a blog about old fashioned values, radically re-imagined
I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Was a little wary about writing about it, because I thought people might take offense without really reading, but....here goes.
Over the years I’ve taught many kids in preparation for bar and bat mitzvah. One of the challenges is getting them to project and enunciate so that everyone will be able to hear them. Self-conscious and semi-strangers in their own rapidly expanding skin, their voices get smaller as their bodies get larger.
It's been quite an introduction to our new community to see how everyone responded to the tragic loss of a teenager in a terrorist attack. It made me think a lot about how we treat each other in the Jewish community at large, and how we handle diversity of opinion. Here are my thoughts in the Times of Israel.
This summer, we moved north. Well, northeast to be exact. We still live in New England, though we are now Boston and not New York centered. I thought that this (nearly) life long New Yorker had considered all the changes that we would need to anticipate. What took us all by surprise is that in these darkest weeks of the year, shabbat begins before 4PM.
Should Orthodox women be rabbis? No one is asking ME that question. They already know my answer. But I have another, more complicated question. Where'd they get this idea, anyway? And why is it so difficult for them to tell the real story?
In today's Forward, I discuss what it's like watching from the other side.
I’ll begin by saying this. I’m really excited at the idea that Modern Orthodox women leaders, some of them friends of mine, are getting support pouring in from all corners of the Jewish world. Well, maybe not all, but many. This includes the CCAR, the umbrella organization for Reform rabbis. It is truly inspiring.
So why do I feel so frustrated?
One of my earliest memories is of my mother coming home from a meeting when our Conservative synagogue was debating whether to allow women to open the Torah ark. After hearing all the halachic arguments in favor of women taking on this supposedly controversial practice, a male congregant responded, and I may be paraphrasing here, “I don’t know anything about halacha, but seeing a woman on the bimah makes me physically sick.”
Last week, Rabbi Jeremy Fine wrote an article opining about the good old days, when Conservative Jews felt they needed to pander to the non egalitarian crowd. Some friends and I feel differently. We wrote about it in the Jewish Journal.
Less than half a century ago, the vast majority of Conservative congregations in the US were non-egalitarian. There were no rabbis who were women. Lots of synagogues refused to allow a woman even to step onto the bimah. Baby girls got a cursory naming at which they were rarely present, while boys were celebrated with the entire community. What a difference 40 years makes.
In a recent piece in the Jewish Journal, Rabbi Jeremy Fine laments the loss of the (non-egalitarian) Stein minyan at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). He claims that this is a sign that the Conservative movement has lost its way. That by getting rid of this prayer space the movement is saying to people who otherwise are philosophically aligned with Conservative Judaism that there is no place for them at JTS. That we will lose them to Modern Orthodoxy.
Our response is this. Change is hard. As feminists we are well aware of the massive changes for which we have worked and of which we are the beneficiaries. As religious feminists it is our nature to be skeptical before reacting to every shift in the wind. But the idea that women are the social and intellectual and LEGAL equals of men is here to stay.