Sep 29, 2024
Marna:
The silver lining of COVID for me has been Yiddish. After dabbling in it for many years, I’ve actually begun to learn the language. The miracle of Zoom has enabled me to take classes from teachers in six countries! And the proliferation of interest in Yiddish, with a corresponding proliferation of learning opportunities, has opened an old-new world to me.
One of the most gifted Yiddish teachers from whom I learned (and continue to learn) is Sharon Power of Toronto. When I told her in early 2023 of my interest in studying tkhines [women’s supplicatory prayers], her response was that, while she knew of their existence, she had never studied them, and, as a secular Jew, did not feel competent to teach them — but that maybe we could explore them together when she was not doing her formal teaching come summer. And so we did, inviting others from our respective Yiddish circles to explore them with us.
Sharon:
The pandemic has also been a blessing for me, both as a Yiddish instructor and as someone living with a chronic illness. By 2019, I had already cut back on my classroom teaching due to my declining health and might soon have had to stop doing what I love entirely. And then the world went online. Yiddish learning (and teaching) exploded. The main organization I work for as an instructor, the UJA Committee for Yiddish in Toronto, immediately tripled our Yiddish class enrollment. We were connecting with students across Canada, the United States, and even the U.K. and Europe, and we’ve been able to maintain and expand our online Yiddish classes ever since. I was able to keep teaching, working from home, and in addition to keeping my career, I’ve been blessed to have met so many wonderful new students from around the world and have had the opportunity to create all kinds of new and interesting courses – including my collaboration with my new friend, Marna, running a study group together 2600 miles and three time zones apart.
Marna:
Almost 30 years ago, my synagogue absorbed what holy books and other items remained when another congregation 30 miles to our south closed its doors. Almost all their siddurim were so tattered and mildewed that they needed to be buried. Among them I found a small book of tkhines (small enough to perhaps be slipped into an apron pocket), published in New York in 1916, and saved it from burial. I knew enough to identify it, but not to read it. It sat on my shelf these many years.
Jews in the Old Country placed a high value on traditional learning for men, and literacy among both men and women was generally higher than among the non-Jewish neighboring population. But, while most boys went to kheder and learned Hebrew and Aramaic, many girls learned to read only Yiddish. Around the late 1500’s, the idea arose that, since women were required to pray, and since God presumably understood Yiddish, it might make sense for women to pray in the mame-loshn [the mother-tongue]. We have examples of tkhines beginning in that period: some apparently written by men for women to pray; others written by women. Some instruct, for example, “to be said with great kavone [kavanah/fervor] by women.” (Some add, “and unlearned men.”)
Sharon:
I knew about tkhines, but only in the distant way a Yiddish student learns the meaning of a new word. I had never read a tkhine or seen a book of tkhines or knew anyone who had done so, either. Although my grandparents were raised frum in Slovakia before the War and my grandfather had completed Yeshiva study there and was the spiritual advisor at his shul in Toronto, I had a largely secular upbringing and am myself not religious. I had never prayed (except as an uncomfortable exercise in Hebrew school), and didn’t have any real sense of how Jewish women would have used, and in some communities continue to use, tkhines as part of their spiritual and daily lives.
I was trepidatious, but I trusted Marna to help us through the religious aspects of the prayers. I also love learning new things and reading new Yiddish texts, so I was excited to find out what tkhines were all about and eager to see if we could make this little experiment of ours work. It was wonderful that so many lovely people wanted to join us on this online journey.
Marna and I spent the month before we started the group last July poring through tkhines available online, choosing which ones sounded most interesting to us and cobbling together a list that would cover both the basics and those juicy little curiosities that reveal so much about the social conventions and expectations for women in the time and place in which they were written and intended to be used. Most of the tkhines we chose came from the Shas Tkhine Rav Peninim (1916), the first book of tkhines published in America.
One of the toughest challenges a Yiddish teacher faces is a mixed-level group. And this group could not have been more mixed! There were folks who didn’t read a word of Yiddish but were interested in the spiritual aspects, learning together with Yiddish students of all levels. And yet we made it work. Those who could read Yiddish would read from the text, and I would facilitate, helping where necessary and re-reading difficult sections. After reading a section, we would translate the Yiddish for members of the group who don’t read or speak it. Then would follow one of my favourite parts of a leyenkrayz [Yiddish reading group]: sharing our impressions and working together to figure out the meaning of what we read. Marna’s role here was invaluable; she helped us understand the Hebrew and religious terms, and she put the prayers in their spiritual context and explained their connections with liturgy and Tanakh, stories referenced from the Bible. This group – and a meaningful exploration of tkhines – would not have been possible without both the Yiddish piece and the spiritual piece.
Marna:
The most straightforward tkhines are parallels to – in many cases, direct translations from – prayers in the traditional Hebrew liturgy. We read a few of those.
Others center on the three mitzves [mitzvot/commandments] traditionally assigned to women: khale [challah/Sabbath bread], nide [niddah/the laws regarding ritual menstrual impurity], and likht-bentshn [Shabbat candle-lighting]. We read a tkhine for separating the dough when making khale, and one for preparing to immerse in the mikve [ritual bath]. We read several for lighting shabbes candles. Most interesting was the one titled “A New Tkhine for Sabbath Candle-Lighting (Special for America).” It starts in a predictable way:
Dear God, You have given to Your people Israel the gift of the holy Sabbath, and You have commanded us in Your holy Torah on this day to do no manner of work, [and] to beautify this holy day with good food and beautiful clothing.
