Der Tkhines Proyekt recovers and revives the tradition of tkhines, Yiddish prayers historically written and practiced by women, trans, and gender non-conforming Jews. We spoke with Rabbi Noam Lerman, the project's founder, about this hidden lineage, what it means to find queer identity woven into the liturgical record, and the living practice being built today.

For people who haven't encountered tkhines before, how would you describe what they are?

I would describe them as both written prayers and also spontaneous prayer. The written prayers were published in little booklets (some of which were kind of like zines), and printed books, like prayer books. Before the printing press made more Yiddish literature accessible, folks were praying spontaneously from their hearts, maybe writing down prayers, but a lot of it was really in the moment: They were praying about what they needed to live and survive.

This was a very common spiritual practice, specifically among women, and also among people who didn't have access to Hebrew and yeshiva or cheder learning. So it was also a class-coded spiritual technology that people would lean on.

In some of the printed booklets in Yiddish the inner cover would say: this book is for women and for men who are like women. Men who are like women refers to poor and working-class people assigned male at birth from families who couldn't afford to send them to cheder or yeshiva, so they didn't have a Hebrew or religiously educated background. The printed tkhines prayers were from a singular woman's perspective. Very personal to women's needs. So in this sense, tkhines were at an interesting crossroads where they were used by people assigned female at birth from all class backgrounds, and people assigned male at birth who were from poor and working class backgrounds.

Some of them are literal translations of what you'd find in a Hebrew prayer book, but most of them are what you might call paraliturgical: outside of the liturgical canon, referring to everyday things. They touch on all the holidays. There's a tkhine for every holiday, and in most tkhine books, a tkhine for the Rosh Chodesh of each Hebrew month. But you can also find printed tkhines about beautiful life moments, like a tkhine for when your child loses their first tooth.

There's so much gender bending happening in those origins: people assigned male at birth publishing prayers written from a woman's perspective, learned women choosing to pray in Yiddish over Hebrew. What does it mean to you to find that woven into the tradition?

As a trans person, I notice that there's a lot of gender bending within these prayers. The "for men who are like women" framing certainly catches my attention, which touches on a gender and class intersection. But also the authors of tkhines: a lot of times, they would be published by people assigned male at birth who had moved to the big city, and they would publish these little tkhines zines and say they were written by "an anonymous righteous woman". And I'm just curious about that. They were publishing these prayers from a singular woman's perspective, talking about the health and safety of their husbands and your children. What life were these authors potentially imagining for themselves through these tkhines prayers?

Then there's gender bending on the other side too. Some tkhines were also published by folks assigned female at birth who perhaps had a father who was a rabbi, and were given a Hebrew education, which was dependent on class and social status, and somewhat rare. Even after learning Hebrew and how to pray from a siddur, they would still choose to author and pray with tkhines because they were just more personal, more heart-to-heart, and connected to their lived realities.

What first drew you to tkhines?

My main inspiration for diving into tkhines was my grandmother, because she had a very beautiful connection to G-d where she would pray spontaneously in Yiddish throughout the day. She would wake up and just talk to G-d as she walked around, go to bed and speak with G-d. I saw G-d as her therapist, in a way. She was a refugee and survivor of WWII, and my grandfather was a survivor of seven concentration camps, so she grew up carrying a lot of trauma. This spiritual practice really supported and comforted her— she spoke aloud the things she was hoping to see transpire in her own life— and often times it worked! She would pray our health, pray that her platelets would be at a high level, pray for my dad's cancer to diminish, and so on.

I have a few recordings of her where she would insert each person in our family's names. I noticed she would repeat things twice, and I'd ask why. She said: in case G-d didn't hear it the first time.

When we'd light the Shabbes candles, she would be whispering in Yiddish, really loudly, and I liked to stand next to her, and lean in to listen. I'd be like, okay, Grandma, what are you saying? I didn't understand Yiddish at the time, but I'd wait to hear my name.

I was raised Reconstructionist/conservative in the midwest, and was very Jewishly engaged. I went to a Jewish school and eventually rabbinical school. We did not learn about tkhines. We didn't learn about feminine spirituality. We did, however, discuss Khana from the book of I Samuel, whose personal tkhine prayer practice is recorded in the TaNaKh when she is praying for a child. We are then taught that Jewish prayer is based on how she prayed— with her lips moving but one can't hear the words of her heart— but we are "supposed to" pray with a Hebrew siddur/prayerbook where the prayers are already written for us. I'm personally curious about how this lineage of feminine prayer and spirituality continued on from Khana, and likely came before her, too.

