BREAD AND FIRE JEWISH WOMEN FIND GOD IN THE EVERYDAY By 60 Women Edited by Rivkah Slonim

Bread and Fire
Jewish Women Find God in the Everyday
Edited by Rivkah Slonim
Bread and Fire is about the everyday lives of Jewish women and the struggles and aspirations, failings and triumphs of their spiritual endeavors. This book asks: What does it mean to be a Jewish woman today? What does Jewish tradition offer to modern women who are looking for practical ways to bring spirituality and meaning to their lives and the lives of their loved ones?

The women whose writings appear in this book span a wide range of ages, backgrounds, perspectives and professions. In her own way, each one reveals God as an anchoring force in her life: from the birthing room to the boardroom, cleaning in the kitchen or scrubbing up for surgery. In places as far apart as Jerusalem, Washington, DC and southern India, these women help us find the sacred within the apparently mundane.

Readers will find themselves laughing, crying and gaining reassurance and strength as they come face-to-face with these women - women just like them - who are moving forward in the ancient quest to find God in the everyday.

About the Editor

Rivkah Slonim, an internationally known lecturer and activist, addresses the intersection of traditional Jewish observance and contemporary life with a special focus on Jewish women. Over the past two decades, she has appeared before audiences in hundreds of locations across the United States and abroad and served as a consultant to educators and outreach professionals. Slonim is the editor of Total Immersion: A Mikvah Anthology (Jason Aronson, 1996; Urim, 2006). Slonim and her husband, Rabbi Aaron Slonim, have been the shluchim of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, of blessed memory, to Binghamton, NY since 1985. Together they founded and direct the Chabad House Jewish Student Center at Binghamton University. Rivkah and Aaron Slonim are the parents of nine children.

Bread and Fire contains moving teachings and honest reflections from more than sixty contributors, including:

Shoshana S. Cardin
Elizabeth Ehrlich
Ruchama King Feuerman
Tamar Frankiel
Susan Handelman
Francesca Lunzer-Kritz
Sherri Mandell
Rachel Naomi Remen
Liz Rosenberg
Julie Salamon
Sarah Yehudit (Susan) Schneider
Wendy Shalit
Sarah Shapiro
Esther Shkop
Marian Stoltz-Loike

Praise for Bread and Fire:

Bread and Fire is an eloquent expression of contemporary Jewish women's spirituality. Women write here about critical experiences in their inner and outer lives, as well as about the evolution of their attitudes to the givens, the normal pleasures and problems of a woman's world. Many describe their struggle to find the sacred within the humdrum, the sensual, and the traumatic dimensions of experience. Single, married, divorced, disabled, with and without children, juggling the demands of home and profession, passionate students and teachers of Torah, these women convey the joy and complexity of Jewish religious life. Deeply felt and powerfully expressed, these essays should touch the hearts and minds of those who seek the sacred within the mundane.
~ Dr. Avivah Zornberg, author of Exodus: The Particulars of Rapture
... In one essay, Karen Kirshenbaum, teacher of a women's Mishnah class in Jerusalem, recalls the Lubavitcher Rebbe encouraging her own mother to launch study groups for women. In another, Susan Handelman describes the Rebbe's encouragement of her academic pursuits, as well as his lifelong efforts to ensure women's active and visible inclusion in Jewish life. Slonim's collection takes its inspiration from the pathway forged by the Rebbe. Rather than asking writers to talk about women, she has created a collection that allows women their own voices....
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In her opening essay, Rivkah Slonim challenges us to recognize her grandmother's challah baking as an act no less spiritual than the scene of her grandfather wrapped in tallit and tefillin. "They were both completely immersed in conversation with G-d; intimate conversation, loving conversation, in a place where little else mattered." Susan Schneider makes clear that the feminine and masculine domains are not simply "separate but equal""they interact, working like two hands in tandem, each lending support to the other. She describes the vital synergy of the feminine modality that is prayer, vs. the masculine domain of study. "I don't learn except where I pray . . . and I don't pray except where I learn (Tractate Berachot, 8a).' Study must be powerful and must be accompanied by an explicit plea to absorb truth and be changed by it. And conversely, the prayerful yearning to grow and transform requires the fortification of study."

