Tkhines--Little Known Jewish Prayers, Written By and For Women

By Renee Septimus for Kveller

Giving birth was the most spiritual experience I ever had.

It was as if my body, mind and soul–my very being–was on high alert. I felt a new closeness to the man with whom I had fallen in love years before and who was now the father of my child. I felt an intense identification with the Creator God, to whom I prayed each day, and who was our partner in the creation of the new life I had just pushed from my body.

But as a religious Jewish woman, I was disappointed that my tradition provided no special prayer or ritual to mark my rite of passage from “woman” to “mother,” even as I softly said the generic Shehechiyanu blessing (“…who has kept us alive, sustained us and brought us to this time.”)

There were many times that I felt shortchanged as a woman marking life cycle events or more mundane experiences that I felt were, in some way, sacred. There was no way to connect them Jewishly to the God I felt beside me as I lived my life.
Some years after my youngest child was born, I found a newly published book which introduced me to tkhines, prayers written by and for women, dating to the 16th century and originally written in Yiddish, the vernacular of the shtetls of Ashkenazic Jews. Although the haredi (ultra-Orthodox) community had never “lost” them, tkhines were rediscovered by the larger Jewish community as a result of feminist Jewish scholarship which began to take off in the 1970s. Since my serendipitous discovery 20 years ago, I have taken a spiritual journey reading, collecting, writing, and teaching about these beautiful prayers which resonate so strongly with me, and with every woman I know who reads them.

Tkhines mark the important events in a woman’s life with prayer, connecting the experience to an immediate God, an approachable God, a God to whom one can pray in gratitude, hope or despair. They consecrate a moment, elevate the “mundane” to the holy.

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