JewFem Blog

Gender is like the slippery fish of news and politics. It doesn’t stay in the hand for too long, always slithering away as other issues that are considered “bigger” or “more important” take its place. At least that’s the impression I’m getting over the past few months’ of public activity around the exclusion of women in public spaces in Israel. Certainly the issue of gender segregation has arrived. But it is quickly swimming away as the public moves on. Indeed, even some advocates are bent on shifting the discussion elsewhere.

Take, for example, the subject of women singing in the army, and controversy over whether religious soldiers should be penalized for walking out of official events where women sing. Although this particular topic is not exactly highest on my agenda – it bothers me much more that *The Knesset* has not had a woman singer in years in deference to religious politicians; I care much less about a few confused young men than I do about governmental policy that excludes talented artists to appease religious men with power – nevertheless, the legislative activity on this issue has been disturbing.

MK Tzipi Hotoveli, the Knesset member who heads the Committee on the Status of Women, recently submitted a bill, along with MK Yakov Katz that would give the IDF rabbinate power to decide on what soldiers should be allowed to do, and ensuring that soldiers will not be penalized for “religious” issues. The bill would effectively authorize the exclusion of women in the IDF. Despite intense pleas by women’s groups, Hotovely came down on the wrong side of this issue. Thankfully, the bill failed to pass today in its initial reading. But this apparently had nothing to do with gender: Defense Minister Ehud Barak said blatantly that his objection had nothing to do with gender but is about his concern about the “damage to army hierarchies”.

In shifting the discussion away from gender onto other things, Barak has company. The former chief rabbi of the Israeli Air Force, Rabbi Moshe Ravad, who was connected to the Shahar program to recruit haredi Orthodox men to the army, said in his recent resignation over women’s singing that he “always relied on the fact that I could allow haredi men who enlist to maintain an ultra-Orthodox lifestyle and observe their faith.” The army’s decision to allow women to sing, he wrote, fails to “protect the beliefs of God-fearing soldiers”. Ravad, like many others, is trying to turn the exclusion of women into an issue of religious versus secular issues in the army and society. It is almost a veiled ultimatum, as if he is saying that the army has to choose between haredi soldiers and women singers. It’s easy to see where this is going. Women are going to be asked to move aside for the “larger” issue of haredi integration in the army. Thus far, the army has been on the women’s side, but it’s not clear how long the pressure will hold.

It is not only politicians, soldiers and haredim who have a gender problem; it’s also the media. A few weeks ago, the New York Times published a story about women’s exclusion – and quoted almost exclusively male sources. (One woman, Labor Party leader Shelly Yachimovich, was the only female sources, brought at the very end of the article, after seven men.) Indeed, the Huffington Post published an article on the topic that did not have any women quoted at all. It’s easy for the media to point fingers at haredim, but they are at times clueless about what the exclusion of women really means.

Even among some activists leading the fight, there have been issues about staying focused on the issue of gender. In the Beit Shemesh rally in December, men completely dominated; ten men in a row got up to speak, leaving important women till the end. There was a clear sense that many speakers were climbing on an anti-haredi bandwagon that had nothing to do with gender issues. Some leading (male) activists have said explicitly that they are not really interested in gender at all (e.g., women’s exclusion in politics, economics or the media) but only the extent to which it connects to the “larger issue” of haredi power in Israeli society. For some of us, the “larger issue” actually is gender.

I don’t know why some people find it so difficult to get fully behind the issue of gender discrimination, why women sitting on the back of the bus is urgent but women earning 65 agurot on the shekel is not, why the status of women is only “interesting” if it is connected to something else deemed more worthy. When members of the government and the media stay on gender without slipping away into religion versus state or IDF power, when our leaders are willing to look at their own sexist practices and not just those in the haredi world, then I will know that change is truly in the air.

Read more about the exclusion of women here

The following is a special excerpt from Elana's new book, The Men's Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an Egalitarian World, released Nov 2011:

Prologue

One cold Saturday morning, I walked into a synagogue in Jerusalem and did something I had never done before: I led the prayer service. It was January 2002, and my friend Haviva Ner David had called me to let me know that a new prayer group was forming and needed a woman cantor, a hazzanit. This was not a Conservative community, where this is normal, but rather an Orthodox group that was trying to give women as many roles in the service as was possible within Jewish law. Haviva said women would be allowed to read from the Torah, to be called up to the Torah and to lead certain sections of the service. This was quite a coup in a world where such roles for women were until then virtually unheard of. Haviva said that the whole project was about to become academic because no woman was willing to do it. “If you  don’t do it, we may have to ask a man to lead services instead. And that would just defeat the whole purpose.”

