The Impact of Gender on Jewish Religious Thought. Exemplar: Jewish Feminist Theology

Abstract

From the early 1970s a small number of Jewish women began to express theological concerns about the kind of language, concepts and values used to evoke the character of God. Judith Plaskow, who had identified as a feminist since 1969, was equipped by both feminist theory and her postgraduate studies in Protestant theology to argue that the Jewish tradition’s assumption of women's Otherness to men and to God is theological and determines their socio-cultural roles and status in Judaism before any particular halakhot might do. Judith Ochshorn also pointed that the masculine God’s Oneness relegates anything that is not the same, namely the feminine, to a lesser or deviant order of power and reality. Where the divine and human masculine will is considered normative and ordains the nature and sphere of female activity as the silent object of its discourse, women are dehumanized. They are the Jews ‘who are not there’ as Adler had described them in 1973. In 1979, the Jewish feminist novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick famously pointed out that while the whole point of the Torah is to countermand the ways of the world, its ethic has not extended to proscription of the dehumanization of women. This glaring omission led Ozick to propose an 11th commandment: ‘Thou shalt not lessen the humanity of women’.