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Feminism and Jewish Tradition |
| TAKING THE LAW INTO OUR OWN HANDS: REFORM AND THE FEMINIST REVISIONING OF HALAKHA |
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A Talk at Temple Israel, Minneapolis, Feb. 20, 1998Rachel Adler |
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| I want to talk this
evening about a touchy topic for Reform Jews - - halakha, Jewish law. As Reform Jews we
often feel bullied by people who claim to live by classical halakha. When we work together
in a community enterprise or live together as in the state of Israel, they sometimes argue
that they are bound by divinely revealed principles whereas we are following only our
inidividual preferences, and since transcendent principles trump personal preferences, we
ought to do things the way they want rather than the way we want. This is a serious
misunderstanding of Reform Judaism. We too have principles and not just preferences. But
we have shied away from the traditional Jewish way of embodying those principles as
communal norms - - halakha - - and I would like to see us reconsider that decision. Our Torah reading this Shabbat is Parashat Mishpatim, a thick collection of legal material that immediately follows the story of the Sinai covenant. We seem to have been the only people in the ancient near east who made a legal agreement with their God. Out of this legal relationship issues a flood of Biblical and rabbinic law. This emphasis on law made the early Reform Jews very uncomfortable. First of all, they were trying hard to become citizens of the new European nation-states, and those states wanted assurances that Jews did not have prior loyalties to a competing legal system. Second, the most modern philosophy, that of Immanual Kant said that ethical laws did not have to be commanded; reasonable people would all reach the same ethical conclusions if they knew how to think correctly. Obeying commandments meant relinquishing your ethical autonomy, handing your decision making power over to someone else. Third,, Christianity taught that religion was about love not law. And finally, Jewish ritual law was what made Jews look weird and alien, which is to say, different from Christians. For all these reason early Reform Judaism was embarrassed by law. They downplayed it or outright rejected its authority. Now 200 yrs later, Reform thinkers are reconsidering Jewish law. Why? A wholesale rejection of any halakhah leaves us with a major problem. Without a means through which the stories and the values of Judaism can be embodied in communal praxis, how are they to be sustained by experiences? Values and stories are empty and meaningless if we lack ways to act upon them. Without concrete, sensuous, substantial experiences that bind us to live out our Judaisms together, we are left with the problem Gertrude Stein is reputed to have articulated about the city of Oakland: There isn't any there there. |
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Rabbi Rachel Adler |
The difficulty about proposing a halakhah to progressive Jews is their presumption that the term, its definition, and its practice belong to Orthodoxy. We urgently need to reclaim this term because it is the authentic Jewish language for articulating the system of obligations that constitute the content of the covenant. In my book, Engendering Judaism, I use the work of an American Constitutional scholar, Robert Cover, to redefine what we mean by law . Cover maintains that law cnnot be reduced to rules and regulations. Law is wider and deeper than the rules it produces because law is generated by a nomos, a universe of meanings, values, and rules, embedded in stories. A nomos is not a body of data to master and adapt, but a world to inhabit. Know-ing how to live in a nomic world means being able to envision the possibilities implicit in its stories and norms and being willing to live some of them out. |
Ethicists, theologians, and lawyers who stress the centrality of narrative would argue that all normative systems rest upon stories. Whether the story is the exodus from Egypt or the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus or the forging of American independence, if we claim it as our own, we commit ourselves to be the kind of people that story demands, to translate its norms and values into a living praxis. If we defined halakhah not as a closed system of obsolete and unjust rules, but as a way for communities of Jews to generate and embody their Jewish moral visions, we would understand that Orthodoxy cannot have a monopoly on halakhah. No form of Judaism can endure without a halakha because there would be no way to live it out.
Halakhah comes from the root hlkh, "to walk or to
go."Halakhah is the act of going forward, of making one's way. A halakhah, a
path-making, translates the stories and values of Judaism into ongoing action.
Commitments, as I have been saying, emerge out of stories and are refashioned in stories.
The ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre says, " I can only answer the question, 'What am I to
do?' if I can answer the prior question, 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a
part?'"
