An unexpected dividend

You may remember that our local Conservative synagogue finally went egalitarian about two and a half months ago.  The first woman to have an aliyah on a regular Shabbat (Sabbath)--a woman easily old enough to be my mother--surprised me some when she put on a tallit before having her aliyah.  The following Shabbat, another woman who had an aliyah, following her example, did likewise.  A Shabbat or two later, a third woman went up for an aliyah, and Olah Number One insisted that a tallit be brought from the rack to the reading stand for her.

When the Ritual Committee voted to have our synagogue go egalitarian, we never made a ruling requiring women to wear a tallit when having an aliyah.  The precedent was set by the women themselves.

The next surprise was that a couple of the women who'd had aliyot stopped taking off the tallitot after their aliyot, and began wearing tallitot as a matter of course, from the beginning of the service.

The biggest surprise of all, though, occurred when Olah Number One showed up in shul one Shabbat morning a few weeks ago wearing her own tallit.  After having usually been the shul's lone female tallit wearer for more than a quarter of a century, I was tickled to see someone else leading the way.