We’ve created our own rituals over wine and a bowl of floating candles. Sometimes it’s the simplest things I look forward to. No matter whose house it is, there’s always a bowl of those fancy chips—crisp sweet potato, taro, yucca and parsnip. Maybe I like them because they symbolize the wholeness toward which we are always striving.

I am far from alone in cherishing the role of Rosh Hodesh in my life. According to Arlene Agus, who revived the awareness of Rosh Hodesh as a woman’s holiday when she wrote in 1976 that Rosh Hodesh “became a room of one’s own” for Jewish feminists, “a room that did not require leaving our homes within Judaism.” Today, women’s groups from the Orthodox to Reform have reclaimed Rosh Hodesh as a women’s celebration, meeting for study, prayer, healing, song, art, ritual and community in homes, parks, synagogues, Jewish community centers and college campuses. Its appeal is spreading faster than even the mountaintop torch relay that notified people of the new month in ancient times.

The Talmud says that women were rewarded with special observances on Rosh Hodesh because they refused to give their jewelry to the men crafting the Golden Calf. According to Jewish law, women are not even supposed to work on this day. While this aspect of the holiday has been overlooked (I’m not sure why!), it has become a time for women to nurture themselves. “It’s a dose of sustenance on a monthly basis,” says Susan Berrin, author of Celebrating the New Moon: A Rosh Chodesh Anthology (Aronson) and editor of “Sh’ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility.” “One of the most primal ways women learn is through connection.”

Rebecca Meyer, an investment strategist in Philadelphia, says she doesn’t often have the opportunity to converse with other women around “the me in me.” She observes, “We’re usually so busy doing for others. Rosh Hodesh forces you to create space for yourself and have others create it for you, too.”

Meyer’s group of 12, in their thirties and forties, includes teachers, engineering and rabbinical students, an optometrist, a psychologist, a marketing director and environmentalist. On the Sunday night closest to Rosh Hodesh, a member prepares a theme or activity. Before Hanukka, cooking sweet potato pancakes and fried polenta led to a discussion about providing food for family.

Meyer’s sister Deborah is a member of another Philadelphia group that began 13 years ago with 11 women who met at a birthday celebration. They closed their membership to maintain intimacy and trust. “It’s a way of becoming our own village and doing it in a Jewish context,” says Deborah, managing director of Kolot: The Center for Jewish Women’s and Gender Studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. At an annual beach retreat, after she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, the group gathered around her and sang Debbie Friedman’s “Misheberach,” a prayer for healing. During chemotherapy, the women took care of her and her children “in a way I never would have asked.”

San Francisco’s Moon Mamas grew out of a Shabbat-Rosh Hashana celebration three years ago, says Deb Fink, a cofounder and director of teen leadership programs at the Board of Jewish Education. On a beach in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge, the group of mostly single women in their twenties and thirties, who were looking for an alternative to traditional High Holiday services, focused on teshuva (repentance) and cast their sins into the Pacific Ocean.

“Though my closest friends are in the group,” says Fink, “when we meet for Rosh Hodesh we talk about things we wouldn’t address if we were just getting together for dinner. It adds a different dimension to our friendship.” After reading a passage from Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, in which Dinah gets her period, the women broke up into four groups: Each wrote a ritual for an event unmarked in Judaism, like the end of a relationship or miscarriage. When Rosh Hodesh fell on Christmas Eve, the women spent the night at Fink’s home and the next day served meals at a homeless shelter.

The coziness of home can create intimacy even among women who aren’t the best of friends, says Rivka Arad, director of education at the Reform Temple Shalom in Dallas, who began leading Rosh Hodesh groups three years ago. Following a potluck dinner, Arad opens the study session with the blessing for studying Torah: la’asok b’divrei Torah. When the women studied Miriam’s punishment for speaking out against Moses’ wife, she asked them to wrap themselves in a long scarf and speak as Miriam. “Although we live in houses instead of tents, not much has changed in the structure of a woman’s soul,” Arad says. “Rosh Hodesh brings Torah study to the level it was intended, not as a history book to memorize, but one in which every word must ignite one emotion today and a different emotion tomorrow.”

For the women in Hadassah’s Florida Atlantic region, Rosh Hodesh has become synonymous with Morikami Park, a Japanese garden in Delray Beach with an outdoor pavilion. “Rosh Hodesh has touched the lives of women who were very far from Judaism,” says Ruth Etkin, the region’s vice president of Hebrew studies, research and reference, and Zionist affairs. “People travel over an hour. The joy is not knowing what will come from the creativity of the facilitators.” “It’s a spiritual homecoming,” explains Linda Winters, of Hadassah’s Florida Sun-Co-op membership development department, who used to lead the women in a meditation each month.

