An excerpt from R’ Noam Lerman’s thesis about how tkhines challenged gender boundaries: Yiddish Tkhines and Spontaneous prayer: An Unbroken Chain

Much can be learned about gender dynamics from the way the Jews of Ashkenaz engaged with prayer practices and liturgy, as individuals both transcended and upheld localized gender roles. As mentioned earlier, the language a person prayed in was a gender signifier, and thus men who prayed tkhines were viewed as being ‘like women’, and women who were more fluent in Hebrew liturgy were similar to men. Although it was not common, women sometimes attended synagogues for prayers. There, a prayer leader known as a zogerke or firzogern, would lead them in communal prayer using tkhines and Hebrew liturgy. The zogerke or firzogern would often be married or related to a rabbi, which was how she gained fluency in Hebrew and halakha. She would sometimes accept money to pray on behalf of other women as an intermediary, much like the professional mourner. A zogerke or firzogern was treated like a spiritual leader, and thus pushed the gender role boundaries of her time. Similarly, well-known authors of tkhines such as Sore Rivke Rokhl Leye bas Yukl Horowitz (also known as Leah Horowitz), Sarah Bas Tovim, Shifra bas Yosef, and other authors of tkhines were breaking out of their gender molds because they were daughters of rabbis. According to Schuster, “Tkhine literature offered women a language through which to transcend their traditional gender roles and imagine themselves as a mystically potent men.” Tkhine Imrei Shifre likens the experience of women lighting shabbes candles to the High Priest’s role of lighting the menorah in the beis hamikdash, and many others reference the world to come, where women are learning Torah with the sages. 

On the theme of pushing gender boundaries, many tkhines were authored by ‘men’, some of whom published anonymously, under their given names, under femimine pseudonyms, and some of whom claimed to be Sarah bas Tovim herself. In Prague, 1718, Mattithias Sobotki openly published Seder tkhines and wrote the prayers from the perspective of women struggling with widowhood, infertility, and one’s husband being away on a business trip.  All such prayers are from a woman’s perspective and focus on women-specific experiences, and thus this author was, “imaginatively taking on a woman’s persona.” In the mid-nineteenth century it became more common for ‘men’, many of whom had escaped their orthodox upbringings to be involved in the haskalah, to write under feminine pseudonyms. Weissler asks, “Is it the case that men imagined women as more lachrymose than they actually were? Or was it a chance for them to be more emotional vicariously?”  They wrote tkhines in a notably emotional style which were frequently republished, and which means that these tkhines were popular with their audience. Some scholars have looked down upon these individuals as meddling with an ‘authentic’ lineage of women tkhines authors, and I believe they are overlooking the ways in which tkhines offered many people a venue to express their genders in ways which differed from their every-day lives. 

While tkhines often refer to the paraliturgical Yiddish prayers that were printed in booklets and intended for “women and men who are like women”, they can also describe the free-flowing spontaneous prayer that came directly from the heart. For Eastern European Jews, and particularly women, the cemetery was a significant place for prayer and devotional supplication. As Deutch writes, “..at important moments, such as before a wedding or during an illness, people would go to the cemetery to consult their dead ancestors for advice, entreat them for positive intervention, or, in the case of a joyous occasion, invite them to participate in a celebration.” Additionally, professional mourning women known in Hebrew as mekonenos, and in Yiddish as klogmuters or bavaynerin, would be hired to compose tkhines on the spot for mourners. In the book Yiddishe Etnografye un Folklor, Rechtman explains, “the professional wailers used to only ask the name and the mother’s name of the dead person and suddenly, without special preparations, abruptly break out in a mournful wail, beat their heads violently, strike their hearts-- improvising their own particular tkhines.”  This first-hand account illustrates just how culturally normative tkhines were for women to engage with, both in their written and spontaneous forms. While traditional Hebrew liturgy used scholarly language phrased in the ‘collective we’ that was accessible only to some, tkhines were written in the first person singular, and often had places for individuals to insert their names and express themselves directly to G-d using their own vernacular language.  The tkhines that were written in books were approached with reverence and respect, yet they could also be viewed as formulas to inspire one’s own personal supplications.

…….I believe that when some people wrote and published tkhines, the creative process may have served as an outlet for gender-non-conforming individuals who were assigned male at birth. I would like to suggest that perhaps some of these authors might consider themselves non-binary or transgender in today’s world. They may have found the act of writing tkhines as a way to imagine a life in which they were able to express themselves in more feminine terms. For gender-non-conforming people, praying personalized tkhines may have offered spiritual and emotional support in a world heavily dominated by the gender binary. Tkhines might have served as an empowering outlet for individuals to have the agency to create spontaneous prayers based on their own lived-experiences, and thus I consider them as having the potential to be Feminist.