When I visit Israel, I usually go straight to the Kotel. My former husband, an Israeli, treated this as a diaspora aberration, but her always solicitously waited for me while I prayed. In 1977, when I was pregnant, my physician called and told me that I would have a son. In With Child: A Diary of Motherhood, I write, “It’s late Friday afternoon. A holy quiet has begun in the city. I go to the Kotel and press my stomach against it. Idly, perversely, I think to go to the men’s side, claiming my rightful presence there. I contain a male child. They’d probably stone me to death. ‘Hear, O Israel, I am One. Mother and Child. Male and Female. Past and Future.’”

For years, the Israel I visited was the feminist Israel. This time too (1988), Israeli feminists met my plane and drove me to Haifa, where I toured the shelter for battered women and rape crisis centers—services that I’d only envisioned when I first visited Haifa in the early 1970s. I remember having coffee with then Knesset member and ardent secularist Marcia Freedman, and joking, wistfully, about whether in the future a plaque would be mounted to note where such shelters—which did not yet exist—once stood. In 1975, MK Freedman and other Israeli feminists wanted to “demonstrate” at the Kotel. (I remember lettering a placard in Hebrew that read: “If the rabbis want the Kotel, then let them leave the Knesset.” Martin Buber’s granddaughter and an ex-Berrigan nun who had recently converted to Judaism were among those who planned to join us; a group of feminists was coming from the Negev. We called this off. Religious Jewish women were not ready to claim sacred ground.

In November 1988, I lectured at the Haifa Women’s Center to a standing-room-only crowd of Israeli activist leaders. When I talked about a feminist government in exile, Nabila Espanioly, a Palestinian feminist, announced to general laughter, that now she understood that her struggle was for a feminist as well as a Palestinian state. “And,” she said, “I’ll probably see a Palestinian state long before we’ll ever have a feminist state.

I was in Israel to attend the First International Jewish Feminist Conference in Jerusalem, which had been coordinated by the American Jewish Congress and the Israel Women's Network. On their behalf, at our first meeting as a conference, the late Bella Abzug ordered us to turn out the next morning to demonstrate against the Orthodox rabbinate and the State of Israel on the issue of "who is a Jew." I stood up, protested, and asked in what way this issue was a feminist one, and might we not first achieve an understanding of the issue more democratically before we allowed ourselves to be led like sheep to The Headline.

"You," she bellowed, "sit down."

A few hours after participating in a plenary session on women and religion, I heard that women were meeting to plan a prayer service at the Kotel. The room was packed, the mood both electrified and somber. Once it became clear that the American Jewish Congress had already sent out a press release, I got everyone to agree that we would not talk to the media but would, instead, only say, "We have come to pray." As women started to leave, one woman remained seated, wringing her hands. “Don’t go,” she implored. “Why do you have to go? We can pray right here in the hotel.” These were the words of one of Israel’s leading Orthodox feminists. I was shocked. “But you must come with us,” I said. Her fearful face remained agonized. Sadly, she did not join us.

One by one, I sought out my North American feminist colleagues. “Please come with us,” I said, “this is important.” Disgust, scorn, and impatience crossed their faces. Most would not join us. Years later, many changed their minds, but no one ever acknowledged to me privately that she’d misjudged the importance of this Orthodox-inspired grassroots feminist moment.

I returned to my room at 2:00 A.M. I was hot, I was cold, I was hungry, I was nauseous. Why am I doing this? I’d averaged about two hours of sleep each night since I’d left New York seven days earlier. Clearly, it was beyond me to go; I’d pushed myself too hard. I canceled my wake-up call. Nevertheless, I was dressed and ready long before the agreed-upon meeting time of 6:50 A.M. I had a tape recorder running in my handbag. I wanted the police to have a record in case we were attacked.

A small group of us tightly "guarded" a gaunt, ecstatic Francine Klagsbrun as she carried the Torah. When we reached the Kotel, the women swiftly donned their tallesim (angel's wings, capes of sheltering glory), their prim head scarves and exotic skullcaps--and they became Jews. We stood before the Wall, under the morning sky, and began the Thursday morning service.

