On Women and Judaism

Can a Mild-Mannered Yeshiva Girl Find Happiness among the Feminists?

On occasion I have been asked: How can one so rooted in Jewish tradition, so at home with halakhic prescriptions and proscriptions, have such strong feminist leanings? Are the two not mutually exclusive, anomalous, contradictory? […]

I was born into a strongly traditional family. With all the structure this entails, it was quite natural to be socialized early into the proper roles. I knew my place and I liked it—the warmth, the rituals, the solid, tight parameters. I never gave a thought as to what responsibilities I did or didn’t have as a female growing up in the Orthodox Jewish community. It was just the way things were—the most natural order in the world. […]

I had a fine Jewish education, the best a girl could have. My father always was more interested in my Hebrew studies than in my secular ones, and he studied with my sisters and me regularly. My mother, the more practical one, also encouraged my Hebrew studies. Having lived through the Depression, she believed that a Hebrew-teacher’s license was like money in the bank—the best insurance a girl could buy. Why a Hebrew teacher? That was just about the highest career expectation for a Jewish educated female in the fifties. […]

After my marriage in the late 1950s, my feelings of contentment and fulfillment were enhanced rather than diminished. The ways of a traditional Jewish woman suited me just fine. […]

The real thing, then, was for him to perform his mitzvot and for me to attend to mine. I wasn’t looking for anything more than I had, certainly not in the way of religious obligations or rights. […]

All of this is not to say that I lived a perfectly docile existence within the boundaries of this natural order. There were certain incidents that made me chafe at the outer limits, but these were isolated, sporadic, and unconnected. I did not see them as part of any meaningful pattern. […]

And then came feminism. In 1963, I read Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, still the classic text of the women’s movement. I was a little intimidated by its force and had trouble with what seemed to me a portent of friction between the sexes, but the essential idea, equality of women, was exciting, mind-boggling, and very just. Still, correct or not, it didn’t mean me, nor did it apply to women in Judaism. On that score I was defensive, resistant, and probably just plain frightened. It must have threatened my status quo. […]

I began to think not just about the idea, but about myself as a woman—in relation to people, to a place in the larger society, to a career, and finally to Judaism. I did not look back over my past and say it was bad. In fact, I knew it was very good. What I did begin to say was that perhaps it could have been better. […]

It was almost ten years before I began systematically to apply the new categories to my Jewishness. As I reviewed my education, one fact emerged—a fact so obvious that I was stunned more by my unresponsiveness to it over the years than by the fact itself. It was this: the study of Talmud, which was a primary goal in my family and community, consistently was closed off to me. Beginning with elementary school, the girls studied Israeli folk dancing while the boys studied Talmud. In the yeshiva high school, the girls’ branch had no course of study in Talmud; the boys’ branch had three hours a day. In Israel, in the Jewish studies seminar, all of the classes were coeducational except Talmud. The girls studied laws and customs on one day and enjoyed a free period the other four days. […]

A turning point for me came in 1973. By sheer accident I was invited to deliver the opening address at the First National Jewish Women’s Conference, to be held at the Hotel McAlpin in New York. […]

[…] When I confronted the sources directly, I found I could no longer accept the apologetic line so popular among those in the traditional Jewish community who were attempting to deal with feminism. Different role assignments? Yes, that part was true. But genuine equality? There was simply too much evidence to the contrary. On the other hand, my background, indeed my love for the tradition, had given me a different perspective on the feminist movement. Untempered, it seemed to me, feminism fell short in some basic human values. Thus, as my talk developed, it ended up being a double-edged critique of Jewish tradition vis-à-vis women and feminism, each from a perspective of the other. […]

More significant was the conference experience itself and the larger group that was present. To my amazement, there were some five hundred women from every point along the continuum, not just the twenty-five hard-core types I had expected to find. Although all were feminists, they were not hostile to Judaism. A good many of them, especially those with no extensive Jewish background, had come to Judaism through feminism: in the course of searching for their roots as women, they had begun to search for their roots as Jews. The tone was not as I had feared, a shrill, seventy-two-hour tirade against Jewish tradition. Instead, the whole weekend abounded with a great deal of love for Judaism. […]

From the conference, I began to understand the value of cohorts, the strength one derives from a like-minded community—the support, the testing of ideas, the cross-fertilization. Until then, except for conversations with my husband, the process for me had been a very private one. […]

Still, it wasn’t a smooth path. Like millions of other women and men, I’ve pretty much stumbled my way through this revolution. Perhaps because the divisions were so clear and sharp and well defined, I often felt an emotional resistance to things I could accept on a theoretical level. Partly because the lines were so heavily drawn, I found it difficult to know what is form and what is essence in the traditional dichotomy between male and female. It was even more difficult to understand that at certain points in a normative religion, form and essence are one and the same—but who can know these intersecting points?

In 1973, I was still able to say, “Women in the Reform rabbinate, that’s one thing. As for Orthodox me, I’ll take my rabbis male, thank you.” The first time I saw a woman draped in a prayer shawl, my instinctive reaction was, am ha’aretz, ignoramus. The first time I spotted a young woman wearing a kipah in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, I thought she was spoofing; it never occurred to me she might be in earnest. As I drew nearer and saw her studying Mishnah, I began to feel a charge of anxiety. For the rest of the morning I couldn’t concentrate on my own work. Instead, I tried to figure out what she was doing under that powder-blue kipah. And I tried to figure out why I was so uneasy. Was it because, once again, someone had crossed the lines? I know what my reaction will be on that day when I see some smart-aleck woman marching around with tzitzit—the ritual fringes worn by observant Jewish males—hanging out. Maybe, if she’s not some kind of exhibitionist but rather a deeply religious Jew, eventually I’ll overcome my palpitations and begin to consider what kind of statement she is making. Maybe I’ll even have to consider the possibility that my own great-granddaughters will be obligated to wear some equivalent of tzitzit. […]

Two things I know for sure. My questioning never will lead me to abandon tradition. I am part of a chain that is too strong to break, and though it needs no protection from me, a child of the tradition, I want to protect it with the fierceness of a mother protecting her young. But I also know that I never can yield the new value of women’s equality, even though it may conflict with Jewish tradition. To do so would be to affirm the principle of a hierarchy of male and female, and this I no longer believe to be an axiom of Judaism.

I feel instinctively that drawing the lines is important and correct at both fundamental and transcendental levels. Divisions of labor and function are, in fact, humanly expedient; there is a remarkable staying power of sexual identity and distinctiveness, the uniqueness of male and female beyond biology. Yet there are many instances in which the sex-role divisions in Judaism do not work. To deny participation in this or that experience because one is a man or a woman is an act of inhumanity. Somehow, Judaism will have to find a way to bridge the gap.

Meanwhile, there is probably a great deal of tension in store for people like me. But that no longer frightens me, neither personally nor in terms of the system. In fact, I suspect—indeed, I know—that ultimately Judaism will emerge stronger and not weaker from this encounter with feminism. Happiness for a mild-mannered yeshiva girl? Less naiveté perhaps, more unrest, a constant probing, endless queries. Surely that’s no blueprint for happiness. But the engagement of Judaism and feminism offers something else: new heights to scale, a deeper sense of maturity, and an enlarged scope of responsibility for oneself, society, and the continuity of tradition—exactly what the religious endeavor is all about.