Feminism and Judaism are Friends

A year and a half ago, I had the great honor of being part of a conference at Barnard called “Jewish Women Changing America: Cross-Generational Conversations.” It was great fun.

Now they’ve put the whole thing online, so you can check it all out–sessions on culture, the American mainstream, community organizing, and, of course, religion. Lots of smart people saying smart things–video clips, transcripts, the whole deal. (I sound like Darth Vader a little bit on that video clip–every time I took a breath, the microphone seemed to have insisted on making a gigantic sucking sound.)

Anyway, check out the whole conference here. And since the thing is already “published,” I’ve included the transcript (complete with several fewer commas than I’d use) of my talk here, below. Please note that under the terms of my Creative Commons license, it’s permitted to quote from this talk IF and ONLY IF a) You do not reproduce the thing in full (I’d rather you link to me in that case) b) You attribute full credit to me and c) if it is in a not-for-profit context. I’ve already been burned by the CC thing, so I’m wary of even having this thing accessible. But here you go.

——-

Feminist Change in Religion
by Danya Ruttenberg
Given at Barnard College, New York, NY, in October, 2005.

I’d like to raise a couple of questions to which I don’t have any ready answers, but perhaps we can discuss them
later.

First, the issue of denominationalism around which this panel is organized. As more and more Jews and Jewish communities begin to identify as post-denominational, or outside a denominational framework, I’d like to ask: “How will this affect both the attempt to make change from within the denominational framework (where movements by their nature have an inherent organization that can be helpful or obstacle-raising), and outside of it, where we might have more freedom, but, by design, less organization?”

I’d also like to ask, as Sepharadi and Mizrahi voices are very slowly becoming more integrated into a more general Jewish
discourse, “How can we as religious communities take seriously the mandate to create spaces, (whether it’s via prayer melodies or traditions or something else) that are reflective of Klal Israel, of all Judaism, without tokenizing?” I don’t have answers to either of these questions, but I thought I’d put them out there for later discussion.

The next piece I’d like to talk about is reclamation. In the last few years, I’ve observed a renewed interest by feminists in going back through the “garbage pile,” to see which parts of tradition, initially maybe discarded as a necessary part of feminist process, might be worth cleaning off, repairing, and putting to some use? I see this impulse in many aspects of Third Wave feminism in general, such as the recent explosion of feminist knitting circles or feminist burlesque. But I think this approach may be more useful and challenging to us over here in Judaism. It demands a comfort with paradox and an ability to acknowledge that a text or ritual may simultaneously have problematic meanings and rich spiritual depth.

In reappropriation, we cannot only access the full range of treasures available in our tradition, but we also have the
potential to use all of the critical tools at our disposal to subvert or disarm some of Judaism’s most problematic tacks, to
see that they be used—God willing—for good and not for evil. Just as the feminist revolts from the left have had a tremendous impact on more traditionally Jewish circles, I think, too, as more and more women become learned in traditional texts on a very high level, we’ll see less-traditionally-religious women and men willing to consider new uses for discarded ideas, and perhaps to transform their relationship to Judaisms that have otherwise seemed irrelevant, outdated or too problematic to engage.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that feminist thought is slowly becoming more implicit in Jewish theology without being named as explicitly feminist. And though generally, I look forward to the messianic age in which we don’t need gender studies as a field at all, it’s not uncomplicated today.

I recently encountered a relatively minor example of this that I think illustrates the dilemma. After hearing about a friend’s
work on domestic abuse survivors’ relationships to Episcopalian liturgy on sin and repentance, I was inspired to give a d’var Torah, a sermon, over Rosh Hashanah about certain types of obstacles to the tshuvah (repentance) process that maybe we all encounter. Since I was speaking to a diverse crowd, I shaped the d’var to try to address the more general human concerns underlying my friend’s thesis. And while in the end, I think it was a more accessible sermon for more people in my choice to do that, I was absolutely aware that in the process I was rendering the abuse survivors’ experiences invisible.

I think it’s vitally important to present feminist theology, ethics, analysis, and interpretation as mainstream Judaism. That
ultimately is how we will make important, real, lasting change. And yet, we also must remain aware of the price that comes with this.

For each of us who are out there trying to sneak feminism into the orange juice of the average American Jew without their
noticing, there need to be other people who are keeping an eye out to make sure that not too many important feminst balls get dropped in the process. We need both.

As ideas that were once radical become absorbed into the mainstream, we also need to keep an eye on what products are
being sold, under what names. As Judith Plaskow already noted, the rhetoric of feminism, female empowerment, multiculturalism and the like are being used by the very people who are refusing funding, denying tenure, or undermining plans for a daycare program, to say nothing of charging exorbitant prices for education programs that only a select few can afford to attend. This passive-aggressive pseudofeminism is, of course, hitting hardest those who lack privilege and/or have not yet in their careers attained a measure of security and power. In some ways, we need the old feminist hermeneutics of suspicion, now more than ever, and we need to have vigilance to insure that, whether or not there is a women’s Passover seder with a Miriam’s cup, the hosting organization has a fair and equitable employment practice.

Our feminist approaches and strategies need to continue to shift and evolve in this slippery new environment to ensure that
meaningful Jewish changes accompany the rhetoric of Jewish change. I have more to say, but I can save it for the Q and A.

Tu B’Shvat Hegia

In honor of the approach of Tu B’Shvat, I’m going to make a point of recycling–Torah, that is. Here’s something I wrote a year ago for Radical Torah; I know some of you have seen it, but perhaps not everyone has?

I’m cranking hard to get Chapter Eight out of my life (at least for the time being). Hopefully I’ll still have a chance to come up with some fresh 15 Shvat Torah this week, but in any case, here’s some stuff that hasn’t yet been composted.

Oh, and here’s your seasonally-appropriate bonus link. You’ve probably seen it, but have you actually started changing your own actual behavior? Just sayin’. Trees don’t like global warming, after all.

Anyway:

Tu Bishvat is, of course, the new year of the trees, the first hint that winter’s blusters are on the wane and that hope–growth, renewal–is already on the way. Though the original importance of the day was more commercial than ecological (it was about the tithing of fruit) the holiday offers a rich set of associations between our relationship to the land, to the trees, to the fruits for which we say a blessing of thanks every time we eat them. The Kabbalists took this further, using the mysteries of seeds and peels and shells as a way to map our inner world and relationships to the Divine.

In honor of Tu Bishvat, I’d like to discuss a little Torah that is, for many people, deeply troubling. The Mishnah in Pirke Avot tells us, “R. Shimon said, A person who is walking along repeating a teaching (of Torah) and interrupts his learning to say, ‘What a beautiful tree,’ ‘What a beautiful field,’ deserves to lose his life.” (Pirke Avot 3:7)

The sorts of problems that people have with this passage are obvious: it seems to denigrate the appreciation of God’s Creation, to fetishize God’s words, to promote an insular and myopic view of what matters in life and in the world. But none of that takes into consideration the context of the mishnah. The grave sin here is inturrupting the learning of Torah to say these things.

And given that the language here is probably talking about a person engaged in the repetition and memorization of the always-fragile oral tradition, pausing in the wrong place could cause a person to forget or, worse, corrupt the tradition. Which would be nothing short of absolute disaster. The intention here was to exhort the reader to mindfulness in our actions and giving everything we do our full attention. It’s about not being split, partly here and partly there: listen fully when you listen, eat fully when you eat, study fully when you study. Don’t study when you eat. It’s not that admiring trees is bad–rather the opposite–but the time to do it is not when one’s attention must be turned to something else. The time to do it is when one’s attention must be turned to… admiring trees. And sunsets. And fields. And all of the glory of God’s work. There are many times for that, and this season, Tu Bishvat, is one of them.

