When my fifteen-year old daughter, Avigayil, came home with detention for skipping morning prayer, I was devastated. It wasn’t just that in her pluralistic community school, where there are supposedly choices for everyone, I did not think detention for missing prayer was a possibility. It was not just that the angry note from the principal came without warning, without even a prior phone conversation to discuss my daughter’s spirituality or attendance record. What shocked me most was the newfound knowledge that Avigayil had no interest in prayer at school. If the people of our synagogue got wind of this, I thought, they would undoubtedly say, the principal must have the wrong kid.
At Shabbat services, Avigayil is a star. She reads from the Torah beautifully and meticulously as often as she is asked, she regularly leads the children’s services as the only non-adult in the rotation, and perhaps most significantly, she willingly and without coercion comes to synagogue every week. That’s not a bad accomplishment in a country where teenagers go to school six days a week and thus the only day to sleep late is Saturday. Moreover, considering that Avigayil is one of the oldest kids in the synagogue and has no contemporaries to hang out with during services, I would say that this is indeed most impressive. In synagogue, parents are in awe of Avigayil, and tell me that they hope their children will be as motivated, skillful and full of joy when it is their turn to join as full members of the congregation. Yet, somehow, in school, Avigayil has now been labeled as delinquent around prayer, and I in turn as an obviously terrible mother.
How is it that school life can completely destroy one’s spiritual experience? I began asking this question nearly ten years ago, when I embarked on my doctoral research on gender and education among adolescent religious girls in Israel. The research, an ethnographic study of the Levy School[2], a state religious girls’ junior high school in Israel, explored the ways in which school culture, as an arm of the Orthodox establishment, constructs gender and religious identity. I examined in-class and out-of-class events, staff meetings, parent-teacher conferences, outings, informal gatherings, sport meets, and even conversations in the “cutting corner” – a spot near the women’s bathroom where girls regularly went to hide from the male principal. In all these locations, girls received controlling messages about correct and incorrect, feminine and non-feminine, religious and non-religious behavior. But perhaps none of these events were as striking and salient in their oppression of girls’ inner selves as my observations of the morning ritual. Inaccurately dubbed prayer, the events I witnessed extinguished any sense of spirituality in the students and observer alike.
One Tuesday morning in October 1999, at 7:50 AM, I walked down into the bomb shelter, the room serving as the prayer room for the eighth grade girls. From the back of the room where I entered, it looked like a sea of brown ponytails. Bible-teacher Chanit stood at the front of the room, stern-faced, arms folded, with her small hand-held prayerbook open in front of her chin, looking around the room, pacing slowly up and down the first meter of the aisle. One girl was at the front podium, facing forward, emotionlessly reciting some of the opening verses of the morning service, Shacharit. Her reading was swift, without tune or even intonation, the sound of words that have been recited too many times to count. In the front few rows, many girls were moving their lips, some with heads bowed, and eyes closed, some reading from their prayerbooks, and others looking aimlessly in the air. Further back, girls were talking, whispering, giggling, yawning or nodding off. I noticed a direct correlation between proximity to the front and degree of visible participation. My observations were interrupted by a shrill sound of Chanit’s voice screaming “Quiet!” and waving a finger at some girls. They looked up at her briefly, and when Chanit paced back to the front, they bowed their heads towards one another, presumably to continue their conversation.
The leader continued with the standard Shacharit service, stopping at different points for sections to be read privately. Girls in the front all stood when it was time for Az Yashir [the song of Moses], and gradually many girls from the back stood as well. They chanted a Sephardi tune quickly and uniformly, the result of many days of joint recitation. When they finished, the girls sang a quick Yishtabach, [Praised be He] and then they all sat. The girls moved without directives, as if there is an invisible connection between the words and their bodies, as movements come with unthinking ease, a result of years of practice, knowing instinctively when to bend, bow, step back, or raise a right hand.
The principal, Dr. Sylvia Cohen, a New Yorker by birth and Israeli by choice, walked in right before what is meant to be the climactic Shema [Hear O Israel] and the room got quiet. For the first time, the voice of the leader was actually audible over the murmuring, as she recited “El melech ne’eman” – three words traditionally uttered only in private prayer, a reminder that although there are many girls in the room, they were not considered a minyan, a quorum. Sylvia stayed for a few moments, and after she left, the room got a bit noisy again.
