Women's day of learning enters new era in year 10

By JENNIFER DIRECTOR KNUDSEN

article created on: 2009-02-15T00:00:00

So packed with content was the recent Women’s Day of Jewish Learning, session moderators also played the part of parent, offering the “five-minute warning” to the roughly 60 attendees from across the Jewish specturm to help transition the group from one workshop to the next.

Held Feb. 1, from morning till early afternoon at the Mittleman Jewish Community Center, the 10th Women’s Day of Jewish Learning filled women’s hearts and minds with concepts, practices, Jewish texts and questions around the theme of “Praying in her Heart: Women Seeking God.”

(And a cozy lunch of winter-squash soup, salad, veggie pasta and a rich carrot-cake dessert filled their tummies.)

Rachel Brodie, the weekend’s scholar-in-residence at Congregation Neveh Shalom, spent her final day in town as keynote speaker for the Women’s Day of Jewish Learning.

Brodie, raised in New York by a Conservative rabbi and educated at an Orthodox day school, is now the mother of two daughters and lives and works in Berkeley, Calif., as the co-founder and executive director of the non-profit Jewish Milestones.

This format was a departure from past years’ events, said Sylvia Frankel, a key event planner and adjunct faculty in Lewis and Clark College’s Religious Studies department. Previously, the Women’s Day of Jewish Learning from 1998 to the present (with a hiatus in 2005 and 2006) focused on one woman from the Old Testament. Miriam. Michal. Esther.

This year the committee decided to choose a theme rather than a Biblical figure.

“After 10 years of studying a number of biblical women we were ready to tackle a theme such as women and prayer,” Frankel said.

The day still featured small-group, text-based hevruta sessions and larger workshops, each facilitated by local Jewish educators, including Mel Berwin, Devorah Spilman, Deborah Eisenbach-Budner, Erica Goldman, Frankel, Aviel Brodkin and Margie Rosenthal.

Brodie’s contributions added a profound —and funny, fast-paced, scholarly, probing—dimension to the day, despite her misgivings when first presented with the topic.

Brodie said that while she teaches many different topics, prayer is one she shies away from.

“But,” she said once back in Berkeley, “because the session was grounded in biblical text study ... I found myself revisiting some familiar characters like Sarah, Hagar and Leah among others, and delighting in the myriad ways their God encounters could extend our understanding of prayer to encompass so much more than the spoken word.

“That’s when the juices really started flowing and being handed this topic began to feel like a gift,” she said.

From the participants’ perspective, it seemed Brodie was the gift.

First-time attendee Jennifer Greenberg, a Shir Tikvah member, said about Brodie: “She was the highlight for me. I really couldn’t get enough of her.”

She continued, “Dynamic and down-to-earth, she made pertinent comments about prayer types and the intention behind prayer that really hit home with me.”

Judith Kahn, who’s been to “many” Women’s Day of Jewish Learning and attends both Neveh Shalom and Havurah Shalom, said, “Rachel Brodie did give me great resources but, more important, she reinforced my belief that action is more important than prayer.”

Berwin, who previously worked with Brodie—in San Francisco at the Bureau of Jewish Education and then in Boston at the Summer Institute of Jewish Women’s Archive—had invited Brodie to keynote this year’s event. (The Aspen Mitzvah Fund of the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation and Portland Women’s Tefillah both provided funding.)

“Rachel brought an inspiring blend of wisdom and humor to WDJL this year,” said Berwin, who’s helped plan three such Jewish Learning days.

“On the one hand, she dismissed traditional prayer as ‘just one path, just one agenda,’ while on the other, she spun out a whole list of words ([such as] korvan, avodah, tefillah, tzedakah) that should only be used in the Hebrew because the English strays so far from the Hebrew meaning.”

The planning committee soon will meet to lay out next year’s Women’s Day of Jewish Learning. Berwin summed up the collective impression that “Rachel will be a hard act to follow.”

“But,” she added, “I think we’ve set the bar for WDJL at a new high, and it will be a fun challenge to meet or exceed the experience of this year.”