Without knowing it, this is what I'd longed for all through my Orthodox, Borough Park childhood. This was my missing link, a dream come alive—my dream, “halom halamti,” “I dreamed a dream,” words that we in fact read in Vayeshev, the Torah portion of that week. I was lost in time, in a reverie. "Would you do us the honor of uncovering the Torah for us?" Rivka Haut asked me. It was a transformative honor. It wedded me fatefully, faithfully, to this struggle. Years later, I asked her, "Why me?" Her answer: "You had such an otherworldly expression on your face."

We had stepped onto holy ground, experienced a moment in time in which we constituted a sacred congregation; we'd had a glimpse of what might be possible if women dared to claim their religious inheritance without patriarchal approval or support. The power has lasted. For example, whenever I meet another first-time davener, we both smile, from deep within, and embrace. Words barely matter. We greet each other not as the strangers we truly are, but as participants in holiness. On that day, praying in an all-female group felt right, miraculous. This feeling carried us that day, and forever after, high above the roar of ugly sound that rose, higher and higher, louder and louder against us. It was the sound of a riot, a lynch mob, Khomeini’s men in tefillin and tellesim, our psychologically and theologically challenged bothers. We hastily concluded our service and reboarded the waiting buses.

Jubilation was ours. Rabbi Deborah Brin, who had led the davening, asked, “How do you say ‘Right on!’ in Hebrew?” We cheered, clapped, wept, laughed, talked, and exchanged names. I passed around a sign-up sheet. By midafternoon, I suggested to Rabbis Brin and Helene Ferris that we return to the Kotel for the evening service.

Clearly, I was out of my mind, high.

"Rivka," I said, "we've just crossed a psychological sound-barrier. This is a major event in history." She simply said, "Do you really think so?" Oh, I did; I still do. “Crossing over” is so Jewish a venture: from a pagan worldview to a monotheistic one, from this world to the next one, from daily life to sacred time. Ivrim (Hebrews) literally means those who “cross over”: Avraham’s rivers, miraculously parted Red Sea waters, the Jordan River into The Land.

In my view, the act of women praying with a Torah at the Kotel has the power to psychologically transform the way Jewish women see themselves and each other. When this becomes and everyday sight, Jewish women and men will have undergone another sea-crossing. The consequences will be subtle, continuous, enormous, and ever-reverberating.

Alas, many otherwise enlightened people underestimate the psychological importance of organized religion and religious symbols. As a liberation psychologist, I’d been writing about female role models, and about God’s female face, since the early 1970s. As long as we psychologically continue to envision God (or Jews) as tall white men with long white beards, the goals of gender equality will never be realized. Thus, I believe that our struggle will have a profound psychological impact on Jewish women’s self-esteem and respect for each other in every area.

I had theorized about this for years. Putting such theories into action had eluded me—until now. And what a grand, symbolic action it was. I had, therefore, expected broad feminist support for this struggle. I was naïve. What we experienced instead, at least initially, was profound apathy and some hostility from both secular and religiously active feminists who had left either organized Judaism or Orthodox Judaism. Many had sound reasons, which nevertheless did not make their lack of support less painful. I took me a while to understand that our struggle had no “natural” constituency. That existed only in the future. In our lifetime, it might remain entirely mystical in nature.

In the diaspora, feminist Reform, Reconstructionist, and Conservative Jews were, understandably, ambivalent about supporting a women-only, non-minyan prayer group. As Jews, and as feminists, they had fought very hard for egalitarian mixed-gender minyans, new God-language, and women’s right to be ordained as rabbis. In 1990, feminist theologian Judith Plaskow published a piece in Tikkun magazine in which she argued that what we were doing sacrificed egalitarian principles to Orthodox principles, and that we would never “win by playing things safe.” Although she viewed our struggle as “sacred,” she also thought it was “only one very small step in the larger transformation of Judaism.” We disagreed with her in the pages of Tikkun. To her feminist credit, Plaskow met with us, withdrew her own response to our letter, signed a joint statement instead, and agreed to join our board. Other commitments made it difficult for her to stay.

Like Plaskow, most religiously active feminists in North America are staunch egalitarian integrationists. They are used to praying in mixed-gender minyans. They do not want to compromise this principle or desert their denominational affiliation. They could not understand why, as a group, we were willing to give up saying certain prayers that require a minyan (e.g., Barkhu and Kaddish). In order to pray together at the Kotel.