Chanit again walked up and down the aisle, prayerbook in hand, brows furrowed, saying “Shhhh!” in between the rapid movement of her own lips. She hadn’t actually uttered a complete word out loud since they began the Shema section, because according to Jewish law, speaking during these sections is prohibited. She just “shushes” loudly, a convenient way for her to scream and reprimand without actually talking, all whilst continuing her own religious practice. After the chanting of the Shema, a tuneless swift recitation that left me yearning for cantillation, the girls stood up for the silent prayer, the Amidah. Almost all of the girls stood up, though I do not know if they were actually praying. When I observed this same group two years later, a handful of girls had the guts and honesty to actually sit while others said the Amidah.
As girls gradually finished the Amidah, the noise in the room got louder and louder, until Chanit finished her own prayer and spent a few minutes pacing and yelling, “Quiet!!” Some girls at the front, imitating a teacherly authority, turned their heads to scream “Quiet” as well. Finally she yelled, “Until the Shema you were fine but now, what, you don’t care about prayer?” One girl whispered to her friend, “If Sylvia were here, this wouldn’t happen.”
This particular prayer service was sewn together in an eclectic robotic dance that, after so many repetitions, constructed its own internal pattern of songs, skips, and silences. The girls know when and how to sit, stand, chant, sing, close their eyes and move their bodies. Many of the words and intonations are ancient, but the unique combination of sounds, location, atmosphere, and people makes the event specific to school culture. Although some elements come from centuries of practice, like covering one’s eyes for Shema or taking three steps back before the Amidah, others, like the chanting of the paragraphs in Shema, are part of the girls’ own routine, culled from practices taught in elementary schools around the city. The few tunes that are injected into the now standard routine are actually an amalgam of traditions from different eras and continents.
This prayer experience was very much a girl thing, unlike any synagogue service of any denomination. First of all, the students, prayer leader and staff are all female – and thus, unlike the standard Orthodox synagogue in Israel, there was no partition, and no men. Second of all, the service does not include the quorum-centered texts such as Kedusha and Kaddish, in which the entire congregation responds “Amen,” and thus lacks a certain group unison that such prayers provoke. Third of all, the room itself is not a synagogue – it is dark, damp, dirty, and located in the basement, a reminder that girls’ prayers do not really count as important. Moreover, it does not have a Torah or an ark, mainstays of the synagogue experience. This was the clearest message that girls do not belong in a synagogue but can “make do” with whatever muck life sends them. Mostly, the whole experience was one of girls being told what and when to act and speak, even to God, enforced with clear and present reprimands at every turn.
Indeed, for me, the most striking feature of this prayer was the teacher standing at the front shushing everyone. It was a panoptical presence, reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s[3] famous analysis of the 19th century prison panopticon structure, which institutionalizes gaze as a form of control by ensuring that the watchers were unseen by the watched. Ethnographer Nancy Lesko, in a fascinating book on adolescent culture entitled, Act Your Age! The Cultural Construction of Adolescence[4], claims that much of the way society tries to control teenagers is rooted in panoptical constructs. She adds that schools have some frighteningly creative ways to enforce the “panoptical gaze”, especially upon girls. The school I observed, The Levy School, was particularly interesting as an all-women’s space. The mostly Orthodox or ultra-Orthodox staff members are women who, like Foucault's wardens, are caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. Panoptical prayer was an event in which coercion and gaze transformed a process of potentially personal, cultural and spiritual meaning to one of control and obedience to school authorities.
Veteran educator Dr. Devorah Steinmetz, who founded the remarkable Manhattan Jewish Day School Beit Rabban – and whose daughter happened to be attending the Levy School during this time – had a very strong reaction to the event of school prayer as well.
They’re in a bomb shelter, there are 96 girls, two girls are on this little platform sort of leading the davening, and these teachers are walking around the room like supervisors, with this sour look on their face like looking to see 'Are you davening?' Like, what do you mean, are you davening?! What, is your prayerbook open, are you moving your lips, and are you not talking to your friends? Is that what davening has come to mean? You look around the room and basically there was only one girl who seemed to me to be alive. And everyone else seemed like, there was nothing happening in that room. The whole thing seemed to me to be dead.
The presence of the teacher-warden ensuring that external signs of formal prayer were being met destroyed the girls’ spirits, and destroyed the prayer. “Davening" is meant to be spiritually, emotionally and physically active – and in practice it was anything but.
Steinmetz added that the lack of participation and active engagement was compounded by the gender message of passivity.
It’s about teaching girls to daven where nothing really matters, where you go through the motions. With boys, because you’ve just become bar mitzvah, at least someone is going to give you an opportunity to do something you couldn’t do before. At least it brings some energy or some sense of moving ahead. Whereas with the girls, just at the moment that they’re being bat-mitzvah they’re being put into a situation of complete and utter passivity. So like, forget about whether we can make the davening spiritual or meaningful, it’s not even about anything, it’s not even about their own growth. It’s about forever being a child.
