Jewish prayerbooks for daily life
A women’s siddur for the prayers that need a living voice.
Laurie S. Sherman’s prayerbooks accompany readers through Shabbat and the ordinary, difficult, holy work of a life. They offer Jewish language shaped by feminist practice, with room for inherited form, present experience, and the questions a person cannot pray past.
Prayer that can meet you
Not a replacement for tradition. A deeper conversation with it.
A siddur gives a person words to return to. It makes a rhythm for gratitude, grief, rest, repair, and praise when private language feels too small. Yet a prayerbook also carries choices about who is addressed, whose life is imagined, and which voices are allowed to name the sacred. For many readers, those choices can be felt long before they are spoken aloud.
A women’s siddur does not require a reader to leave Jewish tradition outside the door. It asks tradition to be large enough for women’s experience and spiritual authority. It can bring feminine images of the Divine into view, place women’s stories closer to the center, and make room for a body, a history, or a season of life that older language has not fully held.
Laurie’s prayerbooks begin there. They are written for readers who want more than a beautiful phrase, and more than a revised label placed over the same old absence. The work is intimate without becoming private in the narrow sense. A prayer spoken at a table, in a sanctuary, beside a sickbed, after a loss, or at the edge of Shabbat can help a person recognize that their actual life belongs in the room.
The point is not to make every prayer unfamiliar. Familiar words can become newly generous when a reader has language that lets her enter them whole. A practice can honor what has been handed down while also naming what has been missing. That work is patient. It happens through the prayers a person repeats, the images that begin to feel possible, and the permission to speak from where she actually stands. It also asks for humility: to listen for the places where another person’s prayer has taken a different shape, and to make space for that difference without asking anyone to disappear.
A faithful place to begin
Choose the form that fits the moment.
Some readers are looking for a Shabbat companion, one that can sit beside a familiar siddur and make Friday evening, Shabbat morning, or Havdalah feel more inhabitable. Others need a daily practice that can travel through fear, healing, gratitude, mourning, courage, and the desire to begin again. Those are different needs, and they deserve different forms.
Return to Presence is a feminist Shabbat prayerbook. Its feminized Hebrew liturgy, transliteration, and poetic English give readers a way to encounter Shabbat prayer with attention to the Divine within, the people at the table, and the week they are leaving behind. It can support a private practice, a household observance, or a gathering where some people know the prayers by heart and others are finding their way in.
She Who Dwells in Spirit is a companion for the days between Sabbaths. It draws on the image of the Shekhinah and offers prayerful language for ordinary need and human threshold. Its prayers are not a demand to feel uplifted. They are a place to bring what is present: fatigue, courage, sorrow, gratitude, uncertainty, and the wish to remain connected to life.
For Shabbat and every day
Two books, two ways into prayer.
Read the full description of each prayerbook, then choose the one that meets the practice you want to tend.
Ways to use a prayerbook
Let the practice be honest about the room.
At a Shabbat table
Use a blessing, poem, or short reflection to mark the change in time. A table does not need to become a performance. One shared line, a candle, bread, or a moment of quiet can make a welcome for the people who have arrived.
In private reflection
Begin with the prayer that names what is already true. Read it aloud, copy a phrase into a notebook, or sit with it before adding your own words. The aim is not completion. It is an encounter that can continue after the book closes.
With a study group
Let a passage become a question rather than a conclusion. Readers and Jewish communities can notice where familiar language opens, where it resists, and what new language asks of them. Leave enough time for more than the quickest response.
For a time of change
Prayer can offer a form when a person is grieving, recovering, facing uncertainty, or trying to receive joy without rushing past its fragility. Choose a small practice you can return to. Repetition is not a failure of imagination. It is how a word becomes company.
When prayer becomes shared practice
Bring the work into the room.
Prayer may begin with one reader, then grow into a shared act of attention. Laurie’s HINENI trilogy, HINENI: Ritual, HINENI: Voices, and HINENI: In Sarah’s Tent, offers readers, performers, and Jewish communities a companion path from the shape of a gathering, to many distinct voices, to a sacred reader’s script.
For a class, a ritual performance, a library gathering, or a community conversation, the prayerbooks can sit beside this wider body of work. They do not prescribe a single way to gather. They offer language sturdy enough for people to meet one another with care.
Explore the HINENI trilogy →Frequently asked questions
Before you choose.
- What is a women’s siddur?
- A women’s siddur is a prayerbook that makes room for women’s experience, language, and spiritual authority in Jewish prayer. Some retain familiar liturgy while offering new translations, commentary, or images of the Divine. Others provide entirely new prayers for the rhythms and thresholds of daily life.
- Can I use Return to Presence with my regular siddur?
- Yes. Return to Presence is a companion for a siddur, a Shabbat table, a gathering, or private reflection. It offers feminized Hebrew liturgy, transliteration, and poetic English for Friday evening, Shabbat morning, and Havdalah, so readers can bring its language into a practice they already know.
- Are these prayerbooks only for women?
- They are written from feminist Jewish practice and attend closely to women’s voices, bodies, questions, and authority. Anyone drawn to a Judaism of tenderness, strength, justice, and honest language may find a companion here. Jewish communities can decide together how the books belong in their own practice.
- Which prayerbook should I choose?
- Choose Return to Presence when Shabbat is the center of your practice, or when you want a companion for Friday evening, Shabbat morning, and Havdalah. Choose She Who Dwells in Spirit for daily prayer around courage, healing, gratitude, protection, mourning, and renewal. A reader may begin with one and return to the other as the season changes.
Make a beginning
Find a prayer
that can stay with you.
Explore the prayerbooks, or contact Laurie about a reading, ritual performance, presentation, or community gathering.
Contact Laurie