It is particularly easy to see in this week's Torah portion how Jewish law is grounded in
our experience of having been slaves and having been liberated by God. The legal code in
our Torah portion resembles other ancient law codes with one striking exception: no other
law in the ancient near east opens with laws about how slaves should be treated. All
ancient economies involved slavery, But no other people in the ancient near east had so
many safeguards to keep indentured servants from becoming perpetual slaves. And in no
other ancient society was killing a slave prosecuted as murder.
If a halakha is a specifically Jewish process for at arriving at a specifically Jewish
praxis, rooted in Jewish stories and the experiences of Jewish communities then a halakha
is an integral component not merely of Orthodoxy, but of any kind of Judaism. Orthodoxy
cannot have a monopoly on the word halakhah and we have to stop conceding it that
monopoly.
Halakhah belongs to liberal Jews no less than to Orthodox Jews because the stories of
Judaism and the responsibility for translating those stories into communal praxis belongs
to all of us. When I say a halakha is a praxis I mean it is a coherent system for acting
on the committments we infer from our stories. A contemporary Jewish praxis would reduce
our sense of fragmentation. If we had a praxis rather than a grab-bag of practices, we
would experience making love, making kiddush, recycling paper used at our workplace,
cooking a pot of soup for a person with AIDS, dancing at a wedding, and making medical
treatment decisions for a dying loved one as integrated parts of the same project: the
holy transformation of our everyday reality. Furthermore, we would experience ourselves
less as fragmented enactors of divergent roles in disparate spheres--public/ private,
ritual/ethical, religious/secular, duty/ pleasure--and more as coherent Jewish
personalities.
We often think of law as rigid and static, even arbitrary. But o have credibility, to be
respected, law must claim to uphold some social meaning or value. It is not enough for law
to say, "Obey me because I have coercive power - - I can fine you or put you in
jail." All law has to be meaningful, and meaning is always growing and changing
because people and the cultural contexts they inhabit are always changing. Consequently
law has to be dynamic rather than static.
The image Cover offers to express the dynamism of the meaning-making component that both
constitutes law and propels law is the image of a bridge . Law-as-bridge is a tension
system strung between "reality,"our present world of norms and behavioral
responses to norms, and "alternity," the other normative worlds we may choose to
imagine. In other words, the bridge is what connects the world as it is right now to
potential worlds of meaning we might create: alternity. Law is neither reality nor
alternity but what bridges the gap between them, and what bridges that gap is "the
committed social behavior which constitutes the way a group of people will attempt to get
from here to there. Ultimately, Cover says, law is maintained or remade, not by
orthodoxies or visions but by commitments of communities either to obey the law as it
stands or to resist and reject it in order to live out some alternative legal vision.
Cover's image of the bridge built of committed praxis grounded in story makes it possible
to think freshly about halakhah, because it counters precisely those features that
progressive Jews, and progressive feminists in particular, find repressive in halakhah's
traditional formulations. It is dynamic rather than static, visionary rather than
conservative, open to the outside rather than closed, arising communally, cooperatively,
covenantally, rather than being externally imposed and passively obeyed. The metaphor of
the bridge also expresses what it is like to inhabit a modern nomos. Bridges are generally
open rather than enclosed. They span gaps and connect disparate entities, functions that
reflect the needs of open, democratic societies populated by diverse groups of highly
individuated modern selves.
This bridgemaking activity is not easy nor is it peaceful. People who inhabit a nomos
together cannot simply "live and let live" because they are interdependent. How
we live out the stories we share affects our neighbors' lives as well as our own. When
Orthodox authorities reject divorces or conversions performed by other movements, when the
Conservative movement ordains women or tables its discussion of the moral status of
homosexuals, when the Reform movement acknowledges children of Jewish fathers as Jews,
everyone's Judaism is affected. Those who present a different legal vision require not
just imagination and hermeneutical skill but courage, faith, and the ability to
communicate humanely and in a morally compelling way with the frightening and frightened
defenders of the existing legal order.