Ironically, I happened to receive the book Voices of the Matriarchs, by Chava Weissler as a B mitzvah gift in 2002, and it sat collecting dust for about 8 years before I opened it when I was starting to become interested in Yiddish. This is the book I would recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about tkhines.

Was there a moment when that inheritance, this practice being passed down without anyone naming it, really landed for you?

My mother also prays spontaneously all the time, but in English. I didn't fully realize that until I had this epiphany experience.

I was visiting Milwaukee and had an early morning flight, so my mom was driving me to the airport and we stopped at my grandparents' graves on the way. We arrived and suddenly realized it's pitch black. It's 5 AM. My mom says we shouldn't go in because its too dark. I say, it's fine, it's safe. So we start driving through the cemetery slowly, and she goes: please protect us, please protect us, please protect us in English. I was kind of making fun of her for being worried. Then I put my stone on my grandparents' grave, and as we drove out she whispered, thank you, thank you, thank you, three times. And it was literally at that moment I thought: my grandma would say thank you three times. She would ask for things twice and say things three times. And my mom just thanked G-d three times, in English. I grew up with around my home as well. And it was so infused in my home life that I didn't realize how sacred and traditionally Jewish this practice is.

What Der Tkhines Proyekt is trying to say is: we can't lose these little threads of lineage that were passed down subliminally. In all my Jewish education, no one ever told me that spontaneous heart prayers are a Jewish way to pray. They handed me a prayer book and said, say these words. The Hebrew words are meaningful to me as well. I do pray with a siddur every day. But it's also important to continue this hidden lineage that honestly wasn't given enough attention, because who wrote history? Men with social status. This hidden spiritual world where women were in their homes doing all this domestic labor, praying, having this beautiful spiritual life — I think that's really important to teach about.

There were literal spiritual leaders who were women, with titles. They were called zogerkes or firzogerins, prayer leaders in the women's section. If someone had a sick relative, they would go to one of these women and say, pray for them, they would come to the cemetery and say a tkhine. That was literally a livelihood for people. This is a Jewish lineage that deserves respect, and deserves to be taught, and deserves to be practiced, because it's very powerful. Der Tkhines Proyekt collaborates often with Annabel Gottfried Cohen, who has done extensive research and teaches about "the forgotten traditions of Ashkenazi Jewish Women". If you check out her work, get ready to be in awe of all the incredible things she has dug out of various yizkor books and archives.

The tkhines tradition raises some bigger questions about who gets credit for Jewish spiritual innovation. Can you say more about that?

Most people associate Jewish spontaneous prayer with Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, who named a practice called hitbodedut that he wrote about extensively. But across the diaspora, Jewish women and gender non-conforming people had been far more likely to regularly pray spontaneously than many men, precisely because of unequal access to Hebrew education. (Men also prayed spontaneously, but they had access to other ritual practices that women and gender-non-conforming people did not have access to. So I think spontaneous prayer was more likely to be associated with women and gender expansive people.) The practice Rebbe Nachman described — beginning with riboynu shel oylem, master of the world, returning to that phrase over and over — is the very same opening you find in tkhines. I wonder if Rebbe Nachman learned this practice from the women who raised him, and from the women and gender-expansive people praying spontaneously around him.

This happens over and over throughout Jewish history. Work isn't being attributed to each and every person who co-creates community and culture. So folks become invisibilized, and we have all this beautiful oral Torah, and it's being filtered through and preserved by men, and nowadays anyone of any gender who holds social capital and power. The tkhines tradition asks us to hold the question: whose voices are coming subliminally through in these teachings that we aren't seeing?

Your workshops invite people to write their own tkhines in their own languages, about their own lives. What comes up for people when they do that, especially queer and trans participants?

We just had twelve new songs added to our Bandcamp and SoundCloud. The first is "a tkhine for having a child during genocide". It was written by Leah who is a doula. They drew from an older tkhine and added their own Yiddish phrases to capture where we are today. Read the English translation of their Yiddish tkhine.

