A Thought from the Succah

אך טוב וחסד ירדפוני 

Surely goodness and kindness will chase me. . .  

And if I slow down they will catch me!

There's no moral requirement that men and women have identical roles in the synagogue.  In fact, when they don't we can see our way out of some of the problems of modern life.  

 

What Is Lost When Gender Doesn't Matter

or

Why I am not an egalitarian when it comes to Jewish ritual

A Jewish mother's rumination

Blessed are You, O Lord, King of the Universe, who did not make me a woman.
           --Jewish morning prayer for men
                                                                                                                                  
Sing, O barren one, you who bore no child!  Shout aloud for joy, you who did not travail!  For the children of the wife forlorn shall outnumber those of the espoused, said the Lord.
           --Isaiah 54:1


He sets the childless woman among her household as a happy mother of children.  Hallelujah!
           --Psalms 113:9

                       As a Jewish mother and twenty-year expatriate from America and American Jewry, I sometimes wince at the words and images my birthplace is giving birth to lately.  When I go back home for a visit or wade in the stream of American culture that flows to me here in Israel via the internet and my American magazine subscriptions (The New Yorker, Hadassah and Psychology Today), one cultural current that never fails to grab my attention and sink my heart is a deep and apparently growing ambivalence towards babies, young children and parents, especially mothers.  From the equating of pets with offspring ("The author lives in Sausalito with her husband and three fox terriers"), to phrases like "mommy track,” to the popularity of books that anxiously examine and reexamine the "work-life balance" for working mothers, to bizarre New Yorker covers like one showing a proud mother and father gazing contentedly at their baby standing in a crib ringed with barbed wire, to the ad for Grand Marnier liqueur:  "One kid or two?  Or maybe we should just get a dog..."   All these and more point at a troubling feature of today's American life:  confusion and ambivalence about parenthood, babies and children.  

I live in Israel.  I came here twenty-six years ago at the age of twenty-nine.  I still think and feel like an American, but not quite the American I would have been had I stayed in the States. I am a member of a progressive Orthodox synagogue where a group of Jews from many backgrounds are engaged in trying to strike a fair bargain between tradition and modernity.  Adopting Israel and Orthodoxy on top of my Conservative Jewish American background gives me several angles from which to try to puzzle out what lies behind that ambivalence.

I believe that men and women are equally valuable in God's eyes, that women are in no way inferior to men, and that men and women alike deserve to realize their dreams.  So what does traditional Judaism, full of gender-based distinctions, offer someone like me?

Take for example the blessing quoted above.   It highlights, with embarrassing clarity, what seems to be traditional Judaism's male chauvinism and disrespect for women.  This blessing is a major flaw in the prayer book, in many Jews' eyes.  Many in the younger generations have never even seen it, spared by editors of new siddurim.   Likewise, for many, the traditional synagogue is flawed by the mehitza that divides men and women, and by the exclusion of women from leading prayers or reading Torah in synagogue services.

My childhood friends, like the majority of today's North American Jews, now inhabit a ritual world in which gender just doesn't matter. In most synagogues in North America -- nearly all but the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox -- women and girls participate fully in activities until recently reserved for men and boys.  Torah study, public Torah reading, leading congregational prayer, and being counted in a minyan (prayer quorum) are no longer male-only practices.  Women and girls don tallit (prayer shawl) and teffillin (phylacteries), once reserved for men and boys over bar mitzva age.  Women are ordained as rabbis and serve as cantors in the Reform, Conservative, Renewal, and Reconstructionist movements.  In short, all public roles are now open to both men and women equally in most American synagogues.

These changes serve, among other things, to reduce the ambivalence of many American Jews towards Judaism itself.  To the extent that Judaism can be made over to resemble the larger culture, it is more appealing to Jews seeking seamless integration into the larger society.  And indeed, among the American Jews from whom I come, many have forgotten or never knew that Jewish tradition offers not merely a collection of nostalgia-inducing customs but an alternative way of life, a rival way of acting, thinking, feeling, and being, of structuring personal and communal life.  Secular western modernity is the air we breathe, the water we swim in.  Lived Judaism for many American Jews has become, at best, a drop of decorative food-coloring in the water or a plastic castle on the bottom of the aquarium.