Despite my then 33 years of dwelling in Orthodox communities, despite the fact that my father is a seasoned cantor and Torah reader, and that his father was a famous cantor, and despite the fact that I had spent hundreds of hours sitting in synagogues listening to others leading the service, the thought of doing it myself was daunting – and, frankly, exhilarating.

"Okay, I'll do it," I said. Ignoring my complete lack of experience, and displaying either courage, blind faith, or startling irreverence, I agreed to do it. I called my friend Aaron Frank, an Orthodox feminist rabbi and Carlebach devotee, and asked for help. He taught me some tunes, made a tape recording, and guided me. I practiced for hours, suddenly making explicit what had only been passively understood, paying attention to stops and starts, memorizing melodies that I had heard since I was a child, and taking ownership, for the first time in my life, of a text that had been central to my religious identity for decades. I was ready to become a hazzanit.

This particular Shabbat was about to make history, not only for me, but also for the entire Orthodox world. It was the very first Shabbat service of Shira Hadasha, (literally ‘new song’) an Orthodox-egalitarian synagogue that has since become a legendary, world-renowned focus of conversation at countless dinner tables and blogs, and a must-see tourist spot for Jews of all denominations visiting Jerusalem. That first week, Haviva, along with Tova Hartman, a Harvard-educated feminist professor who was the spirit and energy behind the initiative, were nervous that nobody would come.  This was not a lecture hall where people from non-descript backgrounds were taking notes and writing academic papers on feminist theory or researching sources on women in Jewish law. This was an attempt to actually change Orthodox women’s lives. To succeed, they needed ten men, a quorum, willing to place themselves, their families and their religious identities behind a completely new idea. It was all rather unsettling.

That first Shabbat everyone watched the door in nervous anticipation. Would people come? Would anyone protest? Would some rabbi that nobody ever heard of issue an edict of excommunication? Would the participants even know what we were trying to do? To everyone’s delight, that first night, in which over 50 people participated, and which took place at the International Cultural Center for Youth on Emek Refaim Street in the funky and cosmopolitan German Colony, passed without incident. Within a year or two, it evolved into a standing room only service. This became the experiment that exceeded everyone’s wildest dreams.

Shira Hadasha had some unexpected consequences as well. Like the proverbial rock in the lake, it sent ripples throughout the Jewish world, altering Orthodox discourse and practice. Feminist communities have been emboldened, and the model has been duplicated in various versions in at least 20 additional communities from New York to Melbourne.  Shira Hadasha enabled more public roles for women and permanently changed the rules of what is considered possible within Orthodoxy. As one journalist in Modi’in, Israel, wrote, “People are asking: If they are doing it, why can’t we?” Suddenly, rather than asking, “Can we allow women to lead?” Orthodox communities are asking, “Why shouldn’t we?”

For many women, the world impact was not nearly as significant as the personal one. That Shabbat morning, I was not thinking about numbers or broad social change – I was feeling alive. Liberated. This was the moment when I stepped out of my assigned role, when I rejected that cloistered enclave that is the “woman’s place”, and experienced feeling truly present in synagogue for the first time.

Growing up in Brooklyn, New York in the 1980’s in a fairly typical modern Orthodox family of four daughters, going to synagogue on Shabbat had pretty much one meaning: clothes. My sisters and I would spend most of Friday planning our outfits down to the last detail, walking Avenue J to fill in the missing pantyhose, earrings, nail polish, shoes, and any form of accessory that would enable us to stand out while following the fashion rules.  Shabbat morning was full of the female family ritual of negotiating earrings and belts, and deliberating over jackets and the weather until we hit the ‘scene’ – that is, the “shul”, or synagogue. My sisters and I usually arrived towards the second half of the service. The prayer leader was like a stage performer – if you were lucky, it felt like going to a concert, but at other times the audience could be seen looking at their watches, snickering at their bench-mates’ jokes, or nodding off. Reprimands to stop the constant chatter were frequent, supplemented by the occasional loud rap-rap-rap on the podium.

There was a large stage at the front of the men’s section, where four seats faced the congregation. One seat was reserved for the rabbi, one for the President, and two for other communal leaders, such as the chairman or treasurer. I suppose the idea that a woman would hold one of those positions never even entered anyone’s mind. As far as I know, no woman ever asked to sit in one of those chairs; leadership was indelibly etched into the men’s section, and everyone seemed content. Certainly no woman ever asked to lead the services or to be president – in fact, I doubt it ever occurred to anyone to imagine such a scenario. There was no discussion, no suggestion, and no protest. That was the standard Shabbat experience of my youth.