I live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, which is multiracial, multi-ethnic. It is populated by old leftist, antiracist, and feminist activists; young, out lesbians and homosexuals; families with young children; trendy cafes and bookstores; lawyers, social workers, therapists, teachers, poets, rabbis, a shelter for battered women; and the odd citizen who actually supports whatever government is in power. My Conservative egalitarian shul reflects our population.

Most feminist egalitarians tend to be gender-neutral and therefore liberals—which is no crime; some of my best friends are liberals. However, gender-neutrality and integration are not always in women’s best interests. For example, girls and young women often do better in girl-and women-only schools; gender-neutral legislation sometimes has been used against battered women and custodially and economically embattled mothers. (Of course, what preceded gender-neutral legislation was also used against women.) However, since men remain the gender-neutral standard for what is considered “human,” many employers still do not provide coverage for birth control for women. Some employee health plans cover abortion and some don’t, but most do cover Viagra. Of course, gender-neutral legislation has also benefited both women and men; the want ads as well as many jobs are no longer segregated by gender, and students of both sexes are increasingly entitled to the same educational and athletic opportunities.

Orthodox women, including feminists, are not always egalitarian, gender-neutral integrationists. Politically speaking, some are radical, others liberal, still others quite conservative, Many Orthodox women tend to be essentialists who believe that men and women are different; some may even believe that women are superior or inferior as a result. My experiences of anti-Semitism among non-Jewish and Jewish feminists in the early 1970s and at the United Nations (where I worked at the end of that decade) drove me to spend some time with “out” Jews. Only Orthodox Jews were “out.” I spent some time in Crown Heights. My Shabbos hostess was a Lubavitcher Hasidic woman. She once took me aside and said, “Let the men have their titles and their public displays of importance. They are not as strong as women. Men need this encouragement. We give birth to life. Our every act is holy. We are always close to God, not just when we pray.” I told her, “Perhaps you’re right, but you sound just like a radical lesbian separatist.”

Patriarchal Judaism and painful Jewish family dynamics have sent so many Jews “out” to practice Jewish ethics on behalf of other tribes, often with no understanding that they are practicing religious Jewish ethics. Thus, praying in a women-only group so that Jewish women of all denominations would be able to pray together may not have been seen as a radical enough feminist effort. Ironically, many feminist, egalitarian, and progressive Jews are quite comfortable working for the material or educational needs of women, including those of other tribes, religions, classes, or races. To date, they have not valued the potential importance of working for the religious and spiritual needs of all Jewish women, including Orthodox women.

The denominational wars continue to rage among religious Jews; secular and antireligious Jews are not attracted by the commotion. Even if I, personally, have other prayer options, because Orthodox women have pioneered women-only prayer groups, it is a feminist act to join them—if only at the Kotel. Women of the Wall wish to remain “connected” to Klal Yisrael; we’d rather be whole than right; we do not want to win on principle but lose each other in so doing.

During this struggle, I learned that the most important feminist support we had was not necessarily “out there,” but “in here”; it was the support that the handful of us gave each other by doing the work and refusing to give up. How could we? We believe that women are Jews, created “in God’s image”; that our souls yearn for freedom, without which we cannot serve God; and that, painfully, the pharaoh we face is Jewish and sometimes even feminist.

Almost immediately after our first prayer service, I invited Rivka Haut to accompany me to Tikkun magazine’s first national conference in December 1988. She was reluctant. “Are you sure that these people will be interested in this?” “Yes,” I insisted, “trust me, it will be all right.” I was so wrong. Michael Lerner graciously allowed me to speak at the opening plenary; Arthur Waskow, in full, flowing beard, kept beaming as I spoke. The feminists who had signed up for my workshop, however, wee disgusted. Within five minutes, one woman angrily protested, “I did not come here to discuss the psychology of prayer or religion.” A second woman said, “I don’t believe in God. If I did, it would be in a goddess and not necessarily a Jewish one. Patriarchal religion oppresses women, it does not liberate us.”

It would take years before I was able to master this dialogue, years before feminist Jews would understand that the right to practice one’s religion is as important as the right to live without being religiously coerced, and that women are entitled to spiritual as well as physical and economic autonomy and integrity.

