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A few weeks ago, we read parashat Beha'alotekha, which contained the enactment of Second Passover, the repeat festival for those who missed it the first time round. Passover in the Torah involves sacrificing a lamb and eating it, and if you happen to be ritually impure on account of having had contact with a corpse, you can't eat sacrificial meat.
So in Numbers 9:7 we find a group of people who were ritually-unclean-because-of-contact-with-a-corpse at Passover time, and they go to Moses in protest. למה נגרע, they say, לבלתי הקרב את קרבן ה' במעדו בתוך בני ישראל? Why should we be excluded, kept from making the Lord's offering in its season with all the other Israelites? Why should we, through no fault of our own, be barred from participating in possibly the single most important ritual of Jewish identity? And Moses says Hm, hang on a second and I'll see what God has to say.
"Why shouldn't we be allowed to?"
The other scenario beloved of observant feminist circles is the daughters of Zelophehad in parashat Pinhas, in which the intrepid daughters of Zelophehad successfully challenge the law of inheritance. Both are frequently cited as examples of "It's not fair!" protestation in the Torah, but there is a vital difference.
Spotted it? Zelophehad's daughters say "It's not fair! Our father's name will die out!" The ritually unclean men (okay, anashim is arguably non-gendered as an inclusive masculine noun, but at base it is a word meaning men) protest on their own behalf, and the daughers of Zelophehad protest on someone else's behalf.
This is a terrific example of the subtle ways we have different social expectations for men and women, that have their roots in pre-Torah civilisation and continue today, so much part of the wallpaper that most people don't even notice.
It's absolutely acceptable for men to want things for themselves. We raise men to conceive of the world as being basically about them. But it's much less acceptable for women to want things for themselves - we label them as pushy, greedy, bitchy. We raise women to value themselves based on how useful they are to other people, such that acceptable wants are on behalf of others. Men say unashamedly "I want;" women say apologetically "I need." Men get away with being competitive and self-focused; women are expected to be selfless and share even at the cost of their own well-being.
The degree to which this applies depends on the society you move in, but it applies, and for Zelophehad's daughters to say "Why shouldn't we be allowed to participate?" is pretty much as unthinkable now as it was then. Yet we like to think ourselves egalitarian.
Another verse in Beha'alotekha concerns the superlative humility of Moses. The balance between humility and pride led the Kotzker Rebbe to say that a person should have a piece of paper in each pocket; one says "The world was created for me" and the other "I am dust and ashes". The idea is that you balance the two.
This is laudable, and it is one of the areas where egalitarian Judaism fails utterly.
I'll explain.
If you are brought up as a man in our society, you start out with a good-sized "World was created for me" paper, and you have to keep reminding yourself of the dust and ashes bit. However, if you are brought up as a woman, your "World was created for me" paper is very small, and your "dust and ashes" paper, probably along with a "You are bad and worthless unless you are useful to other people and they love you" paper, is very very large.
The mishnah in Sanhedrin (4:5) says נברא אדם יחידי ללמדך שכל המאבד נפש אחד מישראל מעלה עליו הכתוב כאילו ...לפיכך כל אחד ואחד חייב לומר בשבילי נברא העולם - Adam was created singular to teach you that the loss of one soul is akin to the loss of the entire world, and the saving of one soul is akin to the saving of the entire world...Accordingly, every individual is obliged to say, "The world was created for me."
Except that as a woman, I am continually and acutely aware that the world was not created for me. So who owns this text? I don't.
There is a later emendation to the text that restricts the souls in question to Jewish souls only, and it's a plausible interpretation because the text is speaking to a limited audience. It's not really speaking to all people, it's speaking to people like us, important people, people we want in our world - even taking out the Jewish particularism, this text is still a text with a limited audience, and I am not part of the intended audience.
Consequently, it is all very well to draw beautiful universalist messages from it, but unless you acknowledge the text's fundamental limitations, your own message is likewise going to be fundamentally limited. The text is speaking to the audience it conceives of as default people, normal people, and in our culture that means men. When your universalism is speaking in a men's voice to an audience of default-people, which-means-men, it is a limited universalism, just as a white person lauding racial equality in a roomful of white people rings somewhat hollow.
How to deal with it? I don't know exactly, but it seems to me that one needs to be extremely conscious of one's audience, particularly if one is male, particularly if one is expanding a traditional text into a non-traditional audience. Egalitarianism isn't the same thing as gender-blindedness, or being oblivious of matters gendered.
Egalitarianism means being aware of one's tendency to oblivion, and making efforts to accommodate those in different circumstances to one's own - it doesn't mean assuming that everyone's circumstances are the same. Specifically, gender egalitarianism has to include awareness, because otherwise you are giving male messages to a male audience, and you risk ignoring the women in your audience. למה נגרע? Why should we be excluded?
