Judaism’s privileging of the masculine, dating the foundational contract between God and the Chosen People, has been maintained across the centuries through the relation between male Jews and sacred texts. Furthermore, every male Jew’s lifespan is marked by repeated performance of the rituals, and contact with the objects, that allow him access to the sacred, most notably both the Torah’s textual content and the scroll that carries those words. In parallel, the Shekinah, the feminine manifestation of God’s presence, which came to life in the biblical figures of Rachel, Leah and Esther, exists in every woman. This acknowledged duality of the masculine and the feminine presences of God poses the question of the legitimate role of men and women in religious practice. Does the co-existence of the Torah and the Shekinah mean that women’s exclusion from many ritual practices does not really matter? Or does it, in fact, provide a legitimation for gender equality in Judaism? These are the questions that have animated the life work of the anthropologist Claudine Vassas’, The voyage along her intellectual path provided here sheds light on the logic of Jewish women’s demands for full participation in the synagogue life, study, and ritual practice from which they have traditionally been excluded, as well as on some men’s resistance to those demands.