Among those Jews who do see Judaism as something weightier than a set of antique customs, that is, if they see it as a compelling way of life and thought and feeling, then for many that way of life, as traditionally understood, is morally unacceptable on the grounds that it discriminates against women. Among these, for example, are rabbinical students I have met from the Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and Renewal movements, young North American Jews who staff Camp Ramah, who come to Israel to study at Pardes, at the Conservative Bet Midrash, at Hebrew Union College, etc.  They will try, and many will succeed, to integrate their gender-egalitarian way of thought and life on the one hand with their love of traditional Jewish synagogue, family, and community life on the other.  I applaud them but I myself cannot overlook the tendency for mutual undermining that exists between the two.

Egalitarianism is needed in the political sphere, not in the synagogue

When measured by the yardstick of modern Western values (the only yardstick available to most American Jews today), distinct gender roles in the synagogue offer no discernible benefit to anyone.

Measured by the yardstick of Western values, the benefits of egalitarianism speak for themselves:  In many congregations, women rabbis, cantors, and active congregants have contributed immeasurably to community life.  I acknowledge that many Jewish women's lives are enriched by their participation in the synagogue services and leadership.    And for some contemporary Jews, men and women, only egalitarian practice coheres with their sense of justice and equality.  For them, it may be the only way to take Judaism seriously.  These benefits are real and important, and the losses I wish to highlight do not cancel out these gains.

Nevertheless, if Judaism matters to us then the Western yardstick need not be our only yardstick.  Later I will point out the benefits I see for men and women alike in traditional synagogue life, but first I wish to clarify the role of equality in general.

What is needed for a successful Jewish (or indeed other religious) institution or community differs in some respects from what is required for a successful secular modern institution or community, because the two have different goals and therefore different indicators of success.  In particular, the primacy of equality appropriate to some institutions is not appropriate to all.  Equality does not always trump every other value.  While equal treatment as citizens before the law of the state is a moral requirement, equal treatment in religious ritual is not. This is because public secular institutions are meant to provide an even playing field on which each member of society, regardless of race, religion, class or gender, has a fair chance to pursue the life he or she chooses.  Social and political equality deserve defending because they protect our freedom to pursue our individual visions of happiness and goodness.  One pillar of modern Western ideology is the belief that the modern secular state has no authority to favor some people, groups, or some visions of happiness and goodness above others.  The only values it is justified in imposing are values required for the preservation of order and of equal opportunity to pursue happiness and the good life as each individual conceives it.  This belief grounds the separation of church and state, for example, and legal protections of individual freedom.  And, on this basis, we make the moral demand that society uphold the broadest possible understanding of equality among citizens, and reject discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and gender.

Religious communities differ in this respect from secular civil society.  Within the world of religious ritual practice there is no moral requirement to distribute power and goods equally for the sake of competing visions of goodness.  Ritual life is not meant to be an "even playing field" for individual pursuits.

Within each religious community, a particular vision -- or a particular montage of visions -- of goodness, truth, and happiness is a given.  The chance to live their lives in the light of such a vision is exactly why people turn to religious or other spiritual paths.  The particular vision offered by a particular group may or may not include gender egalitarianism.  Judaism, like many traditional world-views, does not hold up  as an ideal equal access to public positions.

Communal ritual life is one especially vivid way of dramatizing a vision of God and man. Ritual says:  Behold what is and what ought to be!   Each religion has its own distinct message but all use ritual to broadcast it.   The young men, the old women, the best dancers, the best singers, the best warriors, the most beautiful, the virgins, the celibate, the elders, the wise, the initiates to mysteries, the heirs of ancient priestly dynasties, the rich, the learned:  these, and not others, dominate the ritual life of various religions throughout history and around the world.  Through formal ceremonies structured by strict rules of inclusion and exclusion, religious ritual enacts a people's vision of life, of humanity and divinity and how they are connected.  It actualizes a vision of what is divine, good and worthy of awe, reverence and love.   It sends a unique message to its own members, and to others capable of reading the symbols.

The Jewish Message

The Jewish message tells us who God is and who we are by drawing distinctions.  Unity has its place -- God, after all, is one -- but in our human realm, distinctions are real and significant. 

