Strategies for Reflecting Gender Equality in Progressive and Liberal Jewish Liturgical Language

Abstract

Although Progressive and Liberal Judaism has long advocated complete equality between the sexes as far as participation in prayer and synagogue and community leadership, the liturgy has for many decades reflected the sexism of traditional Judaism. A recent trend within the progressive and liberal movements within Judaism is the compilation of prayerbooks (siddurim) that address the issue of gender equality in the language of prayer, both in the original Hebrew and in the translation. The amendments take two forms – the eradication of the male generic term, and replacement of male pronouns and attributes of God. This article investigates the issues and strategies involved in compiling gender sensitive siddurim. A number of Progressive and Liberal prayerbooks have been studied and the prayers concerned have been compared with the traditional, male-orientated, liturgy. The difficulty of changing Hebrew, which, like all Semitic languages, is gender based, into a gender neutral language is discussed and the translations in various Liberal and Progressive siddurim compared.