5 Introduction

Abstract

In the Passover Hagaddah, we read each year that even Torah scholars, ostensibly familiar with the story of the Exodus from Egypt, are still responsible for retelling it around the table. Those who go further in their liturgical retellings, expanding and elaborating, are said to be worthy of praise. In a commentary on this familiar passage for a contemporary Haggadah, Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg notes that the telling and sharing of stories plays a potent role in liberation movements. It is in the space where stories are shared, she says, that " strategies for transformation " evolve. 1 In this spirit, we continue the discussion of Jewish women's spirituality begun in Nashim no. 9. If there is praise to be had for returning to a story as well known and essential as the Exodus, how much more is there praise to be had for dwelling upon the often hidden, suppressed, or silenced narratives of Jewish women's spirituality. Israeli and American scholars speak here from the vantage points of various disciplines and interdisciplinary fi elds. Anthropology has the loudest voice: Five of the scholars draw upon ethnographic analysis—fi eld research—to consult the evidence of women's spirituality. Those working in the contemporary period make sense of emergent forms of spiritual expression by listening to the spoken words of women refl ecting upon their engagement. A lone historical anthropologist listens too, but to the voices of Jewish women emerging (perhaps) between the lines of sixteenth-century texts written by men. Ethnographic research among professionally trained liberal Orthodox actresses in modern-day Israel who address spirituality and worship in their theatrical performances is presented by Reina Rutlinger-Reiner. This is a phenomenon perhaps unknown to American readers. The actresses she studies (mostly trained in university theater departments) discover that theatrical space, conventionally understood by the Orthodox as forbidden, subversive, and idolatrous, can become, for them, both a permissible sphere and a setting for their holy endeavors, avodat kodesh. Rutlinger-Reiner compares these 6 Vanessa L. Ochs Orthodox actresses, who, in their courageous performances, lay bare the nakedness of mainstream Orthodoxy, to those women who have, in the last three decades, created and sustained women's prayer groups and institutes for advanced women's learning of Talmud. Quoting Tamar Ross, whose book is reviewed in this issue by Elizabeth Shanks Alexander, she claims that these enterprises represent " a break with dominant interpretive traditions of the past and a grass-root initiative …