So in Numbers 9:7 we find a group of people who were ritually-unclean-because-of-contact-with-a-corpse at Passover time, and they go to Moses in protest. למה נגרע, they say, לבלתי הקרב את קרבן ה' במעדו בתוך בני ישראל? Why should we be excluded, kept from making the Lord's offering in its season with all the other Israelites? Why should we, through no fault of our own, be barred from participating in possibly the single most important ritual of Jewish identity? And Moses says Hm, hang on a second and I'll see what God has to say.
"Why shouldn't we be allowed to?"
The other scenario beloved of observant feminist circles is the daughters of Zelophehad in parashat Pinhas, in which the intrepid daughters of Zelophehad successfully challenge the law of inheritance. Both are frequently cited as examples of "It's not fair!" protestation in the Torah, but there is a vital difference.
Spotted it? Zelophehad's daughters say "It's not fair! Our father's name will die out!" The ritually unclean men (okay, anashim is arguably non-gendered as an inclusive masculine noun, but at base it is a word meaning men) protest on their own behalf, and the daughers of Zelophehad protest on someone else's behalf.
This is a terrific example of the subtle ways we have different social expectations for men and women, that have their roots in pre-Torah civilisation and continue today, so much part of the wallpaper that most people don't even notice.
It's absolutely acceptable for men to want things for themselves. We raise men to conceive of the world as being basically about them. But it's much less acceptable for women to want things for themselves - we label them as pushy, greedy, bitchy. We raise women to value themselves based on how useful they are to other people, such that acceptable wants are on behalf of others. Men say unashamedly "I want;" women say apologetically "I need." Men get away with being competitive and self-focused; women are expected to be selfless and share even at the cost of their own well-being.
The degree to which this applies depends on the society you move in, but it applies, and for Zelophehad's daughters to say "Why shouldn't we be allowed to participate?" is pretty much as unthinkable now as it was then. Yet we like to think ourselves egalitarian.
Another verse in Beha'alotekha concerns the superlative humility of Moses. The balance between humility and pride led the Kotzker Rebbe to say that a person should have a piece of paper in each pocket; one says "The world was created for me" and the other "I am dust and ashes". The idea is that you balance the two.
This is laudable, and it is one of the areas where egalitarian Judaism fails utterly.
I'll explain.
If you are brought up as a man in our society, you start out with a good-sized "World was created for me" paper, and you have to keep reminding yourself of the dust and ashes bit. However, if you are brought up as a woman, your "World was created for me" paper is very small, and your "dust and ashes" paper, probably along with a "You are bad and worthless unless you are useful to other people and they love you" paper, is very very large.
The mishnah in Sanhedrin (4:5) says נברא אדם יחידי ללמדך שכל המאבד נפש אחד מישראל מעלה עליו הכתוב כאילו ...לפיכך כל אחד ואחד חייב לומר בשבילי נברא העולם - Adam was created singular to teach you that the loss of one soul is akin to the loss of the entire world, and the saving of one soul is akin to the saving of the entire world...Accordingly, every individual is obliged to say, "The world was created for me."
Except that as a woman, I am continually and acutely aware that the world was not created for me. So who owns this text? I don't.
There is a later emendation to the text that restricts the souls in question to Jewish souls only, and it's a plausible interpretation because the text is speaking to a limited audience. It's not really speaking to all people, it's speaking to people like us, important people, people we want in our world - even taking out the Jewish particularism, this text is still a text with a limited audience, and I am not part of the intended audience.
Consequently, it is all very well to draw beautiful universalist messages from it, but unless you acknowledge the text's fundamental limitations, your own message is likewise going to be fundamentally limited. The text is speaking to the audience it conceives of as default people, normal people, and in our culture that means men. When your universalism is speaking in a men's voice to an audience of default-people, which-means-men, it is a limited universalism, just as a white person lauding racial equality in a roomful of white people rings somewhat hollow.
How to deal with it? I don't know exactly, but it seems to me that one needs to be extremely conscious of one's audience, particularly if one is male, particularly if one is expanding a traditional text into a non-traditional audience. Egalitarianism isn't the same thing as gender-blindedness, or being oblivious of matters gendered.
Egalitarianism means being aware of one's tendency to oblivion, and making efforts to accommodate those in different circumstances to one's own - it doesn't mean assuming that everyone's circumstances are the same. Specifically, gender egalitarianism has to include awareness, because otherwise you are giving male messages to a male audience, and you risk ignoring the women in your audience. למה נגרע? Why should we be excluded?