In a brilliant essay called "Speaking to G-d," Tamar Frankiel considers why male imagery is used to describe G-d in our prayers. In the process, Frankiel asks us to confront the fears that often underlie a strident feminism. Rejection of the masculine can sometimes be a mask for our own self-doubt and even self-loathing:

"Like an abused child who cannot suffer intimate touch, we as women often fear to evoke too much passion from men. In our religious lives, we may also guard ourselves from evoking the love of G-d, from asserting our ability to call forth love. So we have frequently chosen to take a meeker role . . ."

Frankiel boldly reframes gender: "We cannot define masculine as one thing and feminine as another, and then bring them together to construct our understanding of love. Rather, love comes first and genders emerge from it . . . To love and yearn, to call forth love and receive it. Surely at this point, the meaning of gender defined in specific roles' disappears."

In its most glorious moments, this book achieves what is so rare in accounts of women's spirituality and transcends the artificial distraction of male and female. It creates a grammar of womanhood that makes no reference to womanhood at all, totally transparent, calling no attention to itself, yet authentic to the feminine experience. These essays could have been written by men, but they are related by women because women relate them best.

They speak of universal themes, of G-d, Torah, family, and the cycle of life. In a breathtakingly lyrical piece, Devorah Leah Rosenfeld, recalling the challenge of explaining death to her young students twenty years earlier, writes, "My father took his final small breaths at dusk, and the long night and day that followed became a confused jumble of disbelief, numbness, and the crushing heaviness of loss. But one slice of time stood out from the rest. As my father's casket was laid gently in the earth, and those who loved him best covered it with shovel after shovel of dry rocky soil, I stood dry-eyed, reassured, calmly watching. Just then, like those four-year-olds had patiently explained to me, it really was the most natural thing in the world."

~ Chana Silberstein, Lubavitch.com
Right inside our front door, we have a wooden cabinet where I store copies of my first two books, Expecting Miracles and One Baby Step at a Time. The only other book in that cabinet are copies of a thick lavender book entitled Bread and Fire: Jewish Women Find G‑d in the Everyday.

This lavender book's place of honor is no coincidence. Bread and Fire is there because it is my favorite book. It is a book I have given to my mother, my sister and my sister-in-law (none of whom is Orthodox) as well as my rebbetzin (who is). It is a book for which I have established its own lending society in my Jerusalem neighborhood. It is a book that I have recommended on my website www.JewishMom.com as one of the top resources that exists for Jewish women.... What I love most about Bread and Fire is its real-ness. It is Jewish womanhood uncensored. I highly recommend Bread and Fire to every Jewish woman at every stage of life. I thank Rebbetzin Rivka Slonim for asking the same questions that I have been asking myself for years, and for having the courage, the intellectual integrity and the determination to answer them in this thought-provoking and powerful book.
~ Chana Jenny Weisberg, The Jewish Press
... Now, following the latest publishing craze of themed Jewish anthologies comes "Bread and Fire: Jewish Women Find God in the Everyday" (Urim Publications, 2008), edited by Rivkah Slonim (with consulting editor Liz Rosenberg). The 400-page compilation features writings from 60 women on topics including modesty, faith, childbirth, prayer, family, community, feminism and, in one way or another, Orthodox Judaism.

"What can it mean to be a Jewish woman today? Does the Jewish tradition offer ways in which a contemporary woman can bring spirituality and meaning to her life? How and where does one begin in a practical way?" writes Slonim, a lecturer and Chabad shaliach, or emissary, of the Lubavitcher movement who works with her husband, Rabbi Aaron Slonim in Binghamton, N.Y. Slonim also edited Total Immersion: A Mikvah Anthology (Jason Aaronson, 1996, Urim, 2006).

"We all have moments of existential reflection. We might question why we are here. We might doubt our ability to make a difference, or despair of connecting to our inner self and to God," she writes.

But this is not a book about existential reflection, doubt or inner despair. It's not even a book about questions. It's more of a collection of writings from people who have already found the answers. Some have had questions in their past -- a number of the writers are ba'alei teshuva, or newly religious....