Judaism abounds in distinctions and divisions:  At the end of Shabbat each week we address God as HaMavdil, the One Who Divides.  God divides holy from not-holy, light from darkness, Israel from the other nations, the Sabbath from the other days.  God creates the world by speech ("Let there be light!") which sets in motion a process of dividing one thing from another ("And God divided the light from the darkness . . .")  We, God's people,  are expected to divide the challah from the dough, the milk from the meat, and on some occasions, the men from the women.  
Yet making distinctions appealing or meaningful is uphill work in our contemporary Western cultural context.   To many Jews, imbued with a culture in which distinction is nearly synonymous with discrimination, and discrimination with injustice, assigning ritual roles along gender lines has come to seem at best meaningless and at worst immoral.  It seems an example of outdated prejudice against women, analogous to racial prejudice against African Americans.  Indeed, in modern America, ‘discrimination’ has become a dirty word because of its association with racial prejudice. 

But to discriminate means to distinguish one thing from another.  Rather than simply succumbing to a cultural bias that inclines us to mistrust all cases of discrimination,  I believe it is worth examining this particular distinction -- between men and women -- in this particular context -- the synagogue -- in order to discover what we are throwing out when we throw out differing gender roles.  A synagogue in which men and boys over thirteen are leading prayers and reading from and blessing the Torah, while women are listening, responding, and praying (or without guilt are observing Shabbat or holiday at home) may have something to offer us, something to say to us, if we are willing to set aside our cultural bias long enough to look past the objectionable fact of different gender roles.

The Jewish message, insofar as I can translate an enormous body of practice and text into a few phrases, says:  God is one.  That is, God is whole, complete and perfect; we humans are not.  The oneness of God is unique to God, but we humans are created in God's image.  This means we share (in a limited way) in God's nature, so there is a sense in which we too are (or can become) whole.  Wholeness, for human beings, is a kind of wholeness that must co-exist with limitedness.  Ours is a dependent kind of wholeness, based on our relationship to the one God.  The wholeness which we seek is possible for us only insofar as we acknowledge, and live in the knowledge of, God's completeness.  In order to do this we need to recognize our own incompleteness, our limitations, our diversity and distinctness -- from one another, from other peoples, from God.  Knowing ourselves as limited beings and recognizing God's oneness are two sides of one coin; they can only be grasped when they are grasped together, and both are equally necessary to our redemption.

This vision of humans as limited and therefore connected to divinity infuses Jewish practices with meaning.   Many Jewish practices hone our ability to see ourselves as limited beings.  Among them are the practices which involve distinct gender roles.  At the same time, many Jewish practices hone our ability to see ourselves as effective, powerful actors in the world, capable of doing good, of changing things for the better, of creating, with God, a world as God intends it to be.  Ritual distinction between the genders plays a role here too.

By assigning men and women different roles, Judaism is claiming that our maleness and our femaleness are of religious significance.  Why would that be?  Aren't we all the same, under the skin?  (Or, "regardless of color and shape of skin" as my high school gym teacher used to say).  Aren't all souls alike, or rather, equally unique, and therefore genderless, in God's eyes? 

According to a traditional understanding of Torah our physical/biological aspects are not incidental, spiritually meaningless aspects of what we are.  We are not, in essence, bodyless souls.  We are not holy spirit wrapped up in non-holy matter.  We were created as males and females for a reason, and the reason is not merely because sexual reproduction happened to work out as a convenient way to bring offspring into the world.

Our gender has spiritual significance.   This is tradition's message when it assigns us different roles in accordance with gender.  In other words,  the divinity that is parcelled out for expression among humankind comes in two flavors, male and female.  To treat them as one in our ritual life is to render that life -- and life in general -- tasteless.  Or:  the rungs by which we as a people climb upward are suspended between two upright poles; to remove one of the poles, or to fuse them into one, deprives us of a secure grip as we climb. 
         
A more down-to-earth expression of this idea runs like this:  We are all called upon to be partners with God in creation. We are created to create. One of the central ways we humans are meant to serve as partners with God in creation is by bringing in, and bringing up, the next generation of people.  Among the most potent tools we have to create a new world, and to repair the one we have, is our sexuality.    Our coupling, childbirth and childrearing are part of our spiritual service:  via these we create new worlds.  Each couple is a world, each home and most of all each child is a world. So the roles we play as wives, husbands, mothers and fathers (and indeed grandmothers and grandfathers) are central to the meaning of our existence.  We were created to be and do these things.   The fact that not all of us are blessed with the opportunity to serve in this way does not negate the spiritual centrality of the task; blessings of all kinds, including the blessings that allow us to fulfill our purposes in life,  are allotted in different measures to different people.  Each of the founding couples of the Jewish people, Avraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob and Rachel, faced the real and devastating possibility of childlessness.  Not for all but for many of us the greatest opportunity we have to engage in our life mission of creation, and the greatest contribution we make to tikkun olam, the repair and maintenance of the world, is as parents.    

