White Fire Web: Reviews

WHITE FIRE REVIEWS
Rev. Dr. Arlene J. Clover March 27, 2005 by Rev. Dr. Arlene J. Clover Rabbi Drucker takes you into the living rooms, churches and lecture halls of thirty-one of America's notable female spiritual leaders. The author's open descriptions of her personal reactions to each interview engage the reader in both the conversation and its relevance to spirituality today. There is no doubt that Malka is doing more than collecting data. She is making friends, comrades and allies on her own quest to return the feminine voice to religious and spiritual teachings. These women share their stories, pointing out both the joy and suffering that comes with active participation in ministry. Ranging from Jewish Rabbis, as is the author herself, to Yoruba priestess' and New Age thinkers they are stars shining a bright light on a changing world. Malka Drucker has exposed that light to guide us as we reunite the Divine Feminine with her consort. Black and white portraits done by Gay Block reveal something about each of her subjects that would have been veiled by color. Ms Block does a wonderful job of capturing the soul through expression and setting. Reviewer: Rev. Dr. Arlene J. Colver, Author of Magdalen's Way and From Whence They Came, Vice President of Lifelight University, Founder and Chaplain of the Society for Universal Concordance Washington Jewish Week January 29, 2004 'Missing half the story' Women charting new spiritual terrain, rabbi contends by Paula Amann News Editor Rabbi Malka Drucker sees hints of a religious transformation afoot in U.S. society. She glimpses it, for instance, in the proliferation of "spiritual" titles, many penned by women, in airport bookstores. Above all, this author of 20 books for adults and young people, who leads the HaMakom congregation in Santa Fe, N.M., discerns a "new face" of American religion. It's female. "This is the first time in history there has been a community of women spiritual leaders in nearly every faith path," Drucker told a Bethesda audience last week, pointing to "an invisible but palpable alchemy among these women." Drucker was speaking about the ideas behind her book White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America (Skylight Paths Publishing, 2003) on Wednesday of last week at Bethesda Jewish Congregation. The event drew an interfaith, largely female audience of some 70 people, reflecting a diverse set of co-sponsors, including BJC, the Capital Kehillah, Bradley Presbyterian Church and members of the Islamic Information Center. Proceeds from book sales went to the Academy for Jewish Religion, where Drucker and BJC leader Cantor Sunny Schnitzer, the program's moderator, studied for ordination. Even after some 30 years of women rabbis in liberal Judaism, the concept still startles and unsettles some congregants, Drucker suggested. "My best teaching is, 'Hi, I'm Rabbi Drucker,' because it's still a new experience for people to see a woman rabbi," Drucker said of her first post with a Westchester, N.Y., congregation. "I realized my mere presence as a woman rabbi was controversial." Not only that, but she believes that, across the denominations, women are bringing a different sensibility to religious institutions and spiritual communities they create. The leaders profiled in her book "showed me that there is such a thing as a way to do religion that is warm, passionate, nonhierarchical, inclusive -- and they often have great food!" said Drucker, drawing laughter from the audience. "This is not so much about gender, as about bringing into balance the feminine and masculine energy that we all have." Drucker took the name of her book from a talmudic remark that "Torah is written with black fire upon white fire." With the texts as handed down, suggested Drucker, "We're missing half the story." White fire, for this rabbi-author, represents the long-invisible contributions of women to spiritual life. Potomac artist Debra Band, 47, who belongs to her community's modern Orthodox Beth Sholom Congregation and Talmud Torah, voiced mixed feelings about Drucker's talk. "Societies are changing so that women can say things about what they've always done," Band said, alluding to international speaker Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, who is profiled in Drucker's book. "The new part is that they can come out and say things as a woman, rather than simply following their husbands." At the same time, Band said she was "discomfited" with the "number of Jews who feel they need to go elsewhere." These include some of those who figure in White Fire, such as motivational author and speaker Marianne Williamson, who sends her daughter to Hebrew school, but draws on Christian teachings in her work, and teacher-writer Sylvia Boorstein, who calls herself both Jewish and Buddhist. Audience member Bonnie Berger, 48, counts herself as one of those wrestling with religious boundaries. "All those years of going to synagogue, I felt like I was just repeating words that didn't mean anything to me," said Berger, a first-year student at Silver Spring's Institute for Religious Development, a metaphysical program run by Iyanla Vanzant, a Yoruba priestess profiled in White Fire. "For the first time in my life, I feel I have a relationship with God." Yet this Takoma Park diversity consultant still counts herself a Jew. "My goal and task and struggle is to blend" the two approaches, Berger said. "I have the desire to find how to make Judaism work for me and perhaps for others who felt like it didn't speak to them." Jeremy Mendelson, a Torah reader for the Capital Kehillah who attended last week's program, sees women's spirituality as also important for men. "I always need my Shekhinah side to be cultivated," said Mendelson, 33, referring to God's feminine attributes, and explaining his reasons for coming. "Women can open men up to sides of themselves they didn't know they had -- the compassionate side, feeling as opposed to doing," said Mendelson, a financial aid administrator for Trinity College who says he is considering the rabbinate as a future career. Rabbi Tamara Miller, Capital Kehillah's spiritual leader, helped field questions at the close of the program. "Some people will choose a woman spiritual leader because they want a new paradigm, a new way of gaining access to their spiritual treasure chest," Miller said in an interview two days later. "The point is that God is divine, which includes both male and female, so in order to reach the divinity, we have to include both male and female in our spiritual search." In her