Within months of that first prayer service, female worshippers at the Kotel were met with violence. We founded ICWOW, turned each of our home offices and kitchen tables into “WOW Central,” were on the phone to Jerusalem, organized and publicized our Solidarity Services for WOW under siege, struggled to have ICWOW become a nonprofit organization, and initiated a grassroots campaign to purchase a Torah and donate it to WOW. We celebrated its dedication under the Jerusalem stars. I wanted to hire our own private security detail because our lives had been threatened. No one harmed us, but threatened with the loss of its kashrut license, the Laromme hotel refused us the room we had booked. We found a nearby schoolhouse and celebrated and read from the Torah there. In 1989, Women of the Wall became name-plaintiffs in the Israeli supreme court. ICWOW joined within a year. I continued to recruit new women to our board, write press releases, talk to the Jewish media, and attend board meetings. I also became our fundraiser.

WOW has been the recipient of great passion and admiration and of great hostility and opposition. Often we have functioned like a Rorschach test. Those who are afraid of and angry at misogynist Orthodoxy see us as too Orthodox and project their anger onto us; those who are angry at secular and anti-Orthodox Jews see us as too radically feminist and likewise project their anger onto us. We have absorbed a great deal of neglect, opposition, misunderstanding, excitement, love, and deep appreciation. ICWOW has slipped through these polarized restrictions into the interstices to become a stubborn, active force in history, defying expectations, representing no one except ourselves.

We must be doing something right to excite so much passion among so many.

Israeli feminist support was, initially, nonexistent. In the mid-1970s, I remember listening to a heated conversation among some secular feminist sabras in Jerusalem. The feminist criticism of the Israeli government and Orthodox rabbinate was so intense, so extreme, that, tongue-in-cheek, I suggested that they apply to Saudi Arabia for political asylum. Now, the hard-heartedness of some of my longtime secular Israeli feminist comrades was even worse. “Phyllis, have you taken leave of your senses? What are you doing with these God-besotted fundamentalists?” Eventually, after many years, some Israeli feminist secularists “got it”—that is, they realized that the right to practice one’s religion is as important as the right no to do so. Some ardently secular Israeli feminists began to treat his struggle with puzzled but grudging respect. For example, Shulamit Aloni, who was well known as Israel’s antireligious Knesset member, offered to help us quietly.

Initially, the Israel Women’s Network (IWN) tried to join the lawsuit. Unfortunately, the Court refused them standing. From that moment on, Dr. Alice Shalvi, IWN’s tireless, eloquent, and accomplished director, repeatedly told North American feminist and progressive philanthropists that our lawsuits and struggle were entirely “marginal” to Israeli women; that the majority of WOW’s members were recent immigrants from English-speaking countries and therefore did not speak for “real” Israeli women. Although Shalvi did testify on our behalf before one of two Knesset commissions, her persistent criticism and refusal to support us was keenly felt.

For years, another leading Israeli feminist, Leah Shakdiel, who herself had won an important legal victory, did not support us. However, for a variety of reasons, Shakdiel, a hero to Orthodox feminists for her struggle to be admitted to the Religious Council of her city, distressed many of them by publicly and privately criticizing WOW as a group and especially some of the ritual practices of some of its young Orthodox members.

One might argue that ICWOW’s kind of activism is revolutionary in that it brings Jewish women of every denomination together and gives Orthodox women access to public group prayer as only Orthodox men and non-Orthodox Jews currently enjoy it. ICWOW may also represent a new kind of religious pluralism, another visionary and pro-Orthodox way of approaching God—one equal to that of equality feminism.

However, both secular and religious non-Orthodox feminist Jews mistrust the feminism of Orthodox women because Orthodox women are psychologically conceived of, from afar, as women who accept and seek to justify women’s second-class citizenship in the synagogue. Non-Orthodox feminists ask, What does it mean to be committed to women-only prayer in the women-only section next to a mechitzah at the Kotel? Will ICWOW set feminist progress back? Are we playing into the hands of our misogynist opponents?

Many Orthodox women—including those who are judges, physicians, stockbrokers, and professors—do have different and more burdensome family obligations than their male counterparts. (This is true for most other groups, too.) In general, Orthodox girls and women are not given, nor are they intellectually and religiously mentored, as boys and men are, to inherit positions of religious authority. Most Orthodox women do not oppose this; however, the Orthodox feminists do. Amazingly, paradoxically, a potentially transformative revolution in religious learning among Orthodox girls and women is also underway.