This is an anthology for anyone interested in religion, in the religious experience, in a community of women who have chosen to live differently from the norm. Varda Branfman, for example, in "The Voice of Tehillim," writes that during her first year in Jerusalem she was "peeling off the layers of my American cultural identity until I was left with what I had been all along, a Jew." She discovered a custom of saying the psalm that corresponds to the number of years one has lived. At 29, she recited psalm 30:

"Hashem, my God, I cried out to You and You healed me. Hashem, you have raised up my soul from the lower world, You have preserved me from my descent to the pit.... Hashem my God, forever I will thank You."

Perhaps this is what my grandparents had been doing all that time -- they were reciting Psalms, although I am not sure they'd have been able to express it in Branfman's words: "Even before we begin to say them, the act of taking the Tehillim down from the shelf returns us to the calm at the center of the storm. By saying these words, we climb into a lifeboat that carries us beyond this moment, beyond peril, beyond our finite lives."
~ Amy Klein, LA Jewish Journal

When Rivkah Slonim was a new bride, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, assigned her and her husband Aaron to serve as a bridge to Judaism on a large and important American university campus. The decision was unexpected. Rivkah Sternberg came from a hassidic family that could trace its roots at least as far back as the Maggid of Mezritch. She was a bit of a rebel, articulate and outspoken.

Aaron Slonim had arrived from Israel, from a Hebron family, a bookish yeshiva student in a black suit. He didn't speak English. It worked out. The Binghamton campus of the State University of New York to which they were dispatched became one of the model outposts of Chabad's Jewish outreach.

If Jewish campus life changed as a result of their presence, then campus life had its impact on Rivkah Slonim, who serves as the director of the Chabad House, a buzzing educational and social center where more than 300 students show up each Shabbat for her homemade hallot, hot meals and the opportunity to schmooze with the rabbi and rebbetzin. On this liberal, intellectual campus, even as Slonim explained and defended Judaism in light of the burgeoning feminism, she worried that women really did wind up with "the short end of the stick."

And so on a visit back to New York City, she headed for the kitchen of her grandmother, who had played such a formative role in her life. When she opened the door, she found both grandparents: her grandfather, wrapped in his tallit and tefillin, completing his morning prayers and her grandmother concentrating on her prayers as she fulfilled the biblical commandment setting aside a portion of dough for halla.

"Both were immersed in loving conversation with the Creator," writes Slonim. "Neither one of them was thinking about self-actualization or equal opportunity. They had achieved."

But few of the women with whom Slonim has held heartfelt conversations over more than two decades have come to religion with such self-actualized role models or the inbred, intuitive, educated Judaism of a woman born into a hassidic dynasty. Slonim's new book, Bread and Fire, is an anthology of day-to-day grappling with the religious experience of women.

The essays, with introductions by Slonim, make up a fascinating and eclectic collection of life slices, replete with seminal experiences and deep thinking, by women who live in Israel and the Diaspora. Some are better-known: Rachel Naomi Remen, Wendy Shalit, Sherri Mandell, Shoshana Cardin, but many are new, compelling voices you'll be glad to discover.

Slonim has succeeded in her mission of making the anthology both intimate and panoramic. There are a few "I found the light" essays, but more are compelling accounts of searching for the light switch. Women talk frankly about shadowed areas of Jewish life. Marcia Schwartz's essay about her reaction to her youngest son trading in his motorcycle helmet for a yarmulke, Minna Hellet's story of her retarded son, Honey Faye Gilbert's description of the dissolving of her marriage give frank expression to painful subjects. Certain essays will appeal to beginners in Judaism, but much of the material will resonate for women with some basic Judaism under their belts. If you need to know something to get the subtlety of the argument, footnotes provide important glosses.

One of my favorites is by Yocheved Reich who tells a story about a Jewish student transplanted from communism into a Jewish school in Brooklyn. Despite their lack of observance, her parents have lovingly carried her grandmother's candlesticks into the new world, and in an act of rebellion Yocheved decides to light them. "During the week I had surreptitiously gathered candles, matches and my grandmother's candlesticks. Furtively I made my way through the house to the one room where I would not be discovered. I thrust my package inside, and locked myself in the bathroom. I didn't know that it's improper to perform a mitzva in the bathroom."