We cannot simply resurrect the old pre-modern praxis because it no longer fits us in the
world we now inhabit. Some of its elements are fundamentally incompatible with
participation in post-industrial, democratic societies. For example, we believe it is
fundamentally unjust to exclude women from communal worship or bar them from initiating
divorce proceedings. Because we understand human sexuality to be a complicated
interweaving of psychological factors, social conditioning and biological hard-wiring, we
cannot countenance punishing people for being homosexual. Furthermore, as Reform Jews, we
find it fundamentally undemocratic to try to coerce people to adhere to a single uniform
version of Jewish praxis. We expect Judaism to be pluralistic and we value its diversity.
Modern values are not inevitably superior to values we find in
classical halakha. But there are some distinctively modern values most of us would want to
incorporate into any decision making process we would commit ourselves to, values that
Jews have special reasons to cherish., such as equal respect, inclusivity, diversity, and
pluralism, the obligatation members if a society have to recognize and protect one
another's integrity and well-being. The prime example of classical halakhah's failure to
incorporate these values is its commitment to the subordination and exclusion of women in
communal life. The inability of classical halakhah to alleviate the second class status of
women is the paradigmatic example of its inadequacy as a praxis for Jews in modernity. A
halakha that is able to address the problems feminists raise, will be adequate to other
problems distinctive to modernity and post modernity.
The desire to live with integrity in the world as it is and to envision and enable a
richer, more human alternity are the yearnings that created Reform Judaism in the first
place. We wanted not to have our religious lives based on radically different premises
than the rest of our lives. We wanted to be whole. Reform Judaism's task for the
twenty-first century will be to regenerate a nomos, a world of legal meaning in whichwe
can be whole, a world in which the stories and dreams, revelations and responsibilities of
Jewish women and men are fully and complexly integrated and a richly textured Reform
Judaism takes shape.
Rachel Adler
University of Southern California
and Hebrew Union College-JIR
Los Angeles, California
| I am a committed Jew. I am also a
feminist. There was a time when these two committments seemed at war with one another but
I and other Jewish women reconciled them, and in the process we have had an immense impact
on every variety of modern Judaism. Thirty years ago, in no form of Judaism did women have
equal access to communal participation, leadership, or religious education. In no branch
of Judaism could women be rabbis or cantors. There were no women Judaica scholars teaching
at seminaries or universities. No women were high officials in Jewish communal
organizations, although women were their largest source of volunteer labor. Jewish law was
invoked not only in Orthodoxy but in other branches of Judaism to exclude women from the
minyan, the quorum for public prayer and hence, from leading worship services. Our
Conservative synagogues in Mpls. and St. Paul were among the very few in the world that
allowed women to be called to the Torah. Most women had never been near a Torah scroll.
They were usually told (despite Talmudic rulings to the contrary) that because women
menstruate, they would defile the sacred object. Today women are represented in all the
structures and institutions that sustain and reproduce American Judaism. A fierce battle has been fought for women's equal access in Judaism.
Traditionally women's religious behavior was home-centered and involved enabling rather
than leadership roles. Since Torah study was the preeminent obligation/privilege of men,
women's religious educations were rudimentary. Without access to education, women could
not speak authoritatively in a religion defined by its devotion to texts. Even had they
been permitted, they would have been incompetent to assume liturgical leadership roles,
since this required Hebrew scholarship and other specialized knowledge. Without equal
access, women could not be other than peripherally Jewish . |
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| I have said that equal access was the first requirement of feminist Jews. It is a necessary but not a sufficient goal. Equal access integrates women into structures created by men. It trains them to think and pray and study and practice in the androcentric or male-centered categories these structures generate. But if equality means only the erasure of women's difference, it makes women invisible by making them honorary men. What really has been accomplished when the woman rabbi exhorts us about the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man or the female Talmudist does a perfectly traditional analysis of a text about how much a virgin's hymen is worth? If women are really going to be full participants in Judaism, then Judaism has to reflect women's experiences and concerns and not just men's. The goal is not simply access but transformation. the very content of prayer, study, and praxis must be reconsidered and Judaism itself must be studied and practiced differently. |
Rabbi Rachel Adler signing books following the program. |
| Feminists differed about how this was
to be accomplished. But there is a basic problem about innovation and that is the problem
of authenticity. If all the traditional texts and liturgies were rewritten and and all the
ancient practices replaced what entitles the result to call itself Judaism? I argued that
authentic transformation has to emerge from engaging with Jewish tradition. Now, a
religious tradition is not a static monolithic artifact, not a thing you manipulate but a
conversation you join. The conversation is vast, a sort of Internet unrestricted by
mortality. Imagine the various books of the Bible, the tractates of the Talmud, the law
codes and commentaries and responsa not as a collection of books but as thousands of
voices in that conversation all articulating different outlooks and different opinions.
