For Jewish communities
HINENI trilogy: Jewish ritual texts for communities.
Three books for the work that happens when a community chooses to listen, speak, study, and make room for voices that have too often been held at the edge of the sacred record.
A shared act of arrival
Not a script for performance alone.
Some gatherings need more than a topic and a circle of chairs. They need language that can hold memory, disagreement, grief, courage, and the distinct presence of the people who arrive. The HINENI trilogy is Laurie S. Sherman’s body of work for that kind of room: Jewish feminist ritual texts made for readers, performers, and Jewish communities.
HINENI means “here I am.” In these books, arrival is not a demand for certainty or display. It is an invitation to show up with attention. The trilogy joins ritual framework, monologue, prayer, and communal practice so a group can work with both inherited language and the living questions in front of it.
The volumes can be read alone, but they are designed to deepen one another. HINENI: Ritual offers a way to shape a gathering with care. HINENI: Voices brings more than seventy Jewish women into distinct speech. HINENI: In Sarah’s Tent gathers voice, prayer, and ritual into a shared arc of welcome, struggle, memory, and blessing.
Book one
HINENI: Ritual
How to Rite
A guide for facilitators, artists, clergy, educators, and people who hold space. It offers a framework for presence without spectacle, depth without manipulation, and encounter without extraction.
This is the place to begin when a group knows something needs to be marked but does not want to force intimacy, borrow a ready-made mood, or mistake activity for meaning. It helps a facilitator ask what the room can honestly hold.
Explore HINENI: Ritual →
Book two
HINENI: Voices
Monologues of Presence
More than seventy Jewish women across time speak in their own registers: biblical figures, thinkers, rebels, artists, activists, and future daughters. The collection is made for study, rehearsal, and ritual use.
For performers, the monologues offer language with moral pressure and human complexity. For readers and communities, they make a gathering of voices possible without flattening anyone into a chorus or asking one person to speak for all.
Explore HINENI: Voices →
Book three
HINENI: In Sarah’s Tent
The Hineni Circle Project, Vol. 1
A sacred reader’s script and communal ritual rooted in Jewish tradition and feminist practice. It makes room for welcome, struggle, memory, and blessing, with prayer and transliteration available for voices in the room.
It can be held privately, studied in a group, or spoken aloud as communal ritual. Each voice carries its own weight, while the gathering moves toward a shared act of attention.
Explore HINENI: In Sarah’s Tent →Ways into the work
For the room you actually have.
For readers
Read slowly, alone or together. The trilogy rewards attention to the places where inherited stories have gone quiet and where a new question needs a witness rather than a quick answer.
For performers
Rehearse voices that are particular, contradictory, and alive. The work gives performers text with room for thought, feeling, silence, and relationship to the people listening.
For Jewish communities
Build a study session, reading, ritual performance, or gathering around language that welcomes participation without requiring sameness. A community can work at the scale that fits its people.
What the trilogy makes possible
Begin with a question worth holding.
A group may come to these books because it is preparing a public reading, but the work need not end at the edge of a stage. A chapter can open an adult-learning conversation about the women named in a text and the women left unnamed. A monologue can give a performer a difficult voice to inhabit without pretending to resolve that voice. A ritual framework can help a host decide what to invite, what to leave open, and where a gathering needs a real closing.
That flexibility is useful because Jewish communities do not all gather in the same way. A synagogue class, a library program, a living-room salon, a rehearsal room, and a circle of friends each carry different histories, expectations, and vulnerabilities. The HINENI trilogy does not flatten those differences into a single approved experience. It offers material sturdy enough to adapt with care and particular enough to keep the work from becoming vague.
For an educator, that can mean pairing a selected voice with study and discussion. For a director, it can mean letting a monologue find its right pace before deciding how it belongs in an evening of performance. For a ritual leader, it can mean beginning with a purpose that is clear enough to guide the room but spacious enough to receive what participants bring. The measure is not a flawless event. It is whether the gathering lets people encounter the material, one another, and themselves with dignity.
The trilogy also gives a group permission to work in sequence. Start with a question about the gathering itself. Let one voice complicate the question. Notice what changes when another voice enters. Then close in a way that acknowledges the work without pretending it is finished. That pattern can serve a single evening or return across a season of learning. It asks neither expertise nor performance from every participant. It asks for preparation, consent, and the patience to let meaning take its time.
This is also why the books belong together. One volume helps a group attend to the shape of a ritual. One offers voices with which to wrestle. One brings prayer, text, and communal action into a shared form. Together, they let a community move from intention to encounter without losing the particular lives at the center of the work and its care.
A different kind of gathering
Let the voices remain distinct.
A meaningful communal ritual does not need to smooth away the difficult edges of experience. It needs enough structure that people can enter without being pushed, speak without being used, and leave without being abandoned in intensity.
That is the ethic running through the HINENI trilogy. The work is serious about Jewish memory and women’s lives. It does not ask a group to agree on everything before it can gather. It asks for the discipline of presence: to notice, to listen, and to let each voice carry its own texture.
See Laurie’s ritual work →Frequently asked questions
Before you bring the work into the room.
- Who is the HINENI trilogy for?
- The trilogy is for readers, performers, clergy, educators, and Jewish communities seeking language for study, rehearsal, ritual, and shared reflection. Each volume can meet a group at a different point in its work.
- Do we need a large cast or formal production?
- No. The books support private reading, small-group study, selected voices, and fuller communal presentation. A group can choose a scale that suits its room, time, and capacity.
- Can the books be used alongside Jewish learning or worship?
- Yes. The trilogy is rooted in Jewish ritual logic, feminist ethics, prayer, and story. Communities should use their own judgment about how a particular gathering relates to their practice and leadership.
- Where can I find the HINENI books?
- Each volume has its own book page with links to available retailers. For a reading, workshop, or community conversation with Laurie, use the contact page to begin an inquiry.
Begin a conversation
Bring HINENI
into the room.
Explore the books, or contact Laurie about a reading, ritual performance, presentation, or community gathering.
Contact Laurie