Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Jewish Memory from a Feminist Perspective (1986) p.1
Judith Plaskow is Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College. Her scholarly interests focus on contemporary religious thought with a specialization in feminist theology.
There is perhaps no verse in the Torah more disturbing to the feminist than Moses' warning to his people in Exodus 19:15, "Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman." For here, at the very moment that the Jewish people stand at Mount Sinai ready to enter into the covenant - not the covenant with the individual patriarchs but presumably with the people as a whole - Moses addresses the community only as men.
The specific issue is ritual impurity: an emission of semen renders both a man and his female partner temporarily unfit to approach the sacred (Leviticus 15:16-18). But Moses does not say, "Men and women do not go near each other." At the central moment of Jewish history, women are invisible. It was not their experience that interested the chronicler or that informed and shaped the text. ...
We cannot redefine Judaism in the present without redefining our past because our present grows out of history. The Jewish people need to reconstruct the past in light of the present converges with the feminist need to recover women's history within Judaism. Knowing that women are active members of the Jewish community in the present, we know that we were always part of the community, not simply as objects of male purposes but as subjects and shapers of tradition. To accept androcentric histories as the whole of Jewish history is to enter into a secret collusion with those who would exclude us from full membership in the Jewish community. It is to accept the idea that men were the only significant agents in Jewish history when we would never accept this (still current) account of contemporary Jewish life.
The Jewish community today is a community of women and men, and it has never been otherwise. It is time, therefore, to recover our history as the history of women and men, a task that will both restore our own history to women and provide a fuller Jewish history for the Jewish community as a whole.
Rachel Adler, "A Question of Boundaries" (2016)
Rachel Adler is Professor of Modern Jewish Thought and Judaism and Gender at Hebrew Union College, at the Los Angeles campus. Adler was one of the first theologians to integrate feminist perspectives and concerns into Jewish texts and the renewal of Jewish law and ethics.
I have been saying that the obligation to do justice is derived rationally, and rests upon on prerequisite obligation to perceive a likeness to self in the other. Taken together, these obligations comprise a fundamental normative principle in Judaism. If this is so, however, why has Judaism consistently estranged and excluded its most intimate others – Jewish women? How shall we understand sacred texts that polarize and subordinate? How shall we determine what authority any text may claim to form our attitudes and to inform our actions?
What perpetuates this intimate injustice in Judaism is that in its deconstruction of dualistic, other-rejecting, patriarchal thought-structures, Judaism stops short and leaves in place the foundational construction – the otherness of woman. This constructed rift is embedded so deeply in our language, in our psyches, and in some of our texts that we reinforce the objectification and estrangement of women without even being conscious of it.
Man names himself zachar in Hebrew, the creature with the male member. And it is perhaps more than coincidence or homophony that the zachar is also the zocher and the zachur, the rememberer and the remembered. In a patriarchy, the only memory is the male memory, because the only members are male members. They are the remembers and the remembered, the recipients and transmitters of tradition, law, ritual, story, and experience. They are the righteous whose memory will be for a blessing and the teachers whose lips will move in the grave.
Zachar names as his antithesis negeva, the pierced one, the one whose boundaries are penetrated by the invading male. Even her name is held hostage to male memory. How she described herself to herself has been forgotten. Negeva represents not only an objectification but a projection. In this naming, patriarchal man points at the other as the permeable one. He portrays himself as sealed an impenetrable.
We cannot be too surprised to discover that our texts have been marked by male memory and by the alienated, hierarchical relations of the patriarchal self with the other. The rabbis' dictum, dibra Torah beleshon bnai adam, "The Torah speaks in human language," implicitly acknowledges the limitations of context-dependent human language and human texts for conveying transcendent truths.
Rabbi Margaret Wenig, “God is a Woman and She is Growing Older” (1990)
Margaret Wenig is an American Reform rabbi who served as the first Jewish President of the Academy of Homiletics.
God is a woman and she is growing older. She moves more slowly now. She cannot stand erect. Her face is lined. Her voice is scratchy. Sometimes she has to strain to hear. God is a woman and she is growing older; yet, she remembers everything.
On Rosh Hashanah, the anniversary of the day on which she gave us birth, God sits down at her kitchen table, opens the Book of Memories, and begins turning the pages; and God remembers.
