Hanukkah isn't only a story about Judah Maccabee and the miracle of the oil.

I have long seen myself as the dissident daughter of an orthodox father, a truant who broke her father’s heart by turning my back on his cherished orthodoxy and living a more experimental way of life. It is therefore a delicate matter, this fascination of mine with the Other Daughter – the good girl – the one whose father did not call out after her in censure, the one whose aptitude for learning was cultivated on her father’s knee, the one who no doubt offered both her parents much solace.

Every Shabbat, Jews all over the world go to synagogue, pray, kibbitz, and, of course, read from the Torah. And while there is plenty of debate among and within the Jewish movements about who wrote the words of the Pentateuch, there is no question that the words got on the parchment thanks to the master skill of the sofer.

Last year, b’etzem hayom hazeh, on this self-same day, As It Is Written: Project 304,805 opened. 

Another important event in my life happened on this day as well: sixty-one years ago, on October 8th, 1949, my mother, z”l, was born.

While this convergence may seem a mere interesting coincidence, there is precedent in our tradition for the notion that related events occur on the same date

Earlier this week, a post on The Sisterhood blog (with whom JWA regularly cross-posts) publicized a call from Women of the Wall for photographs of women with Torahs as part of a solidarity movement with WOW, who have been subject to harassment and arrest over the past several months in their attempts to hold egalitarian Rosh Chodesh services at Robinson’s Arch in Jerusalem.