Another way to honor this holiday is to (also) take a break from one’s studies and to get out there in the big world and do some ma’asim tovim, good works. Acts of righteousness, even. To honor the trees by becoming like them.

For, it is written, “The one whose deeds exceed his wisdom, he is like a tree whose branches are few, but whose roots are many, so that even if all the winds of the world were to come and blow against it, it could not be budged from its place, as it is said in the Torah: ‘For you shall be as a tree planted by waters, that spreads its roots by the river, and it shall not notice the heat’s arrival, but its foliage shall be green; it shall not dread the year of drought, neither shall it cease yielding fruit.’” (Pirke Avot 3:17)

Tu Bishvat Sameach!

The Unetane Tokef and Collective Responsibility

On Rosh Hashana it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be
Who shall live and who shall die
Who shall attain the measure of his and who shall not
Who shall perish by fire and who by water
Who by sword and who by beast
Who by hunger and who by thirst
Who by earthquake and who by plague
Who by strangling and who by stoning
Who shall be secure and who shall be driven
Who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled
Who shall be poor and who shall be rich
Who shall be humbled and who exalted

But teshuvah, tefillah and tzedekah cause to pass over the evil of the decree.

The theology of the Unetane Tokef–which appears in both the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur liturgy–has always troubled me–how can we accept that tefillah (prayer) and teshuvah (repentance) and tzedekah (acts of righteousness, usually translated as “charity”) are going to save us from earthquakes, car accidents, persecution? We know that lots of very good people suffer every day, and that many people who do horrible things prosper. One could write off the prayer as reflective of an era in which people found solace in trying to control their fate, but I think that’s unfair and dismissive of the liturgy.

I wonder if, instead, we should regard it as a collective imperative. The prayer is written more or less in the third person, with some second-person address to God. And when it’s written in the first person, it’s in the plural, as is much Jewish liturgy. Not I. We.

What if it weren’t about my individual repentance as it affects my individual fate? What if our repentance as a society (which demands that each individual do his or her part) is the thing that affects our collective fate? What if the reason a person gets cancer is not because he or she personally has done something wrong, but because we as a nation and a globe have poisoned our air, our water, and our food with toxic chemicals and negligence? Are the tsunami of two years ago and the hurricanes of last year a sign that entire sections of the world were filled with sinners, or a tragic by-product of global warming? Are the women killed by stoning–yes, today–in honor killings around the world guilty of insufficient prayer, or should we assign responsibility to everyone who perpetuates a culture in which this is considered acceptable? Are the war refugees (like those fleeing the genocide in Darfur or the Lost Boys of Sudan) who sometimes fall to wild beasts personally responsible for their situation, their fate? Of course not.

I’m not sure that I believe that, were we a perfect world of perfect souls, nobody would ever die young or suffer for any reason. That’s naive, and, in any case, I personally don’t conceive of God as a guy up in the sky with a roll of dice (or a “good” and “bad” list, like Santa Claus). But I do think that the Unetane Tokef prayer points at the ways in which we are–as a collective–responsible for our own suffering or for preventing it, for impacting the degree to which evil besets us. We can’t change the decree itself, but perhaps we can avert its severity.

We need teshuvah–literally, “returning”, to return to God–to face the reality of who we are, how far we have strayed from where we need to be in relationship both to God and other people. We need tefillah (prayer) to align our wills with the Divine will, to remember that we are on this Earth to serve, not to please ourselves. We need tzedekah (charity, righteousness) to enact, in part, this service–by caring for others we care for God.

It’s not necessarily about saving our individual selves. We’re not in control of that, really. The liturgy continues:

The human’s origin is dust and his end is dust, at the risk of his life he earns his bread, he is like a broken vessel of clay, like withering grass, a fading flower, a passing shadow, a drifting cloud, a fleeting breath, scattering dust, a transient dream….

Which isn’t to say that there is not individual responsibility. The Talmud (Shabbat 54b) teaches that “Whoever can forbid his household [to commit a sin] but does not, is considered liable for [the sins of] his household; [if he can forbid] his fellow citizens, he is considered liable for [the sins of] his fellow citizens; if the whole world, he is considered liable for [the sins of] the whole world.” It’s not enough simply not to sin. We must take active steps in preventing others from causing harm–else, their transgression becomes our own.

What will do you do help avert the evil sure to be present in the coming year?

moving past two-mindedness

A lot of people have trouble with Hanukah. I did, for years. I’d go to parties and nibble on my latke or sufganiya while grumbling under my breath about how there was nothing here to celebrate. I’d light my hanukiyah, but I’d only do the bare minimum needed to fulfill the mitzvah and I’d do my best not to enjoy it.

My problem then, and the problem of the people who this year have already informed me that they’re all but going to boycott the holiday, is that the history of this particular celebration is, well… complicated.

The war through which we celebrate Hanukah was, in part, a Jew-on-Jew civil war, in which zealous traditionalists attacked and killed more assimilationist Hellenized Jews. The catalyst for the violent revolution was the reigning Syrian Greek king, Antiochus IV, who demanded that Jews worship false gods and violate the Sabbath, or die. The Jews who refused to do this were not very pleased with the ones who did.

Historically speaking, the miracle of Hanukah is that this small, bandit guerrilla army (the zealots) triumphed over Antiochus’ large army and formidable weapons, against all odds, not only taking back the desecrated Temple, but re-dedicating it as well.

The “Hanukah miracle” with which most kids are raised was apparently invented by rabbinic sages living 300-600 years after the Maccabean events took place—the first time we hear the story of oil that was meant to last for one day but instead burned for eight is in the Talmud. It’s not clear exactly when the story originated, but some scholars posit that the tradition originated when some of the rabbis still living persecuted under Roman rule figured it wouldn’t be that clever to publicly celebrate a holiday marking the violent overthrow of a foreign government, particularly (possibly) in light of the failed Bar Kochba rebellion. So, instead, they came up with the much more kid-friendly version about the oil which, conveniently, lends itself much more to spiritualized interpretations of Hanukah.

Why was it 8 days originally? There are a few theories. One suggests that the Maccabees were too busy waging war to celebrate Sukkot on time, so they did so later—but that doesn’t explain why Hanukah would become a whole separate holiday in subsequent years. Two others offer a little more irony: one suggests that an eight-day winter festival of lights was widespread in Greek, Roman and Babylonian Antiquity, and another notes that that’s how long the Greeks celebrated their military victories.

All this, frankly, wasn’t even enough to bother me–not even the Jew-vs-Jew part. That’s nothing new as Jewish history goes. What happened afterwards, however, was really disturbing. After the Hasmoneans/Maccabees/Zelots/heroes of our story won, once Israel was reclaimed and the Temple restored, Judah, the Hasmonean leader, and his brothers set to making a mighty Hebrew nation, by force. First they attacked the non-Jews on their own Hasmonean turf. As it says in the apocryphal Book of Maccabees, “they forcibly circumcised all the uncircumcised boys that they found within the borders of Israel.” (I Mac 2:46) As if that weren’t bad enough, Judah “Maccabee” “took [a Gentile-filled] town, and killed every male by the edge of his sword, then he seized all its spoils and burned it with fire.” (I Mac 5:28). He then did the same thing to the innocent people in Maapha, Chaspho, Maked, Bosor, other towns in the region of Gilead, Hebron, Marisa, Azotus, and other places in the land of the Philistines. There are a lot of stories; when the army “saw a tumultuous [wedding] procession with a great amount of baggage, they rushed on them from the ambush and began killing them… the wedding was turned into mourning and the voice of their musicians into a funeral dirge.” (I Mac 9:39-41)

The people that were killed or circumcised here were innocent. I don’t feel any more OK that it was “our guys” doing the unprovoked attacking and killing; that makes me feel worse, more uncomfortable, more upset, and I feel compelled to take some sort of responsibility for it.

