Lysistrata in Sheital and High Heels: Have men hijacked the Mesorah?

To the average Yeshiva University denizen, Jewish Orthodox feminism is a double oxymoron -- the F-word irreverently flanked by two hallowed yet complex modifiers. As usual, the misguided, stereotypical position derives from unfamiliarity with the facts and a masquerade of simplistic, weighted views under the guise of haredi caution.

This article will do less to describe the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance's (JOFA) conference per se (visit http://www.jofa.org for that) than it will to explore why YU fails to involve itself with JOFA, both institutionally as well as on more personal levels. That Chovevei, JTS and Drisha appeared prominently exposes YU's haughty disinterest and reveals as much about YU's self conception as it does about JOFA's given its attracted clientele. Clearly, it also reveals much about Modern Orthodoxy at large.

When pressed, most will agree that women deserve a more active platform in Modern Orthodoxy. They have certainly put in their time in front of the cholent pot, the Shabbos candles and the washing machine, and having fled the kitchen (respectfully), they have enrolled in law school, medical school and the arts. Modern Orthodox day schools teach them that they can achieve distinction equal to their male counterparts anywhere they choose.

But it has lied.

Quarantined on the wrong side of the mechizah, barred from rabbinical posts and tagged "unclean," "more spiritual" but unfit for Talmudic inquiry, and stifled with the biblical rhetoric of Original Sin childbearing responsibilities, the Modern Orthodox woman finds herself bombarded from all sides. She may choose to float or to sink. To float is to bat her eyelashes and ignore her very valid complaints, while she may conversely choose to sink and add "feminist" to her curriculum vitae of stigmatized words that is her identity.

This year's conference dedicated itself to gender differences in "zakhar u'nikeva bara otam." Acknowledging gender difficulties in the tradition, JOFA President Carol Newman said, "I do want changes. I want changes to take place in a halakhically acceptable manner...and I am a very patient woman."

Patience is the name of the game, though JOFA will need much more than just patience.

This article will particularly attend to Dr. Tamar Ross', Dr. Tova Hartman's and Rabbi Yosef Blau's talks, first exploring their talks and then their impressions of the question of YU and JOFA's compatibility.

Dr. Tamar Ross, the philosophical approach

Ross began with the disclaimer. "There is something of an anomaly in a feminist conference that schedules a talk on Judaism as a gendered experience," she said, arguing that the Torah affirms and supports two separate genders and an "hierarchy and innate male superiority" (emphasis hers). "But irrespective of how we choose to interpret the metaphysical grounding of male hegemony in the Torah, there is no denying that a rigid view of gender and distinct gender roles became further entrenched with the development of the rabbinic tradition," she said, despite the differences between Genesis 1 and 2.

Feminism, according to Ross, confronts the model of labor divisions on the basis of multilayered essential differences in gender natures. Clearly, differences reside in the political realm of equal opportunities to women across the spectrum, but an ideology "understanding that gender equality must question the very notion of gender itself" remains a notion that paints the man as dominant and the woman as dormant.

Ross addressed the "dominant view" in modern feminist thinking (that she used Simone de Beuavoir to exemplify), which distinguishes between sex and gender, comparing it to the postmodern feminist platform which argues that all sexual differences are learned. She admitted many strides in debunking "the myth of 'women to the humanities and men to the natural sciences,'" but "many Jewishly observant women find it equally difficult to accept a halakhic ban on equal opportunities for learning Torah and on other activities of religious significance when that ban is grounded on essentialist claims."

This ban epitomizes a conflict between Judaism and feminism that involves defining God in a masculine image, and extending that groundless definition to include the divine. "Because our perception of God is the grand canvas upon which we generally project our understanding of reality," Dr. Ross said, "sociology tends to get objectified as theology and as a reflection of absolute truth." Thus, the whole system contains many manmade pit traps that not only threaten the Orthodox feminist, but that also camouflage themselves as an inherency of the system itself. Given this, "Can we find a halakhically kosher solution for responding to women's wish to read from the Torah, lay tefillin, wear tzitzit?" Dr. Ross wondered.

Ross stressed that not only has the male mesorah sought to undermine women, but that "to ratify it all, women have been kept totally out of the decision making process, leaving them no hope of their doing anything to change any of it."

"Ultimately, however," she argued, "the question extends to how we are to view the world we live in? Is the biblical conceptualization of reality cheating women of their natural birthright by describing the world and God in exclusively male terms?"

Ross argued further that discovery that a certain belief does not necessarily prove the case provides a variety of options, rather than discarding our initial conception entirely. "After deciphering the arbitrariness of gender, we may, if we wish, still prefer to accept or simply endure it... But all too often feminists are so excited by their new sense of release...that they immediately jump to the conclusion that this is reason enough for opposing and rejecting the picture altogether."

Even though male hegemonic conceptions of reality are not "the fixed furniture of the universe," she said some useful tools may still lie embedded within. "The agency by which any particular idea is generated need not say anything about its intrinsic worth." Practicality and various moral and religious advantages may lead us to accept the contingency, though flawed.