Reflections on Feminist Jewish Approaches to the Bible and the Making of a Feminist Jew in Israel

This article incorporates personal insights into the development of feminist Jewish approaches to the Bible. I discuss what it means to be a feminist Jew in Israel and make a clear distinction between feminist Jews and Jewish feminists, by using my personal history as a feminist Jew and how my upbringing in an intense American Jewish environment influenced me. I explain how I became a feminist Jew and reflect on the Jewish feminism that emerged between the 70s and the 90s. My reflections are part of the process through which I became a midrash writer and an independent Bible scholar and in doing so I situate myself within various feminist/Jewish approaches to the Bible. In the third section of this article I describe how I and other feminist Jews have dealt with the problematics of being both Jewishly engaged as well as being ardent feminists. I conclude the article by citing a poem by a well-known Bible scholar who represents to me what it means to be female and Jewish at the same time. In 1992, I made a list of “How I became a feminist Jew.” This is what I wrote then: 1. I enjoyed Junior Congregation until I turned twelve when I moved upstairs in the main synagogue (in the women’s section) and became an usherette. The 5th grade cantillation class, where we learned how to read the Torah tropes, was wasted on me because they were irrelevant—who ever heard of a female Torah reader. I did not enjoy prayers in camp and I always tried to escape. I flunked Judaic subjects in high school despite my fluent Hebrew. 2. I read Betty Friedan when my first born daughter Ariella was five months old and thought my life was wasted and over and wished I could begin it again, unencumbered by marriage and children. I wrote an impassioned, single-spaced two pages bemoaning my fate and then forgot all about it. 3. My active synagogue participation began in Omer when Ariella was 10 years old with the realization that if I did not serve as a role model for the community, my daughter would not consider it natural either to participate in and/or lead services for her Bat Mitzvah. 4. I began to learn all the issues--reading the quarterly Conservative Judaism and everything else I could get my hands on; convincing my husband the rabbi of the correctness of this (as well as myself). First I learned how to chant a haftarah and then decided I could do Torah reading as well if not better than my husband and began doing it for more than forty years. 5. I began to write midrash when I returned from my “wasted” sabbatical in 1985. a. This resulted in the investigation of rabbinic midrash to see what its attitudes towards women were, and b. conscious writing of midrashim which reflected the feminist approaches of Judith Plaskow etc. 6. My participating in the first (and only) Jerusalem International Conference on Women and Judaism: Halacha and the Jewish Woman (1986) and in a feminist conference in Ireland, where I gave papers on the topic of the rape of Dinah which led me to a more radical approach which I then tempered (do not throw out the baby with the bath water). 7. My need for a support group and desire to set up a resource library led to starting a branch of the Israel Women’s Network in the Negev. 8. My trip to Russia (in May 1987) led to a feeling of sisterhood vs. identity and loyalty to my religious group. 9. My dialogue with Arabs made me think, am I a feminist first or a Jew? Israeli? Is there a contradiction? I thought so then – if we were being honest with ourselves. 10. I then began to think “What does it mean to be a feminist Jew?” To whom is the ultimate loyalty? This was in the wake of the First International Jewish Feminist Conference in 1988, which was also when the Women of the Wall first met. 52 MELILAH MANCHESTER JOURNAL OF JEWISH STUDIES 13 (2019) Being a Feminist Jew in Israel I have been a feminist Jew in Israel for more than forty of the fifty years I’ve lived in Israel. What does it mean to be a feminist Jew in Israel? In describing myself as a feminist Jew I am making a statement. Obviously there is no one party line for what it is to be a feminist and that is true more so of being a Jew. It gets even more complicated when we connect the two. Just as Judaism is not monolithic, so there are many feminisms. I think that it is safe to say that all feminists agree on three things. 1) There is such a thing as patriarchy. 