Ritual and Horizontal Tradition

By Avital Morris

A few weeks ago, I was sitting on my bed with a friend, watching a YouTube video of a man tying the knot of tefillin shel yad in the Sephardi style. She had just bought tefillin and wanted to put them on in her family’s Moroccan tradition, but they had been made for Ashkenazim and didn’t wrap the right way. We had no idea how to tie tefillin, so we found the YouTube video and watched it slowly, pausing every few seconds to make sure our knot matched his.

Avital Morris

I am grateful for the Internet for many things, but especially for the access it gives me to Torah and mitzvot. I  cannot learn in most of the Torah institutions in the world, because I’m a woman and also in college in Chicago, but I have learned so much Torah from the Internet by downloading sources and shiurim from around the world and learning them in chevrutot. When I need to lead a part of tefillot and have no one around who knows it or would teach it to a woman, I can almost always find instructions online and figure it out. And when I was asked to tie someone’s tefillin because she doesn’t know a Sephardi man who would fix them for her, I was able to help only because of YouTube.

But it still feels feels sad and wrong to learn these skills from the Internet, useful as it is. Ritual practice has centuries of mimetic tradition behind it, and I’ve heard so much about people learning Torah from years in a beit midrash, learning to daven by singing with a chazan, and learning ritual from parents and teachers. Learning from a person who has no idea I exist (and would be horrified if he did) seems like a rupture in this tradition.

I’ve been putting on tefillin since I was twelve, but in the past couple years, I’ve become more serious and more public about it. Since then, several women interested in putting on tefillin have reached out to me for help. Each had tried to figure it out from YouTube and had been thrown off by some combination of the technical complexity, the fact that most of the videos are of extremely burly Chabad men and therefore hard for people who don’t look like that to follow, and the fact that it’s hard, weird, and lonely.

Teaching other women to put on tefillin is one of the most meaningful experiences I’ve had with mitzvot. Tefillin are physically challenging at first: it’s hard to make them tight enough to stay on but loose enough for comfort, and it’s easy to be discouraged and tempted to give up before it becomes second nature. Especially for women who’ve been told that they should not be wearing tefillin, physical difficulty can feel like confirmation that this mitzvah is inaccessible to them. And even years into putting on tefillin, I feel much safer and able to daven when I’m not the only woman in tefillin, so I’m incredibly happy to talk other women through it and say amen to their shehechianu the first time they fulfill this mitzvah. I love the feeling of passing on mitzvot, and I’m happy to have them learn from me instead of the Chabad man on YouTube.

Of course, the tradition is not supposed to work this way. Most boys learn to put on tefillin from their fathers, not their friends. All of the women I’ve helped with tefillin are at least my age and, in the ordinary tradition of tefillin, would have had them for years. We’re turning a vertical tradition, passed from one generation to the next, into a horizontal one, passed within a single generation, and sometimes it feels confused and off-balance.

Halakhic egalitarian Jews have an analogous relationship to mimetic Judaism more generally. Because we think that paradigms of the roles different people play in halaka have shifted completely since the Rabbinic period and most contemporary halakhic authorities do not, we can’t consult most rabbis about many of our questions and end up looking to older sources and trying to map normative halakha to the world we live in.

Although this frontier is sometimes exciting, I will admit to an occasional longing for an Artscroll-type series that would just tell me what to do, instead of the broad collection of sources and opinions that I usually end up with when I need to make any kind of halakhic decision. Our institutions, rituals, and communities use categories that have been understood by Jews for centuries, but the process of figuring out what exactly they look like is still very much ongoing, and is being done largely from the ground up, by people who are not halakhic authorities in any way.

By creating these communities, I hope we are constructing a chain of transmission that, a generation from now, will feel like it’s always been there. I hope that our children will have an experience of this mitzvah that feels like any other Jewish ritual that children see modelled at home, but that can only happen if people know how to put on tefillin in the first place. For now, teaching women to put on tefillin feels like at least a taste of the mimetic tradition by which people have passed on mitzvot for centuries, and I’m proud to be a part of it.  

Avital Morris is an alumna of Midreshet Ein Hanatziv and is currently a second-year at the University of Chicago.