One can, perhaps, understand why this holiday made me so angry for so long—why I’d go to synagogue and blurt uncomfortable facts about military history while everybody else was trying to enjoy a nice game of dreydel. It wasn’t really a fun place to be.

Then something shifted. I don’t know what, or why. One year, though, I started sitting meditation in front of my Hanukiya every night, sitting and breathing with the candles as they burned, thinking about renewal, rededication, how to make something from what seems to be the utter desolation of nothing. It’s not that I had forgotten the atrocities committed at the end of the Hasmonean war, it’s that… they didn’t block me anymore. Rather, I began to wonder how I might be able to clean up the despoiled Temple of our history, to once again sanctify my faith—in Hanukah, and in celebrating Judaism as it exists today—even after everything my ancestors had done.

A few years ago, I took a class on Biblical criticism—scholarly theories about who wrote which parts of the Bible when, and why. In class, the professor and my rabbinical student colleagues talked a lot about a sort of a two-mindedness that they think is necessary to be able to both understand probable historicity of the text and to experience them as sacred documents. When teaching, you’re a serious scholar, when praying you’re a religious Jew, and never the twain shall meet.
And yet, it doesn’t have to be that way. Paul Ricoeur talks about a “second naïveté,” the ability to see God shining through the words of the Bible even after one has been immersed in the potentially cynicism-inducing theories of Biblical authorship. Me, I had learned about all this Biblical criticism stuff way back in college, before I believed in God, before I was interested in practicing Judaism. It had seemed perfectly rational and didn’t bother me—so maybe I never had a first naïveté.

A few years later, God showed up pretty powerfully for me (or, more likely, I showed up for God) and I began using the language of “revelation” a lot. It didn’t matter that I knew perfectly well that historically speaking, the revelation at Mt. Sinai story in Exodus 19 and 20 were likely written by this or that authorial school embedded in particular human contexts. It just didn’t matter. That information didn’t impede my experience of Divine radiance pouring through me and around me, making the events on Sinai look more and more plausible. The God I was starting to meet glowed quite a bit like the God described in the Sinai story, and seemed, increasingly to me, to be utterly capable of the events narrated on those pages. Whether the stories in the Torah were literally or metaphorically true, they were telling me something about the nature of the God I had already begun to meet. The Torah, I began to see, was true on its most important terms.
As such, the two-mindedness advocated by my teacher struck me as a bit schizophrenic, and maybe not the most mature theological approach. Isn’t God bigger and more radiant than a few historical facts here and there? Can’t we do better, shoot for more? Dare I say… integration?

A mature adult faith demands that we take in difficult, painful facts and allow them to become part of our understandings of God, our language of faith and connection. Hanukah is not a holiday about innocence. Neither is Purim, actually–Jews did some slaughtering there, too.

Part of adult faith is being able to look truth in the eye, to take responsibility for it, and to not get stuck by the fact that it’s not an easy story. It certainly requires us not to take our frustrations on God. I know too many people whose faith was seriously shaken by Biblical criticism–as though God changes just because our understanding of history might. As though God weren’t bigger and far more expansive than that. As though it’s God’s fault that we’re just getting some new information. As if it’s God’s fault that human beings sometimes behave in ways that are unforgivable. As though God’s Divinity might not shine through texts written at different times and places, for different reasons.

An adult relationship to our tradition has to include the facts of, in this case, bad human behavior and Jewish culpability, and yet also maintain the awe and reverence that God Godself deserves. Is there any reason that I can’t be grateful for the survival of the Jewish religion while condemning the actions of those who were involved in its (miraculous) survival?

Or, to put it another way, perhaps our question is not, “How can we possibly celebrate God and miracles if God didn’t save our pure souls from the evil hands of others?” but, rather, How might we celebrate God and miracles while acknowledging the many complex ways in which our own hands have impacted history? How might our theology shift to accommodate the awareness that our miracles have sometimes had painful consequences for others? How might we now celebrate renewal, rededication, re-sanctification with a greater understanding not only of what it means to receive light, but also to give it out? What might that mean about what we do in the world today, what action we take as unforgivable atrocities rage just outside our door? We leave our Hanukiot in the windows of our houses to publicize the miracle that is God’s ongoing manifestation in the world–how might our behavior, our actions, similarly reflect our desire for all to partake of God’s miraculousness?

We have to be honest about the history that’s happened, to take responsibility for what has been done by Jewish hands and to use what’s past to spark discussion and action about how to behave in our world today. We can and should embrace the rededication of our souls, hearts and minds on a spiritual level, and we should also use these tropes of rededication to look at the world at large, to see what has been defiled and how we can make it holy again. And maybe, after all, being able to move past a child-like faith into something more integrated and whole is, in itself, a sort of re-dedication, re-sanctification–in itself kind of a miracle.

Death and Yom Kippur Atone

I don’t put much in the way of actual Torah up here, so I thought I’d share a bit of seasonally-appropriate cheer. Okay, it’s not cheery. But it’s seasonal, at least. This is a d’var that I gave a couple of years back at the Shtibl Minyan.

This, as with all my writing, is covered by the Creative Commons License. Feel free to link to it or to quote from it citing me as the author; do not feel free to copy it whole at all, or to quote from it (or copy it outright) without citing me. Thanks for understanding; as I’m sure some of you know, the Internet can be a thorny place for working writers sometimes.

In any case, g’mar tov to one and all.

Mitah v’Yom HaKippurin Michaprin
by Danya Ruttenberg

When Rav Nahman was dying, the Talmud in Moed Katan teaches us, he begged Rava to implore the angel of death not to torment him. Rava replied, “But, Master, are you not esteemed enough to ask him yourself?” Rav Nahman considered this for a moment, and then pondered aloud, “Who is esteemed, who is regarded, who is distinguished” in the face of Death Himself? Then, after he died, Rav Nahman appeared to Rava in a dream. “Master, did you suffer any pain?” Rava asked. Rav Nahman replied, “As little as taking a hair from milk. Still, if the Holy One were to say to me, ‘Go back to that world,’ I would not consent, the fear of death being so great.”

This summer, I worked as a hospital chaplain at the UCLA Medical Center. I was the chaplain for several units—general medicine, geriatrics, and the Medical ICU. The MICU, as it’s called, has a lot of very, very sick people in it—the chaplains call it “the last stop before Heaven.” There, I was blessed with the opportunity to be with people as they received a terminal diagnosis, or as their families made decisions about withdrawal of care, or as they died.

I think of one patient in particular, whose memory lingers with me. His name was Tom, sometimes people called him Tommy. He was a veteran of both Vietnam and Korea who had survived two liver transplants before throat cancer decided to rend a final toll. By the time I met him there was very little left on his thin frame, and a large, scabby tumor on his neck served as a constant reminder that, soon, the cancer would wrap itself around his throat and, ultimately, suffocate him.

He was angry. Understandably so, but he was a shut down, depressed sort of angry. Most of the time when I went to see him, he was reticent, unwilling to talk, and he often indicated with a grunt and a dismissive wave of the hand that he didn’t want to see me. Sometimes he’d talk to me, but only from a place of deep denial: he was going home soon, he’d tell me. He was going to buy a house. Over time, he became more willing to talk and, one day, he drowned me in a furious torrent of furious questions: He survived two wars and two transplants, and it all came down to—what? What had all of his work added up to? This was how it was going to end? He’d sit up, the bones of his knees bulging out under his hospital gown, mustache twitching and he’d peer at me, livid: This is all I get? It’s not enough.

