Feminism and Neo-Hasidism

FEMINISM, QUEER THEORY, TRANS THEOLOGY FOR PEOPLE OF ALL GENDERS

bell hooks

Understanding Patriarchy

Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation. Yet most men do not use the word “patriarchy” in everyday life. Most men never think about patriarchy—what it means, how it is created and sustained. Many men in our nation would not be able to spell the word or pronounce it correctly. The word “patriarchy” just is not a part of their normal everyday thought or speech. Men who have heard and know the word usually associate it with women’s liberation, with feminism, and therefore dismiss it as irrelevant to their own experiences….

…therapist Terrence Real makes clear that the patriarchy damaging us all is embedded in our psyches:

Psychological patriarchy is the dynamic between those qualities deemed “masculine” and “feminine” in which half of our human traits are exalted while the other half is devalued. Both men and women participate in this tortured value system. Psychological patriarchy is a “dance of contempt,” a perverse form of connection that replaces true intimacy with complex, covert layers of dominance and submission, collusion and manipulation. It is the unacknowledged paradigm of relationships that has suffused Western civilization generation after generation, deforming both sexes, and destroying the passionate bond between them.

By highlighting psychological patriarchy, we see that everyone is implicated and we are freed from the misperception that men are the enemy. To end patriarchy we must challenge both its psychological and its concrete manifestations in daily life. There are folks who are able to critique patriarchy but unable to act in an antipatriarchal manner.

To end male pain, to respond effectively to male crisis, we have to name the problem. We have to both acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy and work to end patriarchy. Terrence Real offers this valuable insight:

The reclamation of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men than it has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large.

If men are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.

Susanna Heschel

Introduction, On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader

The issue is not that feminism poses insoluble problems to Jewish law, but that Judaism has long ago died in the way it had existed for nearly two thousand years. The crisis has not been brought on by feminism, but feminism clearly discloses the morbid condition of Judaism that has continued, untreated, through-out the modern period.

Thus, from Judaism's perspective, the conflict emerges not so much from the particular agenda of feminism, but from the weakness of Jewish theological responses to modernity, which are thrown into relief by the challenge of feminism.

Joy Ladin

Trans theology holds that if our goal is to recognize our kinship with God, we need to look to the aspects of our humanity that, like God, exceed, con- found, or defy gender and other human categories. None of us perfectly fits human categories, but for people who have grown up in a binary world that has no place for us, those aspects are at the heart of our sense of ourselves. We are accustomed to living in the wilderness, to being human in ways that other human beings may not comprehend. It can be lonely there, and hard, but as many stories in the Torah suggest, it is in the wilderness that humanity comes closest to God.

Patrick S Cheng

An Introduction to Queer Theology

..."queer" is a self-conscious embrace of all that is transgressive of societal norms, particularly in the context of sexuality and gender identity. In fact, this term is best understood as a verb or an action. That is, to "queer" something is to engage with a methodology that challenges and disrupts the status quo. Like the function of the court jester or the subversive traditions of Mardi Gras, to "queer" something is to turn convention and authority on its head. It is about seeing things in a different light and reclaiming voices and sources that previously had been ignored, silenced, or discarded. It is proudly asserting a worldview for which LGBT people have been historically taunted, condemned, beaten, tortured, and killed.

Some teachers in the Jewish mystical tradition understand a shift from patriarchy to feminism as a necessary towards liberation:

TOOLS OF TIKKUN, BRACHA, GEULA

(1) The Kranjec Test

The Kranjec Test

By Andrea Hoffman, Lauren Cohen Fisher, Rabbi Ben Berger, Leah Kahn, Danielle Kranjec, and Rabbi Charlie Schwartz

eJewish Philanthropy

The Kranjec Test posits that a source-sheet with more than two sources must include at least one non-male-identified voice.

...The Kranjec Test takes its name from a combination of the Bechdel Test and Danielle Kranjec, Senior Jewish Educator for the Hillel Jewish University Center of Pittsburgh, who set a challenge for herself to learn and teach more women’s voices.