own remarks, Drucker noted that she and her life partner, Gay Block, who took the photographs for the book, had dedicated the book to all four of their grandsons, "new men." "This struggle for equality is not just for girls," Drucker said, adding that "justice is a religious issue and this may be the time to see the other face of God." Publishers Weekly March 24, 2003 The Wisdom of Women (excerpt) Across the religions, women can find a bond in their femininity, as a number of new books discover. In another Skylight Paths book, Malka Drucker profiles significant religious women of today. Drucker, a rabbi who serves the HaMakom Congregation in Santa Fe, N.Mex., says she decided to write White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America (Jan.) because she felt lonely in her role and wondered how women leaders on other religious paths saw their experience. "I think I was looking for a sisterhood," she tells PW. Her subjects include Sylvia Boorstein, the Right Rev. Leontine Kelly, Marianne Williamson and the California witch Starhawk. Some of the women are prominent; some are not. Says Drucker, "What they're all doing is stepping into a new space. Even the nuns I have in this book are radical, though not intentionally." She began writing the book in 1998, and by the time she finished it, with war at hand, she realized she was talking about another way to live, not just practice religion, with a groundswell of women speaking in the name of peace as mothers of the world. Drucker says she hopes the book will contribute to that. "But at the very least, if we could come together in this sense of every woman—whether she's a Sufi or Jew or Christian—representing the feminine, perhaps we can bridge our differences more gracefully than we've seen religions do so far." -- Juli Cragg Hilliard Santa Fe New Mexican October 15, 2003 Converging Views by Doug Mattson The New Mexican Twelve female religious leaders meeting in Santa Fe believe this week just might become a historic one. From different faiths and other parts of the country, they have swapped ideas and shared concerns ranging from job layoffs to war. But the leaders say a maternal approach might help reach seemingly impossible goals like world peace. Or, as Northern California meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein said, "one should love everyone just as a mother would give her life to protect her one and only child." In the midst of a four-day gathering, the mostly middle-age women met Tuesday at Rabbi Malka Drucker's house on Bishops Lodge Road, where they sang, chanted and walked a labyrinth while meditating. Last year, Drucker wrote the book White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America. This year, she invited the women she wrote about to Santa Fe, and her guests include Christians, Buddhists, a Muslim, a Sikh, an ashram leader and a voodoo practitioner. Drucker's goal is to change perceptions of women's religion and create a White Fire Council that would meet regularly. "White Fire" is taken from an ancient mystical text that describes sacred writings. After the book came out, Drucker thought, "My God, what would it be like to have these women together, sitting around a table, talking to each other?" The women have had varying experiences breaking into their jobs as religious leaders: - Acharaya Swami Krishnapriya, an ashram director in Sebastian, Fla., said a woman guru who blazed trails long ago made the younger woman's path easier. Yet, she said, grabbing her bright robe, "This orange is a man's clothing, so it has been a challenge." - Bibiji Inderjit Kaur, a Sikh with the title chief religious minister Sikh dharma of the Western Hemisphere, said she doesn't encounter sexism in her culture. She lives in Espa�±ola, with husband Yogi Bhajan, whom Kaur likened to the pope of the Sikh faith. "Woman is the foundation, foundation of her family," Kaur said. "When a woman decides to do something, she does it and has the plan to do it." - Nahid Angha is a Sufi Muslim leader from Marin County and a native of Iran. Her religion has other women leaders, but she struggles with changing the perception of Islam. Contrary to media portrayals, she said, the requirement for women to wear burkas or chadors, the head-to-toe cloth cover, in some Islamic countries is a cultural problem -- not a religious one. - Luisah Teish of Oakland, Calif., is a voodoo practitioner and Yoruba priestess, a position with West African origins. Women in her tradition are more likely to hold leadership roles in Africa than in the United States, but she sees that changing. Less rare, she said, are the kind of gatherings held Tuesday. "All over the world, there are little pockets like this that are saying, 'We don't have to fight. I don't have to convert you, and you don't have to convert me,' " she said. "We are here to share the wisdom of our religious traditions." Hadassah Magazine November 2003 Speaking Up, Being Heard Malka Drucker, herself a rabbi, takes the title of this penetrating collection profiling women spiritual leaders from the Talmudic description of the Torah as written with black fire on white fire. Women, Drucker maintains, are the white fire, often unseen but always aglow. That said, her subjects, sensitively photographed by Gay Block, are hardly unseen and decidedly not unheard. They range from Leontine Kelly, a retired African American bishop, to Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis of Hineni fame who is dedicated to "saving spiritual lives." Jungreis, a Holocaust survivor, sums up her philosophy in a single sentence: "We all have to look at each other with compassion as God looks upon us." Other interviewees include Rabbi Laura Geller, the senior rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills; Sylvia Boorstein, a self-described "faithful Jew annd passionate buddhist"; and Debbie Friedman, whose compositions for life-cycle events and healing melodies have revolutionized Jewish music. It is Friedman who captures the essence of Drucker's credo when she says, "Women are the vessels for the transformation of liturgy and spirituality." -- Gloria Goldreich interview A Conversation with the Author Malka Drucker is interviewed by Dianne Stromberg about White Fire. "I would like anybody whose interested in just trying to find another way to live in the world now with some slim hope that things could be different to read this book. Women spiritual leaders are changing faith groups. Their energy is changing faith groups; they have a different style of the way they do things. Many men have