Thus, the panoptical gaze constructed an extended childishness, a stagnation within the age hierarchy described by Lesko, intended to keep girls down in terms of age and gender. The experience was infantilizing, constructing adolescent girls as unable to think, process and explore for themselves. This panoptical gaze stands in contrast to the boys’ prayer experience where, because the boys count and perform active roles within the service, their construction is of full members of the community, on a par with adults.
Unlike some other aspects of the panoptical gaze that are not always overtly intended, the panoptical gaze on prayer was formalized at a staff meeting I attended in August 2000, before the start of the school year. Sylvia introduced a discussion of prayer by describing some new practices and policies, and mentioning that she wanted to freshen up the prayer with more singing. Then Deena, the school psychologist, agreed and promptly took over the conversation about attendance.
“The first day is very important,” Deena said. “The girls are checking out the teachers and so we have to be clear and consistent."
Liat, the assistant principal, interrupted, “We have to teach ‘prayer habits’”. Bible teacher Ora suggested that they get older kids to “train” the younger kids in “how to daven,” but Chanit replied that this was the teachers’ job. “We daven with them to show them,” she instated. I thought about what exactly Chanit was teaching when she moved her lips as she paced up and down the aisle growling at students.
Deena brought the conversation back to her own agenda. “We are going to have a rotation. Teachers must come on time otherwise it’s not fair to kids or to teachers who feel like suckers because they come on time.”
“We need bells,” Chanit said. “I go crazy without bells.”
“What do we do about lateness?” Liat asked
Chanit concurred. “We had one girl who came late every day. We said she can’t continue the rest of the day.”
“Every lateness has to be reported,” Deena insisted firmly.
“The home room teacher deals with it,” added Liat, though I’m not sure if this was an agreement or a contradiction. A conversation ensued about how to define lateness.
“What’s considered late?” Liat asked. “7:55?”
“No,” Chanit replied, “ from Baruch She’amar [the first of the morning Psalms] when you’re not allowed to talk.” A very animated discussion ensued about students coming late.
“You know,” Aliza said reflectively, “I used to go to a prayer service on my settlement and I hated it.”
“Maybe we can bring in someone to play a musical instrument,” someone else suggested.
“A musical instrument?” Rabbi Itay, significantly the only man in the room. “Wait until the second temple.”
“And what about Grace After Meals?” Ora asked, referring to the period right after recess when they are supposed to recite this prayer after having eaten bread sandwiches. “How do we make sure that they come back to class on time after recess in order to recite it?”
“Spend a few minutes that period saying it together,” Itay suggested. “They won’t do it otherwise.”
“Look,” Deena finally said, “We can’t fight over everything. You have to know what your important issues are. Choose the issues, tell all the students what they are, and stick to them. Never tell them what the punishment will be. You'll climb a tree that you can’t come down from. Just say, there will be consequences. Never say specifically how. Simply set seating in advance so you just have to look for the empty seats."
Sitting in this meeting, I felt like I was privy to the center of the panopticon. Here, prayer was transformed from a personal spiritual expression to the place in school where a girl’s movement begins to be recorded, measured and evaluated. Details of the panopticon, such as seating arrangements and minutes of lateness, became the most animated focus of the discussion. There was an enormous distrust of the students. Ora believes that even though these girls have been praying in schools for nearly ten years, they still need to be “trained”, Chanit talks about students who continuously come late, and Itay believes that without the control of the group prayer, many girls would simply choose not to pray. Thus, prayer enforcement becomes the main function of the warden-teacher. The spiritual content of the prayer experience was almost completely ignored, save for Aliza’s attempt to explore her own experience.
In short, the panoptical gaze, combined with passivity and coercion, destroyed the girls’ desire and ability to pray. Girls in the school repeated this idea often. I remember a particular conversation with fifteen-year old Noa, a lovely Sephardic girl who studied hard and always found time to talk with me and share her thoughts, experiences, laughs and dreams. One Sunday morning, I found her distressed. The night before there had been a bombing in town, and she and some friends were right there. One of her friends was thrown several meters by the blast and was taken to the hospital. Noa was visibly shaken, and needed a hug and some care. “I came in this morning and I really felt like I needed to pray,” she said. Her family is very traditional, and she takes her prayer seriously. But as soon as she walked into the prayer room, all desire to participate in the experience vanished. “This is not good prayer,” she told me. “All the teachers do is tell us off for talking. I can’t pray like that.” Noa’s narrative, with its layers of sadness, revealed the depth of the tragedy of the school prayer experience.
