Jewish community today. After watching my mother this chag, I realize that women like me will not change Judaism. It is women like her, women who are joyous with their lot and excited to find they can do something more, that will bring Orthodox Judaism slowly but surely into the twentieth century (their great-granddaughters may bring it into the twenty-first). I, for whom a gag reflex is triggered when a well-meaning man tells me, “of course women can do that,” can no longer abide being in the same room as a discussion about whether women can or cannot celebrate some aspect of their religion in public. It’s my religion—how dare you imagine that you have control over it? Don't give me permission to celebrate my faith communally. But mostly, at this point, I nod and give a sickly smile.

My withdrawal from community means, to me, that I can have no say, no power, in how the Jewish community develops. But it’s a withdrawal that has allowed me to keep my joy in Judaism. To celebrate it personally, in tefillah and learning and kashrut and Shabbat, in my private conversations with G-d and considerations of how to act and what to say. It hurts too much to offer the raw, gaping slashes of wounds that I’ve received over the years to communal observance, even while withdrawal feels like I'm betraying something and stifling my religious identity. Eventually, I will find a community driven by the same impulses that drive me, and then I will again begin to contribute and be part of a community. Until then, I will enjoy the brief simple delight of leining on Simchat Torah, give what I can to the Sunday School children of the Conservative community in Charlotte, quietly celebrate my religion on my own terms, in my own private space, and repeat over and over the lines of the Shabbat davening, which, in my mind, represents the religious feminist's creed:

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