The Lilith Blog

October 6, 2010 by Bonnie Beth Chernin

Stepping Toward Minyan

If you had asked me, growing up, if the Conservative synagogue my family attended on Friday nights also offered a daily minyan, I would have answered, somewhat vaguely, that I thought a few old men got together for services on Mondays and Thursdays, and was that what you meant?

Because neither my mother, who would not have counted as one of the necessary ten in that non-egalitarian time, nor my father, spoke about or chose to go to minyan. Not even for Kaddish. When my paternal grandfather died, and then my paternal and maternal grandmothers, my father and mother faithfully attended Shabbat evening services each week for twelve months and rose each time for the mourner’s prayer. I understood that to be the way to observe a family member’s death in the Jewish tradition.

That is, until I met my husband and shared my family’s practice several months after our wedding. (more…)

The Lilith Blog

July 30, 2010 by Bonnie Beth Chernin

Bema Comfort

I attended religious school, called Hebrew School back then, at a time when girls didn’t see much bema action.

Yes, I had a Friday night bat mitzvah and chanted a haftorah. And I had the privilege of being the first girl in my synagogue to say Kiddush during her bat mitzvah service. My sister had celebrated her bat mitzvah seven years earlier and chanted the Kiddush during her bat mitzvah when we lived in Youngstown, Ohio, and my parents, who wanted no less for me, took months to persuade our rabbi in Trenton, New Jersey to allow my chance.

But come Shabbat mornings, the mechanics of the Torah service eluded me, as I wasn’t taught to chant from the Torah or to dress it after the reader finished chanting from the scroll. Yet somehow I was taught the prayers for an aliyah, to sing along with my whole Hebrew School class.

So flashforward forty-some years when I find myself a member of an egalitarian congregation with ushers who one Shabbat morning offer me the sixth aliyah.  (more…)

The Lilith Blog

July 19, 2010 by Bonnie Beth Chernin

Hope for Deliverance

“I don’t like to think about the future. It freaks me out,” my nine-year-old daughter Rachel announces from the back of the car. She stopped using a booster seat a month ago, her height finally sufficient to require a simple seat belt.

Her announcement is in response to a Scholastic News article. Her third-grade class had read that morning about water found on the moon and the possibility of people making their homes there one day.

I ask Rachel if she would like that and receive her vehement reply. I am driving us home after her after-school program and my trying day at work. The day has also brought the news my mother’s blood pressure had shot up, and multiple phone calls with the insurance company about a biopsy I needed a month ago. Thankfully it turned out benign but left me with a claim mix-up I could use Columbo to unravel.

I brake for a red light. “Are you concerned about growing up or the future of the world?”  (more…)