Jewish feminist thought

CHAPTER 38
Jewish feminist thought
Judith Plaskow
Jewish feminist thought is praxis-oriented. Its goal is not simply the formulation of a
meaningful philosophy of Judaism, but the transformation of Jewish history and law,
religious practice, and communal institutions in the direction of the full inclusion of
women. Because of its activist bent, feminist thought finds expression in many modes of
writing—from prayers to novels, and from rituals to historical research. Seeking to
imagine and create a Judaism that reflects women’s experience, feminists often embody
their philosophy and visions in forms that are immediately usable by Jewish communities
and individual Jews. While, for the purposes of this essay, I will limit myself to Jewish
feminist theoretical reflection on the nature of Judaism, in actuality, such reflection
always nourishes and is nourished by non-discursive modes of expression.
DIAGNOSING THE PROBLEM
Individual Jewish feminist voices can be identified from the beginning of the modern era
(Umansky and Ashton 1992). As a movement, however, Jewish feminist thought
emerged in the early 1970s as an attempt to describe and protest the subordination of
women within the Jewish tradition. The first feminist works generally agreed on the
contours of women’s subordination—exclusion from the minyan, exemption from study,
women’s inability to function as witnesses or to initiate divorce—but different Jewish
feminists understood the causes of women’s marginalization in different ways. Rachel
Adler, in her classic piece “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” argued that women are “viewed
in Jewish law and practice as peripheral Jews” (1971; reprinted 1983, p. 13).1 Paula
Hyman contended that “the position of women in Judaism rests upon…patriarchal sexrole differentiation and the concomitant disparagement of women” (1972; reprinted 1976,
p. 106). Cynthia Ozick, exploring the “woman question” from a variety of angles,
insisted that the status of women in Judaism is a sociological and not a theological
problem (1979; reprinted 1983). Blu Greenberg essentially agreed, arguing that women’s
disabilities result from the tradition’s unwillingness to apply its “revolutionary ethical
teachings” to women (1981, p. 3). I argued that women’s specific disabilities are
symptoms of a far more basic problem in that the Otherness of women is embedded in the
central categories of Jewish thought (1983a).
Although some of these understandings of women’s position were complementary,
they did not all represent alternative ways of describing the same set of problems. On the
contrary, they reflected deep—and continuing—disagreements about just how
fundamental women’s subordination is to Judaism, and thus how easy or difficult it is to
dislodge. Thus, while Paula Hyman wanted to see an end to the sex-role differentiation
that is central to Jewish life, Blu Greenberg was willing to accept different roles for men
and women so long as those roles were equal (pp. 36f.). While Ozick and Greenberg saw
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the achievement of equality as essentially a practical problem of getting the tradition to
live up to its own best ideals, I saw it as requiring the profound transformation of every
area of Jewish thought and practice.
In part, these disagreements reflected denominational divisions, with Orthodox women
more sanguine about the possibilities of reform within a traditional framework. But time
also brought changes in focus. As, over the last twenty years, women have gained
increasing access to public religious roles, they have been brought face to face with the
content of the tradition and the ways in which it contradicts or is simply irrelevant to
women’s religious participation (Plaskow 1990b). This has led many Jewish feminists to
shift their emphasis from criticizing the legal disabilities of women to examining the
exclusion of women’s experience from the creation and formulation of tradition. Rachel
Adler’s work nicely illustrates this change. In “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” she implied
that empathetic and open legal scholars can find ways to foster women’s religious selfactualization within the context of halakhah (1971). But, in an article published twelve
years later, she argued that attempts at halakhic change come up against the fact that
many of women’s deepest concerns are simply non-data for a tradition that has
obliterated women’s experience (1983, p. 23).
