Salon.com > Prayer

Supreme Court to rule on prayer at government meetings

Mon, 20 May 2013 20:22:00 +0000

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear a case on whether or not prayer may be offered at government meetings. The justices agreed to determine if an upstate New York town council violated the Constitution's Establishment Clause by beginning meetings with prayers invoking "Jesus," "Jesus Christ," "Your Son" and "the Holy Spirit."

As reported by USA Today:

The religious expression case, which comes to the court from the town of Greece, N.Y., focuses on the first 10 words of the First Amendment, ratified in 1791: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

That Establishment Clause was violated, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year, when the Greece Town Board repeatedly used Christian clergy to conduct prayers at the start of its public meetings. The decision created a rift with other appeals courts that have upheld prayer at public meetings, prompting the justices to step in.

Alliance Defending Freedom, an Arizona-based Christian non-profit group, appealed the case to the Supreme Court. It is supported in separate briefs by 49 mostly Republican members of Congress and 18 state attorneys general.

In a press release entitled "Prayer will be heard on high," the group noted the high court affirmed the practice of prayer before public meetings in the 1983 case Marsh v. Chambers, in which it cited an "unambiguous and unbroken history" of such prayers.

Israeli court: Women can wear prayer shawls while worshiping at the Western Wall

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 16:58:00 +0000

In a major victory for feminist religious group Women of the Wall (and for all women who want to worship freely at one of Judaism's holiest sites), an Israeli court ruled on Thursday that women could pray at the Western Wall while wearing prayer shawls.

The decision comes after a series of clashes between female worshipers and the Orthodox rabbis who manage the Wall according to a strict interpretation of Jewish law. The rabbis' enforcement of Orthodox tradition barred women from wearing tallit (prayer shawls), reading aloud from the Torah and entering certain areas around the Wall, all of which significantly restrict women’s ability to pray. Women were often arrested for defying these restrictions.

But the court ruled on Thursday that their presence did not pose a threat and did not violate "local custom," as the Washington Post reports:

Is a more egalitarian Western Wall coming soon?

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:10:00 +0000

For months, chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel Natan Sharansky has been working to broker a compromise between Jewish women who want to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall and the ultra-Orthodox rabbis who have called their presence an “abomination.”

And a compromise may be on its way, as Jane Eisner at Forward reports:

If implemented, the proposal, a product of months of deliberation, would mark a dramatic acknowledgement by the state of Israel that prayer at the Wall — regarded as Judaism’s holiest site and a modern-day symbol of national sovereignty — should include non-Orthodox practice in which men and women pray together. But it is uncertain whether the proposal will satisfy Women of the Wall, who for years have tried to hold full prayer services in the women’s only section and may see this compromise as a betrayal of their mission...

Under the proposal, sources said, the area now known as Robinson’s Arch on the southern end of the Wall will be greatly expanded to create a prayer space roughly equivalent to the existing men’s and women’s sections. Egalitarian prayer is currently permitted at the Arch, which is an archaeological site, but that prayer is only available at limited times and with an entrance fee. The expectation is that the enlarged space would be free and open around the clock, as the Kotel is now, but that could not be confirmed.

The plan also calls for the plaza surrounding the Wall to expand, so that visitors approaching the site in the Old City could clearly chose between praying at the egalitarian section, or the existing sections reserved only for men and for women. Still under discussion is governance of the new prayer area, but several sources said that they thought it would be run by something other than the Western Wall Heritage Foundation, the organization that currently controls the Kotel.

Women of the Wall head Anat Hoffman has signed off on the proposal while expressing her reservations about its "separate but equal" premise, but the measure still requires approval from the Netanyahu government, "where it may face resistance from Orthodox groups unwilling to share authority over the holy site," Eisner notes.

h/t Adam Chandler at Tablet Magazine

Anne Lamott: My secret little prayer

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 00:30:00 +0000

It is all hopeless. Even for a crabby optimist like me, things couldn’t be worse. Everywhere you turn, our lives and marriages and morale and government are falling to pieces. So many friends have broken children. The planet does not seem long for this world. Repent! Oh, wait, never mind. I meant: Help.

What I wanted my whole life was relief—from pressure, isolation, people’s suffering (including my own, which was mainly mental), and entire political administrations. That is really all I want now. Besides dealing with standard-issue family crisis, heartbreak, and mishegas, I feel that I can’t stand one single more death in my life. That’s too bad, because as we speak, I have a cherished thirteen-year-old cat who is near death from lymphoma. I know I won’t be able to live without her.

This must sound relatively petty to those of you facing the impending loss of people, careers, or retirement savings. But if you are madly in love with your pets, as any rational person is, you know what a loss it will be for both me and my three-year-old grandson, Jax. My cat Jeanie has helped raise him, and it will be his first death. I told him that she was sick, and that the angels were going to take her from us. I tried to make it sound like rather happy news—after all, vultures aren’t coming for her, or snakes—but he wasn’t having any of it.