Me, My Classmates And My Tefillin

By Gefen Lavee

Every one of us dreads public ridicule. Being put on the spot, stared at, teased. Many people will put in extreme effort so as not to be laughed at by their peers, not to be thought of as different, as weird. Unfortunately, in our society, feminism, on this front, puts us in a tricky position. Even though I live in quite a liberal community, and go to an open-minded school, I find that my feminist views, and more so actions, are often looked at as something

Gefen Lavee

negative, maybe even extreme. Sure, I can do whatever I want with my own life, but still people seem to misunderstand the point of my actions, or not be very willing to listen to the ideas behind them. This is caused mostly by what society has taught them to do, and what they are used to.

I remember the first time I told my classmates that I don tefillin. It wasn’t all of them -- I told only my few closest friends from school, one time when we were sitting at break and I was so excited that I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I had readied myself for the looks of shock on their faces, maybe for a few glimpses of disdain and hopefully a good discussion about obligation and women. I was not ready, however, for the laughter. This was followed by a rain of questions; “You do? Really?”, “Do you do it regularly?”, “Doesn’t it feel weird?”. Then one girl said “As open minded as I am with these things, I’m warning you that if I ever see you with tefillin, I’ll probably laugh.” More than this hurt me, it confused me. What is so ridiculous about donning tefillin? Most women don’t do it, but men do all the time, and no one laughs at them.

From a totally objective standpoint, however, if an outsider, someone who is not used to seeing men don tefillin daily, would go into a shul and see a bunch of men standing with black boxes strapped to their heads and a black leather cord wrapped around their arms, it would probably look quite ridiculous to them. These girls, my classmates, have grown up watching men don tefillin their whole lives; it is a very basic, very normal thing in their minds. However, they are not used to the concept of women doing so, and therefore this to them seems bizarre, ridiculous.

I do not blame or judge my classmates. It is human nature to be afraid of things they do not know or are not familiar with. It makes sense to do so -- from an evolutionary point of view, keeping wary and alert keeps you alive. However, nowadays, when our lives do not depend on it, we must teach ourselves to be more open, more thinking, examining our lives and what we do daily. It is the key to our society’s well being. If we learn more, if we think things through, we are more likely to both find the place fitting for us, and help our society progress.

The first step towards this life of constant thinking and learning is creating a different mindset, one that may not come easily. A way of looking at the world that isn’t black and white, good and bad, safe and scary. What we do, as educated humans, is constantly cross lines, explore new realms, go a little bit further every day. This takes courage. It requires that we not be scared to ask questions, to look further into things, to keep acquiring more knowledge. I believe that this mindset will also lead to more tolerance - as long as we do not have all the information about a person, information that as other people we can never access, can never fully understand, we cannot judge. We must not judge.

My classmates' bout of laughter came from ignorance, from a mindset so used to one thing that it found it hard to get accustomed to another. We must strive to change that mindset, to cut loose the boundaries made by society and by our own brains so as to be more open to different behavior, to other opinions. This will lead us to a more tolerant society, a better starting ground not only for feminism, but for every growing liberal movement. We must learn to put ourselves in other people’s shoes -- or maybe even other people’s tefillin.

Gefen Lavee is from Zichron Yaakov, Israel, and is a graduate of Pelech -- Zichron Yaakov and an alumna of Drisha's Dr. Beth Samuels High School Program. This year, she is studying at Midreshet Ein Hanatziv.

Kippah, Tefillin and Standing Out

By Kohava Mendelsohn

Tefillin often feel foreign or strange initially, especially for women.

I am a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who grew up in a feminist house. I attend a Jewish school that supports egalitarianism, where girls are allowed to wear kipot, tallitot, and tfillin. However, girls in middle school wear doily kipot at the bottom of their hair and boys wear “normal” ones. In the lower grades, boys and girls wear the same type of Bucharian kippah, one that is large and stays on their heads without clips. I felt that wearing a doily hanging from my hair would not feel to me like wearing a kippah. I always wore a regular kippah at shul, and I felt like a doily didn’t cover my head. If a kippah is hanging from the bottom of your hair by a bobby pin, it is not serving its purpose--kippot are supposed to cover the head to remind the wearer that there is a something greater above you. When I entered middle school, I asked to wear a similar kippah to the younger grades, one that I had worn before at my previous Jewish day school. I was allowed to, and I was the only person that wore that type of kippah.

