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I went to cheder from 5 to 12 with nothing to mark my coming of age -not even a bat chayil (I do not think they had invented them yet then). My clearest and most persistent memories of shul, as girl then woman, are of looking down from the ladies' gallery onto a sea of becappeled male heads, wondering what it was all about. I felt alienated from everything that was going on downstairs. Why should my younger brother be allowed to be involved in all that was completely inaccessible to me? Why did I have to be surrounded by shminks and listen to talk of lockshen soup and shidduchs when all the meaningful action was down there, out of my reach?
Sounds familiar? Like so many others I drifted away - not from my Jewishness but from Judaism.
Joining Reform as an adult with my husband and children was one of the best moves of my life. It was good to feel much more part of the congregation and to sit in shul (yom tovs only) with my husband, son and daughter. But my involvement still remained pretty passive.
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Then Rosh Hashanah 1984 it all started to change for me. We had had a woman rabbi since that June but I had not met her yet. I had never seen one before. It all seemed so strange, especially the kippah and tallit but she made something, somewhere, start to stir in me. I was gradually beginning to feel that perhaps it could all be accessible to me now.
It has been a slow evolution. Little by little I went to shul more often, even had a few mitzvot. Sometimes I caught myself starting to long to have a tallit around my shoulders. A tallit seemed somehow to represent a last barrier between me and Judaism.
It was really hard to decide to try one on for the first time, one Shabbat when I had an aliyah. I was so scared. There were not just my emotions about it to contend with - but what would people think? Actually doing it was much easier than worrying about it, and when I got back to my seat I just did not want to take it off for the rest of the service. It is such a wonderful feeling to be wrapped in a tallit. And buying my own, with my family helping me to choose, was more exciting than I could have imagined.
All the women who already wore tallitot in our shul had created a space for me to move into if I wished, and I thank them. I have not become a frummer overnight but now, at last, I have a choice. I feel a real part of the mystery and history that are Judaism. And I can reach out and touch it all whenever I want to - without falling off the gallery.
I hope that perhaps, in my turn, I might be making it just that little bit easier for the next woman who is on the brink to take the plunge - do! It feels so warm and good.
Linda Harris
Copied with permission from www.reformjudaism.org.uk
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