I didn't know these lovebirds, but there they were, unmistakably just that,
standing at Sabbath morning services amid a sea of men and women with his arm
around her waist, she leaning into his shoulder and the two of them swaying
gently back and forth to the sound of the prayers. How nice, I thought, that
they're learning Torah together. Where it will take them no one can say, but
they're together on a great and splendid journey.
Since then my own journey, begun in part in that same room, has led me to a
place where I could not possibly stand in prayer with my husband's arm around my
waist. Praying might just be the most important thing we humans do, setting the
It's hard enough to pray when you're alone
stage for all of the rest of our behavior, but it is not the easiest. For most
of us it takes tremendous concentration, a great erasing of everything outside
and at the same time a bringing of everything we are into one small moment
framed by a particular piece of ancient text. The problem is that love is so
powerful – especially love for a spouse, but even premonitions of love like
crush and curiosity – that in any given moment, prayer cannot compete.
Perhaps that's why Jewish tradition invented something called the mechitzah,
surely the most widely maligned – I would say misunderstood – of any institution
in Judaism today. A mechitzah, literally "separation", is a screen or
other barrier in a traditional synagogue that separates women from men during
worship; in this separation, some say, the women are demeaned. The religious
idea is that men should not be able to see women while they're praying, for if
they do, their prayer will not be heard. To me, that's not demeaning; it's a
statement of obvious fact. It's hard enough to pray when you're alone.
Try this exercise: Imagine that you need to speak with G-d. Imagine that you
need something very, very badly, and that G-d really is all – powerful and the
only One Who can grant it to you. Or imagine that you've done something terribly
wrong and need some great forgiveness, or that your first child has just been
born and you want to offer thanks. Close your eyes. Find the words. Now try,
really try, to send them up to heaven.
Could you do this while cuddling with your spouse? Could you do it while ogling
the latest beauty to join the synagogue, or that guy you see each Saturday who's
so cute it makes you laugh? Maybe you could – everyone's different – but I
strive mightily just to sense G-d's listening when I pray.
For many of us, the mechitzah opens a door in...
Sometimes I picture great tree-limbs, an overarching Father seeing every word
and deed, or see myself as human clay addressing Him who formed it. Or I conjure
up an awesome, holy Throne bathed in rays of light, considering with mercy my so
tiny, distant plea. Yet with all these tools and more, still it's hard. We need
all the help we can get.
And so we have a curtain – to center us perhaps, to make a place that forms a
space where we can pray. There are as many kinds of mechitzahs as there
are synagogues – I've seen sleek wood carved in modern shapes, and balconies
where height is the mechitza, and gathered lace on curtain rods that
roll.
But all mechitzahs hold us back from one another and group our prayers by
gender rising heavenward. Perhaps this helps G-d hear us, too; perhaps we sound
clearer, are more ourselves, unmediated by our opposites. Judaism loves
categories and celebrates them every way – night and day, milk and meat, Sabbath
versus holidays and ordinary days – and gender's no exception.
The men's section is front and center because men have more ritual commandments
in the synagogue, while women are responsible for bringing Torah into the home.
Synagogue becomes one place where we can be with our own gender, something
not without a pleasure all its own.
So you can say the mechitzah exists to keep women out, that the genders
are identical and all else is cultural conceit. For many of us, though, the
mechitzah opens a door in, perhaps into a more concentrated experience of
who we are and certainly into the presence of G-d where holiness and much
direction lie. In prayer, we reach outside our earthly yearnings and search for
something different, something that ennobles us, sets our sights high and
improves us from the inside out. In love, we find an outlet for those
improvements, for our goodness, kindness, generosity. Love is arguably our most
G-d-like activity, and also our greatest earthly reward; in its physical
expression, it is said to bring G-d's presence to rest on us directly. Each
paves the way for the other; I'm a better wife for praying, and drawn closer to
G-d through the love my marriage brings. Each creates a chasm we can cross.
And so I wonder again about those Sabbath lovebirds, trying to make their
yearnings heard above the din of daily life, studying Torah and singing psalms,
arms linked, perhaps journeying down paths deep into wisdom.
There's no one way to pray, and none of us can say for sure whose prayers are
heard. But perhaps their love has grown so much that they can't sit together in
services anymore, or their love for G-d has grown in such a way that they don't
want to. Maybe it would take more than a curtain to keep them apart – and
perhaps just a curtain to link them.