When Cousins Meet in Torah: Finding Our Place in Tradition

Nervously stepping up to the bimah, I brushed my rainbow tallit with my fingertips and took a deep breath. It was my bat mitzvah, and I was chanting the first section of my parasha, Re’eh, which means “look.” 

I’d been preparing for months. Usually, I’m pretty comfortable with public speaking, but that day felt different. I was restless, as if tiny little sparks were jumping in my stomach. Clutching my yad (the pointer used to read from the Torah), I located the first few words.

I looked up several times during my parshah, just like my parents reminded me to, enough to catch my dad mouthing “slowww down” in the audience. My leyning was long, 17 verses for only the first section, and I still had shishi and shevi'i to go. After this first section, I sat down next to the Ark to take a break, feeling immense happiness and pride. The hardest part was over, and it was now time for others to read. 

I watched as a tall, elegant young woman with long dark curls and a printed floral skirt stepped up to the bimah. She was my cousin, Gavriela Weitzman. She took the yad and began to chant. Her voice was beautiful—steady, calm, confident, but gentle. It was easy to listen to, the kind of voice that makes you want to lean in and pay close attention, trying to soak in every note. 

She read with such eloquence and fluency, you would never know that until that day, Gavriela had never leyned Torah. You would never have guessed that, although she was fluent in Hebrew, she had used YouTube to teach herself how to chant the melodies just a few months prior. 

For as long as I can remember, I’ve looked up to Gavriela, or Gavi as we call her. I remember Facetiming her from my house in Chicago during the pandemic, as she sat in her Philadelphia home and shared what it was like to be a professional artist. She showed me her childhood sketchbooks filled with little characters, and I was instantly inspired to start drawing my own.

Gavi grew up in a Modern Orthodox family, where women were not encouraged to participate in services, let alone read Torah. My bat mitzvah felt like a turning point in my Jewish feminist identity, not just because it was my first time chanting, but because all eight Torah readers, myself included, were women, challenging the long-standing tradition, in Orthodoxy at least, that the Torah only be read by men. 

Watching Gavi step into a ritual so often reserved solely for men made me think about the power of inclusion and representation in religious spaces—how women are fully capable of engaging in religious life, even if they are not always given the opportunity.

My sisters and I have been lucky. We’ve grown up in an egalitarian Conservative Jewish community that has always allowed and actively encouraged us to read Torah, recite prayers, and participate in Torah study. This wasn't always the case in Conservative communities, and there are older women in my community who can recall not being allowed to read from the Torah, or even have a bat mitzvah at all. 

Through my cousins, I’ve been exposed to other types of Judaism. At another cousin’s bar mitzvah in Paris, we women sat behind a mechitzah, or partition, separating men and women. I was 13 at the time, and couldn’t see anything that was going on behind the white lace curtains. I understood that this was a tradition intended to let us focus on prayer, but it felt unfair that we weren’t allowed to see the main “action” of the service. 

I admire that Gavi has not left Orthodoxy. In an interview with JWA, Gavi explained that she could not throw away her love for the community or the rigor of religious ritual. Instead, she wants to reimagine and redefine how she engages with Judaism in a way that was entirely her own. This is really powerful to me. Why should women have to distance themselves from the Orthodox world they value, with its commitment to strict religious practice, just to participate? It makes me think about different Jewish practices, and how women can think about claiming the tradition for themselves without being preoccupied with labels. 

Gavi takes words from Orthodox liturgy and flips them to make art that celebrates being a woman. She’s willing to use art to challenge conventions. This is a language that I don’t have to grapple with in the same way. 

In his own way, my father is also a Jewish feminist. Like Gavi, he grew up in an Orthodox Jewish community, and he made a very conscious decision to teach my sisters and me everything that he knows. The fact that my Dad, who was raised in Orthodoxy, chose to teach his daughters the tools he was able to learn as a male means so much to me. It is the reason that today, I can add my voice, along with Gavi and all the other women who chanted with me, reimagining what Jewish tradition can be.

Since my bat mitzvah, I’ve continued to leyn at my synagogue on the south side of Chicago. It’s not unusual among my community for a young woman to read from the Torah, but that is something I will never take for granted. I’m thankful for Gavi’s example and the way that, in our relationship, two different streams of Judaism have come into thoughtful conversation with one another. In Re’eh, Moses instructed the Israelites to see the paths before them. Knowing Gavi has helped me to see my own Jewish journey more clearly.