Bat Mitzvah Speech from a Feminist Jewish Mother

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Oh, milestones! My dear daughter recently became a bat mitzvah, and I’ve received several requests to post the speech I gave to her.

Dearest daughter ~

My baby girl woman, this is amazing, to be with you on the bima for this special Shabbat.

As I’ve watched you prepare for this day, I’ve been thinking about what a marvel and miracle it is for you to accept the mantle of womanhood in front of our family and our community.

Your Torah portion, Vayeira, is also auspicious because it’s one of the few that focuses on a woman’s story and introduces Sarah’s role as the mother the Jewish people.

This concept of a Holy Mother is an important one but often hidden from in our regular worship. In our synagogue, we have moved to a neutral way of referring to our Creator, but in the rabbinic literature there remains the tradition of the Divine Feminine, also called the Shekinah. This sacred feminine aspect of God is represented in the symbol of the hamsa—the hand of God—a symbol that has seen spiritual and cultural resurgence in the past few years, and our guests will be seeing a lot of them this weekend in the decorations!

I have always been a faithful person, and when your brother made me a mother I was brought to my knees by the awesome honor and responsibility of passing on life.

But it wasn’t until I had a daughter that I truly understood the sacred power of the feminine.

When you were born, one of the nurses told me that little girls are born, they have all of their genetic material already inside them. (Without going into an anatomy lesson up here, let’s just say that this is not the case for the male members of the species.)

I looked at your tiny little face and blinky black eyes and realized that meant that part of you had always existed inside of me. That you were already there when I was born to my mother, Marcia, and me to her, and her to Bubbe Reggie, and likewise Reggie to Grandma Lillian, through all the mothers, all the way back to Sarah and the other matriarchs who we still honor every Shabbat.

This STILL BLOWS MY MIND when I stop to think about this direct and powerful lineage. Makes you wonder how we ever got distracted into patriarchy! [**side eye**]

Of course, your dear dad brought the rest of the beautiful pieces that have become you, and you carry the legacy of his mother, who was also named Marcia, and her mother, Ruth, whose name you share with my paternal grandmother Ruth Feinstein, who first introduced me to the symbol of the hamsa when I was a little girl. The influence of your dad’s paternal grandma, Florence, is in there, too.

You have inherited much strength, resilience and creativity from these women, and you are a unique, fortuitous composite of all the ways God creates and directs Life— as our people say, you are beshert, “meant to be.”

I’ve been overjoyed and humbled to celebrate and honor the Divine Feminine with you in some truly meaningful ways this year, from learning about the moon cycles in the Red Tent at the Women’s Herbal Conference to dunking ourselves in an ocean mikveh with the wonderful women of our congregation before Rosh Hashanah last month.

I will always remember you as the perfect little baby in my arms, as the hilarious little girl who bounced like a ball through the hallways and the kind, thoughtful, courageous, confident young person standing before us now, and I am so excited to watch and support the woman you are becoming.

As you step into this world that is full of challenges yet brimming eternally with beauty, grace and love, may you walk your own path, straight and tall.

And whether you choose to become a mother or channel the Divine power of creation in other ways, never doubt that everything you need is already inside you.

Custom hamsa design by rubistudios.com – isn’t it DIVINE?!

Me and Sylvia and Nicole Hollander

civil1-1I had the honor and pleasure of hanging out with a childhood idol this week–or the woman behind the idol, anyway.

Feminist, Sylvia cartoonist and Chicago escape artist (in that order) Nicole Hollander is in Savannah, and I wrote a column about our Bad Girl Chat.

A few Jewish gems didn’t make it through the editorial Cuisinart, like how I invited her to Shabbos dinner (she and her friend Janice are coming this week) and this bombshell:

“You know, I never thought of Sylvia as Jewish.” WHAT.

Read on:

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Schlepping with Sylvia

WHEN I was a teenage anarchist sitting around my suburban bedroom plotting how to subvert the patriarchy without chipping my nail polish, I had a fabulous role model.

Sylvia did exactly what I wanted to  do when I grew up: She spent her days clacking out opinionated missives at her desk and snacking on donuts in the bathtub with a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

She wore lipstick and a feather boa but rarely dealt with her hair. Her cats were smarter than most people, and she was not in the least bit afraid of Rush Limbaugh.