All who study, teach, and write within Judaism are adding their voices to this immense
conversation and speaking to one another across the centuries. But historically the Jewish conversation had always excluded women. With very few exceptions, they were not able to become writers or interpreters, lawmakers, chroniclers, liturgists,or mystics. Our task, as I have understood it, is to talk our way into this conversation. If a tradition is an entity whose rules are ahistorical and unchangeable, then women cannot be invited into it because they were not there to begin with. But if a tradition is a conversation, then it is fluid. People talk their way into conversations. They slide in or edge in when they were on the periphery and even if the previous conversationalists are thinking, how the hell did you barge in here, they're also likely to be at least a little curious and intrigued. Because without infusions of new participants, conversations get boring. Talking our way into the conversation of tradition raises a number of questions: What does it mean for women to join a conversation from which they have been excluded for centuries, an interchange whose past topics, language, and categories were framed by interests and experiences other than their own? How does the conversation itself change when women bring their experiences and needs and desires to it, and how are conversations from before their inclusion re-viewed in retrospect? Once in conversation with religious traditions, women bring new perspectives on old questions as well as new questions altogether. These questions have far-reaching implications for redistributions of social power and religious authority and leadership. They require reevaluations of canon, of how to interpret texts, of how Jews ought to practice Judaism. The following are a few of the areas affected. One of the earliest and mostv exed theological questions spotlighted by feminist Jews concerns the authority of Jewish law. Because the theological implications of Jewish law are realized in praxis, the subordination of women in classical Jewish law is no mere theoretical issue. Orthodoxy maintains that Jewish law is divinely revealed and consequently its method and mechanisms cannot be changed. For non-Orthodox Judaisms the problem is more complex. Jewish law is seen as a historical development and a human construction. Left-wing versions of Reform Judaism that prize autonomy have been at war with Jewish law for two centuries. They would argue that Jewish law is not binding or in response to critics who sarcastically suggest that they rename the Ten Commandments the Ten Suggestions, they argue that only the ethical principles are binding but not laws involving rituals. The problem is that Jewish law is the means by which the particular stories,values and ethos of Judaism are transformed into action. Without a distinctive obligatory praxis -- something more than just being ethical-- Judaism has no content. As Gertrude Stein reportedly said of the city of Oakland, there isn't any there there. Law conserving versions of Reform and Conservative Judaism argue that Jewish law must be maintained but that properly constituted authority (by which they mean themselves) can change the law. As you can see, the conversation between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Judaisms about law was a mine field even before feminists stepped into it. Feminists (largely me) offered the following critique : classical Jewish law is a system whose categories and methods were constructed by a male elite who have also monopolized its application. Their presumptions about what data is important regarding women are reflected in its categories, process, and content. Given the presumptions made by the system about the status and function of women, legal data about them will stress questions of marital status, of tasks and obligations vis-a-vis husbands and fathers, the disposition of property brought into marriage by women or subsequently acquired and the exclusion of women from the masculine realms of Torah study, juridical activity, and public prayer. The presumptions select the questions. The categories shape them. Adjudication creates precedents that influence the form and direction of future questions. Predictably, then, when the system is asked to address the concerns of Jewish women, it rejects topics women might advance which do not affect its preestablished legal concerns and, hence, upon which it has no information. Instead it turns to the topics upon which it has the most information: the status problems of marriage, divorce, and desertion, and the participation problems of witnessing, judging, and liturgical performance --problems created by the system and its presumptions. For Reform and Conservative legal authorities to put bandaids on specific legal problems is an insufficient response to the feminist critique. If the source-texts of Jewish law are not timeless or absolute but shaped within social contexts, if its categories must exclude much of our gendered modern life experiences as non-data, and its authority structure is neither democratic nor inclusive, then adapting