The wisdom of our ancient mothers is excluded from so many of our older sacred texts, but their teachings can be learned and honored in the objects they held dear:

Saying Goodbye to Friends: A Ritual for Today from the Bar Kochba Caves

Jane Litman, Lilith Magazine

Several months ago, my friend Margaret, a Reform rabbi, moved away to Mendicino, California to serve a congregation there. Three of us — Sue, Zari and myself — wanted to send her off with a ritual that was 1) Jewish, 2) gave her something of us to remember and 3) reflected a sense of the importance of women’s history, since we all felt strongly about the need for women’s voice in Jewish practice.

We ended up making her a qesher, that is, a small bag of keepsakes, herbs, shells, semiprecious stones and the like, which she can use as a sachet. We learned of this ancient Jewish religious object through the work of my Recon-structionist colleague, feminist historian and rabbi, Julie Greenberg. Her research uncovered the following Talmudic verse:

Abbaye said, “Mother told me that three qesharim protect; five cure; and seven are effective against spiritual malaise.” (Shabbat 66B — my translation)

For many hundreds of years this verse was indecipherable. However, Greenberg cites the finds of Israeli archeologist Yigael Yadin in the Bar Kochba caves to show that small bags of shells, crystals and feathers were “protective amulets” which Yadin identified as the mysterious qesharim. They were bound to a person’s clothing — hence the name, “qesher” that is “bound.”

(2) Uplift Female Rebbeim

A very partial list of quotable female mystical sages:

Miriam the Prophet

Beruriah the Sage

The Women of Shikhantziv

Ima Shalom

Ima shel Abbaya

The Wife of Dunash

Qasmūna bint Ismāʿil

Eastern European women who authored tekhines

Yemima Avital

Rabbi Phyllis Ocean Berman

Miriam Peskowitz

Engendering Jewish Religious History

The ideal of "letting women speak" can empower certain women (and men) in certain places, but, as feminist theory, it ignores the problem of the social construction of voice. After all, the same masculinist societies and discourses that foster and construct men's voices construct our female voices as well. Women perform femininity in all sorts of different ways. Women speak through the mediations of masculinist culture, and through negotiations with what we determine to be "horizons of possibility." "Letting women speak" means accepting as feminist those women whose speech reinforces and legitimizes masculinist discourse and society.

(3) Toratah Male Characters

chimamanda ngozi adichie

We Should All Be Feminists

Culture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not our culture, then we can and must make it our culture.

JWA Podcast

Nahanni Rous and Yael Kanarek

Yael: I want to know, for example, I want to tie menstruation to the divine in a deep way. Not through the idea of tumah.... At the moment. Menstruation is described in, in terms of tumah, tehorah and tuma.

Nahanni: Which means purity and impurity.

Yael: But is there another way to, to talk about that is another way to unfold, that is not in this category at all? For example, in the fourth chapter of Toratah, we meet Hevla and Kina. Cain and Abel become Kina and Hevla.

Nahanni: The Biblical brothers Cain and Abel, the first sons of Adam and Eve, become the sisters Kina and Hevla. As in the traditional text, Kina kills her sister Hevla. In the traditional text, God punishes Cain and condemns him to a life of wandering. In Hebrew-- na v’ nad.

Yael: Na v’ nad-- moving and drifting. The nad part of it has its meaning in Toratah to be bleeding. We changed the vowel of the word.. of the word nada, moving through the space, to nida. So now she's na’ah, now means moving, and nida means menstruation. “Drifting and bleeding you will be on the earth.”

Nahanni: Hebrew words are based on roots. By changing the gender and sometimes pronunciation -- which is easy to do because the original Torah text doesn’t have vowels -- Yael has dug deep and pulled out new meanings-- in this case, finding nida, or menstruation, in the root of the word nad, which means moving, or drifting.

Yael: And why is this interesting? It's interesting because now we can open new commentary and new thoughts that are not existing yet. For example, Elohin says to her,

Kina, where is Hevla your sister? And she says, I don't know, am I my sister's keeper? And Tehova Elohin says to her, what have you done? The voice of your sister's blood is calling to me from the earth.

And now we have a really interesting lesson or connection-- things to unfold. It's not a simple thing. It's an interesting complex set of ideas.

Nahanni: The new language brings out new connections. In this case, there are new interpretations about the meaning of menstruation that are not simply connected to the traditional ideas of purity and impurity.

Yael: You know, moving around while menstruating is not fun, that's not... so it even accentuates and makes her despair even more powerful. Now more-- is she leaving tracks behind? You know, is, is her menstruation begins after she kills her sister? Is she coming of age? You know, And that's an event that happened before. I mean, there's so much interesting psychological...