For my father, however, Shabbat was an entirely different affair. He would wake up early, and, as if getting ready for work, put on his suit and tie, make a cup of tea, read the newspaper, and sometimes simply head off to synagogue in time for shaharit, the morning service. Other times, he spent the morning practicing his layning, the Torah trop, or cantillations. He was a seasoned ba’al k'riah, reader of the Torah, having mastered the complex tradition of trop at the age of 13. The sounds of my father practicing his reading on Shabbat morning spreading through the house, filling my lungs and spirit with the ancient chants as my body rose to inhale the Shabbat. I loved those sounds, perhaps as an unconscious alternative to the clothes ritual, or perhaps because I also longed to take part in this time-honored Jewish heritage of words and song.

But alas, I was a girl. The idea that I would one day chant from the Torah was beyond my life experience, a thought that was as likely to enter my consciousness as the possibility of one day becoming an astronaut or a Broadway dancer. These were things that religious girls simply did not do. Listening to my father practice his cantillations was the closest thing I had to a meaningful prayer experience.

As years passed, my own sense of alienation from Orthodoxy, especially Orthodox synagogue life, swelled. For a few years, I tried to come to synagogue earlier, in time for Torah reading, feeling a connection to this part of the service. Sometimes I would pay close attention to my father’s chanting, trying to figure out what notes the little lines on top of the text signified. It was like a puzzle, like learning to read music by listening to someone else play the piano. It was enchanting and stimulating, but owned by someone else. Eventually, when I became a young mother and going to synagogue was more of an effort, these moments subsided, and synagogue faded from my life. When Shira Hadasha opened, I had pretty much stopped going to synagogue altogether, except to stand outside and socialize. For although the sanctuary may not be a place for young mothers, the Shabbat community experience is still a central feature of Orthodox life.

Becoming a hazzanit in the synagogue was one of several watershed experiences that profoundly altered me, and helped me discover my own belief system and identity. It’s as if it released my spirit, and let me know that the sanctuary was a place where I actually belonged, where my presence mattered, where I could fully participate, where my space was a space not on the side of (passive) women, but rather in the center where prayer happened, where real connection to God was taking place. For the first time in my life, I felt like I was actually in synagogue. The Jewish heritage that I yearned for from behind the mehitza, the partition, became mine.

The establishment of Shira Hadasha was also a defining moment for my family. Shortly after it opened we moved to Melbourne, Australia, for three years. Because there was no equivalent of Shira Hadasha, I spent many Shabbat mornings at home. I eventually hooked up with the Orthodox Women’s Network, a group of remarkable, feminist women who have their own prayer groups once a month at mincha, the Shabbat afternoon service. There, under the warm and caring guidance of Dr. Jordy Hyman, Janet Belleli, and Naomi Dessauer, I learned to read from the Torah for the first time, and became an avid reader. Though relegated to a space outside of the synagogue, these women gave me the courage, inspiration, practical tools and friendship that enabled me to take ownership of this tradition among like-minded women.

When my oldest daughter became bat mitzvah in our third year in Melbourne, we gave her all the options for celebration. At the age of eight, she had been to Shira Hadasha with me, where she led the “Yigdal” at the end of the service, a role generally given to underage boys in Orthodox synagogues. Unlike me, she knew what it felt like to lead services. She had also come with me to the women’s prayer group many times, including for her friends’ bat mitzvah celebrations. She had also been to disco parties, and to the Conservative synagogue, and had experienced virtually the entire range of options for a bat mitzvah celebration. She chose the Shira Hadasha model because, she said, “the women’s group is unfair – why should we leave the men out?” I asked her to repeat that answer several times because I did not comprehend what could possibly be unfair to men. My experiences of female exclusion were not her experiences. She felt that she had every opportunity to read Torah, to participate, to lead services. And in a bizarre irony, the only exclusion that she witnessed was the exclusion of men from the women’s service! Shira Hadasha, in a matter of a few short years, had shifted my daughter’s perception of justice in the world. I had to wrap my head around the fact that her reality was simply different than mine; the world had changed rapidly indeed.