The claim that women’s experience is largely invisible in Judaism is
echoed in different forms by many feminist thinkers. Feminists have
argued that since all (or virtually all) the sources for Jewish theology were
composed by and for men, Torah as we have it represents only half the
Jewish religious experience (e.g., Umansky 1984; reprinted 1989, p. 194;
Plaskow 1990a, p. 1 and passim). Drorah Setel contends that the real
conflict between Judaism and feminism does not lie on the plane of
specific legal and historical issues but on the deeper level of a “conflict
between the feminist value of relationship and the Jewish concept of
holiness as separation” (1986, p. 114). Rita Gross, Marcia Falk, and I have
pointed out the ways in which the Jewish understanding of God
recapitulates and supports women’s subordination (Gross 1979; Falk
1987; Plaskow 1983b).
RETHINKING TRADITION
If one accepts this more thoroughgoing critique of tradition, the challenges to Jewish
thought are profound. Indeed, feminists are calling for nothing less than the
reconceptualization of every aspect of the Jewish religious experience. My book Standing
Again at Sinai (1990a) is the only work to spell out the challenge of feminism for Jewish
thought in a semi-systematic way, but it emerges out of twenty years of communal
discussion and writing dealing with many central categories of Jewish religious thinking.
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Halakhah
Of the halakhic problems that first drew feminist attention, all remain unsolved within
Orthodox Judaism, while the non-Orthodox movements have either resolved or dissolved
virtually all of them. This dual reality—on the one hand, the intransigence of the
Orthodox rabbinate, on the other, the emergence of new contradictions generated by
women’s access to religious participation—has led to a deeper analysis of the patriarchal
character of halakhah. Rachel Adler’s shift from a straightforward call for more sensitive
legal decision-making to an examination of the presuppositions of the halakhic system
exemplifies this turn to “meta-halachic issues” (1983, p. 24). If Jewish religious life, she
asks, rests on the continuing interpretation of a received body of knowledge that excludes
the perceptions and concerns of women, on what can women ground their Jewish selfunderstanding and behavior? (1983, p. 26; 1992, p. 5). The fact that the Mishnah’s Order
of Women, for example, centers on “the orderly transfer of women and property from one
patriarchal domain to another” means that large numbers of questions women might raise
about how to function as autonomous religious agents lie completely outside the realm
and imagination of normative Jewish sources (1983, p. 24). This problem cannot be
resolved through a more sensitive application of the rules of halakhah; it requires a new
moment of jurisgenesis, a transformation of “the normative universe Jews inhabit” (1992,
p. 1). Moreover, since halakhic interpretation as a mode of religious discourse and
experience has rested solely in the hands of a male elite, it is not clear whether, given the
choice, women would turn to halakhah as a dominant form of religious expression. To
presume that the solution to women’s subordination will come within the framework of
halakhah is to foreclose the question of women’s experience before it has begun to be
fully explored (Plaskow 1990a, pp. 60–74).
Torah
Such criticisms of halakhah raise powerful questions about the authority of Jewish
sources and classical modes of thinking. In this area, as in others, feminism focuses and
intensifies the problems for Judaism raised by modernity, especially the attack on
traditional forms of authority (Heschel 1983, pp. xxiii–xxv). To the extent that normative
texts are silent about women’s experience, how can they function as authoritative for
contemporary Jewish women?
While no Jewish feminist simply turns her back on Jewish sources, non-Orthodox
feminists often characterize normative texts as partial and incomplete. From a feminist
perspective, only a portion of the record of the Jewish encounter with God has been
passed down through the generations. Jews know how an elite group of men named God,
human beings, and the world, but they have yet to recover and imagine women’s
perceptions of Jewish reality. Before Jewish feminists can transform and transmit Jewish
teaching, they must first hear their own voices within the tradition and discover the
contours of their own religious experiences (Plaskow 1990a, pp. 25–36; Umansky 1984,
p. 194).