After countless conversations (and countless media misperceptions of us), I came to understand that most people, including feminists, tend to judge ICWOW mainly in denominational but not in feminist terms. Few consider the possibility that compassionate identification with the spiritual needs of all Jewish women is as much a feminist priority as constituting an egalitarian minyan is.

Many people continue to resist understanding that we are the only multidenominational and pluralist prayer group among Jews, that male Jews of different denominations do not pray together—anywhere, not even at the Kotel. This is WOW’s great feminist achievement. It is an achievement made possible by the persistence and hard work of only a handful of grassroots “Kitchen table” feminists and by our conscious decision to make sacrifices and take risks in order that women of every Jewish denomination will, in the future, be able to pray together in the ezrat nashim at the Kotel.

Early in 1989, I called upon Jonathan Jacoby, then at the New Israel Fund (NIF), for help. He did not hesitate. He immediately led me to Lynda Bronfman and Linda Levinson, who together funded our entire legal bill for the first phase of the lawsuit. The American Jewish Congress, the New Israel Fund, the Reform movement, Kol Ishah, and US/Israel Women to Women also helped us in a variety of ways; they continue to do so, both here and in Israel. We have enjoyed no other organizational support, although many organizations and individuals have written letters on our behalf to various Knesset commissions.

No one in Hollywood or on Wall Street ever emerged to fund “the real Yentl,” as I put it in letter after letter beginning in 1989. Diaspora Jewish leaders have not financially supported us in a major way, but the people have. Our supporters are mainly religious people who have been influenced by feminism and who are acting in its name. Our supporters are not secular antireligious feminists—even though without their years of pioneering work, this struggle would probably never have taken place. Our grassroots support is enormous. Year after year, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of individuals, both men and women, have written significant, modest checks to ICWOW for WOW and have purchased WOW tambourines, tallesim, T-shirts, and greeting cards. A handful of small, woman-led family foundations have modestly funded us once, sometimes twice.

I have fought as hard as the next feminist for my principles, but I have rarely committed myself to a long, arduous struggle merely because it was in my narrow “self-interest” to do so. (I personally will not be praying at the Kotel in the ezrat nashim every day; I neither pray with others every day nor do I live in Jerusalem.) One’s capacity to transcend self-interest, even at one’s own peril, always at one’s own peril, renders one “dangerous,” for such a person cannot always be contained by appealing to her or his self-interest.

Traditionally, women-only groups have been lesser places, less valued. But—dare I say it? Women-only prayer groups are worthy in and of themselves. Women-only praying together constitutes a powerful force, a unique vibration—not “better,” not “worse,” only “equal” and “different.”

For example, last year I celebrated Simchat Torah in my egalitarian Conservative shul. We had several Torah scrolls out; a women-only group gathered at one. Two women were “in charge.” Woman after woman came up for an Aliyah. The first woman wept because it was her first Aliyah. The second woman needed help in reciting the blessings. Quietly, lovingly, we helped her. There was no competition, shame, or terror here, only encouragement and collective pride. The moment two men came over and joined us—two perfectly nice men, by the way—the mood changed. Suddenly we all became a shade more uptight. Perhaps we felt that the men were watching and judging us; perhaps we wanted to be the gender in charge of everything and felt we’d lost our adult or psychological authority when men joined us. Perhaps one of the many ways of approaching God runs along gender lines. For example, I have noted that women hold the Torah like a beloved infant; men almost never do. Thus, mystically speaking, as women only, engaged in group prayer, we may radiate one hue and not another, constitute one vibration and not another.

Yet, imagine my situation. My liberal, progressive, left-leaning, secular feminist comrades were criticizing me for associating with fundamentalist (and presumably reactionary) women, and I was being viewed with ongoing suspiciousness by those very “fundamentalist” (and fabulously feminist) women. I must admit that my Orthodox sisters both thrilled and terrified me. Their learning thrilled me, but I was terrified of their disapproval. In the 1940s and 1950s, I had rebelled against a rigid, joyless Borough Park Orthodoxy, one in which girls did not become bat mitzvah or become rabbis and cantors. My mother had suffered and become embittered by my brazen disobedience, which included embracing Zionism and much, much else. Would my new Orthodox comrades also reject me for being “different”? The fact that I now lived with a woman was not the problem. (“It’s not against Halakhah to do so” was the immediate ruling on that issue.) Far more important were my friendships with prominent American feminist “goddess worshippers.”