Once a week, the upper grades gather to pray together. This is when we put on tfillin. Male teachers put their tfillin on, and some of the boys who have had bar mitzvahs do as well. While girls are allowed to lay tefillin, they just didn’t, nor did the female teachers. One week, a male teacher asked a group of girls if they wanted to put on tfillin, so they did, and one of the female teachers also did. The next week, only one girl layed tefillin, and the next week it was only boys again. I did not put tfillin on at that time because I was one of the younger people in my grade and was not a Bat Mitzvah yet.

Later, the first week after bat mitzvah, when I could wear tfillin, I left my tfillin -- which my parents gave me -- at home the first time because I was embarrassed to put them on when no other girls were. I eventually took them to school and one of the male teachers who put them on every week showed me how. The teachers were very friendly and made me feel more at ease. A few people gave me weird glances but nobody really cared. I felt different and a little on edge. The tfillin helped me feel like a Jewish adult, but I felt a little unsure of what to do. The next time I put them on I still needed help tying them, but I remembered more. I was more comfortable wearing my tfillin because I had done it before.

I wanted to wear tfillin because I never have heard a valid reason why I shouldn't put on tfillin, and if there is no reason why I shouldn't, then I should; I am obligated as a Jewish adult.

Kohava Mendelsohn is thirteen years old. 

Committed but Conflicted

By Shoshana Michael Zucker

I began praying with a tallit when I was in high school in the early 1970s. Active in NFTY, it was not a gender issue but rather an affirmation of a more traditionalist stance. I didn’t think about tefillin, I don’t think anyone knew at the time did. Both tefillin and the gendered-ness of certain mitzvot were ideas that I knew existed somewhere, but not in my life.

Shoshana Michael Zucker

Several years later, I landed up on the upper West Side of Manhattan, in the orbit of JTS but not formally affiliated with it. I joined the West Side Minyan and the greater Ansche Chesed community that was just beginning to come back to life. Becoming more committed to halakha but still firmly egalitarian, I bought a pair of tefillin. The discourse about “equal obligations for equal rights” that accompanied the debate about accepting women to the JTS rabbinical school was very much in the air but my personal decision was not based on extensive learning. I taught myself from the NCSY Tefillin book and prayed with tefillin for several years, mostly in private but also with the weekday minyan at Ansche Chesed. The few times I wore them elsewhere, I found the feeling of being stared at unbearable.

Then we made aliya, founded Kibbutz Hannaton and had three children. I was on an emotional roller coaster and couldn’t maintain the practice. The tefillin got put aside.

Fast forward. When my daughter was nearly Bat Mitzvah she asked in the most natural way, “Why aren’t you buying me tefillin? Are they too expensive?” It had never dawned on her that she wouldn’t put on tefillin and I never dawned on me that she would want to. At the time, none of the girls or women in her TALI school or the NOAM youth movement prayed with tefillin, but she knew I had a set (and probably didn’t know how little use they got) and her brothers each lit a Shabbat candle. Although she was raised in a very different religious environment than I, she also had little concept of mitzvot being gendered. I gave her my tefillin. She used them faithfully, even in the IDF, despite some nasty feedback. I felt that the tefillin were being put to good use, and was content to be part of a transitional generation.

More years passed, my children grew and left the nest. I began to feel that I was now “using someone else’s exemption;” there was no reason why my life obligations could not accommodate tefillin, especially because I prayed every morning and my synagogue community was accepting. Just when I was on the verge of starting again, a friend was threatened in a public place by a man who found the tefillin marks on her arm objectionable. I felt embarrassingly weak, but that scared me.

The dissonance of reciting Shema without tefillin, “bearing false testimony against myself” (see TB Brachot 14b) continued to nag. Since I work at home, I began using my husband’s tefillin “on a second shift” after he left in the morning. Slowly my commitment strengthened and I bought my own set. Thankfully, the seller didn’t ask who would be using the tefillin. Most of the conversation revolved around the scarcity of Ashkenazi sets. I didn’t want to wait, lest I lose courage. I bought a Sephardi set, and retied the arm knot so I could wrap inward. With an Ashkenazi knot and Sephardi parchment, my hand tefilla represents the ingathering of exiles.

Laying tefillin remains primarily a private practice for me, limited to home and few “safe places.” External expressions of piety feel brazen. Not as a matter of gender, but rather of faith and theodicy. So much in the world is broken, how dare I declare myself committed to God and mitzvot beyond the minimum required for communal identification? Some days, I honestly don’t know.