its content to modernity is an inadequate solution. To argue that the system requires no systemic critique, you must ignore or discount the fact that legal rules, categories, and precedents were constructed and applied without the participation of women, that they reflect perceptions of women as a commodified sub-class, and that they are inadequate or inimical to concerns which women themselves might raise if they were legal subjects rather than legal objects. Naturally everyone was thrilled with us for making such an interesting critique. In fact feminists argue even among themselves about how to solve the problem. Orthodox feminists maintain that discrimination against women is historically conditioned rather than a manifestation of divine will, and that it can and should be amended through existing legal mechanisms. Other feminists argue that Jewish law is nothing more than a structure for maximizing male power and authority in Jewish communal life and can serve no useful purpose in a feminist Judaism. I argue that law-making in partnership with God is a defining feature of Judaism, but merely amending discriminatory laws is insufficient. Jewish law must be radically re-envisioned, the narratives that ground it must be reinterpreted, and the power to create and maintain law must be distributed equitably throughout the community of those who commit themselves to it . A further question is whether feminist issues are necessarily legal problems. Jewish feminist theologians originally formulated some issues in legal terms simply because there was a legal literature on the topics of gender, the female body, and sexuality, whereas these topics had no precedent in Jewish or non-Jewish philosophical theologies of the past. Access questions such as whether women could count in a minyan, be called to the Torah, or be ordained as rabbis, were phrased in legal language because the male-dominated institutions that controlled access insisted on phrasing them in these terms. However, the tendency to articulate all feminist issues as legal questions permits legal language and categories to hold hostage what are essentially theological questions and to refrain from addressing equally crucial non-legal questions concerning exclusively masculine God-language and androcentric sacred narratives . The feminist debate over Jewish law, then, reawakens the familiar theological challenges of modernity: If beliefs and behaviors are shaped within social contexts that vary from place to place and change over time, how can any revelation be eternally true and binding? What sanctity should be accorded to tradition? Has the past any claims upon us? By what processes is revelation reshaped within historical time, and who has the authority to do this reshaping? Representations of God and Israel: Language and Imagery Another approach to feminist theology gives precedence to issues concerning the representation of God and Israel in language and imagery. Some feminist scholars charge that depicting God as male both constructs and justifies a world in which power and authority are allocated to men. The primary responsibility for making women "The Other" rests not with Jewish law, they argue, but with theological conceptions of God as male embedded in stories and prayers. A legal system that privileges men and subordinates women is an after-effect of male-supremicist God-language. Most feminists agree that an exclusively masculine God language is ethically objectionable because it fosters injustice, but it is also theologically inadequate because it suggests that masculinity is an essential attribute of God instead of a metaphor. Some feminist theologians would rather than all God language be gender neutral and steer away from anthropomorphisms. Others argue that the only way to make clear that masculine God language is metaphoric, rather than describing some truth about God's essential nature is to use feminine God language as well. This discussion has produced both new theology and new liturgy. Many feminist thinkers have revived interest in feminine God-imagery and in non-gendered images drawn from nature, some of them traditional in origin, for instance God as rock, lion, or tree (Gross,1983, Falk,1989, Plaskow, 1990, Frymer-Kensky, 1994 ). Marcia Falk has produced a prayerbook which not only incorporates such imagery but replaces the masculine language of time-honored canonical formulas (Falk, 1996). New Rituals and Ceremonies Orthodox Judaism knows of only two life cycle rituals for women: weddings and funerals. The woman is equally silent at both. Traditionally, women are not counted as participants in communal prayer, nor do they lead home rituals such as the Passover seder. Consequently, feminist Jews have both demanded equal access to life-cycle ceremonies and communal prayer and invented religious ceremonies and religious language to address previously unacknowledged experiences in women's lives (Orenstein, 1994).. Bat mitzvah, the first ceremony to which women attained equal access in non-Orthodox American Judaisms, exactly parallels the boy's bar mitvah. However, the demand for bat mitzvahs among women who were not