None of us can do this alone.  We are dependent on our mates and on God to fulfill these roles. In facing this, we face our limitations.  Our fruitfulness, fulfillment and continuity are not entirely in our own hands.  Yet entering into life as husband or wife, mother or father, we also experience our potency.  We are given the opportunity to know ourselves as creators and partners in the divine process that runs the world.

By living out the distinct roles of mother and father in a serious and devoted way, we are realizing a vision of the highest spiritual kind. We are both receiving and sending one of Judaism's central messages.   Unfortunately, many of today's American Jews, even many of those who are living the life I describe, do not conceive of what they are doing as highly spiritual.  The terms and concepts that would make this clear to them are gone, or emptied of meaning, because (among other reasons) their Jewish ritual life has relinquished the traditional gender roles in favor of practices, terms and concepts of modern America, whose secular vision is so different from that of traditional Judaism.

The Egalitarian Message

This secular American vision is based mainly on the ideal of individualism, defined by the dictionary as "a doctrine holding that the interests of the individual should take precedence over the interests of the state or social group,” and on the ideal of equality.   Non-traditional synagogue practice of full gender egalitarianism expresses those ideals.  Gender-blind ritual means that when we address and worship God, we do so as Jews or as individual human beings, but not as men or women.  That is, the egalitarian message states that there is and should be no particular way for men to serve God as men, or for women to serve God as women.  Traditional insistence that there are distinct ways for men and women to serve God is seen, by this light, as expressing a superceded notion of an essential difference between men and women which is now known to be not merely incorrect, but immoral and unjust.  Just as racial difference has been understood, in our time, to be an inessential, morally irrelevant difference, likewise gender difference has been understood as inessential in nearly all areas of life, including the spiritual.

Even when supporters of egalitarianism acknowledge that the difference between men and women is of some spiritual significance, they are wary of institutionalizing those differences in the synagogue because they see a danger of powerful men excluding or marginalizing powerless women.  Their worries are not without foundation.  Women have been excluded and marginalized from Jewish prayer and Torah life too often in our history.  But strong active Jewish women have and are claiming their heritage, without rejecting traditional roles completely.  The balance I am seeking between modernity and tradition will not be attained by disregarding all that is lost when synagogues become gender-blind.

Two Unavoidable Problems

By giving men a particular role in synagogue life, traditional Judaism solves two problems.  First, it highlights and accords respect to the greater role women inevitably play in childbearing and childrearing.  How so?  Public worship carries great weight in Jewish life.  If the reason women are not obligated to take part in public worship (and therefore are not entitled to lead it) is their obligations as wives and mothers, then those obligations must be correspondingly weighty.  What might have been, and in some cultures is, merely a despised burden -- women’s responsibilities for children before and after birth -- becomes an honorable calling, mirrored and balanced as it is by the calling of men to minyan in synagogue.   The balance between these two callings is brightly outlined by the halachic explanation of the difference between men's and women’s ritual obligations:   women are exempted from most time-bound commandments because of the demanding and time-consuming nature of their duties as wives and mothers.  Secondly, men's special synagogue role provides an answer to the question every culture must answer: What are men for?  As Margaret Mead wrote, in every human society “man's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary" as compared to woman's.

These two problems -- which all cultures face -- arise because there are differences between men and women that are not culturally conditioned.  These differences include and extend beyond the physical to psychological and emotional aspects of life. Exactly what they are and how far they extend is not my issue here.  My question is not: What are the given differences?  Rather I want to ask: Given the givens, are they important?   Do they matter?  Do we approve or disapprove of these differences?  Would we remove them if we could?  Are they a regrettable aspect of reality, or something to celebrate?   They are inevitably part of the world, but are they more like mosquitoes, a source of irritation, or more like butterflies, a source of delight?  Dandelions or daffodils, pimples or dimples?    A source of shame or pride, degradation or holiness? 

Every human culture has to answer these questions for itself.  One of the ways we as Jews answer them is by choosing whether to preserve an exclusively male role in our synagogue life.

