There is room for you

We're going to have a prayer group. All women. We need ten. Those who have already signed up go around trying to persuade people to come. I remember with an ironic inner smile how my male friends in Budapest used to play this game of getting-ten-together before every Shabbat. I've never done this before. Never prayed women only. Never thought it was important. Right now I'm just curious. You don't get this on the Continent - I want to see what it's like.

And it's eight o'clock on a Thursday morning and people are slowly arriving one by one, sleepy-eyed but committed. The roles have all been assigned. A leads the service in the front. She's not doing this the first time. In fact, none of them are. I'm the only neofite and they honour me with an aliyah, a chance to be one of the three who are called up to the Torah. I shake with excitement and anxiety. The blessings that I have heard hundreds of times before, but have never actually said out loud. Will I know how to? Will I get it right? They envelop me in a prayer shawl and show me how to hold the handles of the scroll. It is rolled open and I'm bending over a real Torah scroll for the first time in my life, I hear the blessing in my own loud and shaky voice, it flows so naturally, and then the reading, and I see all the words in front of me and they suddenly make so much sense. So this is what being part of a people is all about. Being a link in the chain of tradition. Suddenly the fact that I'm a woman and that women are traditionally not supposed to be doing this do not matter any more. I am everyone who has done this before me, and we are all of us tradition itself. We make it come alive. My colleagues smile encouragingly, shaking my hand, they don't believe it was my first time. Nothing will ever be the same again.

The next week I'm the one who reads the Torah for the others. Again, I'm doing this for the first time in my life. I'm thinking of my teacher. He would be so proud if he could see me. He knew well before me that this was going to happen if I come away to America, this land of opportunities. I practise and practise my small portion till I know it back to front, and I know there's no getting out of this. They all depend on me, we have agreed, I'm in charge of this and it's my responsibility for all of us. I have learnt how to do it and I feel so proud and accomplished. Very scared, too, as I do every time I have to perform publicly, but this is different. I'm needed. And it goes so smoothly, I hold the silver pointing device in my hand, and the letters are so beautiful, and the melody is so beautiful they say, it's minhag Anglia I say, and feel so grateful to the man who taught me. When I was learning with him, I didn't realize what it was that he was giving me, but he knew very well: it was empowerment. Showing me the gate to a richer, more meaningful, more committed Jewish life.