While the premise is accurate, the conclusion is flawed.

It is true that men play a leading role in the synagogue, but let us not confuse ceremony with prayer.

The Torah commands us to pray. The Torah, however, makes no mention of the synagogue!

Prayer predated the synagogue, and continues to exceed it. For the first thousand years of Judaism, including the days of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Miriam, Aaron, and Moses, there were no synagogue; yet there was always prayer.

The essence of prayer is an extremely personal experience, and initially didn’t (and in its essential form still doesn’t) include a standard liturgy.¹ (For more about the essence of prayer see here)

Standardized prayer and the synagogue experience were first instituted after the destruction of the Holy Temple in an effort to replace the communal daily public sacrifices and morning services in the Holy Temple.²

the ability to experience internally, to open the heart, to be intuitive, to be, to pray, is just much more established amongst women.

In thier current form, services are comprised of two elements: Prayer and Ceremony.

Fundamentally, these counterparts focus on contrasting needs: being and doing; contemplating and verbalizing; the ability to feel and the need to express; the personal experience and the public display.

The ceremony can be meaningful, but it is the prayer that gives it its essential meaning. The power of internalization in prayer is far more significant than all the ceremonial rituals combined.

That is why despite the "inspiration" of melodious liturgy, and the "glamorous ceremony" of the Torah reading, the essence of prayer is expressed silently in the ultimate prayer: the Amidah.⁴

Women and Prayer

When prayer is viewed in this light it is evident that women not only have a part in prayer, they are actually naturally much better at praying!

As a matter of fact, in establishing the standard for traditional Jewish prayer the Talmud⁵ examines the prayer of a woman: Chanah.⁶

That is because the above mentioned counterparts of the service can be divided into two general terms: femininity and masculinity. As stated earlier the former is much more significant than the latter; and the ability to experience internally, to open the heart, to be intuitive, to be, to pray, is just much more established amongst women.

Progressive is Backward

To think that the lack of participation in ceremony eliminates the significance of prayer is to reduce prayer to public performance and strip it of its heart and soul.

To the contrary: the woman, who has the essential biblical obligation to pray with few formalized rabbinic ordinances; the woman, who can pray at home and has no obligation to go to synagogue; the woman, who can come to the synagogue without becoming the ceremony of the synagogue, personifies prayer in its pure unadulterated form.

By entertaining the notion that women need to pray like men in order for their prayers to be considered "equal", we are destroying one of the last vestiges of personal, pure, and essential Judaism in modern societies. The absence of women in ceremony is not a dismissal of their prayers. The very opposite is true: the power of women to pray without ceremony reminds us all "there is much more to prayer (and Judaism) than the ceremony, the synagogue, and the template prayers in the prayer book".

And in a world that focuses so heavily on public display rather than personal values, facades rather than authenticity, and images rather than actions, we are all the more in need of this reminder.

The Future Is Tradition

Hence, it is not that Judaism treats women inferiorly; it is that society has lost appreciation for femininity. It is not that women aren’t given a role in prayer; it is that we as a whole have forgotten what prayer is.

the power of women to pray without ceremony reminds us "there is much more to prayer (and Judaism) than the ceremony, the synagogue, and the template prayers in the prayer book".

Exile has duped us. Gestures replaced genuineness, and the spotlight became more valuable than the soul. We bought into the hoax that to be you need to be seen, and that its not important unless it gets attention.

The challenge in the Jewish community today is that we need more "prayer" and less "ceremony". We already put too much emphasis on public display; it is time to rediscover the value of personalized private actions.

More than focusing on getting additional people active in the synagogue we should focus on getting more people active outside the synagogue, because Jewish continuity does not depend on having additional people partaking in ceremony, it depends on having more people being Jewish when there is no ceremony.

And to accomplish that we need to rediscover our appreciation for femininity. We are not the first to overlook the power of prayer as portrayed by women. Eli (the high priest) thought Chanah (the above mentioned role model of prayer) was drunk because she was praying silently.⁷ But now we know better, and like the sages of the Talmud we must take a cue from the pure, inconspicuous, heartfelt, prayer of women.

It's due time for more (not less) persons to pray like a woman.