For some computerial reason, the last few paragraphs of this post were sucked into the cybervoid. Here they are again:
And even more startling–its expected reader was often also a woman. The Kol Bo includes plenty of tekhines/ tekhinot/ beseeching preparatory prayers in Yiddish. Tekhines were written for and sometimes by women and address God on intimate terms about the realities of women’s lives. Where they include a reference to the person praying,it is to ‘your handmaiden, A, the daughter of B.”
(My favourite is a tekhine for candle-lighting on Pesach which asks God to look down and see how His people are exhausting themselves in cleaning and emptying their coin-purses to prepare for the holidays. Some things never change!)
Wandering these pages is visiting another world, and I miss it from one set of yomtovim to the next.
Next instalment: Using the new Koren machzor on Rosh HaShanah.
Have a bountiful autumn and a lovely remainder of yom tov.
Shayna
Lomedet 