What Matters Now: A post-October 7 women’s prayer book
Editors of ‘Az Nashir – We Will Sing Again: Women’s Prayers for Our Time of Need’ discuss their push to tap into the tradition of female prayer during this intense national moment
Welcome to What Matters Now, a weekly podcast exploring one key issue currently shaping Israel and the Jewish World with host deputy editor Amanda Borschel-Dan.
This week we speak with the editors of a new prayerbook — “Az Nashir – We Will Sing Again: Women’s Prayers for Our Time of Need” — written by women, for women, in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught on southern Israel.
The anthology was compiled and edited by Shira Lankin Sheps, Anne Gordon and Rachel Sharansky Danziger, and it was published by The Layers Press, an imprint of The SHVILLI Center.
The three editors join Borschel-Dan in The Times of Israel’s Jerusalem office this week and explain their impetus to tackle such an ambitious project and the decisions they made while putting it together, such as the inclusion of “visual prayer” — 30 colorful illustrations by female artists.
According to the editors, the Hebrew-English tome is a prayer book companion that emulates a long tradition of Jewish women writing prayers, supplications and liturgical poems in their own mother tongues.
So this week, we ask Shira Lankin Sheps, Anne Gordon and Rachel Sharansky Danziger what matters now.
Note: “Az Nashir: We Will Sing Again” is available via Amazon.com
What Matters Now podcasts are available for download on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was produced by the Pod-Waves.
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