2) It is necessary to be critical of this patriarchal society and finally, after critically examining society it is necessary 3) to take action, protest and attempt to change this society that we criticize. Both the Jewish feminist and feminist Jew recognize all of the above. The difference perhaps is in the degree to which one is critical. Namely, what is one willing to overlook? Where are the red lines? How deeply do we wish to go? Do we want to undermine the entire enterprise to make a point? Often the latter seems true of the committed Jewish feminist. The feminist Jew might be critical but she will press the brakes when the protest, action and attempt to change seems to be veering out of control and/or if it means being written out of her home community. Feminist Judaism vs. Jewish Feminism When I try to distinguish between the concepts of Jewish feminism and feminist Judaism, I often get confused. Yet I think it is important to make a distinction. It is a matter of priorities. In today’s parlance, it is connected with identity politics. It is true that by making this distinction I am falling into the trap of ignoring and/or conflating other important issues. To clarify, I find it helpful to think of myself as an American Jew who has chosen to live in Israel, whereas the Jewish American still lives in the U.S. Yet, if I ask my close friends and relatives who have a similar trajectory to mine—namely Hebrew Day Schools, Hebrew speaking, Zionist Camps and Higher Education in a Jewish Institution—what they call themselves, they will all describe themselves as American Jews. The majority of Jews who live in America—who have no connection to Israel, do not attend synagogue and do not know how to read Hebrew—and are very loosely connected (if at all) with the Jewish community should be more accurately described as Jewish Americans. It is not so easy to differentiate between the Jewish feminist or the feminist Jew. There are many Jewish feminists whose main allegiance in the past was to feminism, who became interested and totally involved with the Jewish part of their identity and thus became feminist Jews.1 When I am confronted with a conflict between my feminism and Judaism I will push the envelope as far as I can but will ultimately remain steadfast to my sense of being a Jew. I follow this principle in my academic writings. Thus in challenging the tradition to change, I have not left the camp, despite the fact that much needs to be done. Although it is more common and natural to refer to myself and others like me as Jewish feminists, it is probably more accurate to see ourselves as feminist Jews. Those many women who are activists in liberal causes and/or are in academia would probably describe themselves as Jewish feminists. Presumably they would follow their conscience in deciding their loyalties to the “cause” and/or scientific rigor. However, there are many like myself, who while engaged critically * Retired Senior Teacher, Deptartment of English as a Foreign Language, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Email: graetz@bgu.ac.il 1 I think that Letty Cottin Pogrebin and Phyllis Chesler are excellent examples of this. Pogrebin, a well-known feminist journalist, was one of the founders of Ms. Magazine, but then later wrote a book called Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America (1991). Today she sends out a weekly digest of articles which reflect her very liberal political and religious views. See the article where she talks about this in 2014, when she received an award from Hadassah: http://njjewishnews.com/article/19024/authordescribes-return-to-judaism#.U2zipVfDX8M. Chesler, a prominent academic psychologist, started out by writing about Women and Madness (1972) and later got involved in the Women of the Wall. She co-edited a book with Rivka Haut (a well-known publicly identified Orthodox feminist Jew) Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism's Holy Site (2002). Both Chesler and Pogrebin (whose politics today are diametrically opposed) were participants and leaders in the famous women’s Passover Seders that started in 1976 in Esther M. Broner’s living room. Both also initially rebelled against the religious strictures of the Jewish homes they came from. REFLECTIONS ON FEMINIST JEWISH APPROACHES TO THE BIBLE (GRAETZ) 53 with our texts, also tweak our approach and try to find some saving grace, if possible in the same text. This is actually easier than one thinks, since Judaism is not and has never been a monolith. The approach to text is traditionally one of dialogue and thus one can always find an opposite opinion. Being a feminist (religious) Jew in Israel used to be more of a problem than it is today— although Orthodox women are reviled for being feminists (especially in their own community where it is still very much an “F” word). To feminists in Israel being a religious Jew (or identifying as a Jew rather than as an Israeli) is equated with sleeping with the enemy. I have experienced the sense of being welcome in neither group because of my affiliations—on the one hand as a Conservative Jew (not accepted by the Orthodox) and as a religious Jew (not accepted by the secular). This is of course changing as more and more women with strong Jewish backgrounds awaken and re-discover the inequities in our tradition. The ferment in Modern Orthodox communities often seems like a re-invention of the wheel as they discuss women’s place in the synagogue, the wearing of tallit and tefillin, but I find it exciting to view and comment on and try to be part of this revolu