Tommy, like a lot of the folks on the MICU—if they were able—were asking the same kinds of questions that, hopefully, we all have over the last 5 weeks, the last 10 days, the last few hours. Who am I? What meaning have I given to my life? What do I regret? Where did I not live up to my own potential, or integrity, or half of a relationship with God? Where have I been putting my energy, and what does that say about the life that I’ve chosen to live? What would I want to be different?

The Mishnah, in Yoma, makes what seems, at first, like a somewhat puzzling statement: Mitah v’Yom HaKippurim Michaprin. Death and Yom Kippur atone. But the two really aren’t so different: Today, we refuse food and drink just as someone approaching death. The dying person will say, or have said for them, a vidui prayer not dissimilar to the vidui—the confession—that we’ve been saying all day. We wear white today to mirror the simple shrouds in which we will all be buried. We refrain from leather, anointing, bathing and sex as though we were a mourner. We ask, “who shall live and who shall die, who shall attain the measure of man’s days and who shall not attain it.”

Today is the day that we are rehearsing our own death. Our prayers take on the frenzied intensity of last chances precisely because, on the level of Divine reality, this is our last chance. There is an utter finality to this moment. On Yom Kippur it is sealed. Today is the day that we die.

So what tools do we have to emerge through to the other side? What do we need to know, right now, in order to weather the storm of our own death …………and, hopefully, to be reborn?

Longtime hospice worker Kathleen Dowling Singh lays out the stages of dying in an important book called The Grace in Dying. They are, according to her: Chaos, Surrender and Transcendence. And I’d like to suggest that these are precisely the steps we need to take today in order to affect kapparah, to help create atonement for the crimes we have each committed against ourselves, and against God.

The confusion and soul-sickness that Tommy suffered—that some of us have been suffering these last weeks—is the story of Chaos. It’s Rav Nahman, terrified and desperate at the prospect of being tormented. It’s what happens when we finally peel back the layers of denial that characterize most of our waking moments, and we see the disconnect between the story we’ve been telling ourselves about our lives, and our lives as they really are. It’s what happens when we realize that all of our struggles this year are coming to nothing, that as hard, and painful, and exhausting as the last year has been—we still haven’t been able to keep ourselves from chronic, habitual, repeated sin.

Most of the classical literature on tshuvah is about Chaos, I think—about cheshbon ha-nefesh—an accounting of the soul—and beating our breasts. It’s about the denial, anger, bargaining and depression we all move through as the reality of who we are is laid bare.
Chaos is hard, and necessary, but measuring the distance between ourselves and God isn’t, ultimately, how we will be able to bridge the gulf. It’s not how we get back home.

The path home is through surrender.

It’s paradoxical, isn’t it? In many ways, the tshuvah process is completely, utterly about what is in our control—taking responsibility for the decisions that we make, choosing differently the next time we’re in a similar situation, making things clean with people we’ve hurt and trying to find compassion for those who have hurt us. But there’s more to it than that.

We don’t have control over whether or not we will be inscribed in the book of life. We don’t have control over whether our prayers will be answered, whether the gates will still be open by the time we get there. In the Une Tane Tokef we read, Ma-Avir tzono tachat shivto, kayn ta-avir v’tispor v’timaneh, v’tifkod col chai, v’tachtoch kitzvah l’chol briyah, v’tichtov et gezer dinam. We say to God, “As a shepherd passes his sheep beneath his staff, so too do you pass and count, measure and notice every living being, and appoint the ration of every creature, and record the decree of its destiny.”

Or, as Rav Nachman asked, “Who is esteemed, who is regarded, who is distinguished” in the face of Death himself? In the face of God, Godself?

It’s terrifying to acknowledge that we’re not in control. If we relinquish the iron grip we think we have on our story, the pain and the secrets we’ve shoved down into a corner of our heart might have permission to come up. The anger, and sadness, and disappointment, and grief that’ve been there all along might emerge, demand attention, might even reveal something about our lives that needs desperately to be different—something that we don’t want, but that we desperately, desperately need. Maybe we’re afraid that our pain will consume us, maybe petrified by the possibility that our deepest longings will pull us off our self-imposed script and move us into entirely uncharted waters. But ultimately, I think, surrender is a gift. If we’re not in control, we can finally stop trying to force our lives to be what we think we want them to be, stop trying to coerce the outcome—and allow our lives to be what they already are.

There was this one time I went to visit Tommy—put on the yellow robe and rubber gloves required with patients who were considered high risks for infection—and he seemed more subdued than usual. He wasn’t surrounded by the black, anxious cloud that I had come to associate with him. We chatted for a few minutes, and then I took a risk with a question that he would typically consider invasive and unwelcome : I asked him if he was feeling scared. To my surprise, he responded directly, after some thought. “No, I’m not scared,” he said. “I just don’t know what to expect. What with passing on, and all.”

And then, to my surprise, he moved his hand near my gloved one, and allowed me to take his. We sat in silence for a long while, just holding hands. Something had shifted within him. He finally really understood that he was dying, and I think he wasn’t angry anymore.

I think of the wave that sees the beach up ahead and begins to panic, begins to worry about that moment of crashing on sand. And then, another moment: relief. When it remembers that it’s been water the whole time. That there’s only ever been water.

There’s nothing we have to do but surrender. We don’t get to be in charge—we don’t have to be in charge. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned about dying from working with the dying, it’s this: dying is safe. And you, right now, are safe: you are already entirely God, and now you only have to let go, to melt into that awareness as though you were ice in water. Song of Songs Rabbah tells us, in the name of Rabbi Yossi: The Holy One… said to Israel, “My children, present to me an opening of tshuvah no bigger than the eye of a needle, and I will widen it into openings through which wagons and carriages can pass.” You have done good work, and now you don’t have to work anymore.

God will do the hard work. All you have to do is be willing to let God open you, willing to meet whatever you find as it makes manifest. Willing to let go.

Through surrender is the path to Transcendence, to the dissolving of our small-ego selves into the greater whole, to the return of our prayers to the gates of tshuvah before the gates have closed.

The Gemara in Yoma teaches that “Great is tshuvah, for it reaches the Throne of the Glory of God.” The Koretzer rebbe interprets this to mean that “it unites with the Throne of Glory and becomes a part of the Throne of Glory.” In other words, your tshuvah becomes part of the God Godself—and you, the open, returning one, become—and, on another level, already are—a part of the Throne of Glory as well.

Let go, allow yourself to feel what you already know: you are with God. You are of God, you always have been and you are right now, in this moment. Allow the illusory strictures of control to fall away, and you will know that you are, already, home.

This, then, is the legacy of Rav Nachman: that as crushingly heavy as is the fear of death, as is the fear of surrender—the moment of surrender itself—and the path to transcendence that leads us back in unity to God–is easy, effortless. Like hair from milk.

more on halakha

See, then I start thinking about all this halakha stuff, and I find that there’s more to say.

My friend Ahud says that he considers halakic living to be in part, a form of a social contract. Kind of like like believing that a state should have laws, even if we disagree with some of those laws (or, occasionally, jaywalk or go over the speed limit). Even the Rambam said (somewhere in Guide for the Perplexed, forget where) that not every person is going to be super-thrilled about every halakha–but that fact does not invalidate the system. Or, as the philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz put it,

“What characterizes Judaism as a religion of Mitzvoth is not the set of laws and commandments that was given out at the start, but rather the recognition of a system of precepts as binding, even if their specifics were often determined only with time.”

