In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
women’s movement. She began to get more interested in theology, joined a Jewish study group in ←72 | 73→America, traveled to Israel in an attempt to “get in touch with [her] Jewish roots,” and got engaged in the organized American Jewish community by becoming the co-chair of the American Jewish Congress’s National Commission on Women’s Equality (“Jewish Roots: An Interview with Betty Friedan,” 1988: 26–27; Antler, 1997: 259–267). Letty Cottin Pogrebin had a similar experience – her reconciliation of her Jewish heritage with feminist philosophy occurred after coming face to face with anti-Zionism exhibited at the International Women’s Conferences in Mexico City and Copenhagen. She recounts in Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America how Jewish feminism provided her with an opportunity to overcome her alienation from Judaism which started at the age of fifteen, when she was prohibited from reciting kaddish (‘the memorial prayer for the dead’) as the tenth member of the minyan after her mother’s death (1992: 49–52, 75–81, 236–255). Last but not least, the Jewish poet Adrienne Rich also returned to Judaism thanks to her feminism. Born into a mixed Jewish-Christian family in a white Christian community in the South of the United States, Rich was raised to deny her Jewishness. However, despite the fact that according to rabbinic law, she was not Jewish (the daughter of a Christian mother and Jewish father), and had been baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church, Adrienne Rich thought of herself as “more Jewish than half-Jewish, and something other than Christian” (Antler, 1997: 300). Growing up, Adrienne Rich felt that she had a blurred identity; in a long poem entitled “Readings of History” written in 1960, she described herself as “Split at the Root, neither Gentile nor Jew, /Yankee nor Rebel, born /in the face of two ancient cults” (1967: 39). In her 1982 essay “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” Rich performed a kind of self-analysis by examining the sources of her own divided identity in her adolescence and adult life when she perceived the world from “too many disconnected angles: white, Jewish, anti-Semite, racist, anti-racist, once-married, lesbian, middle-class, exmatriate southerner,” acknowledging her identity as “split at the root” (1994: 122), composed of multiple and sometimes conflicting selves. When she came to the recognition of her lesbianism in the late 1970s, she also affirmed her identity as a Jew and turned to Jewish feminist writings as resources. Thus, Rich’s embrace of Jewish identity was not separate from her negotiations around sexuality and gender. In this way, Rich fulfilled the hope with which she ended the essay, that in the future “every aspect of [her] identity would […] be engaged” and interconnected (1994: 123). In the following years, she wrote poems and prose on Jewish subjects, participated in Jewish activism, and was a founding editor of the Jewish feminist journal Bridges (Rich, 1994: 100–123; also cf. Antler, 1997: 299–301; Martin and Zox-Weaver, 2015: 417–419).
1.3.2 Feminist Critique of Judaism
The interaction between feminism and Judaism has undergone a radical transformation since the 1970s. Feminist theologians have maintained that Western religious traditions have systematically excluded women’s voices, that religious institutions have been predominantly male-oriented, and that many canonical ←73 | 74→religious texts, written almost exclusively by men, contain numerous misogynistic statements (Rudavsky, 2007: 324). For the last four decades, Jewish feminists have challenged theological interpretations of Jewish law in every aspect of Jewish living, but most of all, they have attacked traditional Judaism for its sharp gender distinctions as well as the inferior status of women in Jewish society. This goal is very well expressed by the co-editors of the anthology Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion:
Since Judaism is a religion of ritual, law, and study rather than theology, creed, and doctrine, Jewish feminists have devoted their efforts not so much to defining and overcoming the patriarchal structures of Jewish thought as to criticizing specific attitudes toward women and to working for the full incorporation of women into Jewish religious life. Feminist contributions to the reconstruction of tradition most often focus on the creation of new rituals. (Christ and Plaskow, 1992: 134)
The writings of two Jewish feminist theologians, Judith Plaskow and Rachel Adler, exploring the contradictions that many women felt between Judaism and feminism, have become highly influential for the American Jewish community. The case for Orthodox feminism, in turn, was made most eloquently by Blu Greenberg in her On Being a Jewish Feminist: A View from Tradition (1981). Adler in Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics (1998) positioned feminism as part of “Judaism’s commitment to justice [which] obligates it to understand and redress gender inequity” (2001: xvi).
Traditional Jewish societies are organized according to the principles of Rabbinic Judaism, which prescribe separate roles and responsibilities for men and women. Thus, women are required to perform all negative mitzvot, but are exempt from observing the “fixed-time” commandments, the so-called positive mitzvot which have to be carried out at a specific time of day in a public place, including communal worship. First and foremost, women do not have to put on the tallit and tefillin while reciting daily morning prayers. This mitzvah is reserved solely for Jewish men, who in this way are bound head and heart to God (Zahavy, 2003: 182). Orthodox feminist Blu Greenberg remarks that “from the exemption of women from tefillin the rabbis derive several other exemptions: counting the omer, hearing the shofar, and reciting the Shema” (1981: 82). In the public domain, intelligent, committed Orthodox women often feel marginalized when it comes to religious leadership roles and public ritual within their own communities. In Jewish law, women are not counted in the minyan (the official quorum for public prayer of ten adult Jews), including the minyan required for communal recitation of the mourner’s prayer (kaddish). Moreover, women cannot be ordained, cannot read from the Torah at the bimah, are unable to be a witness in a religious trial, cannot initiate a divorce, which contributes in many cases to their plight of an agunah, and in the synagogue, they sit apart from men, often separated by a physical barrier (mechitzah) (cf. Baskin, 2003: 394; Ross, 2004: 15–16; Trepp, 2009: 329).
Although Jewish women are encouraged to pray, their prayers are essentially private, may be conducted in any language, and need not follow a set liturgy. This ←74 | 75→has meant, as Judith Baskin notes, that “historically, […] regularized religious education in sacred language, texts, or legal traditions was not provided for most girls in traditional Jewish societies” (2003: 394). In Orthodox Judaism, women are exempt from the central religious activity of studying Torah, which is based on the opinion of Rabbi Eliezer (a prominent Talmudic sage living in the first and second centuries CE) with regard to religious education for women that was adopted as normative by the Halakhah. Rabbi Eliezer stated, “Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah is teaching her ‘immorality’ or ‘nonsense.’ ” He went even further and wrote, “The words of the Torah should be burnt rather than be taught to women” (Jacobowitz, 2004: 79–80).
As a consequence of Rabbi Eliezer’s binding decision, Orthodox women feel deprived of a full participation in the synagogue and an access to sacred religious texts solely on the grounds of gender. Sylvia Barack Fishman explains this fact in such a way:
For much of Jewish history women were denied access to the intellectual life of the community, which centered around the study of sacred texts, primarily the Talmud, and they were denied a public role in Jewish worship. These exclusions were based on certain assumptions in Jewish rabbinic law about the nature of women. The rabbis assumed that, as a practical matter, the vast majority of women would be absorbed in domestic responsibilities for most of their adult lives. They also assumed that men as a group were easily inflamed into sexual thoughts, and that a woman’s uncovered hair, her arms or legs, or even her voice could – perhaps unwittingly – distract a man from such sacred tasks as prayer or study. One of the rationales for the exclusion of women from study and public worship was that women’s physical attractions were perceived as a sexual snare for men. (1995:101)
Gender-based tasks which a Jewish woman is supposed to fulfill focus on marriage and family rather than female influence and participation in public rituals of prayer and the synagogue. A Jewish wife and mother is not expected to do anything which might interfere with the responsibilities of motherhood and the maintenance of a pious family life (Zahavy, 2003: 183–184). Thus, what is incumbent upon Jewish women is to observe the three specific women’s commandments, termed