In Search of Identity and Spirituality in the Fiction of American Jewish Female Authors at the Turn of the 21st Century. Dorota Mihulka
tzadeket [the feminine term for tzadik – ‘the righteous one’]” (1995: 12–18). One more article is worth adding to this pioneering feminist list, namely Paula Hyman’s “The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition” published in Conservative Judaism. In this article, Hyman criticizes patriarchal cultures, including Judaism, for the “patriarchal sex-role differentiation and the concomitant disparagement of women” (1972: 15). By juxtaposing women’s position with men’s in traditional Judaism, Hyman highlights the second-class status of women within Judaism, and advocates the examination of the Jewish tradition, which “has excluded women from entire spheres of Jewish experience and has considered them intellectually and spiritually inferior to men” (1972: 21).
These early influential articles set the stage for a feminist interest in and an emphasis on women’s experience of Judaism. They also demonstrated the emergence of feminist challenges to the patriarchal structure of the Jewish world. The feminist definition of Jewish patriarchy is based on Simone de Beauvoir’s classic 1940s analysis of Western patriarchy, in which man is the Subject, woman is the Other (1997: 16). When applied to Judaism, de Beauvoir’s definition highlights the role of Jewish men as the subjects as well as the authors and interpreters of Jewish texts and laws, and demonstrates the marginalization of women’s experiences, and the almost complete absence of women’s voices. At the core of Jewish feminists’ criticism against Judaism lay the absence of equality between the sexes which, they believed, was rooted in patriarchal institutionalism. This type of patriarchy is perhaps best expressed by Judith Plaskow in her seminal work Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective:
Underneath specific legislation [is] an assumption of women’s Otherness more fundamental than the particular laws in which it finds expression. Halakhah in its details discriminates against women because the world of law is male-defined and places men at the center. Women are objects of the law but neither its creators nor agents. […] Laws concerning family status assume passivity of women. Women are “acquired” in ←79 | 80→marriage and are passive in the dissolution of marriage, so that the law deprives them of control in important areas of their lives. (1991: 63)
As can be seen from this description, Jewish men are the actors in religious and communal life. Women are ‘other,’ not counting as full people. This otherness of women as a presupposition of Jewish law is then its most central formulation (Plaskow, 1995: 224).
The majority of feminist scholars of Judaism blame the Halakhah for the inferior position of women in Jewish community. They claim that the estrangement of women within Judaism may be traced back to the very birth of the Jewish people as a nation, that is, the giving of the Torah and the entry into the covenant at Sinai. These feminist scholars are inclined to agree with Judith Plaskow’s view, finding the Halakhah objectionable on the grounds that it has been male-centered from its inception. Plaskow writes:
Given the importance of this event, there can be no verse in the Torah more disturbing to the feminist than Moses’ warning to his people in Exodus 19:15, “Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman.” For here, at the very moment that the Jewish people stand at Sinai ready to receive the covenant – not now the covenant with individual patriarchs but with the people as a whole – at the very moment when Israel stands trembling waiting for God’s presence to descend upon the mountain, Moses addressed the community only as men. […] At the central moment of Jewish history, women are invisible. (1991: 25)
It is clear that even at Mount Sinai, Moses addresses the community as though it were composed exclusively of men. This experience of exclusion is extremely troubling to the feminists due to the fact that “biblical memory is an active force in the spiritual lives of Jews,” as Sylvia Barack Fishman points out (1989: 43). Furthermore, Plaskow maintains that the issue of female exclusion is perpetuated and even exacerbated by the later traditions and developments in Halakhah, as put forward in the Talmud, and the responsa literature, where women are rarely seen “as shapers of tradition and actors in their own lives” (1991: 26). Rachel Adler in her article “I’ve Had Nothing Yet So I Can’t Take More,” discusses another dimension to the problem of the Sinai passage without which it is impossible to understand the assignment of Jewish feminism nowadays. She maintains that since the Torah is not just history, but also living memory, every time the story of Sinai is recited during the Sabbath and holiday liturgy, the past is and will be recreated for present and future generations of Jewish women who experience the feelings of alienation and exclusion all over again, “eavesdropping on the conversation between God and man” (1983: 22–23). As Adler puts it, “[…] because the text has excluded [the woman], she is excluded again in this re-enactment and will be excluded over and over, year by year, every time she rises to hear this covenant read” (1983: 23). Similarly to Fishman’s opinion above, Adler contends that women’s silence and invisibility is so overwhelming in the Sinai passage that it can provoke a crisis for Jewish feminists. She says, “We are being invited by Jewish men to re-covenant, ←80 | 81→to forge a covenant which will address the inequalities of women’s position in Judaism, but we ask ourselves, ‘Have we ever had a covenant in the first place? Are women Jews?’ ” (Adler, 1983: 22) This question has become an important part of Jewish women’s search for identity that would be comprised of all aspects of their lives, that is being female, Jewish, and a feminist.