come up to me and said: "This is the first time I've ever hugged and kissed a rabbi." If women are more accessible, then maybe the feminine is not the transcendent distant entity." Read the full interview at malkadrucker.com. Christian Science Monitor October 3, 2002 Tapping the Global Might of the Feminine Spirit Editorial Commentary by Rabbi Malka Drucker As hope wrestles fear for a grip on our imaginations, conversations with family and friends, co workers and neighbors, circle the violent juggernaut that we feel increasingly unable to influence. What, in God's name, we ask each other with each day's headlines, canordinary people do as our leaders plan to unleash unimaginable destruction? As the spiritual leader of a small congregation near Santa Fe, New Mexico who found her calling late in life, I am keenly aware both of my influence and limits. But even as I feel far from the decisions that may transform my world, I see a ray of hope, a place to begin. On October 7, 2002, I will join several hundred women religious and spiritual leaders at the Palais des Nations (United Nations) in Geneva, Switzerland, for the first Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders. This will be the first time women spiritual leaders will gather as an international sisterhood to address global problems in a world contemplating a war without end. As an American rabbi, I will go to Geneva with a freshly cleansed and hopeful heart. In the Jewish tradition of Yom Kippur, I have just asked forgiveness and I have given it. I have looked deeply at myself and found ways that I can do better. I am ready, indeed eager to act differently. Despite the grim news, I pack my bags with hope. My program notes declare that as nurturers, healers and educators, women spiritual leaders of all faiths have a special role to play in bringing the universal values of religion--not the beliefs that divide us-- to the fore. While women of faith have for centuries worked for transformation at the grassroots level, we have been denied or shied away from leadership roles. Now, our skills and attributes are desperately needed on a global scale to build a more just, caring and peaceful society. What I hope we can create in Geneva is a tent where we have gathered, first of all, to be honest, and second, to seek likeness in one another. While there have always been representatives of the divine in feminine form, never have so many women entered the realm of religious and spiritual leadership. Our presence comes at a time, even before the watershed of September 11, of heightened yearning for what we offer. That our time has come is evident by the UN's imprimatur on our gathering. Some may dismiss us, insisting terrorism only heeds military force. From two distinct but linked miracles that I have been privileged to witness in my lifetime, I am convinced we will prove them wrong. First, I look back at those brave souls who resisted Nazism in Europe. In 1992, I wrote a book about a group of people who, like today's women spiritual leaders, acted independently when called to a higher service. For Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, I interviewed scores of ordinary people, non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. Women rescuers equaled men in number and in courage. Irene Opdyke slept with a Nazi officer to keep him from turning in the 18 Jews she had hidden. Marion Pritchard shot a man to save three children. Religious and racial intolerance ended as genocide in World War II. Since September 11 such evils feel quite present . Today, in the U.S., far from the usual battlegrounds of religious wars, we have learned we cannot escape the global reach of raging hatred. Increasingly, we hear the language of religion used to divide us, to turn us into people hell bent on mass killing in God's name. For centuries, the divine has been invoked by men of the cloth to rally their flocks for war. A handful of women religious leaders, like Joan of Arc, have also led troops to battle. But they have been the exception which, I have faith, will continue to prove the rule. This leads me to a second community of courage, women spiritual leaders. Among my peers, I find a similarity of experience. Regardless of whether I sit with a native American elder, a Wiccan, or an Episcopal priest, I feel in the presence of a common message and style. While the feminine dwells in everyone, the language and style of women is distinct. Followers of women spiritual leaders say that women listen well, are empathic, less hierarchical, more approachable. These two backdrops to history-the quiet courage of rescuers who stood up to evil with small acts of large consequences and the determination of women spiritual leaders to redefine faith as a bridge to peace, not fuel for war-inspire me. The ancient sages called the Bible black fire written upon white fire. If women divided by our different faith paths can unite through the white fire of the divine feminine, 21st century women spiritual leaders could prove to be our saving grace. New Mexico Jewish Link November 2003 Women Spiritual Leaders Gather by Willa Shalit SANTA FE -- American women spiritual leaders met at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe last week for the first White Fire Ingathering convened by Santa Fe Rabbi Malka Drucker, spiritual leader of HaMakom, a trans-denominational Chavurah in Santa Fe. Drucker is the author of White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America (SkyLight Paths, Books, 2003). The book takes its name from an ancient mystical text that describes Torah as black fire written upon white fire. The white fire is the white space surrounding the black letters. Overlooked and invisible, this white fire carries a secret shared narrative; women are like white fire, bearing the voice of the divine feminine. The participants represent a wide variety of beliefs and backgrounds. Some serve in denominations that have accepted women ministers for a hundred years; others are part of groups that still don't allow women full rights to spiritual leadership. What they share, besides their gender, is a deep passion to serve. The White Fire women spent three days sharing their best teachings with each other, giving participants the chance to experience on another's religious traditions. Roshi Joan Halifax led meditation in the Circle of the Way Temple. Drucker led Jewish prayers with participants including Buddhist scholar Sylvia Boorstein. Sufi scholar D. Nahid Angha read mystical Muslim poems. Rev. