renewal 517
elsewhere traditional Jewish notions of community and Torah study.
But in the 1960s some of those Jews seeking spiritual renewal in the
United States began to meet in havurot, gatherings for religious fellow-
ship loosely modelled on a largely imagined notion of such groups in
Second Temple times among Pharisees and Essenes. Conceived as loci
for worship and study separate from the formality of synagogue wor-
ship, havurot rapidly became popular in university cities as part of
student counter- culture, with experiments in forms of worship and a
strict lack of hierarchy, but by the 1980s many synagogue communities
in the United States established havurot of their own to operate in con-
junction with more organized worship.^3
An important aspect of liberation in the havurot from the start was
equality of the sexes within each group. Despite the theory within Euro-
pean Reform Judaism in the nineteenth century that Judaism should
accentuate personal faith and ethics and that women are entitled to the
same rights, and subject to the same religious duties, as men, in practice
many Reform Jews were middle class and shared the notions of their
Christian compatriots about female domesticity, which fitted well with
the traditional role of Jewish women as guardians of the home. In the
1960s, what has become known as ‘ second- wave’ feminism encouraged
a great number of women to seek ordination within the Reform move-
ment, in part as a symbol of the genuine commitment of the movement
to egalitarianism. We have seen (Chapter 17) that the first woman to be
ordained as a Reform rabbi in the United States was Sally Priesand in
- She was followed quite rapidly by Jackie Tabick in England in
- We have also seen (Chapter 18) that Reconstructionist congrega-
tions were quick to follow suit, and that this was the issue within the
Conservative movement which led to the breakaway of Traditional
Conservative Jews. About half of the students currently studying for
ordination as non- orthodox rabbis are women.^4
Women’s ordination has brought far more than simply a widening of
opportunities for religious authority. It has encouraged a proliferation of
critical feminist scholarship of sacred texts including the Bible and Tal-
mud, and the invention of new religious ceremonies and liturgies to
mark events in women’s lives, such as a prayer for healing after a miscar-
riage: ‘What is my supplication? Stupid people and new mothers, leave
me alone. Deliver me, Lord, of this bitter afterbirth. Open my heart to
my husband– lover– friend that we may comfort each other. Open my
womb that it may yet bear living fruit.’ Most coordinated efforts to place
feminist issues on the agenda of Jewish communities have been found in