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    Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant
    Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant
    Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant
    Ebook340 pages2 hours

    Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant

    By Debra Nussbaum Cohen and Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso

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    About this ebook

    An indispensable “how-to” guide for creating lasting memories and special ceremonies as you welcome your new Jewish daughter.

    When a son is born, every Jewish parent knows what ceremony will welcome him into the community and signal his part in the Jewish people—the brit milah. What to do when a girl is born? How can you welcome your new daughter in a truly Jewish way, and celebrate your joy with family and friends? In the past, parents who wanted a simchat bat (celebration of a daughter) ceremony for their new daughter often had to start from scratch. Finally, this first-of-its-kind book gives families everything they need to plan the celebration.

    • History & Tradition—The roots of simchat batin Jewish tradition, how it has evolved, and how the past can be used to bring today’s dynamic ceremonies to life.
    • A How-to Guide—New and traditional ceremonies, complete with prayers, rituals, handouts to copy, and step-by-step instructions for creating your own unique ceremony.
    • Planning the Details—What to call your daughter’s welcoming ceremony, when and where to have it, setting it up, how long it should be, how to handle the unexpected, how to prepare a program guide, and more.
    • Ideas & Information—Practical guidelines for planning the event, and special suggestions and resources for families of all constellations.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateJul 12, 2012
    ISBN9781580236591
    Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant
    Author

    Debra Nussbaum Cohen

    Debra Nussbaum Cohen is a mother and an award-winning journalist whose interest and specialty is writing on issues related to Jewish identity and spirituality. She currently writes for the New York Jewish Week. She has been the religion writer for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and has written for many publications including the Washington Post, New York magazine, the Village Voice, Moment, the Jerusalem Report, the Jerusalem Post, Sh'ma and Jewish Family & Life. Cohen lives in New York with her husband and three children.

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      Book preview

      Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter - Debra Nussbaum Cohen

      PART ONE

      An Introduction to Contemporary Jewish Welcoming Ceremonies

      CHAPTER ONE

      The History of This New Tradition

      There’s a reason why the time is ripe for a book on this topic. It’s because we’re ready. We’re ready as a Jewish people, as Jewish women, as people who love Jewish women, and most of all, as people who love the little Jewish girls who are being born into our lives and community. While there has been much focus in recent times on creating naming ceremonies for girls, we know that it’s time to honor their arrival with the same depth of ritual and praise of God with which we honor our sons.

      Those who have preceded us in welcoming their daughters for the past quarter-century have been busy inventing, discovering, unearthing, and adapting rituals and compiling them into their own unique ceremonies. Several important works have preceded this book—articles, the first of which was published in 1973, and booklets and chapters about simchat bat in books about Jewish ritual. The earliest published collection dates back to 1977, when the New York Jewish feminist group Ezrat Nashim published their booklet of welcoming ceremonies. Since then, welcoming ceremonies for girls have gained acceptance in almost all Jewish circles, and are increasingly popular. Creative ceremonies are to be found in all but the most right-wing circles of the Orthodox community, and among liberal Jews of every denominational affiliation.

      There is growing interest as well among new parents who want to welcome their daughters with Jewish ritual, but who don’t necessarily belong to a synagogue or know quite where to turn for assistance. So much has been written by thoughtful, creative Jews to welcome their daughters that thousands upon thousands of such ceremonies are circulating, most of them from one pair of hands to another. Enough has been developed so that it’s no longer necessary for each Jewish parent of a new daughter to reinvent the wheel. There is a level of egalitarianism around simchat bat ceremonies unlike that around any other Jewish ritual, probably because so few of us, no matter what our denomination or level of Jewish involvement, grew up seeing rabbis lead welcoming ceremonies for girls. We don’t feel so much that we are breaking from a Jewish tradition as much as we are building on it, extending it, creating the next chapters of our prayer books. The fact that we are all, essentially, beginners in creating this ritual of celebration and sanctification for our daughters has permitted a great unleashing of liturgical creativity. By gathering together the elements of these ceremonies, this book provides a single comprehensive resource from which to plan the most important new ones—yours.

      In collecting welcoming ceremonies from Jews all over the world, I discovered a curious thing: Common threads of structure and liturgy run through most of them. They are shaped along similar lines, with a parallel order, and share several oft-used blessings and lines of beautiful verse from the Torah that are particularly well suited to the occasion. While the Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and even centrist Orthodox movements have published sample prayers and welcoming ceremonies for girls in their rabbis’ manuals and in the Reform movement’s book of home-based rituals, Jewish religious authorities have not codified a single simchat bat or brit bat rite.