In November 1989, after we dedicated the Torah to the women of Jerusalem but before we signed on as name-plaintiffs in the Israeli Supreme Court, I was most unpleasantly grilled in a Jerusalem hotel room about whether or not I was a “goddess worshipper.” I now understand that perhaps in some ways I was, but at the time the gravity of the question was lost on me. Of course, since then, I have both changed and clarified my views. Today, I might say that imagining God as a “He” or a “She” is, in a sense, “Idol worship”—the idols, Rachel’s terafim, are hidden not in our saddlebags but in our minds. In 1989, I refused to answer this question. I maintained that this is a private matter of faith and conscience, but because I’d worked so hard for us that first year, being so mistrusted unnerved me and broke my heart. I wrote a very beautiful, mournful, letter of resignation, but the letter was not accepted and we continued working together as before.

Participating in this struggle has deepened and transformed me in radical ways. Some might even say that I was merely returning to my roots. This is not exactly true. As I’ve noted, when I was a child, girls had no future in terms of learning; the women I knew did not pray together in a group or in a way that uplifted their spirits. Men remained the final and only religious authorities. Having prayed at the Kotel in1988 allowed me to move toward something that I must have wanted all my life. Beginning in 1989, I began to study Torah informally, mainly with Rivka Haut and other Orthodox or previously Orthodox women. I have recently published my first d’var Torah; I hope to publish others soon. My modest learning fills me with joy and comforts me.

My new Orthodox sisters were, surprisingly, far more “righteously aggressive” in some ways than most of the liberal secular feminists whom I knew. For example, in 1989, WOW was being physically and verbally assaulted at the Kotel; the police refused to protect us or to arrest the perpetrators of violence. Each month, I spent hours on the phone with Jerusalem WOW members who were being attacked for trying to pray. What could I or ICWOW do? We learned that the Minister of Religious Affairs, Zvulun Hammer, was delivering a speech in Lawrence, Long Island, at an Orthodox synagogue. Name-plaintiff and New York City Council member Susan Alter is married to Gilbert Klapperman, who was the shul’s rabbi at one time. Susan Alter, Susan Aranoff, Rivka Haut, and I descended en masse upon Lawrence. The moment Minister Hammer closed his mouth, my sisters were upon him. Their hands shot up; they were speaking, first one, then the other. The minister abruptly ended the public discussion, but he was not to escape. They were fierce, all over the man, all talking at once. We followed Minister Hammer into a side room, where we four women surrounded him. Everyone spoke at once, all in too-rapid Hebrew. “How dare you…you had better…we will go public…we demand protections for the Women of the Wall.” Caught up, swept away, I, mainly in English, said that we would hold him personally responsible if a single hair on a single woman’s head was harmed. I also felt a little sorry for him—he looked terrified. We were probably his worst nightmare. However, my Orthodox sisters knew that Orthodox rabbis and ministers could be corrupt, hypocritical, and dangerous to women, and they behaved accordingly.

I hadn’t seen anything this confrontationally feminist since the late 1960s and very early 1970s. In a sense, theirs was a greater, not a lesser, bravery. These Orthodox women were not “exempt” from public scorn because Susan Alter’s husband was the shul’s former rabbi; on the contrary, they were exposing themselves and their families to potentially serious ostracism because of their beliefs.

At least ten variables characterize ICWOW’s struggle for Jewish women’s religious rights. Our struggle has been waged by (a) secularly and (b) religiously educated women who (c) live in a feminist era, (d) are influenced by feminist ideas, € are themselves religious or engaged in the feminist creation of refinement of Jewish ritual, (f) are committed to practicing, not just preaching, both feminist and religious principles, (g) were in the right place at the right time, and (h) were, from 1994 on, able to remain connected through e-mail technology. I also believe that this particular struggle has required (i) a model of feminism as service to others rather than a model of feminism as service to oneself and (j) the opportunity to “put one’s body where one’s ideas are.” This was once the motto of European existentialist intellectuals; it also defines our struggle. It is crucial to fight for territory In this case, the territory is both real and highly symbolic.