given Jewish educations as children has given rise to adult bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies in which grown women and men celebrate, not their religious coming of age, but their attainment of religious competence. One important ceremony to which women cannot have access is circumcision. Baby boys are traditionally initiated into the covenant through circumcision. At this event they are named and take their places in the historical community of Israel. There is no comparable ceremony to affirm the entrance of baby girls into the covenant. This issue had to be addressed both ritually and theologically. What is the nature of the covenant to which the child is being pledged? If women lack the covenant of circumcision, are they included in the covenantal people or are they an addendum to it? Feminists who argued that Judaism has an equal access covenant innovated B'rit bat ceremonies to welcome baby girls into the covenantal community. The ritual act by which this is to be accomplished has been the subject of much debate, the most extreme (theoretical) proposal being hymenotomy. There is as yet no standard form of the ceremony, though predominant rituals involve light or water. An emerging feminist critique suggests that the association of circumcision with covenant inherently glorifies the penis and grounds masculine privilege in Judaism. The proponents of this critique propose an alternative covenant ceremony for boys as well as girls. A variety of innovations articulate the possibility for holiness in women's experiences and concerns. New blessings and rituals celebrate menstruation, childbirth, weaning, women's entrance into elderhood and wisdom and offer healing for traumas such as miscarriage, rape, and hysterectomy, A variety of liturgical events draw upon rabbinic references to women's celebration of Rosh Hodesh, the New Moon. Many women's groups also celebrate an additional Passover seder with haggadot focusing upon redemption from the bondage of sexism. Many of these rituals are as permissible to Orthodox as to non-Orthodox women. If they fill a liturgical vacuum rather than replacing some preexisting liturgical form, and if they are separate events for women only, classical Jewish law has no precedent for forbidding them. At the same time, because such rituals inhabit an intermediate space between private and public, where attendance is optional and restricted to invited guests, they do not require the larger community to integrate women's experiences and concerns into the genres of institutionalized liturgy and the ritual events of public synagogue worship. These liturgies and rituals that celebrate experiences only women have are problematic in two ways. First , they are sometimes accused of perpetuating gender stereotypes, because they emphasize women's biology--menstruation, birthing, lactation, miscarriage, menopause. You don't find men clamoring to ritually commemorate their first seminal emissions. Some feminists detect in these rituals an assumption that what is important or religiously significant about womenm can be reduced to what their bodies do. The second problem is that rituals exclusively for women serve to segregate women while allowing masculine-language liturgies to go on unchanged in synagogue services. An analogous phenomenon occurs in educational programs: courses exclusively for women about women and often taught by women (usually untenured and usually for chickenfeed). These courses have titles like Women in the Bible or Women and Jewish law or women in different periods of Jewish history. These courses are premised on a fallacy. They assume that there is a pure ungendered entity called Judaism to which studies concerning women can be added. They also assume that only women would want to know about such matters. Men could just study Judaism not men in Judaism or men and Judaism, just plain Judaism. But if it is true that gender is a social construction, then the impact of gender on Judaism cannot be pigeonholed as a women's problem. Masculinity is no less constructed than femininity and no less context-dependent. To paraphrase an old spiritual, all God's chillun got gender. There is not and never was a Judaism unaffected by the gendered perspectives of its transmitters and augmenters. If, as progressive Judaisms argue, social and historical factors affect Judaism, then it is hardly tenable to argue that gender is the only variable to which this rule does not apply. The impact of gender on Judaism, then, is not a women's issue; it is an issue for everyone who seeks to understand Judaism. Anyone who seeks to understand the texts of the past--historical, legal or theological-- needs to be attentive to how gender is represented in them. Moreover, once we acknowledge that gender is a social construction, we have to assume responsibility for how we are constructing it.and how those constructions limit or damage people. Only when we cease to use sexual difference to build domination and oppression into societies can we begin to truly honor the God whose image men and women equally reflect . |
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