Her anguished parents assume she's smoking, hiding secrets and disgracing the family. So she owns up. "My mother, her eyes moist with relief, looked away in embarrassment. She rescued the candlesticks, rinsed them in the sink and after a minute's hesitation handed them back to me."

I find myself going back to reread the personal piece by Liz Rosenberg, who is also the book's "consulting editor" (and the contributing editor of Slonim's previous book, Total Immersion: A Mikvah Anthology). She describes her last days with her father as he lay dying, finding soulful connectedness and comfort through a rich Judaism she mined as an adult.

Miriam Luxenberg's telling of the loss of her first baby, interwoven like the strands of the halla she learned from a wise and kind woman, is much like the book itself - many individualistic strands that blend insight, knowledge and kindness into a delicious blend of heaven and earth.

What is the relationship of Chabad to women's lives? The question is best answered by Susan Handelman, a Torah scholar and English literature professor at Bar-Ilan University. In "Putting Women in the Picture: A Personal Account of the Lubavitcher Rebbe's Attitude Towards Feminism," Handelman - a graduate of Smith College, where her commencement address was given by Gloria Steinem - shares the surprising and exhilarating experience of having the Rebbe personally edit articles she wrote for Di Yiddishe Heim, a journal published by the Chabad woman's magazine. She also details Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson's views.

According to Schneerson, each generation further away from Sinai is also closer to the final redemption and messianic era. "And so, the Rebbe adds, we could say we have merited the increase in Torah study for women precisely because of that proximity: It is part of the preparation for - and already a taste of - redemption."

This perspective, she says, paralleled his reinterpretation of the halachic obligations of women in the mitzva of Torah study, and within Chabad, his encouragement of their dramatically increased public participation in Chabad outreach activities.

Slonim, a mother of nine, is among the best exponents of that work. She is unapologetic about God rather than the self being the point of departure in Jewish life. As she says: "Judaism is neither patriarchal nor matriarchal - it is covenantal." Don't skip her chapter introductions. If I have one complaint about the volume, it's that I didn't have more of her unique voice with its vast experience, wisdom and compassion. I look forward to it.
~ Barbara Sofer Jerusalem Post
Bread and Fire is an anthology of stories by Jewish women of various backgrounds, family histories, and religious upbringing. But their stories all have one thing in common"a search for the sacred within a secular world. Each story touches on a life cycle event, ritual, or transition in the woman's life that is transformed into a sacred moment.

A woman tells of baking challah and while it may be considered a specific Shabbat role for the women, it can be a moment of connection to God that goes beyond the task of making bread. Some of the stories tell of pain such as losing a parent or obtaining a get. The recitation of kaddish or gaining a deeper understanding of a ritual can be a turning point in one's life. It becomes a moment of holiness that connects the person to her community and ultimately to God.

It is a feminist interpretation, not because it urges women to ignore traditional ritual, but rather, to interpret ritual in a new way that gives women unique spiritual connections rather than the fulfillment of a traditional role.
~ Barbara Andrews, Jewish Book World
Sixty essays address the following questions: "What can it mean to be a Jewish woman today? Does the Jewish tradition offer ways in which a contemporary woman can bring spirituality and meaning to her life? How and where does one begin in a practical way?" The book is divided into three sections"Self, Home and Family, and Community and Beyond, but there is often overlap as "women's lives show themselves inextricably woven of these three strands." Some of the contributors are well-known authors or community fi gures and some of the essays have been previously published. Others offer a fresh and interesting perspective on such varied topics as baking challah, giving money to the homeless, divorce, and Barbie. The contributor biographies are as interesting as the contributions.

The editor is affiliated with the Lubavitch sect of Hasidism, and Chabad philosophy is espoused in many of the essays. Each section begins with an introduction, and each essay is introduced with a sidebar"a poem, a quote from a rabbi, or a quote from Jewish sources. Intricate detail bogs down some of the essays, but there is something to spark everyone's interest, including a description of making Shabbat in India and an essay about the woman's three mitzvot (lighting candles, challah, and family purity) that weaves disparate sources into a fascinating discussion of the physical and the spiritual. This book is highly recommended for libraries that collect books by and about women. For most others, it is a solid but optional choice.
~ Kathe Pinchuck AJL Newsletter