For most members of Brandeis who identify with the Modern Orthodox movement, standard procedure tells them to go to services at the Orthodox Minyan. However, for those who want another option to fill their needs, the Shira Chadasha group has an answer.
Started in 2002 in Jerusalem, “Shira Chadasha tries to answer the growing need of many religious women and men to readdress the role of women in the synagogue,” according to its website. The group has met opposition, and one anonymous student simply stated about the organization, “I’m very against them.” However, Noam Cohen ’16 notes that Shira Chadasha “strives to empower our entire community, and a big part of that is encouraging women to participate in parts of the service which they might not have had access to before.”
Cohen also noted some of the specific details as to how Shira Chadasha differs from the more traditional Orthodox minyan.“We pray with a mechitzah, and wait for 10 men and women to begin prayer. Men still lead certain portions of the prayer that have stricter halachic obligations, and allow women to lead certain ‘mi sheberach’ prayers.” A student who asked not to be named described Shira Chadasha as “creating more opportunities for women while maintaining an environment of strict adherence and consideration of halacha.”
Being a new organization, arguably a break-away from the traditional Orthodox minyan, does create detractors. Among the worries is that because the Orthodox minyan and Shira Chadasha have similar memberships, Shira Chadasha’s success could bring down Orthodox membership levels. It is important to note however that Shira Chadasha presently meets once a month with a significantly lower membership than the Orthodox minyan.
Some of the dissatisfaction with the Orthodox minyan was identified by Hannah Kober ’16, a former Shira Chadasha coordinator. According to her, the Brandeis Orthodox Organization (BOO) “has seen a rise in more right-leaning approaches to halacha and the role of women in the community, and therefore many BOO community members who previously were (publicly) content and unquestioning of the gender roles no longer can solely identify with the mainstream pulse of BOO prayer spaces.”
In spite of what many consider Shira Chadasha’s progressive and feminist nature, several students have concerns about the organization. One student said, “Shira Chadasha is against halacha … This halachic standard is based on Rabbi Yosef Caro’s Shulchan Arukh, which is the traditional halachic text that Orthodox Jews have followed for centuries.” Another student went on to say that Shira Chadasha’s impetus was for women who “decided that their role in prayer as outlined by sages was not enough for them.” As for what some perceive to be their intentions, yet another student said, “The backers of SC are those that want to manipulate the Torah into promoting their agenda.”
Despite their detractors, those supporters of Shira Chadasha, such as Julia Sirota ’18, see the organization as “filling a void in the existing community without dividing it.” Tova Perlman ’18 also sees the organization as empowering “both men and women to learn more halacha, lead davening and build spiritual lives.” When asked about how to achieve this, Perlman responded that this could be achieved through “allowing women to lead parts of prayers, singing more prayers out loud, or taking more time to say the Amidah.”
While this issue of what roles women should have in Jewish life and how is not going to be easily solved, for many students like Cohen, Shira Chadasha is simply “an ideal that encompasses both tradition and egalitarianism.”