How men and women benefit from gender distinct synagogue practices 

Consider what the tradition of giving men exclusive roles in the synagogue provides women.  Reserving a place in synagogue life for men serves to balance that part of family life which is reserved by God/nature for women only:  pregnancy, birth, and the nursing of infants.  The primacy granted to men in the synagogue balances the primacy of women at home within the family.  Imagine an old-fashioned balance scale with a magical property:  instead of measuring the weight of an object, it enables you to give or take away weight from an object placed on one of its pans.   By placing something very light or weightless on the opposite pan, the object will become equally light or weightless.  If you place something heavy on the other side, the object will become equally weighty.

Because we humans tend to define ourselves in terms of the other gender, gender roles in synagogue act as such a magic balance.  By constructing a prestigious exclusively male role in our ritual life, we indirectly but inescapably honor the (biologically given) female role in the family.  And if we decline to reserve a particular domain in synagogue life for men, we unavoidably withdraw real honor from those burdens and responsibilities that are given as women's role in the family.  The socially constructed and maintained role of men gives weight to the biologically/naturally/divinely given role of women.

Withdrawing respect from mothers and motherhood, though probably not the intention of those who have instituted egalitarianism, is unfortunately one of the indirect results of their work.  Respect for mothers (from society as a whole, from the larger Jewish community, one's local Jewish community and from one's own congregation) is indispensable to the self-respect of women who choose the path of motherhood.

Motherhood, especially Jewish motherhood, is demanding (as the Jewish Mother joke genre goes to show, when we read between the lines).   The world which we Jews are commanded to create and maintain is a demanding one.  We are required to restrain or channel most of our strongest human impulses and passions:  the impulse to take what is not ours, to be physically aggressive, to oppress, to lie, to cheat, to satisfy our appetites (sexual and other) freely, to consider only ourselves at others' expense, to forget God.  In short we are expected to act like a mensch.   It's not easy to be a mensch, and it's not easy to raise a mensch either.   In order for women to feel justified in devoting their time and energies to such a demanding and often not immediately gratifying task,  the role of childrearing needs to carry with it a great deal of social support and respect.  This is especially true today, when women are more than ever aware of their gifts and of opportunities to win respect and self-respect in other ways.

For decades now, American culture has addressed girls, through books, songs and movies, from Free To Be in the seventies, through The Berenstain Bears in the nineties and beyond, declaring: 'Little girl, you can be anything you want to be:  A police officer,  a doctor,  an astronaut!'  Books, songs, and movies proclaim an opening of the world to girls and women.  I see this as a gain for both women and men.

But there is no gain without some loss.  In the current wide-open American climate, many of us have lost the sense that being a mother is being something important, that being a mother has in any way greater weight than any of the other things a girl can choose to be.

Our communal rituals express our attitude towards the givens discussed above.  Jewish ritual provides an island apart from larger secular society in which we can make a Jewish statement and live in the light of Jewish wisdom about those givens of maleness and femaleness.  When we strive to rearrange every aspect of society and life, including synagogue life, along egalitarian principles, stopping only when we reach those things which we cannot rearrange (the physical differences between males and females and the other "givens" that stem from them, of fatherhood and motherhood, of maleness and femaleness), then those inalterable things do not retain dignity or social worth, because it is obvious that we stopped there only because we had no choice. 

These ineradicable asymmetries -- for example, possession of ovaries, uterus and estrogen by women and not men, and possession of testicles, penis and testosterone by men and not women, with the result that women can become mothers and men fathers --  that is, the givens, while fixed physical facts, are not fixed with respect to importance or value.  A culture can assign high or low significance to these facts, and high or low value.

In general, modern American society, insofar as it aspires towards full public symmetry between men and women, thereby takes the position that those differences are of relatively low significance and low value.

Traditionally, Jews assign high significance and high value to the differences between men and women.  One of the ways this is expressed is by asymmetry in ritual obligations.

The shift to egalitarianism in the synagogue contributes (along with many other factors) to a downgrading of our regard for motherhood.  Corresponding to what we gain when women fill new roles in the community is the loss of honor and privilege once accorded to the path of marriage and motherhood.  Corresponding to the great gain of freedom to choose her own path is the loss of a woman's sense of a God-given purpose in life that once underlay many women's (especially Jewish women's) choice of the path of marriage and motherhood. Being 'just a mother' (or worse yet, 'just a mom') is no longer enough to earn self-respect or the respect of others.  This situation is a loss to mothers, fathers, and children, and to the larger society which, in lowering its estimation of mothers, children, and mothering, lowers its estimation of its own future.

