Thank you for standing up and speaking out on behalf of your own thoughts and feelings. You also spoke for me. If I had been at those services, I'm sure I wouldn't have been as polite in my anger as you were in yours.

I am not a Rabbi, and maybe I'm "off the beam" here, but I would interpret the meaning of the Priest being able to mourn his deceased son, daughter, father, mother, virgin sister, but not his wife as follows: this goes back to the age-old patriachy that women who are sexually active and of menstruating age are considered "defiled" and "unclean". A Priest does not have sex with his son, daughter, father, mother, sister, but he does with his wife, who is presumed to be of menstruating age. If the daughter is young and presumably unmarried, she is a virgin, an may not have yet reached the age of menarche. We don't know how old the sister is, but it is clear she must be a virgin. If the sister were to be married, therefore sexually active, the Priest could not mourn her either, or his daughter if she was married. The mother may be presumed to be older, and therefore may no longer be sexually active, therefore is no longer "defiled" and she may have gone through menopause and therefore is no longer "unclean".

I would have confronted the Rabbi and asked her, as a woman and a Rabbi and a Jew, what is the point of her relating this information to the congregation? What is the relevancy of this for today's 21st century Jewish women? what is the relevancy of this for today's 21st century girls? What is the relevancy of this for today's boys and men who are seeking to embrace the feminine within? For those men and women seeking rapprochement, healing of relationship, and embracement of sexuality as sacred?

I am speaking on behalf of myself and my daughter, age 12, who is just on the cusp of young womanhood. I wouldn't have wanted her to hear how the Torah, the supposed "Tree of Life" known by the pronoun "SHE" as in "SHE is the Tree of Life", proclaims that a woman, as a sexua| human BEing at her most spiritually powerful during the time of menstruation, defiles any man who engages in love-making with her; that such a man becomes so unclean and impure that he is unable to commune with God. Why is such an archaic teaching still mentioned? And if so, what is the teaching for today? If a Rabbi, who is entrusted to teach the holy spiritual teachings to the congregation, can not find the relevancy of such a passage in Torah, then that Rabbi must step down. If that Rabbi is in the Jewish Renewal Movement, which claims to be egalitarian and feminist, and can not find relevancy in such a passage, then the Movement has failed. And if Jewish Renewal has failed to contemporize and modernize the centuries old teachings of the Torah and other "Holy" books, then Judaism is a dead religion, left to be practiced by doddering old men who drool into their beards. And if Judaism is dead, then Torah becomes merely a dead piece of parchment, no more representative of Spirit, the Tree of Life, than a piece of paper is representative of a living tree.

Because today's Torah study and Jewish religious holidays continue to focus on possibly historically interesting but irrelevant-for-today ancient Jewish culture and religious practice, and although I consider myself a Jew culturally, I am no longer a Jew spiritually.