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan led the group in song. Bibiji Inderjit Kaur, Chief Religious Minister of Sikh Dharma of the Western Hemisphere and wife of Yogi Bajhan, ahd the group to her home in Espanola for lunch. Yoruba Priestess Luisah Teish led an altar building. Rabbi Judith Hauptman, Torah Scholar and author of Rereading the Rabbis (Westview Press, November 1997) taught Torah. The participants learned from each other and gave to each other. The result was the birth of an extraordinary multi-faith community of hope and caring. The White Fire Ingathering was a unique opportunity for women religious leaders to forge relationships that will become the basis for greater harmony between peoples of all kinds. The next White Fire event convened by Drucker will be at the World Parliament of Religions in Barcelona in July 2004. Willa Shalit, producer of "The Vagina Monologues" and co-founder of the V-Day Movement to stop violence against women, was the producer of the White Fire Ingathering. Burn, Sister, Burn (essay by Malka Drucker) Burn, Sister, Burn by Malka Drucker An ancient Jewish commentary describes sacred text as "black fire written upon white fire." Black tells one story, white another. We can only read the first story, but one day we will know both narratives, and on that day, when we have the whole story, we'll know how to live in peace. While the metaphor suggests the relationship of the cosmic masculine and feminine energies that dwell in everyone and suffuse the universe, it also applies to gender, and the nexus of women and spirit in our time is a new light and a new day. While women have become in the last twenty-five years far more visible in the workplace, perhaps the most revolutionary place that they have entered is in the realm of spiritual leadership. Here they stand in numbers that make them for the first time in history a community. There have always been a few notable women in every age that lead with the feminine face of God: from Julian of Norwich to Aimee Semple McPherson, a few women have stepped out of the box of conventional religious wisdom that understands women as serving God by serving men. These women didn't wait to be ordained by seminaries, because God ordained them to preach and teach. In 1811, Jarena Lee became the first African-American woman preacher whose sermons reached whites as well as blacks. Naturally she waited until she was a widow so that no one could accuse her of not deferring to a husband. The divine feminine has also been an accepted part of religions. The Beatles sang, "Mother Mary came to me, singing words of wisdom, let it be, let it be." If we don't physically exist and remain in archetypal form, or if there are only a few of us and we don't preach against the doctrine of women's place for other women, we are received joyfully into spiritual communities. Especially in America where we have always outnumbered our brothers in faith groups by two to one. But God help us if we begin to speak the other story, the "white fire" that reveals the divine through women's lives as creators and nurturers of life. As Marianne Williamson says, "They used to call us witches, now they call us bitches." Imagine how dangerous Anne Hutchinson must have been in her teaching that anyone God chose, and only those so chosen, had access to the will of God. The male clergy of Massachusetts in 1638 understood that if they weren't on God's list, then they had no authority! They banished her into the western wilderness where she and her followers were killed by Native Americans. Whether we understand the unprecedented presence of a community of women spiritual leaders as a gift of the women's movement, the decline of religious institutions that has weakened the ban of women clergy, the age of aquarious, or God's hand, one thing is clear. We're here and as a community of rabbis, witches, priests, ministers, teachers, theologians, nuns, and faith healers, we have a lot in common as women of spirit who have finally been given the baton. Never before have we gathered as a community, and perhaps if we do stand together and support each other in our work of bringing more tenderness into the world, we'll find ourselves on trial again. Maybe we should be feared, because our motives are subversive. We don't this work for the money or prestige, no one ever said to us when we were girls that we should think about becoming a spiritual leader, and no matter how successful we may become, we can never forget that we are vulnerable as women. As a constellation of stars burning together, for the first time in history we can show the world what the divine feminine looks and sounds like. We aren't offering an alternative to the male deities, nor are we advocating a supplanting. How about simply bringing forth a more complete glimpse at the power the makes half the creative energy of the world? If the newspapers reported the world of Isaiah's prophecy, a world where war, hunger, and fear were memory, then maybe I'd have to believe that suppression of women's voices in spiritual leadership was the way things are supposed to be. But since the world hasn't yet given us the spiritual authority to sit at the table and speak in the name of children, the natural world, peace, and social justice, I suggest that the time is now. However we understand our new community, let's use it for the sake of heaven and speak in all the names of the divine to give us the whole message. Library Journal review Library Journal January 2003 According to Drucker, the Talmud says that "Torah is written with black fire upon white fire," and woman is the white fire, the invisible background. But as this book demonstrates, women are no longer only in the background. Here are portraits of 31 women in the forefront as spiritual leaders. Some are in the cultural and religoius mainstream, though many are not. Some have quickly recognizable names -- Della Reese, Marianne Williamson, and Sister Jose Hobday -- while others are ordained clergy, teachers, writers, or social activists. All, however, are spiritual leaders. The stories of these women, told mostly in their own words through interviews with Drucker, a rabbi and award-winning author who collaborated with photographer Block on Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, make for fascinating reading, as many have overcome great odds. The author hopes that this volume will offer inspiration and a different view of women and divinity. Highly recommended, especially for spirituality, religion, and women's collections. -- John Moryl, Yeshiva University Library, New York Top of the Page

