I attended a Sushi-making event put on by my friend Rochel at Chabad, during which we discussed the role of the Jewish woman. It discussed the topics you would expect, but what I was really struck by was the stark contrast in how that same message was delivered tonight, as compared to when I was a young girl in elementary school.
As presented during the event, "the ideal role of the Jewish woman is to be elevated in her roles as wife and mother, and to find deep meaning in shaping a Jewish life for her family through building a Jewish Home". In this post I will not debate the validity, pros/cons, right/wrong, or any other opinions on this point of view (though I will certainly be posting on some of this later). My point in this post is simply to illustrate the different lenses through which you can view this role.
I grew up learning that the greatest accomplishment a Jewish girl could hope for was to marry and become a mother. But this didn't sound like such a great deal, because it came along with so many things that we were not allowed to do. The boys got all the cool and impressive sounding mitzvot that you worked and studied hard to earn the right and privilidge to perform. Girls didn't get to earn anything, and in fact, were flat-out told that for most of the things the boys got to do, we were expressely forbidden to even think about doing them.
One year prior to Pesach, we were taken on a field trip to some so-called Lubuvitcher house in NJ. (I am considering it "so-called" because my current experience with Chabad is so drastically different, that I wonder if it really was truly a Chabad house.) It was a dark forboding row-house that from the inside reminded you of a historic NYC "shtetl" boarding house. It felt like I was visiting a Jewish-Amish home... I don't think I saw any furnishings there that were younger than 20 years of age. Everything seemed like an antique, as if they made the house up like a movie set, or more accurately a museum replica. The men wore your standard Chabad "uniform", but the women looked as if they hadn't updated their wardrobe since appearing on Little House on the Prairie. A young man met us at the door and led us down a thin hallway to a large back room. It was dimly lit inside (I would wish for sunglasses when we walked out of the house into the afternoon sun). The Rabbi met us in the center of the room along with a few other young men. I noticed there were women in the room, but they silently waited standing against the walls. They literally stood in the shadows, and you couldn't see their features at all - I could only tell they were women because I could see their lighter colored skirts against the dark wood paneling. It was creepy.
Looking around the room, there were several round tables set up in the back of the room, and the front of the room was set up as a synagogue, with an Aron HaKodesh in the front, a shulchan, a bookcase of siddurim, several rows of chairs, a mechitza and 3 more rows of chairs. The rabbi split up the group, taking the boys up to the front of the synagogue area, and having them sit in the front two rows of seats. He instructed the girls to sit in the rear, behind the mechitza.
The mechitza was a half wall with poles holding lace curtains up to about 3/4 of the way to the ceiling. When we sat down, most of us could not see over the wall, and ended up having to stand, or kneel on the chairs to see through the lace curtain. If we sat normally, we would have been staring at the wall. I know the Rabbi said he was going to talk about the holiday of Pesach with us, but while I could hear him talking, I couldn't understand a word of what he was saying. He was not talking loudly, and there were about 10 empty rows of chairs between us and the Rabbi talking to the boys. I did not understand why we could not sit closer and be able to hear. While I did know about how some synagogues separated the men and women, I did not understand why we could not simply sit boys on one side and girls on the other - why were we sitting all the way in the back, behind a wall, where we could not hear?
One of my female classmates suggested that maybe what the Rabbi was talking about was only for the boys? Like the health videos we watched the week before. We thought this sounded reasonable, and so we sat down and talked with each other while waiting for the boys to end their "Jewish health discussion". One of the women came over and scolded us, telling us to be quiet and pay attention. We told her we couldn't hear. She told us that we needed to be extra quiet and pay very close attention and then we would be able to hear. We stood again to see over the wall, and the woman told us we had to sit down and act like ladies. Some of the girls protested, saying that we had to stand to be able to see over the wall. She told us that we were a distraction to the boys, and that standing in the windows meant the boys could see us, and they were not allowed to see us, so we needed to stay seated. One girl mentioned that it was easier to hear when we were standing up, but the woman repeated that we needed to simply pay closer attention to be able to hear. So, we were left sitting staring quietly at the wall, concentrating on trying to discern muffled talking from behind a wall and across a room. I think I may have fallen asleep.
Of course all of that recollection is filtered through the lens of age. My memories do not seem so creepy to me now, but I remember vividly thinking to myself at the time that we must be in a Jewish haunted house attraction. The point of the recollection though is not to talk about what went wrong in that interchange as much as to establish that it was typical of what I was exposed to in my childhood regarding Judaism and what it teaches about the role of a female. The point of view was that the boys got to do the cool things, and the girls did not. They were expected to find joy and fulfillment in helping their future husbands to do all the cool things that men got to do. Male and female were not presented as equal, and the role of the female was considered lesser than the male, and often times was specifically presented as females were intended by God to be second-class and ruled over by their husbands due to the sin of Eve and the apple.
It was a significant part of the reason I rejected Judaism in my early teens. As a female, I did not have an equal share in religious participation. I also was... alright, I still am, a defiant sort. Tell me I can't do something, and watch me excel at it. Someone in my family called me "a Yentl" - which I would not understand until years later when I watched the movie - but they were right, I would not stand for being denied something simply because I was a girl.
So what a welcome breath of fresh air to be presented with, essentially, the same information, but in a female-friendly context.
We discussed how women and men were equal creations, and that it is a distortion of Judaism to consider a woman or her role as being lesser or second-class. That while a man's domain is the synagogue, and the woman's domain the home, that the main reason this "domain of the home" is seen as lesser is that society at large does not value this role. That if you really stop and consider the impact of the role of the female - leading the family, keeping kosher, seeing to the education of the children, keeping the home observances of Judaism - that the role of wife and mother is the role of ensuring the continuity of the Jewish people. Not a role to take lightly.
Again - this is not the post for me to offer opinions on the role as presented. (Later, later, I promise, we'll talk about it.) But it vividly illustrated that it's all about how information is presented - what is the lens through which we are viewing something. As a child, I was told the same exact thing about my role as a Jewess. But it was framed through the lens of a male. The male's domain was cool and exciting - look at all the mitzvot you got to learn and master, and perform as an adult. The female domain was primarily ignored, and so we were left to draw our own conclusions about why it was important to be a wife and mother. And considering the societal views we grew up with, that women belonged not in the home, but in the workplace, equal to the role of men, of course we would think of the role of wife and mother as being equivalent to being a "housewife" - someone who wasn't living up to her full potential and being trapped as a slave in the home. I was never presented with the concept that being a wife and mother could be an exalted position.
Being presented with a positive view of how Jewish women can find fulfillment in a distinctly feminine role within our tradition has not necessarily changed my questions and concerns about the topic. But it has allowed me to be open to learning more, as compared to rejecting the entire subject as old historic baggage.
This has also been a striking object lesson about the importance of framing and viewpoint in any discussion, and I hope that I have done justice in pointing that out.
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