      The brit milah ceremony for boys is a single ritual of prayers, blessings, and the physical act of cutting the foreskin, which is universally practiced. It is fundamentally the same whether the ritual is being performed at the hands of a Chasidic rabbi in Brooklyn or a Reform mohelet (female circumciser) in Georgia. We have no such single practice for our girls. It is too new a ceremony, still being tried on and shaped by every pair of parents that welcomes their daughter this way. That means there is no set liturgy, that each time the responsibility for what we are to do is in our hands. That is our challenge and our opportunity.

      Jewish religious practice is, and always has been, an evolving, organic process, reflecting the needs of an individual Jewish community at a particular point in time and influences from the cultures in which we have lived. As feminist Jewish theologian Judith Plaskow has written, the boundaries of what is religiously acceptable evolve over time in the context of changing circumstances.¹ The newness and innovative nature of simchat bat extends to each of us the opportunity to compose the ceremony that feels best suited to our family’s needs. What will feel right to one family in the simchat bat they create for their daughter might feel awkward or foreign to another.

      But these ceremonies work best, too, when they are rooted not simply in modern poems and songs, reflections of the popular culture of the moment in which we are living, but in what have become elements of classical Jewish liturgy. The religious evolution reflected in the popularity of welcoming ceremonies for Jewish girls does not mean a break with the past. Instead, it means an adaptation of tradition and continuity, bringing some of the same precepts that we apply to the ritual welcoming our sons into consonance with our contemporary sensibilities. This evolution illustrates the vitality of contemporary Judaism and its centrality in our lives.

      I found, in reviewing the hundreds of ceremonies sent to me from Jewish communities around the world, that there has already been a process of organic codification, that certain prayers and poems and rituals are emerging in many, though far from all, of the ceremonies as the elements that seem right to most of the parents. So while there has been no rabbinic seal of approval designating a single ceremony as the only suitable one, there has been, in fact, a process turning experiment into accepted liturgy all the same. And, as befits this egalitarian age, when the power to determine the level of Jewish engagement we and our children will have is up to our will alone, this process has been in the hands of the people.

      The first contemporary welcoming ceremonies for Jewish daughters were held in the early 1970s by people involved in the then-nascent havurah movement, whose goal it was to take the power of Judaism out of the sole purview of the rabbinate. They wanted to go beyond rabbis and cantors performing rituals for their congregants, empower the laity to take on those tasks and commitments themselves, and create a renewed sense of intimacy and community in Jewish life.

      One of the earliest published daughter’s welcoming ceremonies was that created by Rabbi Michael and Sharon Strassfeld for their daughter Kayla in 1973.² They were central figures in the movement now known as Jewish Renewal and edited the groundbreaking Jewish Catalog series of books, which put do-it-yourself Judaism literally into people’s own hands. It was about that time that two Reform rabbis published a new ritual called kiddush peter rechem (sanctification of the womb’s opening) to mark the arrival of a first child of either sex, in an egalitarian parallel to the traditional pidyon ha-ben, or ceremonial redemption of a one-month-old firstborn son from service in Jerusalem’s holy Temple.

      In an article in Response magazine in the summer of 1973, Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso discussed a welcoming ceremony she and her husband, Rabbi Dennis Sasso, had created for the birth of a daughter of a colleague, and offered an outline of that ritual; the article also explained the rationale behind the creation of this new kind of ceremony.

      Excitement and ferment about these emerging modern welcoming rituals for girls were also spawned in 1973 at the first Conference on Women and Judaism. Thirty years ago nobody even asked the question of whether a girl should have a ceremony, says Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin. There is a huge awareness that has developed over a relatively short span of time, and it has bubbled up from the bottom. These ceremonies were a very radical expression back then, and nowadays they’re not, she said.³

      The very notion of welcoming daughters in a religiously significant way is rooted in an egalitarian concept of what Judaism should be: different, perhaps, for females and males, but equal nonetheless. It is an idea born out of feminism and the then-astonishing idea that women have a voice within Judaism that deserves, and needs, to be heard. Today these ceremonies are held by people who regard feminism in all sorts of different ways—with enthusiasm, with suspicion, or with indifference. Like so many of the benefits enjoyed by contemporary women and men, even if they are embraced by people who would describe themselves as anti-feminist, they are rooted in feminism

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