It may be that some of us have moved so far away from a vision of the dignity and worth of motherhood and fatherhood as distinct roles and relationships that we ask at this point:  Why seek to protect and enhance their dignity?  Why not let the tide of egalitarianism wash up as far as possible onto the shore and engulf those elaborately constructed sand castles, the Mama castle and the Papa castle, leaving behind only a few oddly shaped sets of protuberances on the sand? -- sets of protuberances that do indeed stubbornly retain their different shapes even after the tide of cultural change has washed over them, but whose difference in shape is clearly of no consequence.

In such a social world, we lose social approbation and or even space (in one's society, family, imagination) for reveling in one's future as a woman, as a wife and as a mother of children.  We find ourselves in a world where it seems reasonable to discard the terms "barren" and "childless" and replace them with the term "child-free."  We lose the spirit in which the words above were written, where Isaiah calls on formerly barren women to "Sing!. . . Shout aloud for joy!"  because they have born children.

According to tradition, Jewish women are exempted from many obligations of prayer, mitzvot and Torah study that are imposed on Jewish men.  This exemption  infuses a complementary category of being, 'Jewish man'  with duties, expectations, challenges, pleasures, power, and with opportunities for fellowship and for successful performance and prestige, as distinct from that other category of being, 'Jewish woman'.

(Of course, 'non-Jewish man' is the other category of being that complements 'Jewish man'.  But, instead of wishing to define themselves as distinct from non-Jewish men, most American Jewish boys and men have longed to resemble them, as Phillip Roth so vividly describes in his novel American Pastoral.)

Men need such infusions.  They provide men with a rich role to aspire to as boys, to grow into as adults.  Our gender roles are a powerful force in every individual life and in society's life.  They are both soil for and fruit of our imaginations.  Human imagination needs rich food and will provide it where none is available.  A culture that says merely:  'A man is a human with a penis, testicles, and high testosterone levels', and demands that each man provide the rest of his identity through individual self-definition,  is shirking its duty to its men and boys.  And such a culture will not last.  Some rival culture with a more appealing answer will replace it -- and almost any answer will be more appealing to men and boys and to women and girls as well, because almost any answer will provide more food for the imagination.  As in John Lennon's famous song, imagining is the first step to building anything, from a self to a world and everything in between.

While imagination contributes to our notion of womanhood, what it is to be a man is even more open to imaginative interpretation and cultural play.  If a girl's sexuality matures into motherhood, the role of mother will necessarily impose more on her, demand more from her, and bestow more on her, than will a boy's fatherhood.  Fatherhood is more of a social/cultural construct than is motherhood.  So each culture must decide what men are for, in a way that they need not do for women.    Each culture has more room for creative construction in its creation of manhood than it does in its creation of womanhood. While a significant portion of women's work is a given, men's work is an extremely malleable notion.

Judaism's male role models are The Fathers:  Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Raising men to be sexually faithful husbands and devoted fathers is a tall order for any civilization. As opposed to cultures in which manhood is primarily defined by the qualities of fighters, hunters, or sexual conquerors, in Jewish culture, a man is someone who learns Torah, who prays together with other men, who is required to become a nurturing father and live in a sexually exclusive marriage, and to teach his sons Torah.  His distinctive ritual garments are a long, flowing, fringed shawl and small leather boxes tied on with long narrow straps.  Not a warrior or a hunter's garb, nor an expensive Italian suit, but masculine and manly in a peculiarly Jewish way.  When synagogues are full of women wearing tallit and tefillin, however, that distinctive aspect of Jewish manhood is lost.

Many societies have created male enclaves where male prowess can be developed and displayed, places, unlike the home, where men can win:  sports arenas, politics, and battlefields. 

Traditional Judaism provides men with a place of respect and power, an exclusively male province where female power is neutralized:  the synagogue.  In the traditional synagogue men can aspire to roles of prestige, communal importance and leadership can win the comradery and the admiration of other men, all within a context that is culturally exalted.

In short, both men and women win when their roles in synagogue are different.  Both men and women benefit when a traditional synagogue, like a breakwater, confronts the pounding waves of egalitarianism and keeps them in their proper sphere.