Rev. Dr. Arlene J. Clover

March 27, 2005
by Rev. Dr. Arlene J. Clover

Rabbi Drucker takes you into the living rooms, churches and lecture halls of thirty-one of America's notable female spiritual leaders. The author's open descriptions of her personal reactions to each interview engage the reader in both the conversation and its relevance to spirituality today. There is no doubt that Malka is doing more than collecting data. She is making friends, comrades and allies on her own quest to return the feminine voice to religious and spiritual teachings.

These women share their stories, pointing out both the joy and suffering that comes with active participation in ministry. Ranging from Jewish Rabbis, as is the author herself, to Yoruba priestess' and New Age thinkers they are stars shining a bright light on a changing world. Malka Drucker has exposed that light to guide us as we reunite the Divine Feminine with her consort.

Black and white portraits done by Gay Block reveal something about each of her subjects that would have been veiled by color. Ms Block does a wonderful job of capturing the soul through expression and setting.

Reviewer: Rev. Dr. Arlene J. Colver, Author of Magdalen's Way and From Whence They Came, Vice President of Lifelight University, Founder and Chaplain of the Society for Universal Concordance

Washington Jewish Week

January 29, 2004
'Missing half the story'
Women charting new spiritual terrain, rabbi contends
by Paula Amann
News Editor

Rabbi Malka Drucker sees hints of a religious transformation afoot in U.S. society. She glimpses it, for instance, in the proliferation of "spiritual" titles, many penned by women, in airport bookstores.

Above all, this author of 20 books for adults and young people, who leads the HaMakom congregation in Santa Fe, N.M., discerns a "new face" of American religion.

It's female.

"This is the first time in history there has been a community of women spiritual leaders in nearly every faith path," Drucker told a Bethesda audience last week, pointing to "an invisible but palpable alchemy among these women."

Drucker was speaking about the ideas behind her book White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America (Skylight Paths Publishing, 2003) on Wednesday of last week at Bethesda Jewish Congregation.

The event drew an interfaith, largely female audience of some 70 people, reflecting a diverse set of co-sponsors, including BJC, the Capital Kehillah, Bradley Presbyterian Church and members of the Islamic Information Center.

Proceeds from book sales went to the Academy for Jewish Religion, where Drucker and BJC leader Cantor Sunny Schnitzer, the program's moderator, studied for ordination.

Even after some 30 years of women rabbis in liberal Judaism, the concept still startles and unsettles some congregants, Drucker suggested.

"My best teaching is, 'Hi, I'm Rabbi Drucker,' because it's still a new experience for people to see a woman rabbi," Drucker said of her first post with a Westchester, N.Y., congregation. "I realized my mere presence as a woman rabbi was controversial."

Not only that, but she believes that, across the denominations, women are bringing a different sensibility to religious institutions and spiritual communities they create.

The leaders profiled in her book "showed me that there is such a thing as a way to do religion that is warm, passionate, nonhierarchical, inclusive -- and they often have great food!" said Drucker, drawing laughter from the audience.

"This is not so much about gender, as about bringing into balance the feminine and masculine energy that we all have."

Drucker took the name of her book from a talmudic remark that "Torah is written with black fire upon white fire."

With the texts as handed down, suggested Drucker, "We're missing half the story."

White fire, for this rabbi-author, represents the long-invisible contributions of women to spiritual life.

Potomac artist Debra Band, 47, who belongs to her community's modern Orthodox Beth Sholom Congregation and Talmud Torah, voiced mixed feelings about Drucker's talk.

"Societies are changing so that women can say things about what they've always done," Band said, alluding to international speaker Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis, who is profiled in Drucker's book. "The new part is that they can come out and say things as a woman, rather than simply following their husbands."

At the same time, Band said she was "discomfited" with the "number of Jews who feel they need to go elsewhere."

These include some of those who figure in White Fire, such as motivational author and speaker Marianne Williamson, who sends her daughter to Hebrew school, but draws on Christian teachings in her work, and teacher-writer Sylvia Boorstein, who calls herself both Jewish and Buddhist.

Audience member Bonnie Berger, 48, counts herself as one of those wrestling with religious boundaries.

"All those years of going to synagogue, I felt like I was just repeating words that didn't mean anything to me," said Berger, a first-year student at Silver Spring's Institute for Religious Development, a metaphysical program run by Iyanla Vanzant, a Yoruba priestess profiled in White Fire. "For the first time in my life, I feel I have a relationship with God."

Yet this Takoma Park diversity consultant still counts herself a Jew.

"My goal and task and struggle is to blend" the two approaches, Berger said. "I have the desire to find how to make Judaism work for me and perhaps for others who felt like it didn't speak to them."

Jeremy Mendelson, a Torah reader for the Capital Kehillah who attended last week's program, sees women's spirituality as also important for men.

"I always need my Shekhinah side to be cultivated," said Mendelson, 33, referring to God's feminine attributes, and explaining his reasons for coming.

"Women can open men up to sides of themselves they didn't know they had -- the compassionate side, feeling as opposed to doing," said Mendelson, a financial aid administrator for Trinity College who says he is considering the rabbinate as a future career.

Rabbi Tamara Miller, Capital Kehillah's spiritual leader, helped field questions at the close of the program.

"Some people will choose a woman spiritual leader because they want a new paradigm, a new way of gaining access to their spiritual treasure chest," Miller said in an interview two days later. "The point is that God is divine, which includes both male and female, so in order to reach the divinity, we have to include both male and female in our spiritual search."