So we booked a hall and created our own private synagogue for the bat mitzvah, Shira Hadasha style, and it was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. Listening to my daughter read her entire portion, both from the Bible and prophet sections, in a room filled with 200 people was moving beyond words. Women who were called up to the Torah for the first time in their lives cried. My friend Janice Broder brought her 80-year-old mother, who also cried. “It was the first time I had ever touched a Torah,” she later told me. My daughter laughs when I recount this story, and finds it amusing that something so run-of-the-mill for her can be so wondrous to others. But it was an enormous event, the first of its kind in Melbourne, one that changed reality for many of those present.

A month later, a group led by Professor Mark Baker decided that it was time to make this type of sevice regularly available to the Melbourne Jewish community. Though these were our last few months in Australia before returning to Israel, they were in some ways the most spiritually fulfilling, because for the first time, we had a Shabbat experience as a family in which we all felt like equal participants. Sometimes I would read Torah, sometimes my daughter, and we all went to synagogue together. It was wonderful, and it changed our lives and shifted our expectations irreversibly.

When we moved back to Israel in August 2005 and settled in Modi’in, we naturally joined a group of people who were experimenting with a similar synagogue model.  After two months, the group, Kehillat Darchei Noam, started an Orthodox-egalitarian Friday night service in a private garden. Within two months, the group rented a space, borrowed a Torah, and initiated a Shabbat morning service as well. My family immediately became actively involved, despite a bit of a trek every Shabbat. It was uplifting to be in a comfortable place where the values that we believed in so strongly were shared. It is not surprising that within two years the community had 70 member families, not bad for a group that was not sure it would survive its first month.

My personal involvement with what has become dubbed in some places the “Ortho-egal shul” has taken on different roles over the past six years. I have been hazzanit, layner, teacher, event planner, web-content writer, youth leader and advocate. Between Melbourne and Modi’in, however, as I finished my doctorate and continued my professional interest in ethnographic research, my attention turned to research. Ethnography has that gripping effect: once an observer, always an observer. I could not take off my research lens.
What particularly intrigued me about places like Darchei Noam and Shira Hadasha were the men. It seemed to me that the motivations for coming to a synagogue like this were very different for men and women. As a woman, I could point to my own sense of disenfranchisement, the emotional and spiritual void that the synagogue was filling and in my quest for meaningful religious life. But I wondered: Why are the men here?

My curiosity was magnified during an otherwise innocuous conversation with a male friend, a liberal-Orthodox Jew whose bookshelves are lined with feminist literature, who has four daughters, and who I assumed would be supportive of the Shira Hadasha venture. To my surprise, he said, “I can never pray in a synagogue like Shira Hadasha – because if women are doing everything, what is left for men to do?” I considered this remark, and as much as it pained me, I understood. Clearly the men who go to a partnership minyan  are giving up something and getting seemingly little in return. The partnership model deprives men of absolute authority and ownership of the synagogue experience. I was intrigued at how men navigate that tension.

In 2006, therefore, after having taken part in three different Orthodox-egalitarian synagogues in three cities over two continents, I set out to find out about these men-enablers who go to partnership or ortho-egal shuls. I needed to understand these men, willing to go against social and religious convention on behalf of women, willing to risk alienation from religious normative life, to be labeled “non-Orthodox”, and to abdicate their proud roles as exclusive synagogue leaders. They actively engage in a form of social change on behalf of other, despite bombardments of messages about licentiousness, excessive sexuality, and threatening the continuity of sacred law. I wanted to speak to them, to find out what drives them, what motivates them, and what issues they have to navigate to be in this space. This book, then, is about men changing, and about changing men.

With this research, my connection to these synagogues has taken a new turn. It comes from a place of curious wonder, from the desire to open up an unexplored world. The gender navigations of Orthodox men are, indeed, a newly unearthed island in the ocean of qualitative research. It is thrilling and exhilarating to be at the edge of such discovery. Yet, ironically, I am discovering a world in which I have dwelled my entire life – that is, Orthodox Judaism. How strange for something to be so very familiar and yet completely foreign and unknown – the world of men. As Sara Delamont  writes, if women are changing, men ultimately have to change as well. Exploring men’s inner lives within religious Jewish practice has been an amazing and eye-opening voyage.

Read more or purchase the book

Book FAQ

It is impossible to overstate the intensity of emotion felt in Israel at the news of Gilad Shalit’s impending release. Many of us have been glued to the television screen with unrelenting tears in our eyes since we first heard about the imminent deal. It feels like we just let out a collective breath, like a balloon that had been about ready to burst just let out all its air. And I think this entire episode says something profound about Israel as a society and culture.