There's a tkhine for a woman who can't have children, written by a trans woman who was grappling with the fact that there are already tkhines for women who can't have children, but she rewrote it to hold her personal experience as a trans woman. She added her own lines in Yiddish to make it more her own.

There's also a tkhine for Tashlich that talks about casting off, and links it to the horrors happening in the world right now. Someone from Minneapolis wrote a tkhine about Operation Metro Surge, and the violence caused by ICE this past winter. And there's a Yizkor, the memorial prayer recited on holidays, that takes a Yiddish version and expands it to hold people who died by illness, old age, or being martyred. It's expansive enough that people can use it in whatever context they need, and can add the names of the ancestors they are holding.

You can explore the full collection in the songbook from the most recent cohort.

In the cohort from December 2023 into 2024, basically all of the tkhines that were written were about what was happening in Gaza, very freshly after October 7th. People wrote these prayers to capture their emotions, their horror, their sadness, their anger. Those tkhines have been showing up in the streets, at protest encampments, in synagogues and independent minyanim, in people's kitchens and homes, and in the woods and the natural world. That breadth matters to us. The people who participate in the workshops are often disabled, poor and working class, trans and gender non-conforming, queer, mixed-heritage, from immigrant families— they carry all sorts of identities and lived experiences, and infuse the tkhines they create with their lived realities. The tkhines they create reflect their life experiences and are also a way for them to connect to ancestral ways and traditions.

The workshops are meant to be experimental. We are collectively imagining the spiritual lives of our ancestors. We keep the thread going by building relationships to this spiritual practice and expanding it out to our ancestors' wildest dreams.

And it's interesting to do it in another language, not necessarily people's native tongue. People are mostly working in Yiddish, but I've had people add French, someone once wrote a tkhine partly in ASL and partly in Yiddish, and someone wrote one in Yiddish and Spanish. It's a really creative tool. People also create dances to the songs, and there have been beautiful artist collaborations, paintings, drawings. It just keeps moving.

Pride is often about visibility, but so much of this history was hidden or erased. How does recovering it change what it means to be queer and Jewish today?

I love to work with people to collectively fill in the gaps of history/herstory/theirstory/ourstory. Tkhines offer an opportunity for personal self expression and a complete bearing of the soul, which can also be said about being trans and queer within societies that falsely claim queerness and transness is "not natural". There's only so much we can gather from the historical record because of who wrote it. In the workshops, we say: we are imagining this together. Here's the history. What can we build and create from it to continue this lineage?

Most of the people who come to the workshops are either trans or women, or both. Cis men are very welcome too. This is important to pass on to everyone. There's something very special about working with people and saying, this is your history and lineage. This is a Jewish lineage that deserves to be practiced.

I like to bring this quote from Joy Ladin into some of my classes, because I feel it helps us to understand tkhines as a spiritual tool. Ladin's writing also helps me understand the people who lean on G-d and tkhines for sustenance in a world where they feel like strangers.

What's coming up for Der Tkhines Proyekt that you're excited about?

There's a collaboration underway with Naomi Spector, author of Sefardi Herbalism. We're creating a workshop about the ayin hara, the evil eye, how to make amulets, and we are including tkhines and spontaneous prayer as a powerful tool of protection.

There's also a collaboration with Edot Midwest and Shahanna McKinney-Baldon based in Wisconsin, where we've been honoring the story of Madame Goldye Steiner, the only Black woman cantorial vocalist (that we know of historically) who was part of the 1920s and 1930s golden age of khazones, the art form of Ashkenazi cantorial singing. We did a public ceremonial stone setting and kever mestn (grave measuring) ritual for Steiner, whose gravesite had been unmarked in Milwaukee, WI. We laid wicks around her grave, spoke tkhines, and then made candles with the wick using beeswax from a local Black beekeeper. Listen to Shahanna bring Madame Goldye back to the Yiddish stage.

Der Tkhines Proyekt has ongoing collaborations with many other teachers and Yiddish cultural artists, Baruch HaShem.

And there will be more workshops, particularly focused on songwriting. Der Tkhines Proyekt pops up at various festivals and spaces, so stay tuned.

How can people find Der Tkhines Proyekt, learn with you, or support the work?

You can find our music on Bandcamp and SoundCloud, and learn more about tkhines at spontaneousprayer.com, and subscribe to our newsletter at buttondown.com/tkhines. If you want to learn, come to a workshop.