In her own remarks, Drucker noted that she and her life partner, Gay Block, who took the photographs for the book, had dedicated the book to all four of their grandsons, "new men."

"This struggle for equality is not just for girls," Drucker said, adding that "justice is a religious issue and this may be the time to see the other face of God."

Publishers Weekly

March 24, 2003
The Wisdom of Women (excerpt)

Across the religions, women can find a bond in their femininity, as a number of new books discover.

In another Skylight Paths book, Malka Drucker profiles significant religious women of today. Drucker, a rabbi who serves the HaMakom Congregation in Santa Fe, N.Mex., says she decided to write White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America (Jan.) because she felt lonely in her role and wondered how women leaders on other religious paths saw their experience. "I think I was looking for a sisterhood," she tells PW. Her subjects include Sylvia Boorstein, the Right Rev. Leontine Kelly, Marianne Williamson and the California witch Starhawk. Some of the women are prominent; some are not. Says Drucker, "What they're all doing is stepping into a new space. Even the nuns I have in this book are radical, though not intentionally."

She began writing the book in 1998, and by the time she finished it, with war at hand, she realized she was talking about another way to live, not just practice religion, with a groundswell of women speaking in the name of peace as mothers of the world. Drucker says she hopes the book will contribute to that. "But at the very least, if we could come together in this sense of every woman—whether she's a Sufi or Jew or Christian—representing the feminine, perhaps we can bridge our differences more gracefully than we've seen religions do so far."

-- Juli Cragg Hilliard

Santa Fe New Mexican

October 15, 2003
Converging Views
by Doug Mattson
The New Mexican

Twelve female religious leaders meeting in Santa Fe believe this week just might become a historic one.

From different faiths and other parts of the country, they have swapped ideas and shared concerns ranging from job layoffs to war. But the leaders say a maternal approach might help reach seemingly impossible goals like world peace.

Or, as Northern California meditation teacher Sylvia Boorstein said, "one should love everyone just as a mother would give her life to protect her one and only child."

In the midst of a four-day gathering, the mostly middle-age women met Tuesday at Rabbi Malka Drucker's house on Bishops Lodge Road, where they sang, chanted and walked a labyrinth while meditating.

Last year, Drucker wrote the book White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America. This year, she invited the women she wrote about to Santa Fe, and her guests include Christians, Buddhists, a Muslim, a Sikh, an ashram leader and a voodoo practitioner.

Drucker's goal is to change perceptions of women's religion and create a White Fire Council that would meet regularly. "White Fire" is taken from an ancient mystical text that describes sacred writings.

After the book came out, Drucker thought, "My God, what would it be like to have these women together, sitting around a table, talking to each other?"

The women have had varying experiences breaking into their jobs as religious leaders:

- Acharaya Swami Krishnapriya, an ashram director in Sebastian, Fla., said a woman guru who blazed trails long ago made the younger woman's path easier.

Yet, she said, grabbing her bright robe, "This orange is a man's clothing, so it has been a challenge."

- Bibiji Inderjit Kaur, a Sikh with the title chief religious minister Sikh dharma of the Western Hemisphere, said she doesn't encounter sexism in her culture. She lives in Espa�±ola, with husband Yogi Bhajan, whom Kaur likened to the pope of the Sikh faith.

"Woman is the foundation, foundation of her family," Kaur said. "When a woman decides to do something, she does it and has the plan to do it."

- Nahid Angha is a Sufi Muslim leader from Marin County and a native of Iran.

Her religion has other women leaders, but she struggles with changing the perception of Islam. Contrary to media portrayals, she said, the requirement for women to wear burkas or chadors, the head-to-toe cloth cover, in some Islamic countries is a cultural problem -- not a religious one.

- Luisah Teish of Oakland, Calif., is a voodoo practitioner and Yoruba priestess, a position with West African origins. Women in her tradition are more likely to hold leadership roles in Africa than in the United States, but she sees that changing.

Less rare, she said, are the kind of gatherings held Tuesday. "All over the world, there are little pockets like this that are saying, 'We don't have to fight. I don't have to convert you, and you don't have to convert me,' " she said. "We are here to share the wisdom of our religious traditions."

Hadassah Magazine

November 2003
Speaking Up, Being Heard

Malka Drucker, herself a rabbi, takes the title of this penetrating collection profiling women spiritual leaders from the Talmudic description of the Torah as written with black fire on white fire. Women, Drucker maintains, are the white fire, often unseen but always aglow. That said, her subjects, sensitively photographed by Gay Block, are hardly unseen and decidedly not unheard. They range from Leontine Kelly, a retired African American bishop, to Rebbetzin Esther Jungreis of Hineni fame who is dedicated to "saving spiritual lives." Jungreis, a Holocaust survivor, sums up her philosophy in a single sentence: "We all have to look at each other with compassion as God looks upon us."

Other interviewees include Rabbi Laura Geller, the senior rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills; Sylvia Boorstein, a self-described "faithful Jew annd passionate buddhist"; and Debbie Friedman, whose compositions for life-cycle events and healing melodies have revolutionized Jewish music.

It is Friedman who captures the essence of Drucker's credo when she says, "Women are the vessels for the transformation of liturgy and spirituality."

-- Gloria Goldreich

interview

A Conversation with the Author
Malka Drucker is interviewed by Dianne Stromberg about White Fire.