“There, there is the world when it was new and my children when they were young.” As she turns each page she smiles, seeing before her, like so many dolls in a department store window, all the beautiful colors of our skin, all the varied shapes and sizes of our bodies. She marvels at our accomplishments: the music we have written, the gardens we have planted, the stories we have told, the ideas we have spun.
“They now can fly faster than the winds I send,” she says to herself, “and they sail across the waters which I gathered into seas. They even visit the moon which I set in the sky. But they rarely visit me.” There pasted into the pages of her book are all the cards we have ever sent to her when we did not bother to visit. She notices our signatures scrawled beneath the printed words someone else has composed.
Then there are the pages she would rather skip. Things she wishes she could forget. But they stare her in the face and she cannot help but remember: her children spoiling the home she created for us, brothers putting each other in chains. She remembers seeing us racing down dangerous roads—herself unable to stop us. She remembers the dreams she had for us—dreams we never fulfilled. And she remembers the names, so many names, inscribed in the book, names of all the children she has lost through war and famine, earthquake and accident, disease and suicide. And God remembers the many times she sat by a bedside weeping that she could not halt the process she herself set into motion. On Yom Kippur, God lights candles, one for each of her children, millions of candles lighting up the night making it bright as day. God stays awake all night turning the pages of her book.
God is lonely, longing for her children, her playful ones. All that dwells on earth does perish. But God endures, so she suffers the sadness of losing all that she holds dear.
God is home, turning the pages of her book. “Come home,” she wants to say to us, “Come home.” But she won’t call. For she is afraid that we will say, “No.” She can anticipate the conversation: “We are so busy. We’d love to see you but we just can’t come. Too much to do.”
Even if we don’t realize it, God knows that our business is just an excuse. She knows that we avoid returning to her because we don’t want to look into her age-worn face. It is hard for us to face a god who disappointed our childhood expectations: She did not give us everything we wanted. She did not make us triumphant in battle, successful in business and invincible to pain. We avoid going home to protect ourselves from our disappointment and to protect her. We don’t want her to see the disappointment in our eyes. Yet, God knows that it is there and she would have us come home anyway.
What if we did? What if we did go home and visit God? What might it be like?
God would usher us into her kitchen, seat us at her table and pour two cups of tea. She has been alone so long that there is much she wants to say. But we barely allow her to get a word in edgewise, for we are afraid of what she might say and we are afraid of silence. So we fill an hour with our chatter, words, words, so many words. Until, finally, she touches her finger to her lips and says, “Shh. Sha. Be still.”
Then she pushes back her chair and says, “Let me have a good look at you.” And she looks. And in a single glance, God sees us as both newly born and dying: coughing and crying and laughing and dancing, as a young child afraid of the road ahead and as an old person looking back wondering where the years went.
In a single glance she sees our birth and our death and all the years in between. She sees us as we were when we were young: when we idolized her and trustingly followed her anywhere; when our scrapes and bruises healed quickly, when we were filled with wonder at all things new. She sees us when we were young, when we thought that there was nothing we could not do.
She sees our middle years too: when our energy was unlimited. When we kept house, cooked and cleaned, cared for children, worked, and volunteered—when everyone needed us and we had no time for sleep.
And God sees us in our later years: when we no longer felt so needed; when chaos disrupted the bodily rhythms we had learned to rely upon. She sees us sleeping alone in a room which once slept two.
God sees things about us we have forgotten and things we do not yet know. For naught is hidden from God’s sight.
When she is finished looking at us, God might say, “So tell me, how are you?” Now we are afraid to open our mouths and tell her everything she already knows: whom we love; where we hurt; what we have broken or lost; what we wanted to be when we grew up.
So we change the subject. “Remember the time when… ”
“Yes, I remember,” she says. Suddenly we are both talking at the same time; saying all the things the greeting cards never said:
“I’m sorry that I…”
“That’s alright, I forgive you.”
“I didn’t mean to…”
“I know that. I do.”
We look away. “I never felt I could live up to your expectations.”
“I always believed you could do anything,” she answers.
“What about your future?,” she asks us. We do not want to face our future. God hears our reluctance, and she understands.
We are growing older as God is growing older. How much like her we have become.