And in terms of determining specifics–the act of doing so according to our contemporary understandings is often lot less radical than one might think. I’m comfortable arguing that certain things that are not traditionally part of Jewish readings of halakhic texts are perfectly kosher within the bounds of existing halakha–permitting women to take on positive time-bound mitzvot, exempting married women from covering their hair, eating bread from a non-Jewish bakery, to name a couple off the top of my head. There is both room within the system for more radical readings, and also, often, not the necessity. And at core, I have chosen to accept the system–imperfect and all-encompassing as it is–as binding upon my life.

And, one more note on the spiritual consequences of halakha vs. non-halaka (though, hopefully this is clear, I’m not so hot on the utilitarian value of the system). There is nothing remarkable about praying when you feel like praying. That’s easy, that’s pleasurable, that feels good. Big deal. What is much more difficult is praying when you don’t feel like praying–dragging yourself out of bed, focusing on the prayerbook when you’d rather be doing anything else, stopping something you’re engaged in because it’s getting later and you still haven’t davvened Mincha (afternoon prayers). And on some level, that’s where the action is, that’s where the necessity is. One could make the analogy of going running–if you really want to climb the mountain (or just be in shape), you have to jog every day, whether you “feel like it” or not. And having a rigorous daily practice is a way of staying in shape. But more than that, I think–Judaism is not about chasing the next great aesthetic high. It’s not about just having feel-good experiences where the sky opens up and you feel all, like, connected and spiritual. I’ve had them, lots of them, some really big ones. They’re fun. But they are not the point. The point is staying focused and present and connected to God in all the small moments, the hard moments, the drudge moments. And even if you don’t “feel” connected each moment, all of the small questions and minute decisions are also a form of asserting the value of that connection, of worship in their own right. A mirror, if you will. (And sometimes you don’t “feel” something at the beginning but the kavannah, or focus, kicks in midway through.) It’s about doing things that aren’t about your drunk elephant desire (which sometimes feels like praying), but rather placing yourself in a system designed to wrap you in and obligate you to a constant, almost incessant, barrage of service to the Divine.

halakha is your friend

So there’s an interesting debate happening in the comments section of the post from last week about niddah/menstruation stuff and halakha in general, and Jordan made a comment that I wanted to respond to, but since it’s kind of a global thing, I thought I’d just address it up here. (Seeing as at least here I’m ba’alat ha-blog and all.)

So here’s the officially unofficial, true-for-at-least-these-five-minutes statement on why I identify as a halakhic Jew. Subject to change without notice. Just don’t get cranky at me at least ’till you read the whole thing, for pete’s sake.

One of the things that I noticed when I first started getting interested in all this Jewy stuff was that, when I did things according to halakha, the halakha was usually smarter than me. The Jewish legal tradition says: no cooking on Shabbat, no writing on Shabbat, no watching TV on Shabbat, no spending money on Shabbat. These are all activities that I generally enjoy (okay, TV really depends, but you get the idea.) What I noticed almost right away is that when I refrained from doing stuff that I WANTED to do, I got something that I really, truly, deeply NEEDED. Not doing the things made space for something else to happen inside the quiet and the stillness. A sort of cellular-level spiritual nourishment, an opportunity to–oh, heck, I’m researching Elijah now, pasok overused or not–hear the still small voice, for once. And there have been plenty of times over the Shabbatot since then when I’ve felt antsy and cranky and like, say, all I wanted to do was go to the movies or check my email or whatever. But my commitment to halakha has kept me from running like a drunk elephant to and fro after my desires. Even though I have been, many times, tempted to do what I felt that I wanted in the moment, instead I was grounded, again and again, into taking care of myself on a much deeper and profound level, making time and space to connect with and care for the Sacred.

So that’s one answer–that halakha and halakic living often gives me what I need on a profound level, that it helps guide me into a more sophisticated spiritual practice than I would be able to invent on my own and/or if I were left up to my own devices and superficial desires. That doesn’t, by the way, mean that it’s always fun. Sometimes in the quiet of Shabbat (for example) I hear for the first time that I’ve been angry or hurt or scared all week long–in the noise and running and activity I can pretty effectively drown that out and repress that knowledge, and if I let myself do whatever I desired also on Shabbat, chances are often pretty good that I’d choose to keep taking in stimuli so that I didn’t have to notice and deal with whatever’s been going on there. When I say halakha is smarter than me, that’s what I mean. I’ve often said that halakha is the monestary–it’s the framework that keeps one’s focus, on a daily and minute level, on one’s relationship to the Divine. It affects every aspect of one’s life for a reason. And yet, it’s portable–with this system, one can live in the monestary and the world at the same time. Finding that balance can be difficult, but that, too, is part of the thing–sitting around the (literal) monestary is relatively easy. Negotiating a rigorous spiritual practice when there are a million tugs in every direction is not, and part of the work to negotiate that is vital to the spiritual process.

Another answer–one that is much more to the core of how I understand things now–is that halakha, for many of the same reasons, is, through its act of connecting the practitioner to the Divine, a form of Divine service itself. Not eating treyf is a form of Divine service, making sure that you say the Shema on time is a form of Divine service, saying the Birkat HaMazon and returning lost objects and building a kosher Sukkah and rending one’s shirt when one hears that a close relative has died–they are all ways of servicing God, both directly and indirectly. Whether or not I “want” to do a specific thing at a specific time becomes less relevant. It’s not All About Me. There’s certainly some stuff in there about ego-nullification and humility in there–which, like the “I gain something from doing this” argument, ultimately places mitzvot observance as a utilitarian value, one that can be replaced if we find another thing that does the same thing. But ultimately I regard mitzvot now as something to be done for their own sake, something to do because to do so is to worship and because I regard myself as commanded. Mitzvot can’t be replaced by anything. In part I follow Rambam who argues that it ultimately doesn’t matter if we find reasons for the mitzvot or not. The reason for mitzvot are mitzvot.

I believe that to align my will with halakha is to align myself with Divine Will. This is how Jews serve God. There are other ways to serve God, and I don’t think Muslims and Christians and Hindus and Buddhists and everybody else are not serving God. But that’s not the Jewish way, it’s not what Jews do. I believe that as a Jew I have an obligation to do certain things and to not do other specific things–a hovah, a requirement. This feeling of commandedness (and belief in communal commandedness) doesn’t meant that I’m going to run around throwing rocks at anybody who doesn’t do what I do–a startlingly disporportionate number of my close friends are Jewish and either not Jewishly observant or not halakhically observant. And I can hold my belief in the fact that this is how it works together with the understanding that not everybody thinks that this is the way the world works just fine. As strong as my commitment to this philosophical and religious system is, my commitment both to pluralism theoretically and the people I love more concretely is stronger. This is how I believe it works, and/though (probably fortunately for the universe at large,) I don’t get to decide for everyone. (Of course, when–God willing–I’m a rabbi, I will be making certain kinds of decisions on behalf of whatever community I’m serving, but they will have authorized and empowered me to do so, so I don’t consider that the same thing.)