Nahanni: There's so many questions to ask.

The Turkey Princess

A princess once became mad and thought that she was a turkey. She felt compelled to sit naked under the table, pecking at bones and pieces of bread, like a turkey. All the royal physicians gave up hope of curing her of this madness. The queen grieved tremendously.

A wise woman arrived and said, “I will undertake to cure her.”

The wise woman undressed and sat naked under the table, next to the princess, picking crumbs and bones.

“Who are you?” asked the princess. “What are you doing here?”

“And you?” replied the wise woman. “What are you doing here?”

“I am a turkey,” said the princess.

“I’m also a turkey,” answered the wise woman.

They sat together like this for some time, until they became good friends. One day, the wise woman signaled the queen’s servants to throw her shirts. She said to the princess, “What makes you think that a turkey can’t wear a shirt? You can wear a shirt and still be a turkey.” With that, the two of them put on shirts.

After a while, the wise woman again signaled and they threw her pants. As before, she asked, “What makes you think that you can’t be a turkey if you wear pants?”

The wise woman continued in this manner until they were both completely dressed. Then she signaled for regular food, from the table. The wise woman then asked the princess, “What makes you think that you will stop being a turkey if you eat good food? You can eat whatever you want and still be a turkey!” They both ate the food.

Finally, the wise woman said, “What makes you think a turkey must sit under the table? Even a turkey can sit at the table.” The wise woman continued in this manner until the princess was completely cured.

(4) Use a Feminist lens on Male Frameworks

Judith Plaskow

The View from Here: Gender Theory and Gendered Realities: An Exchange Between Tamar Ross and Judith Plaskow

I see two different gender models underlying feminist efforts to transform the Jewish community, both of which take for granted the existence of two sexes. One I would call a one- sex model of religious change and the other a gender-differentiated model.

The one-sex model undergirds feminist attempts to gain equal access to the rights and responsibilities of Jewish religious life, a goal that has meant seeking access to forms of religious expression defined by and formerly reserved to men. This model assumes that “real Judaism” is the Judaism historically practiced by men, and that women will be full, adult Jews only when they are equal in the public religious sphere. This is the area where Jewish feminism has had most success—in the liberal case, in bringing women more fully into public participation and leadership, and in the Orthodox case, in greatly widening opportunities for study. The struggle for equal access has entailed the partial abolition of gender distinctions, but the end of gender distinctions has meant collapsing women into a male norm….

Thus, alongside the male-as-norm model of gender relations, there is a second—feminist gender-differentiated—model that focuses on the neglected particularities of women’s experience. Sometimes the two models are advocated by different groups, but often they have been supported by the same women. Indeed, as liberal women have adopted and simultaneously feminized male ritual garb such as the tallit, the two models have been fused. But the sex- differentiated model has also led to a host of new religious forms. Feminists have created original ceremonies for important biological events in women’s lives, such as birth, the onset of menstruation, pregnancy, miscarriage, and so on. New commentaries on Torah and Tanakh offer distinctive feminist takes on a range of biblical texts. Women’s seders, often focusing on women’s roles in the Exodus narrative, have been important organizing tools on college cam- puses and in local communities. Rosh Hodesh groups mark events in members’ lives and explore the seasons of the year as seen through the eyes of women.

Miriam Peskowitz

Engendering Jewish Religious History

..[A] good part of feminist teaching is about exposing the threads that hold together traditional masculinist stories and histories. ...To create intellectual room for thinking gender and women into our stories of Jewish religious history, it is necessary to locate, and then to dismantle, the currently available masulinist narratives that constitute that curriculum....

Dismantling authorized narratives of religious histories requires explicit critical tools: tools that can expose the peculiar masculinist logics upon which these narratives rest, tools that can show how these masculinst and other discourses and conditions have come to seem natural and normal. This dismantling requires combining these critical tools with feats of imagination, permissions of some sort, and intellectual courage. Finding ways into and out of these conceptual problems demands that we pay expicit attention-- in the formality of our writings and in the informalities of our classrooms-- to the construction of knowledge.