The recovery of women’s experience is a difficult process that takes place
on many levels simultaneously. In part, it is a historiographical task
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requiring bold new readings of traditional texts, supplemented by studies
of archeological evidence and non-normative sources. But it also assumes
a process of continuing revelation through which women, in interaction
with both traditional sources and each other, “receive” new understandings
of themselves and of Jewish stories, practices, and concepts (Umansky
1984, pp. 194–5). Midrash and ritual, because they allow for the interface
of tradition and contemporary experience, are important vehicles for
Jewish feminist expression. What is important theoretically, however, is
that Jewish feminists are defining and accepting the new material
emerging from these avenues of exploration as Torah. Torah in its
traditional sense is decentered and placed in a larger context in which the
experience of the whole Jewish people becomes a basis for legal decisionmaking and spiritual and theological reflection (Plaskow 1990a, pp. 32–
60).
Hierarchy and connection
This expansion of the meaning of Torah poses a challenge to the content of Torah in
many different areas. Drorah Setel points out, for example, that the Hebrew word for
“holy,” kadosh, means “separate” or “set apart,” with separateness often being
understood in dualistic, oppositional, and hierarchical terms (Setel 1986). Thus men and
women are not simply distinct from each other, but women are Other than men; Israelite
worship is not simply different from Canaanite worship, it is “set apart” from Canaanite
“whoring after false gods.” Feminist thought, on the other hand, has been sharply critical
of hierarchical dualisms, particularly the association of groups of human beings—men/
women, whites/blacks, Christians/Jews—with oppositional categories such as
spiritual/material or sacred/profane.2 Jewish feminist thought, in seeking to reconcile
Jewish and feminist world views, has sought ways to speak about the distinctiveness of
Jewish identity, belief, and practice that are not invidious or hierarchical. Thus in terms
of Jewish practice, the havdalah ceremony’s “paradigmatic statement of hierarchical
dualism” has been rewritten by feminists to affirm both distinction and connection (Setel
1986, p. 117; Falk 1986, p. 125). In terms of Jewish theology, I have tried to rethink the
central concept of chosenness using a part/whole rather than a hierarchical model. While
the notion of chosenness cannot be separated from some claim, however weak, about the
privileged nature of Israel’s relationship to God, the less dramatic term “distinctness”
acknowledges the uniqueness of the Jewish experience but without the connotation of
superiority. Rather than locating Jews as the “favored child” in relation to the rest of the
human community, it points to the specialness of all human groups as parts of a much
larger association of self-differentiated communities (Plaskow 1990a, pp. 96–107).
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God
The paradigm of hierarchical dualism within Judaism is the traditional concept of God.
Especially as depicted in the liturgy, God is a power outside of and above the world, a
king robed in majesty whose sover-eignty is absolute and infinite, a merciful but probing
father who knows all hearts and judges all souls. Since this God is also consistently
imagined as male, male/female hierarchical dualism is correlated with and supported by
the overarching dualism of God/world (Plaskow 1990a, pp. 123–34).
Feminist attempts to dislodge this conception of God initially focused on issues of
gender. Rita Gross suggested in the 1970s that every quality appropriately attributed to
God imaged as male could also be attributed to God imaged as female (1979, p. 173).3
The pervasiveness of male God-language, she claimed, tells us nothing about the reality
of God, but it says a great deal about a Jewish community that perceives men as the
normative human beings. Referring to God as “she,” she argued, would enable Jews to
overcome the idolatrous equation of God and maleness, to speak to God in new ways,
and to acknowledge the “becoming of women” as full members of the Jewish community
(pp. 171–2). Feminist experiments with God-language that have given concreteness to
this plea for new imagery have not simply altered the gender of God, however, but have
reconceptualized God’s nature and power in more far-reaching terms. Feminists have
emphasized the metaphorical nature of God-language. Calling for the freeing of our
symbolic imaginations, they have offered a plethora of new images for God from the
female (shekhinah, mother, queen), to the conceptual (flow of life), to the natural and
gender-neutral (lover, friend, fountain, unseen spark). They have emphasized the
immanence of God over transcendence, and God as empowerer rather than as majestic
and distant power (Gross 1979, p. 169; Plaskow 1983b and 1990a, chapter 4; Falk 1987).