Why not, one might ask, just do the things in Judaism that one likes and feels connected to? Several reasons. One is, as I stated above, I think that very often the halakha is smarter than me. I might be feeling lazy, or insolent, or frustrated, and/though halakhic living does not let me get away with short cuts, with cheating myself or God in this relationship. And halakha is something that’s highly, highly filtered–over literally thousands of years, people have been working to develop this system of connection between the self and the community and the Divine, and that’s why it’s so smart. The vast majority of the time (the exceptions I’ll get to in a second), halakha gets you to the place where they keep God–you dial the number and you get the right line, as it were. (Sometimes Somebody’s home and sometimes you get voice mail, but so it goes.) I have a lot of trust in the fact that thousands and thousands of people who love God have been working to develop this system of connection. And I believe that, generally speaking, the concepts and ideas that don’t work and don’t get us to God have fallen away. Someone proposes an idea, a method for doing something, and the community doesn’t accept it, or it doesn’t last over the long stretch of time and into future generations. I think there are reasons why we have what we have now, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that the rituals and laws we have work, on both the purely human and the human/Divine levels. And I, for one, am very reluctant to tinker with the source code, to assume that my shitah (idea about something) is going to get both myself and generations of communities where we need to go more than the thing that’s already on the books. Maybe it will–maybe my new replacement thingy will also be a workable number to ring God. Or maybe it won’t. Maybe the number I’ve got goes nowhere, or maybe it goes someplace where I’m drawing on something truly skanky and bad. I’m a halakhic Jew because I want to make sure that everytime I call, my call goes through. Have I mixed enough metaphors, yet?

It gets harder when I see a gap between my understanding of the world and the halakha on the books. And, of course, there are those instances. Pretty much all of the ones I can think of have to do with gender and power, but I’m sure there are others. Because halakha has been written by human beings who lived in cultural contexts, historical times and places, and they had their own hurts and angers and whatever else, and sometimes all of these things affected what was written. Part of the halakhic process is the attempt to reveal Divine will, and I don’t for a second believe that all of what we’ve got now is full 100% Revelation. The metaphor we use for when that happens is the coming of the Messiah, and clearly we ain’t there yet.

So–and this is where I address Jordan’s question a little more–what to do when we see that happen? Because I err on the side of trust, and the side of belief that the rituals we have operate on innumerable levels at once, and that they may serve our human spiritual needs in different ways now than they have in the past, and because they are a form of Divine service–for all these reasons, if I see something I don’t like, I tend to err on the side of curiosity. There may be important and useful things there that I don’t see at first, and if so, it’s important not to throw away the important and useful and connective-to-God. What is this ritual (or whatever) about? What did it do originally? What are some of the core ideas underlying it? How did it get to its current incarnation? How have people understood it in different times and places? With niddah, certainly, that has been my process–anyone who saw the essay I wrote for the anthology I edited knows that I’ve struggled pretty hard with the idea of niddah myself. And I’m glad that, at the end of the day, I’ve come to a way of understanding it that feels OK for me–I came up with one solution there, and I’m in the middle of writing another essay on the subject (for an anthology that’ll be published some long time from now) and have found that my thinking has changed in some ways and not in other ways. Basically I’ve been trying to engage in the act of wrestling with God that is an important part of our religious practice and tradition. There’s a reason why the thing that is “neged culam,” more important than just about everything in Judaism, tends to involve a lot of arguing back and forth. Talmud Torah is not linear and it is not always without some serious, impassioned disagreements. So the first thing I do, if I see something that seems problematic, is to fight with it and to see if I can understand it in a new way.

Sometimes that doesn’t work. There are plenty of places where I do think it’s upon our generation and those to come to create space in Judaism that hasn’t always been there. Pretty much all the ones that I can think of have to do with the granting of certain kinds of people full rights, autonomy and status as Jews. Enabling women to take on leadership roles. Granting full rights and status to same-sex relationships and the people in them. Making space for transfolk and anybody else who doesn’t live inside a gender binary (which is, come to think of it, all of us to some degree or another.) Etc. There are mechanisms in halakha for radical change–sometimes it requires a major takanah (edict), more often it requires a more sophisticated reading of or new interpretation of the halakha that we have on the books. Just as I believe it is upon us to not throw the system away, I also believe that it is upon us to fix what is broken. When you have a smashed ankle, you don’t cut off your foot–but you also don’t pretend that nothing is wrong. Diagnosing the ankle is the hard part. Fixing it can be challenging, but it is profoundly holy work. You are not required to complete the task, nor may you desist from it.

I never said that I was consistent. Just to be clear about that. There are lots of answers to some questions, and though some of them may seem mutually exclusive, there’s often an internal logic anyway. Whether that logic is rational, emotional, spiritual or some combination is more of an open question.

Okay, that’s my why I’m a halakhic Jew rant for the day. I’m sure I missed some stuff I wanted to say, but now I have to go think about Isaiah, Elijah and Moses. Speaking of God and all.

DIY mitzvah gear

So, because of my last post, I’ve gotten a query or two from people who won’t be in J’lem for the workshop but are interested in making girl-shaped* tallitot katanot (the garment on which tzitzit are tied.) Since the name of the game is more people having more opportunities to take on more mitzvot, I’m posting the instructions here. Feel free to share this info with others, though in the spirit of my Creative Commons License, I ask that you do so by linking to me and citing me as the author of this post.

Making a Tallit Katan Shaped For Female Bodies

The tallitot katanot one finds in stores are shaped for men’s bodies, they can be bulky, awkward, or ill-fitting for a female-shaped person to wear, especially under women’s clothes. Making your own can solve that problem, as well as addressing any concerns one might have (okay, I personally don’t have these concerns, but some people do) about women wearing beged ish, ie men’s clothing.

What you need:

I am positive that my time is bound by mitzvot

This is the long-overdue post on women and mitzvot for Naomi over at Baraita.
Big fat public thanks to my teacher and friend Haviva Ner-David for all of the learning that’s enabled me to be so facile with these sources. To anyone out there for whom this issue is interesting, I highly reccomend you click on Haviva’s name and buy her book–it’s beautifully written, well-argued and discusses a lot of this stuff at length.

So. Okay. Where to begin? The Mishnah, probably. (I’m going to use some terms that are part of a basic knowledge of Jewish texts. If you don’t know ‘em, go here for background info, or just pick up the gist from context.

Mishnah Kiddushin 1:7 says, “All positive time-bound commandments (מצות עשה שהזמן גרמא) men are obligated in and women are exempt from, and all positive non-time bound commandments both men and women are obligated in.”

What’s a positive time-bound mitzvah? (PTBM from here on in.) The sources discuss, in different places. The Tosefta (Kiddushin 1:10) cites sukkah, lulav, and tefillin, and describes non PTBMs (to which women ARE obligated) as returning a lost object, sending away a mother bird before taking eggs, and tzitzit. R. Shimon says that tzitzit are PTBM, and this is the minority opinion which winds up sticking.

The Mishnah in Brachot 3:3 tells us that women (and slaves, and minors) are excempt from the Shema and tefillin and are obligated in prayer (”tefillah”), mezuzah, and Grace After Meals. It does not use the language of PTBM, but later sources use this language to describe these acts. Other things that are included in other sources include hearing the shofar, for example, as definitievely PTBM.

One of the things that all these PTBMs have in common is not just that they need to be done in a certain time, but that they’re connected to calender time, not personal time–Sukkot comes irrespective of the individual, and the time to say the Shema in the morning comes every day, etc. (Tefillin are connected to the Shema, which must be said by a certain time, and the argument for tzitzit that comes in later, after R. Shimon’s minority view is accepted, is that they are worn for mitzvah only during the day, not at night.) So one could argue potentially that Grace After Meals (which is certainly time-bound in that it must be said a certain amt of time after the meal finishes) is not in this category, nor is niddah (the laws of menstruation, which are on an individual’s body clock) or mezuzah (which one must put up within 30 days of moving, but it’s an individual move.)

