JewFem Blog

The High Holidays don’t work for me. I know that Yom Kippur is supposed to be the holiest day of the year, and I’ve read and listened to many great ideas about how Yom Kippur is supposed to work on supreme spiritual issues and in sanctifying relationships and community. And I’ve been trying it out for a few decades now. But it just doesn’t work, and I think I finally figured out why.

The Jewish people would like to have a special day for forgiveness, but the fact is, we really don’t do forgiveness well at all.

Our entire calendar is dedicated to not forgiving. Every holiday is filled with rituals and practices and texts that urge us to remember the sins that others have committed against us since time immemorial. We remember what the Egyptians did to us over three millennia ago, what the Persians did to us over two millennia ago, what the Romans did to us beforeJesus created a new religion. One of the top six commandments of memory is aimed at the Amalakites a nation that doesn’t even exist anymore and attacked us before we even knew what “Israelite” meant. We remember what the Christians, the Spanish, and of course the Germans did to our ancestors (heck, 70 years isn’t even that long ago). This is what Jews do best: we remember, and we do not forgive. We create elaborate mechanisms with special foods and blessings and hundreds of pages of text in order to remember. We are the masters of remembering what others have done to us.

In fact, the most recent moment of ingrained remembering was just last week. Yes, Rosh Hashana is called “Yom Hazikaron”, the day of memory, and one of the pinnacles of the five-hour service is the afternoon amidah with its blessing of “zikaron” which reminds us of things that have happened in the world since the time of Adam. Seriously.

And now, ten days later, we’re supposed to let it all go? How the heck are we supposed to know how to do that?

For 364 days of the year, we have no mechanisms at all for letting go of anything. In fact, the opposite is true. We invest all our resources and energies on insuring that people don’t let go. A person makes a personal choice to let go, to not be bothered by acts of Jewish memory, is considered detached from his Jewish identity. The Jews spend millions of collective dollars on programs for “Jewish memory”, a hot catch-phrase in Jewish education, based on the idea that to forget means to lose a piece of who you are as a Jew, to stop belonging to the Jewish people. In fact, the entire existence of the State of Israel is based on the fact that for 2,000 years, the Jewish people collectively remembered a place that few had actually been to during that time and looked nothing like what our ancestors experienced.

What is Jewish feminism to me?

It’s a mission. A calling. An identity. A life purpose. To borrow a French term, it’s myraison d’etre. Or to borrow a Buddhist term, it’s my swadharma, the ideal that connects the work that I do in this world with my divine spark. It is the key that fires the engine in my soul. It is the spiritual ideal that wraps up my entire being reminds me that I am here on this earth because God decided that I need to be here, in this person, in this identity. Jewish woman. That is everything to me. It is all that I am.

It wasn’t always this way. This is an identity in two parts, two parts that sometimes coexist, sometimes fight, sometimes mutually empower and sometimes mutually deflect. One part, the Jewish part, I was born into, without a say in the matter, while the other part, the feminist part, I chose as an adult, following a journey that included pain, struggle and discovery. One part is ancient but the other is relatively recent — in definition, at least, though not as an ideal. One part has definitive, authoritative texts and rules while the other has a different kind of textual heritage, the writings of women creating ideas out of their own lives.

Yet both are divinely inspired. And the place where the two pieces overlap is, in my opinion, the place where the shechina rests.

The Bible’s Ruth epitomizes that place for me, the place where the core of Judaism and the core of feminism overlap and melt into each other.

When my fifteen-year old daughter, Avigayil, came home with detention for skipping morning prayer, I was devastated. It wasn’t just that in her pluralistic community school, where there are supposedly choices for everyone, I did not think detention for missing prayer was a possibility. It was not just that the angry note from the principal came without warning, without even a prior phone conversation to discuss my daughter’s spirituality or attendance record. What shocked me most was the newfound knowledge that Avigayil had no interest in prayer at school. If the people of our synagogue got wind of this, I thought, they would undoubtedly say, the principal must have the wrong kid.