Underlying this explosion of new images and concepts is a new
understanding of monotheism. The dominant Jewish conception of God
has identified God’s oneness with the worship of a single image of God.
For those who hold this view, thinking of God as female seems to threaten
monotheism. But feminists have offered an alternative conception,
arguing, in Marcia Falk’s words, that an “authentic” monotheism is not “a
singularity of image but an embracing unity of a multiplicity of images”
(1987, p. 41). Monotheism is not the worship of a finite being projected as
infinite but the capacity to find the One in and through the changing forms
of the many. It requires us to discover the divine unity in images rich and
plentiful enough to reflect the diversity of the human and cosmic
communities (Falk 1987, p. 41; Falk 1990; Plaskow 1990a, pp. 150–2).
NEW DIRECTIONS
Since Jewish feminist thought began with a critique of the patriarchal character of
Judaism, it chose as its initial constructive topics areas where there seemed to be the
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greatest conflict between feminism and traditional Jewish thinking. As feminism has
developed in depth and scope, however, it offers fresh approaches to many Jewish
philosophical and theological issues. When one considers the range of subjects that
feminists have addressed, it becomes clear that Jewish feminist thought is not simply
thinking about women but a perspective on the world (Setel 1985, p. 35) that begins from
a commitment to the full humanity of women. As issues of equal access become less
pressing, and feminists develop a longer history of reflecting on the content of tradition,
the scope of themes receiving feminist attention will only widen further.
Covenant
Up until now, for example, the central Jewish concept of covenant has received relatively
little feminist attention, but at least two thinkers have put the topic on the feminist
agenda. Heidi Ravven suggests that women’s experiences in the family may provide
models of covenantal relationship different from those offered by men (1986, pp. 97–8).
Since the Bible and the tradition conceptualize the covenant in erotic as well as political
terms, women need to find a spiritual-erotic imagery that reflects “female experiences of
love and passion.” Ravven thinks that Carol Gilligan’s delineation of a female ethic of
caring in contrast to a male ethic of “rights and obligations” might provide an interesting
starting point for a new model of covenant (p. 98). In contrast to Ravven, Laura Levitt
uses the feminist critique of patriarchal marriage as a starting point for criticizing erotic
images of covenant. Given the understanding of marriage in the Jewish tradition as male
acquisition and possession of female sexuality, Levitt questions whether the erotic
understanding of covenant is salvageable from a feminist perspective—that is, whether it
can be disconnected from traditional models of marriage. She argues that while liberal
theologians tend to prefer a marital to a contractual model of covenant because the former
seems more egalitarian, in fact the liberal marriage contract still supports the
subordination of women, and the same inequalities and potential for abuse are built into
the Sinaitic covenant (1992).
The problem of evil
Another classical theological problem just beginning to be addressed in feminist work is
the problem of evil. While feminist discussions of God-language initially focused on
finding images that reflect women’s experiences as women, the human problem of evil
and suffering demands attention as part of any adequate understanding of the sacred. In
line with the emphasis on an inclusive monotheism that I discussed above, Jewish
feminists seem to prefer a conception of God that makes room for, and reflects, the
ambiguities of reality to one that imagines God as perfectly good and locates evil outside
the divine realm (Umansky 1982, pp. 116, 118; Madsen 1989; Plaskow 1990a, pp. 167–8
and 1991). The passage from Isaiah, “I form light and create darkness/ I make weal and
create woe” (45:7) is a model for a holistic understanding of God that incorporates both
femaleness and maleness and good and evil. Moreover, the Jewish tradition of protest
against God that began with Abraham and moves through Elie Wiesel is also attractive to
feminists who would rather struggle with and against an ambiguous deity than worship a
God who cannot contain the complexities of human existence.