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(5) Female Corporeality

Yael Kanarek

Larry Yudelson, Creating a Regendered Torah, Times of Israel

"All the people over all the years who worked on these books did a great job. Now let’s open other dimensions of the story. It’s kind of crazy to me that women are now coming into the public sphere, but when they go to pray, they go to pray to the male mind. It’s kind of a spiritual gender dysphoria. It’s the man’s desire projected into language. It’s great that it’s there, but it’s not quite the right desire for me."

(6) Sabbateanism

Gershom Scholem

Sabbatai Sevi

Sabbatai Zevi's teaching as reported by (critical, Christian observer) Thomas Coenen

Woe unto you, miserable women, who for Eve’s sin must bring forth your children in sorrow, and are subject to your husbands, and all that you do depends on their consent. Blessed are you, for I have come to make you free and happy like your husbands; for I have come to take away Adam’s sin.

Chava Weissler

Voices of the Matriarchs

(On the influence of Sabbateanism on tkhines)

Sabbatai Zevi seems to have envisioned a transformation in the status of women to be a necessary corollary to the overall messianic transformation. As Scholem points out, he called women to the Torah, and even promised to free them from the “curse of Eve,” including both painful childbirth and subordination to their husbands.”

“...[M]aterial from a widely read mystical guide to the Jewish festival cycle, which originate in Sabbatian circles, Hemdat yamim, made its way into a few tkhines. Further, most Easter European tkhines were written by women living in precisely those regions of Eastern Europe, now Eastern Poland and Wester Ukraine, in which Sabbatians and Frankists were most active.

Shaul Magid

The Necessary Heresy of Translation- Reflections on the Hebrew Writings of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

...[O]ne can justifiably argue that Sabbatean literature had a profound affect on early modern and modern Judaism...

Once you determine that Messiah is not “Glatt kosher,” (an idea that has roots in the Hebrew Bible, and later, more creatively, in the kabbalistic tradition from the Zohar through Moses Hayyim Luzzatto in eighteenth century Italy) and then reconstruct Judaism around that notion, the foundations of tradition begin to shake. Where Reb Zalman differs from earlier expositers of this idea- and thus aligns himself more with the Sabbatean camp- is that he is willing to take this paradoxical notion into lived religion. That is, he is willing to re-think the very contours of practical Judaism from the point where the categories of kosher and treif begin to overlap. In his words, he refused to “drey.” This is not exclusive to Sabbateanism but, I would argue, also emerges in early Hasidism, although Hasidism chose early on to live out its marginal ideas in ways that did not sever its allegiance to Orthodox (or, perhaps, it was successful in expanded the very contours of that Orthodoxy).

Ada Rapoport-Albert

Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi 1666-1816

[I]n eastern Europe, at the same time and in the same regions where Sabbatianism was waning, hasidism was in the process of becoming a mass movement. It shared the kabbalistic legacy of Sabbatianism, and adopted, or at least independently reproduces, its most distinctive mode of prophetic-charismatic leadership. This gave rise to the still common perception that the hasidic movement was Sabbatianism’s natural heir. Already in the late eighteenth century, the rabbinic opponents of hasidism denounced it as a latter-day offshoot of the messianic heresy, or else as its immediate successor within a long sectarian tradition, which had always been antithetical to Rabbinic Judaism. This was also the context in which the rise of hasidism was set by the Galician maskilim who campaigned against it in the early decades of the nineteenth century; and the same view was still being echoes by some of the movement’s early historians, while others presented hasidism as a dialectical response to Sabbatiansm, and thus, too, its product.

Given this line of descent, hasidism might have been expected to preserve the inclusive, egalitarian attitude to women that was such a definitive feature of Sabbatianism…. But the revolutionary novelty of Sabbatianism-- its promotion of some women in their own right to positions of authority as inspired prophetesses, and its full incorporation of all women as a constituency of the messianic community–was conspicuously absent from the emergent hasidic movement…

That hasidism shied away from engaging women in what was, after all, the logical conclusion of a principle that lay at its core might well be a measure of the bitter lesson it drew from the trauma of Sabbatianism. For the Sabbatian heretics had left behind a profound dread above all of the breached halakhic boundaries of sexual propriety. The sexual depravity imputed to their women was inextricably linked to their full engagement with the failed messianic project. It was an untimely eruption of female spirituality-a powerful force prematurely released which was now to be stowed away, kept out of sight, and securely contained until the appointed time for its discharge, which was not to be until some unknown point in the distant messianic future.

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This source sheet aims to pass the Kranjec test