Let’s just say I saw more to emulate in Sylvia than I ever could in Farrah Fawcett.

It hardly mattered that she was a cartoon; Sylvia represented a woman who did and said and ate whatever she wanted, dominant paradigm be damned. As the kids say these days, she gave no fucks.

In spite of such bodacious outrageousness, Sylvia managed to infiltrate the masses. Her socially-conscious comic strip enjoyed a 40 year-run in the funny pages of over 60 daily newspapers across the country, causing subversive chuckles in big cities as well as unlikely places such as my suburban Arizona town and Savannah, GA. (Maybe you remember her trans fashion advice for Gernif the Venusian?)

My mother, a fan of both feminism and feather boas, also kept a pile of Sylvia’s bestselling compilation books in her bathroom, including Everything Here is Mine: An Unhelpful Guide to Cat Behavior and You Can’t Take It With You, So Eat It Now. I spent a lot of time sitting on the bidet and giggling.

Obviously, when another of my favorite sardonic sages, Jane Fishman, slipped the word that Sylvia creator Nicole Hollander was in Savannah, I plotzed. (Think a Jewish version of the Scarlett O’Hara faint.)

Read the rest at connectsavannah.com

Here’s to All the Beautiful Girls (and All of Them Are Beautiful)

141010121544-01-malala-nobel-1010-horizontal-galleryOh, what a joy that the brave and amazing Malala Yousafzai has won the Nobel Peace Prize!

She shares the prize with Indian children’s slavery activist Kailash Satyarthi, and together they portend a shift in the global temperature regarding gender and youth: Girlstheir health, their well-being, their contributions to the worldmatter.

For millennia and in so many places still, girls have been shoved aside, denied education and treated as property. When Taliban can send a gunman to kill a schoolgirl and terrorists can still steal hundreds of innocent young women from their families, Malala is both a symbol of the death of the poisonous patriarchy and hope that humanity might get it together after all.

Her victory means even more as Little Yenta Girl and I just returned from Southeastern Women’s Herbal Conference, a yearly gathering of sisterly camaraderie and classes in the gorgeous mountains of Western North Carolina, where the trees are just beginning to flash their fall colors.

I’ve been attending since 2007 to deepen my understanding of natural remedies to nourish my family and to spend time with like-minded sisterfolk who dig a good drum circle. Over the years I’ve learned and implemented the medicinal uses of honey, how to prepare a poultice for a bee sting, the herbal pharmacopia used by slaves and a thousand uses for lavender. This is where I get tips on how to sneak more astragalus into the soup and how long to boil down bones for the best broth. It’s where I take in big breaths of unconditional love for my one precious life.

I used to bring along Yenta Boy until his *ahem* britches got too big and began wrinkling his nose every time I said the word “vagina.” I sure hope the knowledge he absorbed stays with him as he forges his own life in the Instagram era. Now my lil’ girl has finally come of age to be initiated in the wise woman ways.

Even though we live in a country where women are free to drive, go to school and wear what they please, our society is still sick with rape culture, inequality in the work force, sexualization of children and Nicky Minaj. Girls and women (along with boys and men!) receive so much negative conditioning about their bodies and social roles, but so terribly little about their inherent gifts and those of the planet itself.

It feels like a very big deal to be a mama to strong, beautiful girl right now, and and I am so grateful she had the opportunity to supplement her education in the following ways:

She sat in the Red Tent with her Soil Sisters (aged 10-13) learning that when her body becomes activated by the moon, she is powerful, not dirty.

She learned that the Earth and its plants are allies for our own health, and the best medicines can often be found growing right outside our front door.

She saw women of all shapes and colors and ages, learning that womanhood is expressed in a kaleidoscope, not a scale.

She helped build a mandala out of flowers to honor the sacred feminine element within all of us.

She ate and danced and drummed with no one telling her “too much, too loud, too wild.”

She was validated and valued for being a girl, that she can and will participate in the healing of the world, including helping the boys and men embrace their own sacred femininity.

What could the world become if every girl received the same sacred education?