Out of the Depths I Call to You: A Book of Prayers for the Married Jewish Woman. - book reviews

Introduction

INCREASING WORK HAS BEEN DONE IN REcent years on making accessible to a wider audience prayers written for and said predominantly by Jewish women. This work is important not only for women searching for appropriate prayers for themselves but also for those interested in learning about the spiritual lives of our predecessors. It is relevant, too, for all those interested in the notion of prayer in the vernacular, and in the varieties of personal as opposed to congregational prayer.

The three books under review are part of this recent scholarship. All are bilingual. The first two are editions of tehines, which are individual prayers that Ashkenazi women recited on different occasions.(1) Tehines in Yiddish were first printed in the 16th century, and were printed and reprinted in Western(2) and Eastern Europe(3) until this century. Indeed, editions in Yiddish are still being reprinted today in New York.(4) There were a few manuscript copies, often luxury editions commissioned for individual women, but these seem to be exceptions -- tehines were basically popular works, a printed genre aimed at a large number of women, that probably grew out of a need for a means of vernacular prayer.(5)

The third volume is an edition of a Hebrew text of an 18th century Italian manuscript of women's prayers. A number of manuscript books of women's prayers in Hebrew were commissioned for particular women in Italy between about 1700 and 1850. The impetus was, therefore, not a need for vernacular prayer but for prayers that related directly to a woman's experience, for example, prayers connected with the three mizvot for women (hallah, niddah and hadlakat nerot), and for the events surrounding pregnancy, childbirth and delivery. Indeed, the Italian captions seem to assume that the women for whom the manuscripts were written prayed regularly; they contain directions as to when certain prayers should be recited in the context of the standard prayer service.

Books Under Review

The Klirs volume, The Merit of Our Mothers, is a selection from different groups of tehines, including many early East European ones. She consciously chose these earlier editions because they are most likely to have been written by women,(6) since, by the end of the 19th century, many tehines were penned by maskilim (participants in the Jewish Enlightenment) and yeshivah students, often using female pen names, as a way of making quick money. Klirs' book is drawn from a dissertation, and she has done a lot of work in explaining the sources of the tehines, Biblical, Midrashic, liturgical, Kabbalistic, etc., adding to our understanding of the richness of the textual and historical allusions employed. Klirs has chosen to use Yiddish names and many expressions in the English text, and then explain them in the glossary at the back, such as "riboyne shel oylem," "koyen godl," "mitsve," "toyre," "shabes," and "shoyfer." At first it seems strange to read of Jacob as "Yankev ovinu, olev hasholem," but this method succeeds in drawing the reader into the pietistic world of the text.(7)

The Zakutinsky compilation, Techinas: A Voice from the Heart, is composed mainly of later tehines taken from two very popular collections, Shas Tehine Hadoshe, and the Shas Tehine Rav Peninim,(8) as well as some prayers that were traditionally said in Hebrew by women. Many of the prayers that she includes capture the "folk" nature of the genre, such as one for a baby's first tooth. The volume is actually printed from right to left. She published the texts in Yiddish with English translation because, a rabbi told her, "Yiddish is a language that was used by Jews for over a thousand years; it is infused with holiness" and "it is preferable to say the techinas in Yiddish while glancing at the English."(9) Zakutinsky even includes a guide for reading the Yiddish, but she does not translate all the texts she uses; her work would have benefitted from a more complete translation.

In fairness we must recognize that translating tehines is very complex: the same tehine in different editions varies, and, because there is so little punctuation in the Yiddish, the possibilities of meanings vary greatly. Both of the editions under review do a good job of making the Yiddish text accessible to those who know some Yiddish by using a clear typeface and vocalisation, although neither vocalises all the tehines presented. Until at least the beginning of the 19th century, tehines were printed in a specific typeface, called "vayber taytsh," that is particularly difficult for 20th century readers, even if they know Yiddish. The translations capture the flavour and nuances of meaning while preserving the literary allusions and the flow of the text.

Out of the Depths I Call to You: A Book of Prayers for the Married Jewish Woman, is an edition of the Hebrew text, with its Italian directions, of an Italian manuscript from the 18th century, now in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, written by a man for his wife, together with English translations by Rabbi Nina Cardin. Because the Italian prayers are all in Hebrew, the assumption is that Yehudit Coen, for whom the volume was written, understood Hebrew as well as Italian.