"I would like anybody whose interested in just trying to find another way to live in the world now with some slim hope that things could be different to read this book. Women spiritual leaders are changing faith groups. Their energy is changing faith groups; they have a different style of the way they do things. Many men have come up to me and said: "This is the first time I've ever hugged and kissed a rabbi." If women are more accessible, then maybe the feminine is not the transcendent distant entity."

Read the full interview at malkadrucker.com.

Christian Science Monitor

October 3, 2002
Tapping the Global Might of the Feminine Spirit
Editorial Commentary by Rabbi Malka Drucker

As hope wrestles fear for a grip on our imaginations, conversations with family and friends, co workers and neighbors, circle the violent juggernaut that we feel increasingly unable to influence.

What, in God's name, we ask each other with each day's headlines, canordinary people do as our leaders plan to unleash unimaginable destruction?

As the spiritual leader of a small congregation near Santa Fe, New Mexico who found her calling late in life, I am keenly aware both of my influence and limits. But even as I feel far from the decisions that may transform my world, I see a ray of hope, a place to begin.

On October 7, 2002, I will join several hundred women religious and spiritual leaders at the Palais des Nations (United Nations) in Geneva, Switzerland, for the first Global Peace Initiative of Women Religious and Spiritual Leaders.

This will be the first time women spiritual leaders will gather as an international sisterhood to address global problems in a world contemplating a war without end.

As an American rabbi, I will go to Geneva with a freshly cleansed and hopeful heart. In the Jewish tradition of Yom Kippur, I have just asked forgiveness and I have given it. I have looked deeply at myself and found ways that I can do better. I am ready, indeed eager to act differently. Despite the grim news, I pack my bags with hope. My program notes declare that as nurturers, healers and educators, women spiritual leaders of all faiths have a special role to play in bringing the universal values of religion--not the beliefs that divide us-- to the fore.

While women of faith have for centuries worked for transformation at the grassroots level, we have been denied or shied away from leadership roles.

Now, our skills and attributes are desperately needed on a global scale to build a more just, caring and peaceful society. What I hope we can create in Geneva is a tent where we have gathered, first of all, to be honest, and second, to seek likeness in one another.

While there have always been representatives of the divine in feminine form, never have so many women entered the realm of religious and spiritual leadership. Our presence comes at a time, even before the watershed of September 11, of heightened yearning for what we offer. That our time has come is evident by the UN's imprimatur on our gathering.

Some may dismiss us, insisting terrorism only heeds military force. From two distinct but linked miracles that I have been privileged to witness in my lifetime, I am convinced we will prove them wrong.

First, I look back at those brave souls who resisted Nazism in Europe. In 1992, I wrote a book about a group of people who, like today's women spiritual leaders, acted independently when called to a higher service. For Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, I interviewed scores of ordinary people, non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. Women rescuers equaled men in number and in courage. Irene Opdyke slept with a Nazi officer to keep him from turning in the 18 Jews she had hidden. Marion Pritchard shot a man to save three children.

Religious and racial intolerance ended as genocide in World War II. Since September 11 such evils feel quite present . Today, in the U.S., far from the usual battlegrounds of religious wars, we have learned we cannot escape the global reach of raging hatred. Increasingly, we hear the language of religion used to divide us, to turn us into people hell bent on mass killing in God's name.

For centuries, the divine has been invoked by men of the cloth to rally their flocks for war. A handful of women religious leaders, like Joan of Arc, have also led troops to battle. But they have been the exception which, I have faith, will continue to prove the rule.

This leads me to a second community of courage, women spiritual leaders. Among my peers, I find a similarity of experience. Regardless of whether I sit with a native American elder, a Wiccan, or an Episcopal priest, I feel in the presence of a common message and style.

While the feminine dwells in everyone, the language and style of women is distinct. Followers of women spiritual leaders say that women listen well, are empathic, less hierarchical, more approachable. These two backdrops to history-the quiet courage of rescuers who stood up to evil with small acts of large consequences and the determination of women spiritual leaders to redefine faith as a bridge to peace, not fuel for war-inspire me.

The ancient sages called the Bible black fire written upon white fire. If women divided by our different faith paths can unite through the white fire of the divine feminine, 21st century women spiritual leaders could prove to be our saving grace.

New Mexico Jewish Link

November 2003
Women Spiritual Leaders Gather
by Willa Shalit

SANTA FE -- American women spiritual leaders met at Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe last week for the first White Fire Ingathering convened by Santa Fe Rabbi Malka Drucker, spiritual leader of HaMakom, a trans-denominational Chavurah in Santa Fe.

Drucker is the author of White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America (SkyLight Paths, Books, 2003). The book takes its name from an ancient mystical text that describes Torah as black fire written upon white fire. The white fire is the white space surrounding the black letters. Overlooked and invisible, this white fire carries a secret shared narrative; women are like white fire, bearing the voice of the divine feminine.

The participants represent a wide variety of beliefs and backgrounds.

Some serve in denominations that have accepted women ministers for a hundred years; others are part of groups that still don't allow women full rights to spiritual leadership. What they share, besides their gender, is a deep passion to serve.

The White Fire women spent three days sharing their best teachings with each other, giving participants the chance to experience on another's religious traditions.

Roshi Joan Halifax led meditation in the Circle of the Way Temple.

Drucker led Jewish prayers with participants including Buddhist scholar Sylvia Boorstein.