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Feminist thought, then, struggles to transform Judaism by incorporating
the missing voices of women into all aspects of the Jewish tradition. In
doing so, it addresses key issues in Jewish philosophy and theology,
seeking to reframe them in ways that both foster women’s full
incorporation into Jewish life and create a meaningful Judaism for the
modern world.
NOTES
1 A number of early feminist articles have been anthologized in
books that are much more readily available than the original
publications. In such cases, I have given page references to the
anthology, while preserving the original date to give a sense of
historical development.
2 Christian feminist Rosemary Ruether has articulated this critique
clearly in all her work. Jewish feminists have learned it from her and
other theorists.
3 The essay was first published in 1979 but was circulating from the
beginning of the decade.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Texts and Studies
Adler, R. (1971) “The Jew Who Wasn’t There: Halakhah and the Jewish
Woman,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, edited by S.Heschel
(New York: Schocken, 1983), pp. 12–18.
——(1983) “‘I’ve Had Nothing Yet so I Can’t Take More,’” Moment
8:22–6.
——(1993) “Feminist Folktales of Justice: Robert Cover as a Resource for
the Renewal of Halakha,” Conservative Judaism 45:40–55.
Falk, M. (1986) Respondent to “Feminist Reflections on Separation and
Unity in Jewish Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion
2.1:121–5.
——(1987) “Notes on Composing New Blessings: Toward a FeministJewish Reconstruction of Prayer,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion
3.1: 39–53.
——(1990) “Toward a Feminist Jewish Reconstruction of Monotheism,”
Tikkun 4.4:53–6.
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Greenberg, B. (1981) On Women and Judaism: A View From Tradition
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society).
Gross, R. (1979) “Female God Language in a Jewish Context,” in
Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by C.P.Christ
and J.Plaskow (San Francisco: Harper & Row), pp. 167–73.
Heschel, S. (1983) “Introduction,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist: A
Reader (New York: Schocken), pp. xiii–xxxvi.
Hyman, P. (1972) “The Other Half: Women in the Jewish Tradition,” in
The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, edited by E.Koltun (New York:
Schocken, 1976), pp. 105–13.
Levitt, L. (1992) “Covenantal Relationships and the Problem of Marriage:
Toward a Post-Liberal Jewish Feminist Theology,” unpublished paper
delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion,
November.
Madsen, C. (1989) “‘If God is God She is Not Nice,’” Journal of Feminist
Studies in Religion 5.1:103–5.
Ozick, C. (1979) “Notes toward Finding the Right Question,” in On Being
a Feminist: A Reader, edited by S.Heschel (New York: Schocken, 1983),
pp. 120–51.
Plaskow, J. (1983a) “The Right Question is Theological,” in On Being a
Jewish Feminist: A Reader, edited by S.Heschel (New York: Schocken),
pp. 223–33.
——(1983b) “Language, God and Liturgy: A Feminist Perspective,”
Response 44: 3–14.
——(1990a) Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist
Perspective (San Francisco: Harper & Row).
——(1990b) “Beyond Egalitarianism,” Tikkun 5.6:79–81.
——(1991) “Facing the Ambiguity of God,” Tikkun 6.5:70–1.
Ravven, H. (1986) “Creating a Jewish Feminist Philosophy,” Anima 12.2:
96–105.
Setel, D. (1985) “Feminist Insights and the Question of Method,” in
Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, edited by A.Y.Collins
(Atlanta: Scholars Press), pp. 35–42.
——(1986) “Feminist Reflections on Separation and Unity in Jewish
Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2.1:113–18.
Umansky, E. (1982) “(Re)Imaging the Divine,” Response 41–2:110–19.
——(1984) “Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology,” in Weaving the
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Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality, edited by J.Plaskow and
C.P.Christ (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), pp. 187–98.
Umansky, E. and D.Ashton (eds) (1992) Four Centuries of Jewish
Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook (Boston: Beacon).