Before I get into explanations for the exemption, I want to point out the number of PTBM that fall into this category to which women are obligated:

Making challah for Shabbat and separating out a piece of the dough
Lighting Shabbat candles (which really must be done by a certain time!!!!)
Eating matzoh
Clearing out hametz
Keeping Shabbat–it is both a postitive and a negative commandment
Rosh Chodesh
Rejoicing on Sukkot (yes, it’s a PTBM)
Coming together to hear the reading of the Torah
Tefillah, which is interpreted by the Rambam, Mishnah Brurah and others to mean saying the Amidah 3x/day

There are others, this is just off the top of my head.

In addition, women are exempt from a few things that are not PTBM, like Talmud Torah, procreation, and redeeming the firstborn. Are they relevant in any way to the category? Or are they just random? Not clear.

In other words, even before we get going it’s clear that PTBM is a pretty unstable category. I have heard from someone who’s studied this stuff in depth that there are actually more exceptions to the rule than there are things that fall comfortably under the rule.

This, alone, I think, is enough to unseat the category as a whole for me. If women are exempt based on this rule, but the rule doesn’t hold, really, why do we need the rule?

Well, we have a few theories:

One is that women’s primary job is to serve her husband and nothing must get in the way of this.

The Tosefta in Kiddushin 1:11 tells us that a man is required to perform certain duties for his father (providing food, shelter, washing hands and feet, etc.) and that, though a woman is obligated in this as well, she is not available to perform them “since she is under the authority of others.” This doesn’t deal specifically with PTBM, but it does tell us something about gender roles and mitzvot in a more general context.

R. Yaakov Antoli (13th c. France) says that women are exempt from PTBM because “if she is needed to perform a mitzvah at a certain time, the husband would be without a helper at those times.”

Sefer Avurdraham (14th c. Spain) spells this idea out even more: “The reason women are exempt from PTBM is that a woman is bound to her husband to fulfill his needs. Were she obligated… it could happen that while she is performing a mitzvah, her husband would order her to do his commandment” and then she’d have to choose between God and her husband. Therefore “the Creator has exempted her from His commandments, so that she may have peace with her husband.”

If this is the reason for the exemption, we certainly don’t need it now. Gender roles have shifted, and few of us in the modern world believe that a woman should drop anything she’s doing–particularly if that thing is service of the Divine–in order to serve her husband. And additionally, this reason only addresses married women. Those who are not yet married, or divorced, or widowed (or, I don’t know, not heterosexual?) should, by this logic, be exempt until they are in this particular state of patriarchal lockdown. (That is to say, married to the kind of guy who expects her to do his bidding at all times.)

The Yerushalmi Kiddushin 61A makes this point when it says, “The same goes for a man, the same goes for a woman. A man has means at his disposal, but a woman does not have means at her disposal, because she is under the aegis of others. If she is widowed or divorced, she becomes like one who has the means.”

Lastly, if this were the reason for the exemption–that a woman must be available to her husband at all times–why is she obligated to Grace After Meals and Mincha, for pete’s sake–both of which are much more time-bound in the real world (even though Grace After Meals is not technically PTBM) and make one much more dependent on the clock and much more unavailable on a regular basis– and exempted from shofar, which her husband is presumably also going to hear? Or sitting in a sukkah? Being happy on Sukkot??

It does not add up.

Another–and this is the popular explanation these days–is that women need to be available to take care of small children. Of the sources that I have (and I’m sure he got this from somewhere, but I don’t know where) the only one who says this is the 20th c. posek R. Moshe Feinstein. This reason is even more illogical than the spousal one if we’re assuming that our woman is still obligated to the other stuff–she’s exempt from shofar because of demanding children but has to perform Grace After Meals and/or Mincha on time? But more to the point, most women are not currently the primary caretakers of small children–perhaps they do not now or will not ever have children, perhaps their children are grown, perhaps their children are at gan (kindergarten), perhaps a lot of things. Why would this small population be the standard-bearer for all women’s behavior? Why has “new mother” been so utterly conflated with “woman”? And what might we do in today’s world, when a man might be the caretaker of young children? Should he be exempt from PTBM? I know a few tired fathers who might appreciate it, frankly–but the notion is hardly one many people would accept. Why is that?

It’s also worth noting that R. Feinstein also said that it’s fine for women to take on PTBM if they’re doing so for the sake of the mitzvah (as opposed to for poltical reasons). So there you go, right there. And given how easy it is to just walk away from Judiasm and to step into the secular world, couldn’t it be argued that any reason a woman wants to take on a mitzvah is at least in large part for the sake of the mitzvah itself?

R. Norman Lamm says that women are exempt because–this is also a popular one these days–that women are just soooooo much more spiritual than men, and they don’t need these big, clunky mitzvot to get them to a high level–they can have babies, isn’t that enough? Samuel Raphael Hirsch combines this and the above by talking about women’s “special role” in serviing God, ie through mothering.

I could write pages about the “women are more spiritual” argument. I don’t beieve that my reproductive organs are a more crucial part of my spiritual life than is my brain. Or my heart. Suffice to say, if women are really soooo spiritual that they don’t need PTBM, why has my life changed so profoundly for the better by wearing tzitzit, laying tefillin, sitting in a sukkah, etc? If we don’t actually need them, why do they seem to work so well? It’s getting towards bedtime and I don’t have time to address this problematic assertion in more detail, but am happy to dialogue about it in the comments section if people want.

I haven’t even begun to address the question of women actually taking on these mitzvot. Suffice to say, there’s tons of room in the halakha for women to do every single one of the PTBM that I’ve listed. Some (shofar, sukkah) are considered normative now even in quite religiously conservative communities. Some (tefillin, tzitzit, lulav, etc) are taken on by a smaller group of people but the sources are in places quite encouraging of them doing so. It’s also gotta be stated for the record that the language of the Mishnah and everybody since is “פטור” and NOT “אסור”–exempt, not forbidden. In some more contemporary sources, it’s even considered praiseworthy to do so. And there’s what to be said about women being able to bless on them–plenty of evidence to support the use of women and brachot re: PTBM. Check the Rambam and the Rema, those of you who are interested. It’s also worth noting that in Mishnaic and Talmudic literature, there is a multiplicity of voices trying to define what these mitzvot are, and it’s only later (cf R. Shimon vs. everybody else on tzitzit in that one Tosefta) that the lists get sorted out. If God shared the Mishnah with Moshe at Sinai (not my theology, but let’s pretend), God was not very specific on this particular matter.

The Tosafot in Brachot 14A makes it clear that women can “obligate themselves” to PTBM–implying that one who is exempt but who does the mitzvah is in fact obligated, “חייב”. There are other sources who agree. In fact, the way that the Conservative movement solved a different halakhic issue regarding the ordination of women (that is, can a woman discharge the obligation of a man?) is by stating that all female rabbinical students must take on all PTBM for themselves. And by obligating themselves… well that’s a whole different argument. I have neither the time, space, nor energy to go there now.

There’s so much to say that I haven’t even touched upon…..

But anyway, here are a few words on why I believe that the category of PTBM–or at least women’s exemption from them–is unstable, outdated, problematic, and inconsistient. It exists, it’s in our literature, but there’s also a lot of room viz, how we understand it and what we think the implications are re: contemporary practice.

Naomi, that answer your question? If not, lemme know!

AJS Talk

The Future of Jewish Feminist Scholarship
Association for Jewish Studies 2004
by Danya Ruttenberg

Copyright Danya Ruttenberg 2004. Reproduction without permission of the author is strictly prohibited.

