Why Rabbi Schochet's wrong about feminism

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?