Many Rosh Hodesh groups take advantage of Moonbeams: A Hadassah Rosh Hodesh Guide (Jewish Lights), which is a text study of the sources.

“There are no strictures on how to celebrate Rosh Hodesh,” says Berrin. “It allows women to look at rituals with fresh eyes in a safe environment.” Whether it is experimenting with wearing talit and tefilin or meditating on the difference between quiet and silence, “there’s nothing to make a woman feel she doesn’t know enough or doesn’t belong.”

“Being involved in a Rosh Hodesh group is not based on how much you know but how much you can give to others,” says Penina Adelman, a foremotherof Rosh Hodesh celebrations and now part of Boston’s Modern Orthodox community. “I’ve seen women become empowered to take leadership roles in the larger Jewish and secular communities.” She says her group helped her develop as a storyteller.

A ritual that is almost commonplace today—inviting female ancestors into the sukka as a retake on the traditional custom of ushpizin—prompted the formation of the first group Adelman belonged to in Philadelphia in 1978. “We were jumping to express ourselves creatively based on our Jewish heritage, especially through stories of women we’d never studied,” she recalls. “Now it seems, so what? But then it was very new and exciting.” She wrote Miriam’s Well: Rituals for Jewish Women Around the Year (Biblio Press) to document “folklore in the making. We were creating our own oral tradition.”

Two years ago, Adelman began the Moms and Girls Group for women and coming-of-age girls. Her daughter Laura, who became a bat mitzva in March 2001, says, “It’s a really good idea because I have lots of friends in the group. We weren’t friends at the beginning, but now we are really close. I’ve learned you have more responsibilities to take care of as a Jewish woman.” The group has studied texts like the Esther Scroll, discussing inner and outer beauty and body image, and has designed and sewn a quilt for the Torah to rest on when the girls read their bat mitzva portions.

Groups for girls are the cutting edge of Rosh Hodesh observance. Kolot has initiated Rosh Hodesh: It’s a Girl Thing! to promote self-esteem, leadership skills and Jewish identity for girls 10 to 16 from day schools, Hebrew schools and unaffiliated families. Twelve peer groups are now meeting in Philadelphia, Princeton, Chicago and Baltimore. The project is developing a curriculum and teacher’s manual to share with others.

Even if they are not intentionally intergenerational, many groups inspire both mothers and daughters to participate. Ruth Marcus, past adult education chair for the Women’s League for Conservative Judaism, says that her daughter, daughter-in-law and granddaughter all belong to her Rosh Hodesh group in Southfield, Michigan. Women in their thirties have become friendly with women in their fifties. The group has gone through several incarnations, from a study group in a local bookstore to a synagogue-based group for prayer and learning. “For me it’s not so much what we do but that we do,” Marcus says.

The women-only focus has caused some to worry that while girls are now encouraged to take on traditionally male roles and attire, the reverse is not true of Rosh Hodesh. “I like the idea of reclaiming Rosh Hodesh as an informal women’s holiday with its emphasis on study,” says Blu Greenberg, author and president of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. “But some part of me says I wouldn’t want this to be a full blown women’s holiday with major ritual definition that would leave men out. Feminism has to be fair. If men feel disenfranchised we may have to rethink how we celebrate.”

Greenberg’s own Rosh Hodesh group is small, but includes many feminists. The personal, communal, halakhic and sociological discussions are “soul-rending and mind-bending,” Greenberg says, stressing that she values the group’s interdenominational aspect. “Sometimes I learn the most from the person who is the most distant from me ritually and ideologically.”

The ritualization of Rosh Hodesh at the peak of darkness instead of light gives the celebration its power, Greenberg notes. “Logic would suggest that the ritual be timed to the full moon,” she wrote in the foreward to Berrin’s anthology. “Why not name each moon cycle at its richest showing, its most exuberant, most romantic moment?”

The message of Rosh Hodesh is inherent in her answer: “Each new month is a time again for optimism. Light follows darkness, hope returns; here’s another chance, an opportunity for renewal.... We announce the new month in a state of total eclipse and celebrate it at the first glimmer of light—because we have faith. Rosh Hodesh says to us, ‘It’s coming, it’s coming, even though you can’t see it.’”