I’m going to talk a bit about what I see from my perspective as a Third-Wave feminist, as a rabbinical student, and as someone whose work is, for the most part, outside of academia. I’ll start with a couple of directions that strike me as still ripe for exploration, and then I’ll speak a little bit about some other issues inside and outside the academy.

One emerging trend I see is an increase in rigorous application of some of the more radical recent gender theory to Jewish studies. The work of folks like Judith Butler, Leslie Feinberg and Anne Fausto-Sterling suggests that we can not only study the roles of Jewish women and men but actively seek ways to interrogate those categories and, ultimately, to unseat or at least resist them.

Some Jewish feminist thinkers have been addressing these issues—Daniel Boyarin, Sarra Lev and, it seems, Lori Lefkowitz among others—but I think there’s much more room yet to play, and ways that cross-fertilization between gender theory and Jewish studies may yet surprise us. For example, one rabbinical student I know suggests that one’s religious gender might be “Jewish butch” or “Jewish femme” based on which mitzvot provide fundamental spiritual gratification. The notion of “Jewish butch” arose in a somewhat playful way, but to articulate these religious orientations as gender categories in and of themselves, entirely distinct from one’s gender identity in other respects opens up new space in which to envision within the self a multiplicity of gender.

In some ways, the absurdity of this religious binary (butch/femme) points to the arbitrary nature of these categories in the first place. At the same time, it opens up some room for play, permission to ask our questions from a new perspective. Just as the rise in transgender visibility has caused feminists in the larger conversation to have to think through and articulate anew what “women’s space” is, so too could these issues have a dramatic impact on our reading of Judaism. If we read gender as less fixed and more constructed, more fluid, who would be exempt from positive time-bound mitzvot, and why? Would it change how we understand the purpose of hilchot niddah, the laws pertaining to menstruants? I’m not sure I have the answer, but I do believe that focusing feminist work on non-binary understandings of gender could at the very least force us to understand what we believe and do and why in a more sophisticated light, and could, potentially, provide the tools to transform our culture so that each of us gets to be a person first and a gender second.

Another tendency I’ve been seeing increasingly is the reclaiming, on feminist terms, of parts of tradition that had been initially discarded as a necessary part of the feminist process. I see this impulse in many aspects of Third Wave feminism in general—the recent creation of feminist knitting circles or feminist burlesque, for example. This reclaiming may be even more pertinent to those of us engaged in Jewish Studies, as our tradition gains much strength from the assumption that a text may simultaneously have problematic meanings and/or implications AND also rich spiritual depth. What concepts in Judaism and Jewish tradition that, though problematic in historical usage, contain the potential for great human and spiritual value? What devices have we, over the last several generations of feminist scholarship, developed to invert and recontextualize them?

Those are some theoretical thoughts. In terms of practical, real-life politics, there’s also a lot going on. I see an increase in acknowledging how much privilege and power some of us do have as Jewish feminists. This, in turn, enables us to welcome and connect with the explosion of voices from feminist Jews who are working-class and poor, Sephardi and Mizrachi, Jews of color, or from one of the many other points of the Jewish sociocultural map, and it creates opportunities for this work to illuminate and affect a conversation that’s already happening. And, as a recent conversation with an Italian Jewish friend who is often asked if he is Sephardi or Ashkenazi (the answer, of course, is that he’s Italian, with traditions from neither Spain or Germany) reminded me that these categories themselves are hardly absolute and perhaps worthy of interrogation.

In terms of the relationship between activism and scholarship—much, I believe, hangs, on the emergence of community across generations and disciplines. I’ve found that, while there are some institutions that might theoretically fund and create space for young Jewish feminist thinkers, access into the high echelons of institutional life– academic departments, in the media, at research institutions, at nonprofits and in a host of other venues—is still limited. As sociologist Tobin Belzer’s research has shown, Gen Xers who are actively engaged and seeking ways to engage in the Jewish meet much resistance, often from the structures and institutions that claim to be most concerned about the future of Jewish life and Jewish scholarship.

This generational disconnect—which persists despite the great and overwhelming generosity of many, many individuals—hurts our whole community. Many before me have worked and fought and sweated for basic access to basic resources in academia, in the pulpit, in the nonprofit sector, in the media. Still, feminists of my generation all too often find themselves expending significant time and energy retracing steps that have already been taken. In some ways, it’s not surprising—our country has swung way to the Right in recent years, and we’ve all been hit by it. Everyone, it seems, is fighting for pieces of a smaller pie, and it’s tempting not only across generations, but amongst colleagues to fall into a scarcity mindset. But it’s more important now than ever for all of us to choose an ethic of generosity—there is a lot at stake now, and this will be only more so the case as the next four years unfold. And yet, while we have to be vigilant during these dark times to preserve and maintain the gains that have already been achieved, we can’t afford to expend all of our energy on basic defense. Rather, we must continue to push the envelope further, to open new questions and areas of discourse together.

We must, as we acquire positions of privilege, access and power within academia and the Jewish world, find ways to share that power—by mentoring younger Jewish thinkers and activists, legitimating their work in our fields, and by helping them get access to resources and opportunities. Of course, every generation must find its own way to some degree. My greatest fear, though, for the future of gender studies, and Jewish gender studies in particular, is that a lack of mentoring and institutional support will force young feminists to expend important time and energy attempting to reinvent wheels rather than, simply, doing their work. Cross-generational connections are even more vital for those in institutions in which feminist and queer work and perspectives are still not always welcome with open arms, and in which much institutional sexism, homophobia and gender-discrimination lingers on. I’d love to see more formal and informal networking and idea-sharing happening among scholars and thinkers on a local and regional level, and concerted efforts by those of us who have some privilege and power to invite emerging voices into these conversations.

In terms of the long-range future of Jewish gender studies, I agree with Chava that ideally, the discipline itself will simply make itself obsolete, that feminist questions and theory will be so well-integrated into life in the rest of the academy that there will be no need for a separate space in which to discuss them. And yet, as long as we live in a world that, Jewishly and more generally—does not reflect our feminist ideals, we desperately need this common space, both as thinkers—to understand how these issues play out in our constantly-changing world, and to envision alternatives—and as activists, to mobilize and create change. Without doubt, the role of Jewish gender studies as a discrete entity will continue to change, and it will hopefully continue to inform work across Jewish studies. But we have not yet evolved, I believe, out of the need to have a place—a common room, of sorts—in which to address the commonalities and differences of Jewish feminist work across disciplines, and departments, and to cross-fertilize, and to address questions that may be difficult to delineate neatly as a part of another department. How we define Jewish gender studies may shift and change along with Jewish intellectual life and American political life, but it’s important to continue to insist that we do define it, somehow. This, of course, does not mean that we shouldn’t resist the temptation to ghettoize, to rest comfortably only in Jewish feminist conversations or even just in the conversations within Jewish Studies—rather, we should use the common space of Jewish gender studies as a launching pad from which we can go forth into broader conversations. Our historians and our sociologists are so often in Jewish Studies programs rather than basing themselves in History or Sociology. Latina or South Asian studies are often regarded as sexy and multicultural in a way that Jewish Studies often is not. How can we share the value of what we do with others, and how can we engage in more external conversations that can refuel and reinvigorate what we do over here?

There are a lot of exciting possibilities for us and a lot of new and important directions in which we can head. Of course, change is always a little bit scary, but through the process of critical investigation and reflective self-awareness, we have the potential to secure and expand the future of Jewish gender studies not only among those already for those of us already in this conversation, but for those just emerging into it. What other choice do we have, really?

Copyright Danya Ruttenberg 2004