And then it changes course:
But today we are in goles [exile], where the strife of earning a livelihood is great, and circumstances often mean we cannot observe the Sabbath the way the Law commands. I beg of You, God, save me, my husband and children, from the need to desecrate shabbes and yontev. Send us a livelihood with ease and not with suffering [so that] we will be able to rest and observe Your holy days with full hearts.
Sharon:
In the same tkhine, I was struck by the author’s concern about how easy it could be for immigrant Jews to abandon tradition in their new home. This tkhine continues:
America serves as a City of Refuge for the persecuted and tormented. But life here is very difficult, and oftentimes Jewish children must violate shabbes and yontev… They do this at first out of need, and later out of habit. May the Angels that come Friday night to every Jewish house not find disgrace [in mine]. May they find in my house the correct Jewish shabbes and may they bless us always.
This represents both a description of the hard realities of immigrant life, and an admonishment by the author to his female readers not to succumb to the lures of acculturation.
Marna:
Most fascinating are the topical/historic tkhines: a tkhine to be said upon hearing bad news (e.g., of a pogrom) from the Old Country; one for a woman who goes out to collect tzdoke [tzedakah/charity], asking God to open people’s hands that they might give to her generously; another to be said by a woman who can no longer live on her own and must bear the indignity of living with her married children. We read a tkhine to be said when a plague breaks out, which seemed timely as COVID lingered. Then Sharon found a contemporary tkhine, published online, in Hebrew, Yiddish, English, and Hungarian(!), to be said upon receiving a vaccine, which paired with it nicely.
There are poignant hazkores neshomes [memorial prayers] for the victims of the Titanic and of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire – both tragedies that occurred shortly before the book was published.
We anchored ourselves in Jewish time by reading the tkhine for Rosh khoydesh Av (the new moon of the Hebrew month of Av) when our group met on that date, and, as the High Holy Days approached, we readied ourselves with a tkhine for shofar-blowing.
Sharon:
I loved reading all the tkhines, particularly the memorial tkhines for soldiers fallen in war or those killed in a fire (which often ventured into surprisingly dark and explicit territory). The “new” tkhines written for America were also marvelous in their depictions of immigrant women’s concerns, and how the writers did their best to impress upon these women not to lose their Yiddishkeyt along the way. The more we read, the more evident became the concerns their (mostly male) authors had about the piety of their readers.
We did read a number of tkhines written by women (including the traditional Three Gates Tkhines by Sarah Bas Tovim, and an amazing eighteenth-century book focused on the High Holidays, Tkhine of the Matriarchs by Seril Rappaport), but regardless of the gender of the author, most expressed the basic theological premise that bad things happen because we did something wrong, thereby rendering the inexplicable predictable (and preventable). The reader was encouraged to blame herself and beg forgiveness over and over again: when soldiers die in war, when her children don’t treat her as they should, when a plague breaks out, even when her husband stays away from home a little too long. For all that she gained a feeling of control and influence over difficult circumstances, she suffered too, taking on the guilt, shame, and sorrow embedded in these words that she was expected to fervently recite.
One of the tkhines that stuck with me most was a heavily German-inflected tkhine to be recited by a kale [bride] before she goes to the khupe [wedding canopy], which I found in a mid-nineteenth century Shas Tkhine published in Vilna. I don’t know if it was written by a man or a woman, but it evocatively captures the anxiety and loneliness of a young bride leaving behind everything she knows to take on the awesome responsibilities of becoming a Jewish wife:
Accept this prayer from Your servant who kneels before You with bowed head, with trembling knees. My heart is full, full as the great sea. My thoughts are troubled and scattered…. Now has come the hour when I should leave my dear parents, my dearest ones in the world, who have borne so much struggle and worry for me… Only You know what a difficult, serious step now stands before me. Terrifying for me is this passage through the gates of my life. And terrifying are the new life’s responsibilities which I now take on. Oh God, honour my innermost prayer…
This tkhine was not included in the book of tkhines published in New York in 1916; only the accompanying tkhine for the mother of the bride remained. Perhaps this hints that the American Jewish bride, occupied with other concerns, no longer had need for such a prayer. Or perhaps, being a modern woman, the bride no longer recites tkhines at all, and it is only her immigrant mother who keeps up the old traditions.
For all the tragedy and anguish we find in these women’s prayers, we ended the summer on a joyous note: reading and listening to different versions of the well-known women’s havdole prayer, “Got fun Avrom” [God of Abraham], recited as shabbes departs and expressing fervent wishes for the new week. We ended our summer of tkhines by listening to the Klezmatics performing the related song, “Shnirele Perele,” a celebration of the traditional Jewish themes of hope and salvation.
Both of us:
What will we do next with these treasures we are still discovering? We’re not sure. We are hoping to facilitate more of these kinds of groups together in the future, exploring different texts located at the intersections of Yiddish and women’s spirituality. And maybe – sometime, somewhere – we’ll figure out how to meet one another in person!
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For further reading:
https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/tkhines
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/nashim.31.1.07
Our primary text (in Yiddish):
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