According to Modern Orthodox feminist Blu Greenberg, part of the problem in terms of Halakhah, seems to be women’s exemption from observing the ‘fixed-time’ commandments, which is likened to exclusion by her and many other Jewish feminists. Such exemptions not only weaken women’s commitment to communal prayer but also suppress any desire to be formally considered equal members of the holy community. This is how Greenberg explains the use of the laws of exemption:
[…] it seems that the principle and practice of exemption generally yielded negative self-images of women regarding a discipline of steady prayer. What tilts the balance perhaps is the language of the principle itself: “Women, slaves, and children are exempt” (Kiddushin 1:7). Of course, women are not equated with slaves or to children, but the phrase subtly suggests that, in the eyes of the Halakhah, women shared with slaves and children a status lower than the adult free men. Not lost on women, surely, was the realization that individual slaves and male children could grow up or out of these ascribed categories, but the entire class of women forever retained a status of ‘exempt,’ ‘released,’ ‘uncountable.’ (1981: 85)
The stance of this group of Jewish feminists, including Judith Plaskow, Rachel Adler, and to some extent Blu Greenberg, who lay the blame for the inferior position of women on the Halakhah, is perhaps best expressed by Plaskow herself. In her ground-breaking essay “The Right Question Is Theological,” and later in her book Standing Again at Sinai, she calls for a new understanding of the primary categories of Jewish theology, that is, Torah, God and Israel that should begin “with acknowledgement of the profound injustice of Torah itself,” adding that “the assumption of the lesser humanity of women has poisoned the content and structure of the law, undergirding women’s legal disabilities and [women’s] subordination in the broader tradition” (1995: 231). Adler expands on their stance in her Engendering Judaism, by maintaining that the central Jewish categories of Torah, God, and Israel are not sufficient for a feminist Judaism and that feminists must experiment with a variety of approaches to Jewish sources by moving outside traditional categories in their reconstruction of Judaism (2001: xxii–xxvi). She proposes “a theology for engendering Judaism in both senses: a way of thinking about and practicing Judaism that men and women recreate and renew together as equals” (2001: xiv).
Even Blu Greenberg, a Modern Orthodox feminist, seems to regard the halakhic process as a flexible means to ensure a change in the women’s position in Judaism. Her attempt is representative of those made by Halakhah-binding women who explore practical solutions to improving their status in Judaism by working within the halakhic system. Apart from struggling with the ideological tensions between Orthodoxy and feminism, in her book On Being a Jewish Feminist: A View from ←81 | 82→Tradition, Greenberg advocates greater women’s involvement in public ritual and communal prayer (1981: 95–97). Simultaneously, however, she foresees that her suggestions concerning the integration of women into the minyan will be perceived by Orthodox rabbis as too much innovation or even a violation of mesorah (Jewish tradition) (Greenberg, 1981: 93). Indeed,