As a woman, I am especially aware that while today's American social conditions have gone far towards expressing the truth of women's diversity, they fail to sufficiently express, and reveal to women themselves, their commonality.  When motherhood is just one option among many available to girls and women, not privileged in any way, not even a particularly respected option, distortion has set in.  

To take the underlying ideas of egalitarianism to an extreme, when a culture does not include motherhood as an essential part of the notion of being a woman, it has lost touch with reality.  It has moved into idolatry of the self, into worship of individual choice which denies the givenness of our existence as male and female human mind/bodies.  It is on a path to cultural self-destruction, because it is cutting its ties to its own future.

Life is not only what we do, and we are not only what we make of ourselves.  Life is also what happens to us, and we are also what we have been created to be. 

Ritual's Peculiar Power

Precisely because ritual life is (merely) ritual, it is the right place to retain non-egalitarian structures. It is not, as many egalitarian Jews suspect, that traditional Jews practice non-egalitarian rituals because we hold that men and women are not equally able or valuable, but rather that by practicing non-egalitarian rituals we (consciously or unconsciously) celebrate those ways in which men and women are not the same.

The dignity we confer on non-egalitarian ritual practices confers, in turn, dignity on non-identical natural structures, on gender differences in general, on manhood and womanhood, and on motherhood and fatherhood: on the non-symmetric relations of the male and female parent to the child.

The cultural distortion discussed above, the loss of a privileged place for mothers and children, leads to suffering of many kinds.  Today many of us suffer from a mismatch between what is most important in our lives and the social shapes in which we live, into which we pour ourselves and are poured.  We suffer from the cold of windy gaps in some spots, where the things we get credit and recognition for doing are things we don't care much about, and the things for which we care deeply go unspoken of.    In other spots we suffer rubbing and irritation, where the time we spend on something is far greater than how important it is to us.

This sense of an ill fit between our inner and outer lives is aggravated when we fail to notice how (within a few decades) we are expecting ourselves to march to a very different drumbeat than that which our forefathers and foremothers heard.  Traditional values and expectations, including of course traditional gender roles in homes and synagogues, were the only way to live for hundreds of generations.  Perfection was never achieved, but simple humility requires that we at least consider what we might have to learn from the ways of those past generations.  Valuing our own wisdom and way of life does not require us to scorn theirs.  We may know things they did not, but surely they knew things we have forgotten.  We are not, after all, so different from our great-grandparents.  Part of the pain of modern life can be relieved when we consciously allow traditional ways to ground us.  Tradition can provide a foundation upon which to place what we care most about unashamedly in the center of our lives. Tradition can supply a foundation, in short, for joy.  Then we have a chance to experience what the psalmist is describing when he says, "He sets the childless woman among her household as a happy mother of children.  Hallelujah!"

My proposal to retain some traditional elements of men's exclusive role in the synagogue is not a plea simply to turn back the clock to the situation of two or three generations ago.  There is much that Jewish women might have been doing, in light of our law and tradition, that the vast majority was not doing for centuries.  That, too, was a great and terrible loss to those generations.  Most grievously, Jewish women were not studying Torah.  I welcome the changes that bring more Jewish women into the world of Torah study with the sense that this is their rightful place.
But it is not the case that women who are excluded from some roles in Jewish life cannot or will not embrace others.  It depends on how gender roles are understood.  

A woman who asks, 'how can I love a Torah that tells me I'm not as important as a man?' or 'why should I revere and study a Torah that bars me from some public roles in Jewish ritual life just because I'm a woman?' is understanding gender roles in a way that derogates her or belittles her as a woman.  It is natural to understand them this way, especially in light of present-day American culture.  And over the centuries, many have understood them this way.  Misogyny is not unknown in Jewish history.  It has been a strong cultural element in certain places and times.  Nevertheless I hope this discussion has shown that there is another way to understand traditional Judaism's male preserve in ritual life.

Synagogues, like all human institutions and societies, like individuals, must make hard choices between competing goods.  But it can only help if we become more aware of what we are choosing between, and what is at stake in the choice.

There is no such thing as a set of religious practices such that adherence to them guarantees spiritual or social perfection.  Neither egalitarianism not distinct gender roles can do that.  But there are sets of practices that are more and less suitable to us as we really are, more and less responsive to our timeless human needs and more and less capable of lifting us towards the heights at which we are capable of living.