What I do know is that laying tefillin has strengthened my discipline for prayer. I miss far fewer mornings now. Afternoons and evenings, too. Like moving from being in a relationship, to being engaged and then married.

Indeed, when wrapping the tefillin straps around the hand it is customary to say, “I will betroth you forever: I will betroth you with righteousness and justice, with goodness and mercy…” (Hosea 2:21-22), which I also said to my husband at our wedding. Before doing this, I move my wedding ring from its usual place to my forefinger (so it doesn’t come between my finger and the tefillin strap), returning it to where it was originally placed when we stood beneath the huppah. For me, it is a moment of recognizing the balancing acts and adjustments we must all make between multiple commitments. It is one of the most significant pieces of my tefillin puzzle. Sometimes I think the world-to-come will be a time when all of our commitments fit together without juggling. May it come speedily and in our day.

Shoshana Michael Zucker is an active member of the Masorti congregation Hod veHadar in Kfar Saba. She earns a living by translating and editing but would rather teach Torah.

Text and Textile

By Maya Rosen

In middle school, I fell in love with Chazal. After a teacher gave me a copy of Massechet Pesachim, I spent hours thumbing through my English-Hebrew-Aramaic dictionary, slowly teasing out the linguistic and textual puzzle. It was through the Talmud that I first experienced the feeling of an intellectual heritage. As I pondered legal principles and fanciful legends, I became aware and appreciative of the gift of books, language, and culture. The rabbinic engagement with every aspect of life taught me to feel both love for and responsibility to the printed word.

Maya Rosen ties tzitzit.

More than just another text, the Talmud introduced a host of characters into my inner world. I encountered figures who view learning as an all-encompassing life orientation, and I loved them. I marveled over Rabbi Akiva’s logic, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s conviction, and Ben Azzai’s intuitions. Reish Lakish always made me smile, and I admired Rav Huna’s character. These rabbis became constant figures in my life, and I thought regularly about what they would think or how they would act in the situations in which I found myself.

At the same time, I was convinced that Chazal would have hated me. I regularly encountered misogynistic stories and statements in rabbinic texts, and I imagined Chazal’s disappointment that I, a young woman, was learning Talmud. I didn’t want to stop, but I felt that my learning affronted the very system I loved so much. I spent my days in public high school wishing I had the opportunity to learn Torah seriously, and it pained me to think about what Chazal would have thought of my secular studies, my Western dress, and my liberal politics. I wanted Chazal to approve of my life, but my female body was a source of resentment and shame every time I opened a new daf.

Around this time, I acquired my first set of tefillin and tzitzit. At the time, it felt like an impulsive decision, though looking back on it, I realize I had a strong conviction that Torah was speaking to and demanding something of me. I wanted desperately to be a full and active citizen in the world of Torah. I no longer believed that the mitzvot I spoke of twice a day in the Shema were speaking only about men. In the same way that Chazal had become real people for me years earlier, I wanted the words of the Torah also to become real. Beginning to lay tefillin and wear tzitzit was, in a literal sense, the materialization of my prayers.

Happily, my relationship with Chazal has changed considerably. As I have learned more Torah, I see the change inherent to the system; also, I now understand better how history generally is constructed. I now think, or at least hope, that Chazal would have thought that I’m worthy of living within the same history as their system.

Perhaps it is ironic that by beginning to observe what many consider particularly “gendered” mitzvot (tefillin and tzitzit), I finally improved my angst-ridden relationship with Chazal. I found that these mitzvot combined the physical and the transcendent in a way that ultimately felt beyond gender. I started counting the seven wraps of the tefillin strap around my forearm with the seven words of Psalms 118:5: “min hametzar karati ya anani bamerchav yah," "Out of the straits I called upon God, who answered me with great spaciousness.” As I tucked the corners of my tzitzit into my clothes, I would smile thinking of the Sifre’s comment: “‘v’asu lahem tzitzit’—af hanashim b’mashma," "‘they should make for themselves tzitzit’—this includes women.” Sometimes I would think of Rashi’s comment that compares the four corners of tzitzit to the four verbs God uses in promising redemption. Often, I recited the words of a baraita in Menachot: “chavivin yisrael she’sivavan ha’Kadosh Baruch Hu b’mitzvot: tefillin b’rosheihen u’tefillin b’zeroteyhen, v’tzitzit b’bigdeihen." "Beloved is Israel for the Holy-Blessed-One surrounded them with mitzvot: tefillin on their heads, and tefillin on their arms, and tzitzit on their clothing.” Putting on my tzitzit in the morning before school and remembering that, indeed, "chavivin yisrael" became a gentle act of tikkun with Chazal.