Questions remain. From a feminist and psychological point of view, is women’s participation in traditional Jewish practice (either in women-only prayer groups or in gender-integrated groups) reactionary, revolutionary, or both? Is women-only space “settling for too little” when it allows women of all denominations to pray together? Can feminists engage in prolonged legal and political battles without fortifying themselves in a collective spiritual way? What unique approaches can religious feminist thought bring to bear against the mistreatment of women? In what ways does it help to conceive of violence against women, as well as women’s inequality, as a sin against God? Does thinking like this empower feminist struggle?

The members of ICWOW often disagree with each other. I have come to think that we each represent a different hot-blooded “tribe,” and that women have yet to work out our sibling, biblical rivalries. Over the years, ICWOW’s boards came to understand that our differences did not matter as much as our common vision. We are proof that feminists can work together even when we disagree and are politically and theologically “different” from one another—as long as we respect and value one another for those very differences and remember to acknowledge each woman’s accomplishments on our behalf. Women, feminists included, have such a long history of acrimonious dealings with one another that a little civility, generosity, and appreciation goes a long way. Women are inspired and encouraged by it, dispirited in its absence.

Despite the enormous inequality of the work load (we have, among us, a handful of “doers,” a handful of “opinion granters,” and a handful of “disappearing-reappearing” board members), we remain connected. Over the years, many of us have threatened to resign, not once but many times; some have dropped out for a while. Women drift in and out and assume different levels of responsibility; some are not heard from for months, even years, then suddenly they’re back, adding their voice to the discussion. No one, no even I, dares say that so-and-so is no longer “one of us.” No one gets removed from our e-mail group list unless she asks to be. Even those who remain quiet still read our discussions. Whoever can help, does so.

I have been blessed with a capacity to work on a book for many years, in profound isolation, without the slightest encouragement, and to participate in a struggle like this for many years, with little support and against formidable opponents. No matter how heavy a work-burden this struggle has imposed upon me, no matter how much suffering bearing this burden has meant, I could never resign from this struggle or resign myself to losing it.

What do I think my own contribution has been? In addition to sometimes working almost full-time and around the clock on our behalf since 1989, subsidizing the struggle with my own funds and office resources, recruiting some of the “best and brightest” for our boards, perhaps my presence has served as a “bridge” between the denominationally identified women: it has allowed each woman to “see” how feminist all of us really are. Perhaps my former secular worldliness allowed the secularists who in time did come to support us to understand that this was indeed a radical feminist struggle for women’s human rights.

I’ve learned a great deal. I’ve learned that it takes enormous patience to put one’s principles into practice and that doing so is a process, that nothing important happens quickly. I’ve also learned that when a woman demands to be treated as a human being, even if she defines her humanity as (only) a “separate but equal” place at her Father’s table, she will be viewed as revolutionary and treated accordingly: badly.

On March 6, 1996, while Israel reeled from four terrorist bomb attacks in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, WOW went to the Kotel to read the story of how Esther saved the Jews of Persia. They dedicated their reading to Sara Duker, the young Jewish American woman who was killed in one of the Palestinian suicide bombings and who had been planning to join WOW at the Kotel for the Purim reading. No woman said, “Oh, it’s the wrong time; there are more important things to worry about.” No one wavered, hesitated, had the slightest doubt about what others might think. For women, this is the first and most important (psychological) battle we have to win: not caring about what others may think, not seeking approval or popularity, being willing to risk discomfort and even danger for the sake of feminist principle. This kind of psychological self-sufficiency might serve as a model for all disenfranchised “others” who also wish to claim sacred ground.

On August 11, 2000, The New York Times printed a photo of three armed Israeli female soldiers reading from the Book of Lamentations on Tish B’Av at the Kotel. It is very powerful. This image has psychological “legs”; it will travel like wildfire through our collective imaginations. In my view, women cannot succeed in politics or the professions until they are—and are seen as—capable of both defending the people and of talking to God on the people’s behalf. Armed female soldiers at prayer are an entirely new sight. It evokes no previous memories. These three young women are, I think, three visitors (angels perhaps) from the future. I salute them.