Growing up, I knew very little about Jewish texts, and I assumed women in Torah would be powerless creatures, trapped in an ancient, patriarchal world with few opportunities to change their lives.

I did have a bat mitzvah at 13, but my real acquaintance with Torah began during college, when a chance encounter led me to study Jewish texts for the first time. This eventually led me to a progressive yeshiva in Jerusalem, where I learned Biblical Hebrew and Talmudic Aramaic, and began to read the stories of the Torah with deep attention. Granted, I found plenty of ancient patriarchal traditions, but at the same time, I was shocked and delighted to find right beside them (or intertwined with them) stories of strong, brave, active women. Women who spoke up, who took bold risks and were rewarded. Women like Hannah.

Hannah’s strength is even more powerful because it
 lies precisely in her vulnerability. Her power comes not through pretending to be brave, but rather through fully inhabiting her difficult reality. She speaks openly about 
her sorrow and her longing, and in the end, it is her brave words that bring about what she most desires. She offers a model for how to negotiate the balance between our public and private selves, between the face we show the world, and the innermost longings of our secret hearts.

I also love Hannah’s relationship to God, not as a distant force beyond her reckoning, but as an intimate Presence. God is sensitive enough to hear Hannah when she whispers, yet powerful enough to withstand the full force of her demands. The chorus of “Marble Floor” includes a nod to another model of Jewish prayer: a Jewish folk tale about a little boy standing alone in the back of a synagogue while a great rabbi leads prayers up front. The boy doesn’t know the traditional prayers, so he simply recites the Hebrew alphabet (which I translated into “A, B, C” in my song.) According to the story, God responds not to the rabbi’s prayers, but to the boy’s. His heartfelt intention makes that whispered alphabet more powerful than the practiced chanting of the prayer leaders at the front of the congregation. I thought of that story as I wrote, “Take this alphabet from me”: both the power of the alphabet, and the burden of our adult fluency.

I was not given a Hebrew name as a child, and when I was studying in Jerusalem in my early twenties, I took the name Chana (Hebrew for Hannah). Her story spoke to me as a writer, someone who loved words, and had traveled very far to seek what my heart hungered for, to speak with the Divine. So I was delighted when the wonderful Rabbi Ellen Lippmann of congregation Kolot Chayeinu in Brooklyn, NY asked me to write a Girls in Trouble song about Hannah to perform at Rosh Hashana services, when we read her story as the haftarah.

Writing this song, I thought about speech, prayer, alphabets, longing, desire. I thought about how hard it can be to honestly acknowledge our struggles, our difficulties, our disappointments, and our truth. And I thought about how Hannah activates God’s powerful presence through speech.

God spoke and created the world; now it is our turn.