I revisited this research when my daughter came back from school with a note from the principal. I asked her if the principal is right that she does not participate. “Nobody participates,” she said, as tears began welling up. Students in this mixed religious-secular school are offered three choices: standard Orthodox prayer, a “discussion” group, or a “women’s prayer.” My daughter explained that the principal, who himself is Orthodox, prays in the “regular” group and does not know what is going on outside. “Everyone is playing cards,” she claims. Is there anyone who is seriously interested in prayer? I asked. There are three boys who wear phylacteries and therefore go to the “regular” group, and maybe two girls in the “women’s” group pray quietly to themselves. The “women’s” group is not actually a group experience, as there is nothing done together, no Torah scroll, and no group singing. “It’s stupid,” she said, feeling the insult of knowing she is fully competent of leading singing and Torah reading. Really, though, the point is that if “standard” prayer is going to put off religious girls who actually want to pray, I can only imagine how alienating the experience would be for secular students. “Anyway, all the teachers ever do is yell at us,” Avigayil added. “They yell at us for coming late, they yell at us for talking, they yell at us for not taking it seriously. That’s supposed to make me want to pray?” I felt like I was listening to Noa all over again. Only this time, I’m not a researcher or an educator, but a mother, my own daughter is the one in crisis, and the person she needs the hug from is me.
Sadly, this is the same story over and over again. Schools are schools, places that push and pull and discipline kids, telling them what to do more than listening to their powerful voices. Such an environment is the antithesis of spiritual growth. Coercion and personal exploration are polar opposites, and a school culture in which coercion is dominant necessarily precludes the latter. I know how I would feel if my own synagogue experience was bracketed with reprimands and yells: I would stop coming. I fully respect my daughter and any other kids who react in the exact same way.
Moreover, it’s troubling to me that even schools that are not Orthodox have adopted the stringent, inflexible emphasis on obedience. It seems as if Orthodox norms – even extra-legalistic norms rooted on expectations of social cohesiveness – remain an idealized superior form in the minds of many educators. I am deeply troubled that this community school, in which a small minority of students define themselves as Orthodox, does not have any egalitarian option. I have no means to explain this other than the known quip “The shul I do not pray in must be Orthodox”. That is, for many non-practicing Jews, Orthodox behaviors remain the standard – even when those standards are clearly destructive to one’s emotional and spiritual health and well-being. Even secular, pluralistic Jews are missing the point.
If the Jewish community is going to educate its young people to form a spiritual connection to their heritage, they need to start thinking seriously about how that happens. It begins with respect for a person’s own journey – even if that person happens to be under eighteen. Yells, reprimands, constant gaze and coercion are in direct conflict with such a process. Schools need to construct safe spaces for the students to grapple, wrestle, explore, and communicate with a higher being in their own way. Even if they are going through the motions, as long as someone else is watching and measuring, it will not be true spiritual connectivity.
Respect for the person also means enabling that person to be active, alive, and energetic. Certainly spirituality requires silences and internal, personal reflections and meditations. But being an active human being is also an integral part of the process. Judaism offers some wonderful opportunities for being active and physical, whether through music, ritual fringes, phylacteries, or the Torah itself. Indeed, the Torah scroll gives us a beautiful and profound center around which we can be active in our spiritual quest. It contains musical, lyrical, and cultural wonders, and the tradition of reading in cantillation, or trop, is one of Judaism’s great cultural heritages. We should look at trop as an exotic, colorful and engaging part of our own culture. In synagogue on Shabbat, my daughter completely owns that. She learns her cantillations with enormous pride and self-respect, and without an ounce of force. In fact, she willingly grabs every opportunity offered her to read for the congregation – and in fact often begs me to take over my reading portions. In Torah reading, she comes to life. In school though, that whole part of her person lays completely dormant. That is just such a waste of human spirit. Perhaps if her school would see her for who she is and what she is capable of, there would be potential for real spiritual expression.
Finally, spiritual expression cannot be a rote experience. It requires spontaneous, genuine expression, and creative ways to live in the present. Educators should open their hearts and minds and find new and refreshing ways to experience the music, movement and soulfulness that could be Jewish prayer.
Dr. Elana Maryles Sztokman is a writer, educator and activist, and lectures in gender and education at the Schechter Institute for Jewish Studies and at the Efrata Teacher Training College in Jerusalem.
All names and identifying details have been changed to protect informants
[3] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. (New York, 1977)
[4] Nancy Lesko, Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. (New York, 2001)