Jewish feminism: Plaskow and Adler

Overview

Recall questions on the rise of Jewish feminism, Orthodox and Progressive responses, Plaskow on Jewish memory, Sinai and language about G-d, Adler's critique of traditional marriage, the agunah, the Brit Ahuvim, and tensions within Judaism and with secular feminism.

What you need to know

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Questions from this subtopic

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1. 1

   What gave rise to Jewish feminism and to Jewish feminist theology?

   Model answer

   A combination of legal, liturgical and textual grievances that became visible once Jewish women entered higher education and the professions in large numbers and encountered second-wave feminism. In halakhah women are exempt from most time-bound positive commandments and are consequently not counted in a prayer quorum, do not lead public prayer, and are not accepted as witnesses in most matters; divorce depends on the husband's act; women were long excluded from serious Torah study. Liturgically the language of prayer is male, the patriarchs are named and the matriarchs were not, and a traditional morning blessing thanks G-d for not making the worshipper a woman. Textually the Torah's narrative and legal subject is a man, and women appear mainly as wives, mothers or problems. Jewish feminist theology developed when it became clear that adding women to existing structures did not address the underlying question of who the tradition assumes its members are.

2. 2

   How have Orthodox communities responded to feminism and to women in leading roles?

   Model answer

   With a wide range of positions and a good deal of internal argument. Almost all Orthodox authorities maintain the men-only rabbinate, the separation of the sexes in prayer and the traditional structure of the service. Within those limits a great deal has changed: advanced Talmud study for women is now widespread and institutionally supported, where a century ago it was opposed; women serve as halakhic advisers on the laws of family purity, as congregational scholars and educators, and as advocates in religious courts. Partnership congregations, on the more liberal edge of Orthodoxy, allow women to lead the parts of the service that do not require a quorum and to read from the Torah. The ordination of women with titles such as maharat or rabba by the movement sometimes called Open Orthodoxy was rejected by the main American Orthodox rabbinical body and by Haredi organisations, and remains the sharpest point of dispute. Haredi communities generally reject feminism outright as an external ideology, while pointing to the status they accord women within the home.

3. 3

   How have Progressive communities responded to feminism and to women in leading roles?

   Model answer

   By extensive and relatively rapid change. The Reform movement ordained its first woman rabbi in the United States in 1972 and in Britain in 1975, the Reconstructionists in 1974, and the Conservative movement admitted women to its rabbinical school in 1983 and ordained in 1985 after a bitter internal fight that led some traditionalists to leave. Progressive liturgy was rewritten to use inclusive language for people and often for G-d, to add the matriarchs alongside the patriarchs, and to remove the blessing about not being made a woman. New rituals were created for events the tradition had not marked, including ceremonies for the birth of a daughter. Women count in the quorum, read Torah and lead services. Progressive Jews generally present this as the tradition's own ethical principles applied consistently; Orthodox critics reply that a movement free to revise the law can hardly claim the change as a halakhic achievement.

4. 4

   Who is Judith Plaskow, and what is the central argument of her Jewish feminist theology?

   Model answer

   Plaskow is an American Jewish feminist theologian whose 1990 book was the first sustained attempt to write Jewish theology from a feminist standpoint rather than to argue for particular reforms. Her central claim is that the problem is not that women are excluded from this or that role but that Judaism has been formulated with men as its normative subject and women as other: the community that receives Torah, makes law and speaks about G-d has been male, and women's experience has therefore never entered the tradition as a source. It follows that the remedy cannot be admitting women to existing structures, because those structures were built without them. What is required is a reconstruction of the tradition's central categories, which she takes to be Torah, Israel and G-d.

5. 5

   What does Plaskow mean by reshaping Jewish memory to reclaim Torah for women?

   Model answer

   She takes Torah in the broad sense of the whole of Jewish teaching and the community's memory of its own past. Her argument is that this memory has been selective: what was recorded, transmitted and treated as significant reflects the concerns of those doing the recording, so women's experience is largely absent, and the absence is read as though women had not been there. Reclaiming Torah therefore means enlarging the memory rather than merely reinterpreting the texts. She points to two methods. One is historical scholarship, recovering what can be known about Jewish women's actual lives, religious practice and leadership. The other is midrash, the tradition's own practice of imaginative retelling, used deliberately to write women back into the narrative, on the argument that a tradition which has always filled the silences of scripture may fill these as well. She also insists that contemporary women's experience must itself count as a source of Torah, which is the more radical claim, since it makes revelation continuing and communal.

6. 6

   What is the problem of Sinai for Plaskow, and why does she treat it as decisive?

   Model answer

   In the account of the preparations for the revelation, Moses relays the instruction for the people to make themselves ready, and the instruction as given addresses them as men who are to keep apart from their wives. Plaskow argues that this single line reveals who is being addressed: the community standing at the mountain to receive the covenant is being spoken to as male, and women are present as part of the situation rather than as parties to it. She treats it as decisive because Sinai is the founding moment. If women were not addressed there, then their absence is not an accident of later custom but is written into the tradition's account of its own origin, and every subsequent exclusion has a precedent. Her response is not to reject the covenant but to insist that women must be understood as having been there, and that the tradition's memory of the event has to be rewritten to say so.

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