With the election of Shelly Yachimovich to head Israel’s Labor Party, two major political parties are led by women for the first time in the country’s history. This is an encouraging development not only because it helps advance gender fairness in Israeli society, but also because it potentially signals a new era for Israeli politics, one that has implications for issues as wide-ranging as the military, the peace process, the role of the Haredim and the movement for social justice.

The news that Saudi women will soon be given the right to vote – if the year 2015 is considered “soon” – is being hailed around the world as remarkable. The BBC called it “groundbreaking”, the White House called it an “important step forward”, and Saudi women’s activists called it “great news”. But this change, which arrived a century late (Finland became the first country to grant universal suffrage in 1906, and a dozen other countries followed suit), is also a troubling indicator about the reality of women’s lives, in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. It demonstrates just how far behind Arab culture is from the Western world, and it is a disquieting reminder of just how dangerous the language of “slow change” can be, especially for women – in all cultures.

The ancient walls of the City of David have never witnessed such a scene. Over four thousand women gathered outside Jaffa Gate last Thursday for the first ever mass festival of women’s athletics in Jerusalem. Women wearing scarves and long skirts shook their bodies alongside women in tank-tops and Lycra shorts to the overpowering thump-thump of dance-music as instructors shouted out motivating instructions like, “Come on, girls! Move those hips!”

Part cancer story, part memoir, part kabbalistic manuscript, ‘Soul to Soul’ is a story about death and dying, but actually it’s about life, relationships, suffering and God.

It is so hard to read a book written by someone who has recently died. The words on the page echo her voice, bringing her whole being to life in your head, behind your eyes, inside your ears.

You forget for a moment that she is no longer in her body. You mistakenly think she is simply elsewhere, in another spot on the planet, while you are holed away, escaping by yourself with her beautiful narrative.

Maybe she’s not really gone, just far away, your mind toys with you. Memories of conversations you had with her over the years morph in your imagination with the story unfolding in the volume open before you. You sense her presence, filling the room, envisage her sitting in the chair across from you, her soft smile lightening the atmosphere.

Anyone trying to understand why Israel does not have a fundraising culture needs to look no further than the tents on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. I know that the demonstrations are not about charity and non-profit life. But the events of these past weeks offer some vital insights into the future of the Third Sector and philanthropy in Israel.

On the most obvious level, what Israelis are saying is that they simply cannot make ends meet. I don’t know how much American Jews fully grasp the appalling status of Israelis salaries. The average monthly salary in Israel is somewhere in the range of $2000-2500 gross. Even two people working full time with those salaries, with say two or three small children and an average mortgage of $1500-2000 a month, will have a lot of difficulty meeting expenses. The newspapers these past few weeks have been filled with stories of people – highly educated, well-trained, and hard working people holding good jobs – whose living expenses are simply higher than their income. Sure, everyone has different ways to cut costs – moving to a moshav, bicycling to work, no afterschool lessons for the kids, second-hand clothes and books, never going out to eat or even ordering pizza, no cable, no second car, certainly no cleaning help and probably no gym membership, and definitely no family vacations to Europe. Instead, there is a lot of overdraft – some 80% of Israelis are living in overdraft, according to some estimates – and definitely no savings.

Kaya Stern-Kaufman is graduating from rabbinical school this spring, but she says she will not always be called “rabbi.” Instead, the 47-year-old mother of two will also use the title “rabba,” making her the first woman to specifically choose this Hebrew feminized version of “rabbi” as a preferred moniker.

Just what this will mean, however, is unclear. After initially announcing her choice in a press release issued by her school, The Academy for Jewish Religion, Stern-Kaufman said she will use either rabbi or rabba, depending on the circumstances.

“I can’t predict every situation,” she said, in an interview, when pressed to explain. “It will be just sometimes ‘rabba’ and sometimes ‘rabbi,’” depending in part on whether she is working in a Jewish or general setting.

This straddling is a choice that distinguishes her from the first woman to ever receive the rabba title. Sara Hurwitz, who had the title conferred upon her in a 2010 special ceremony, is an Orthodox spiritual leader whose Orthodox mentor devised the term on his own to address objections that he was breaking with the tradition that reserves the title “rabbi” for males.

Naama Shafir, a junior guard, poured in a career-high 40 points to lead the University of Toledo to victory in the Women’s National Invitation Tournament championship. She was crowned the basketball tournament’s MVP. And then she walked about two miles home.

Shafir, an Orthodox Jew from Israel, did not want to break the Sabbath.