haftarah, delivering a d'var torah. Women can recite the mi shebeyrach prayer for people who are ill. Orthodox women have, through prayer groups developed a mode whereby women no longer have to vicariously experience religious expression in the synagogue through fathers or husbands; they can participate actively and directly in all aspects of synagogue services, and they can do so in an halakhically acceptable way.

Haut’s defense of the prayer groups emphasizes their func­tion as communities where women's joys and achievements are given public religious acknowledgment. The values of prayer group worship appear strikingly similar to those of the havurah. Both appropriate the communality and active participation that characterize traditional worship but also demand that worship be personally relevant and expressive of experience.”

Significantly, when Haut speaks of what she values most in the prayer group, the Torah service comes immediately to mind. The Torah service, which is at the core of prayer group worship, is its most halakhically controversial feature. The Torah service is a solemn and elaborated liturgical metaphor for the group mem­bers’ appropriation of the Torah as their own. In procession they carry the Torah , and reverently touch and kiss it, direct access denied to women in nearly all Orthodox synagogues, where women witness in their separate section a procession they can never join. Here, in contrast, women read to women, proclaim­ing performatively a Torah that addresses women and seeks their attention as auditors. Reading with cantillation, a skill tra­ditionally unavailable to women, announces that competence with the Torah is no longer reserved for men. Finally and most daringly, there are aliyot. Individuals are called up by name for the sections into which the reading is divided. These honors are traditionally withheld from women, not because they are ineli­gible but because of kavod ha-zibur, the honor of the congre­gation.” Here, where women are the congregation, the aliyot declare their capacity to honor the Torah and be honored by it. The nature of these aliyot vary in different prayer groups, depending on the ruling followed regarding women saying devarim she-be-gedusha.® Thus, in some, the entire Torah blessing is recited; in others, the Torah blessings are not recited in birkot ha-shahar, and then each woman called to the Torah makes her