Wearing tzitzit and laying tefillin remain the most sincere ways I know to portray to God the identity to which I strive. When I put on tzitzit in the morning, I am putting on the uniform of the person I want to be. The words of the Shema and the tassels on each corner under my clothing remind me to try and live a life that is surrounded by and enveloped in mitzvot. For this reason, tzitzit are the best example I know of the linguistic link between “text” and “textile.”

There are still problems. I am vain about not allowing my tzitzit to peak out of the shoulders of my favorite dress, and I often wake feeling that laying tefillin is only a task to be checked off my morning to-do list. One thing that has been helpful is finding peers, teachers, and communities who think seriously about mitzvot, gender, and their intersection. When I started wearing tzitzit, I thought that doing so would isolate me from the Jewish community. My work this past year to create Netzitzot, an initiative to sell tzitzit designed for women (www.netzitzot.com), has shown me that my fears were misguided. At the Netzitzot launch party in New York a few months ago, the dozens and dozens of people in attendance proved to me that tzitzit are fringe in the literal sense only. We tied tzitzit onto fifty garments that night, and as the party came to a close and we gathered together to doven Maariv, there was a certain buzz in the air as each person got to the phrase in Shema: “v’asu lahem tzitzit," "you should make for them tzitzit.” This we had done, and I knew Torah approved.

Maya Rosen is a rising sophomore at Princeton University and the founder of Netzitzot.

Jewish Feminist Luck and Choices

By Judith Rosenbaum

When I think about my Jewish feminist experience, most of the time I think about my luck. I had the good fortune to be born in the early 1970s just as Jewish feminism was unfolding, into the New York havurah community at the center of this development, to one of the young women (Paula Hyman) pioneering the movement. So Jewish feminism has been, for me, a birthright more than a choice – something I almost took for granted as a defining characteristic of my Jewish life.

Judith Rosenbaum (right) wearing tefillin in 1992.

One of the first independent Jewish feminist choices I remember making consciously was my decision to begin laying tefillin when I became a bat mitzvah. This was in 1986, and while I was lucky to be part of a community where this was an option, it was certainly not a given that I would choose to take on this practice. At my day school, there was one other girl who had just begun to lay tefillin around the same time, but it was still definitely seen as an odd thing for a girl to do.

Luckily – again – I was a spunky kid. I didn’t mind standing out. In fact, I liked being different. When I wrapped my tefillin, I felt bold. Though the practice felt strange at first, it was the strangeness of wrapping leather straps around one’s head and arm, not the fact of doing so as a young woman. In fact, I think I wore my tefillin more proudly and confidently than the boys in my class, who I recall as somewhat fumbling in their attempts to get the straps on tight enough that they wouldn’t slip down and bunch around their wrists, and loose enough that they wouldn’t cut off circulation in their arms. For me, laying tefillin was an active choice; for them, it was school policy.

When I began attending a non-Jewish high school, daily prayer – and therefore, tefillin – ceased to be a part of my schedule, and I missed them. My tefillin seemed forlorn, nestled next to my tallit, which still got regular use every Shabbat. Soon I was recruited to join the members of my congregation who volunteered to attend morning prayers on particular days of the week, to insure that there would be a minyan for those who needed one to say kaddish. My day was Wednesday, and though it was always hard to drag myself out of bed to make it to minyan so early in the morning, I was glad to have an opportunity to use my tefillin again.

There were many aspects of that early morning minyan experience that I treasured: feeling like a grown up who was making an important contribution to my community; feeling remarkably accepted by the other regulars in the morning minyan crowd, most of them men over 80 years old. It wasn’t inspired davenning, to be sure; it was quick, chanted hurriedly in low voices. But as we all sat there, swaying in our tallitot and tefillin (my tefillin shel rosh usually perched on top of hair still wet from the shower), I felt an incredible sense of belonging and pride. When I would take my seat in class an hour later, I often ran my fingers over the indentations on my left arm, a sweet reminder that I had already done something important that day.

