Rabbi Yitzhak Schochet’s attack on the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance lays bare the rift in modern Judaism. It’s not between the Orthodox and everyone
else, but cuts across denominational lines, dividing people who want an insular
Judaism to bury its head in the sand from those of us who want our tradition to
embrace, critique and play a wholehearted role in the contemporary world.
Rabbi Schochet advises Orthodox feminists not to push too
far in their attempts to find equality in Judaism. He notes that the glass ceiling has been
shattered and women have achieved social equality, but religion is the wrong
place to extend these rights further. He
argues that Judaism is about serving God, not ourselves and that halachah
as a guide to God’s will is about obligations, not rights. He claims that no Orthodox rabbi recognises
‘partnership minyanim’ where women read from the Torah and lead parts of
the service. He writes that the
bat-mitzvah girl who wished her father could have been there when she was
called to the Torah has ‘missed the point.’
Most strikingly, he believes that Judaism has never relegated women to
the status of second class citizens.
I have news for Rabbi Schochet. We still live in a world of brutal oppression
and growing inequality. You don’t have
to go to the wartorn killing fields of Congo and Syria or the misogynist tribal
backwaters of the Taliban to work that out.
Even in modern civilised Western Europe and the United States we are
beset by growing economic inequality, incitement against the poor, discrimination
against immigrants and – yes – anti-Semitism.
If he thinks the glass ceiling has been shattered, he should count the
number of women in Parliament or on the boards of public companies. And all too often, both in the developing
world and at home, rather than speaking out against oppression and inequality,
religious leaders lend them a helping hand.
In this context, we have to ask ourselves: which side do we
want Judaism to be on? It’s simply not
good enough to argue that while we believe in equality, this value ends at the
entrance to the synagogue. If we believe
in equality, the first place to go about realising it is in Judaism. Anything else is a kind of doublethink which
makes a mockery of our values.
We should make no bones about the fact that the Jewish
tradition is a product of a patriarchal era and, as such, has often cast women
as second class citizens. True, the
rabbis of the Talmudic period instituted ground-breaking reforms to protect
women’s rights. But nowadays, the gap
between women’s status in halachah and the principles of equality and justice
is increasingly clear. Halachic Judaism
is built around the value of obligation or commandedness. The more closely one’s life is aligned with
the demands of the mitzvot the better.
But women are defined in Jewish law as a group which has fewer
obligations and thus fewer opportunities to do mitzvot. Less obligation translates into lower status. This also excludes women from leadership
positions in the synagogue.
More importantly, women have been excluded from halachic
decision-making. It’s no surprise that a
tradition shaped almost exclusively by men should turn out to be patriarchal. This point is lost on Rabbi Schochet, of
course, as he regards halachah as a pre-packaged statement of God’s will,
transmitted through human beings who take no active role in shaping its
contents. But for most modern Orthodox –and
all non-Orthodox – Jews, this is an untenable description of the tradition
which contains many voices, has a history and is influenced by social
conditions in every period (for more on this see Rabbi Louis Jacobs’ excellent
book A Tree of Life).
If halachah is created or at least shaped by human beings, it
can’t be expected to deal adequately with gender issues as long as women are
excluded from the learning and decision making process. The case for women
rabbis and poskot halachah – halachic authorities – is more than
clear. Rabbi Schochet’s point that women
should not pursue equality in the synagogue because Jewish law prohibits it is
flipped – until halachah can be shaped by women, how can it presume any
authority over them? And why,
specifically, should women accept the lower level of obligation and the
consequent limiting of their religious lives which has been imposed on them by
generations of male rabbis?
JOFA is clearly worthy of support, as were similar movements
that pursued gender equality in the Reform and Conservative/Masorti movement a
generation ago. But the fact that Orthodox feminism comes in
the wake of its non-Orthodox counterparts offers it both a resource and a
challenge. For decades, Masorti rabbis
have been formulating halachic solutions to issues of counting women in the
minyan, egalitarian services, calling women to the Torah, women rabbis and
witnesses, agunot, and so on. These
are legitimate, well-researched, scholarly legal resources. At last year’s Limmud Conference, Rabbi
Daniel Sperber commented that many Masorti rabbis are indistinguishable from
their modern Orthodox colleagues (he meant it as a compliment). So why let the fact that these solutions are branded
with a non-Orthodox label stop you from using them as a resource? Modern Orthodoxy has far more in common with Masorti
than it does with Haredi Judaism as represented by Rabbi Schochet (see Rabbi Sacks' comments on this) – especially on
this issue. Isn’t it time to overcome
the denominational divide and learn to work together in pursuit of a common
goal?