Sufi scholar D. Nahid Angha read mystical Muslim poems.

Rev. Cheryl Kirk-Duggan led the group in song.

Bibiji Inderjit Kaur, Chief Religious Minister of Sikh Dharma of the Western Hemisphere and wife of Yogi Bajhan, ahd the group to her home in Espanola for lunch.

Yoruba Priestess Luisah Teish led an altar building.

Rabbi Judith Hauptman, Torah Scholar and author of Rereading the Rabbis (Westview Press, November 1997) taught Torah.

The participants learned from each other and gave to each other. The result was the birth of an extraordinary multi-faith community of hope and caring.

The White Fire Ingathering was a unique opportunity for women religious leaders to forge relationships that will become the basis for greater harmony between peoples of all kinds.

The next White Fire event convened by Drucker will be at the World Parliament of Religions in Barcelona in July 2004.

Willa Shalit, producer of "The Vagina Monologues" and co-founder of the V-Day Movement to stop violence against women, was the producer of the White Fire Ingathering.

Burn, Sister, Burn (essay by Malka Drucker)

Burn, Sister, Burn
by Malka Drucker

An ancient Jewish commentary describes sacred text as "black fire written upon white fire." Black tells one story, white another. We can only read the first story, but one day we will know both narratives, and on that day, when we have the whole story, we'll know how to live in peace.

While the metaphor suggests the relationship of the cosmic masculine and feminine energies that dwell in everyone and suffuse the universe, it also applies to gender, and the nexus of women and spirit in our time is a new light and a new day. While women have become in the last twenty-five years far more visible in the workplace, perhaps the most revolutionary place that they have entered is in the realm of spiritual leadership. Here they stand in numbers that make them for the first time in history a community.

There have always been a few notable women in every age that lead with the feminine face of God: from Julian of Norwich to Aimee Semple McPherson, a few women have stepped out of the box of conventional religious wisdom that understands women as serving God by serving men. These women didn't wait to be ordained by seminaries, because God ordained them to preach and teach. In 1811, Jarena Lee became the first African-American woman preacher whose sermons reached whites as well as blacks. Naturally she waited until she was a widow so that no one could accuse her of not deferring to a husband.

The divine feminine has also been an accepted part of religions. The Beatles sang, "Mother Mary came to me, singing words of wisdom, let it be, let it be." If we don't physically exist and remain in archetypal form, or if there are only a few of us and we don't preach against the doctrine of women's place for other women, we are received joyfully into spiritual communities.

Especially in America where we have always outnumbered our brothers in faith groups by two to one. But God help us if we begin to speak the other story, the "white fire" that reveals the divine through women's lives as creators and nurturers of life. As Marianne Williamson says, "They used to call us witches, now they call us bitches." Imagine how dangerous Anne Hutchinson must have been in her teaching that anyone God chose, and only those so chosen, had access to the will of God. The male clergy of Massachusetts in 1638 understood that if they weren't on God's list, then they had no authority! They banished her into the western wilderness where she and her followers were killed by Native Americans.

Whether we understand the unprecedented presence of a community of women spiritual leaders as a gift of the women's movement, the decline of religious institutions that has weakened the ban of women clergy, the age of aquarious, or God's hand, one thing is clear. We're here and as a community of rabbis, witches, priests, ministers, teachers, theologians, nuns, and faith healers, we have a lot in common as women of spirit who have finally been given the baton.

Never before have we gathered as a community, and perhaps if we do stand together and support each other in our work of bringing more tenderness into the world, we'll find ourselves on trial again. Maybe we should be feared, because our motives are subversive. We don't this work for the money or prestige, no one ever said to us when we were girls that we should think about becoming a spiritual leader, and no matter how successful we may become, we can never forget that we are vulnerable as women.

As a constellation of stars burning together, for the first time in history we can show the world what the divine feminine looks and sounds like. We aren't offering an alternative to the male deities, nor are we advocating a supplanting. How about simply bringing forth a more complete glimpse at the power the makes half the creative energy of the world?

If the newspapers reported the world of Isaiah's prophecy, a world where war, hunger, and fear were memory, then maybe I'd have to believe that suppression of women's voices in spiritual leadership was the way things are supposed to be. But since the world hasn't yet given us the spiritual authority to sit at the table and speak in the name of children, the natural world, peace, and social justice, I suggest that the time is now. However we understand our new community, let's use it for the sake of heaven and speak in all the names of the divine to give us the whole message.

Library Journal review

Library Journal
January 2003

According to Drucker, the Talmud says that "Torah is written with black fire upon white fire," and woman is the white fire, the invisible background. But as this book demonstrates, women are no longer only in the background. Here are portraits of 31 women in the forefront as spiritual leaders. Some are in the cultural and religoius mainstream, though many are not. Some have quickly recognizable names -- Della Reese, Marianne Williamson, and Sister Jose Hobday -- while others are ordained clergy, teachers, writers, or social activists. All, however, are spiritual leaders. The stories of these women, told mostly in their own words through interviews with Drucker, a rabbi and award-winning author who collaborated with photographer Block on Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, make for fascinating reading, as many have overcome great odds. The author hopes that this volume will offer inspiration and a different view of women and divinity. Highly recommended, especially for spirituality, religion, and women's collections.

-- John Moryl, Yeshiva University Library, New York

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