Embracing tefillin was one of the ways in which I made feminism my own. I’m proud to hold the distinction of being one of the oldest women who has been laying tefillin since becoming a bat mitzvah, and for many of my friends, one of the first women they ever saw in tefillin. More than 25 years after my bat mitzvah, I remain in the minority as a woman who lays tefillin. Though I feel some disappointment that this mitzvah still feels inaccessible or unappealing to many women, I am proud to be able to model not only how to wrap tefillin but also how comfortable a woman can feel in those strange leather straps.

Judith Rosenbaum, PhD, is a writer, educator, and historian, and the incoming Executive Director of the Jewish Women’s Archive. She also serves on the faculty of the Bronfman Youth Fellowships in Israel.

No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of These Tefillin

Eden, right, prays with her father.

By Eden Farber

Growing up in an observant household, taking on new mitzvot has always been exciting, part of initiating and personalizing my Jewish
journey. When I was seven, I started keeping Shabbat. When I was eleven, I started fasting on fast days. When I was twelve, I started davening every day. When I was fifteen, I started studying daf yomi (admittedly not a mitzvah, but certainly a significant practice). When I was sixteen, I had my first truly inspirational prayer experience at a partnership minyan in New York City. And when I turned seventeen, I began laying tefillin.

Of all the reasons that I took a long time to start wearing tefillin, I’d like to address only one here: frankly, I was grossed out by the idea of wrapping a dead body around my arm every day. It just felt uncomfortable. As a person who is very conscientious about what I put in my mouth and on my body—I adhere to a vegan diet, make my own toiletries, and more.—this mitzvah felt unnatural. How can I perform a spiritual ritual that can only be completed through the untimely death of a fellow creature?

This issue quickly became more than just a theological question: it became an ethical dilemma.

I’d like to bring a halachic concept to the table. It’s called a mitzvah haba’ah b’aveira, a mitzvah that comes from a sin. Recently, my chavruta and I came across this concept in our Talmud shiur. Our scenario involved using a stolen lulav on Sukkot—which is forbidden, for this reason. We don’t want to do mitzvot, which are inherently good, by doing aveirot, which are inherently bad. It would seem obvious that stealing to fulfil the mitzvah of lulav would be wrong—why even give an explanation? It’s unethical. Doing something good in the world by doing something bad in the world cancels the good deed out; it’s basic mathematics. A negative plus a positive gets you nowhere—especially when they don’t have the same weight. Killing for the sake of fulfilling a mitzvah didn’t seem to add up. I didn’t want my prayer to become a mitzvah haba’ah b’aveira.

Despite my feelings about the ethics or lack thereof of leather, however, I still really wanted to take on the practice of tefillin. As a halachic Jew, I simply couldn’t not. Tefillin are part of the deal. I didn’t know how to balance wanting to fulfill my chiyuv, my obligation, and sticking to my ground about not supporting the killing of animals. I asked questions and did research until I finally heard of something that seemed to be the perfect solution: tefillin shel shlil. Tefillin shel shlil are tefillin whose leather is made from an animal that died of natural causes. There are sofrim in Israel who ask kibbutzim to tell them when a cow dies naturally, and from that hide and that hide only they make the tefillin.

This way, no one is killing; there is no prescribed death for the purposes of human benefit. It’s natural, it’s recycling. It’s like giving the cow another life, without touching its first one. I can’t say if this is objectively so or I’ve just sunken into a deep level of cognitive dissonance—I can only tell you that I’ve never once felt gross putting on my tefillin shel shlil.

Finding a comfortable solution was not easy, but Judaism is not about ease. There are questions—very difficult questions—and there is no one answer for every person. Not picking and choosing my halachic practices or my ethical ones is difficult, but worthwhile when I can say that my halachic lifestyle compromises neither my integrity nor my ethical commitments.

Now, every day when I put my tefillin on, knowing that they are a product of nature and not of industry, I daven proudly. I am happy to have taken another step in my Jewish journey.

Eden Farber, age seventeen, is an unschooler and an alumna of Drisha's Dr. Beth Samuels High School Programs and BIMA at Brandeis. She is a columnist for the Atlanta Jewish Times and has written for  theFBomb.org, JOFA's The Torch, the JOFA Journal, the New York Jewish Week's Fresh Ink for Teens, and Modern Hippie Magazine.  Next year, she will be attending Midreshet Ein Hanatziv's Hesder program, which combines Torah study and military service.