Hatam Soferet

Me in the Forward :)

Just in time for the new year, several notable firsts have taken place in the world of Jewish women...

Full story (but there's a picture in the print version!)

I quite often hear this criticism from angry Orthodox types: The Torah I am writing is pasul according to Orthodox views because I am a woman, so it is irresponsible of me (at best; others say downright disgusting and immoral) to release my Torah, indistinguishable as it is from a kosher Torah, into the wide world where some Orthodox person might happen to read from it.

I know for a fact that there are soferim in those exact same communities who happily sell Torahs to Reform and Conservative communities which are totally pasul. I have seen repairs taking place which are absolutely invalid. I have heard people say "They're Reform, what do they care if it's treif?". No-one is criticising these soferim, even though they're worse than I am - they're creating pasul Torahs and defrauding their customers by telling them that they're kosher.

Of course, it is much easier to be anti-woman than it is to combat fraud and theft within one's own community. Preaching righteous indignation makes you popular. Preaching honesty and integrity doesn't.

Torah Cleaning at Temple Beth David yesterday. Me, a bag of cleaning tools, and about eighty willing congregants, cleaning their Torahs with sponges, erasers, sandpaper, and vodka.

Continuing the metaphor of Torah repair for Life, I think cleaning a Torah gives people an interesting extra perspective - it shows that Torahs are, as it were, only human. Admitting that Torahs need cleaning just like anything else, and furthermore having ordinary people help with the cleaning, I think helps people own holiness. It's easy to get used to thinking of holiness as something which gets trotted out in shul once a week, and Judaism along with it - something which happens for a couple of hours on a Saturday morning. Performing an everyday task on a holy object is a powerful demonstration of the less familiar concept of mixing sacred and mundane. Reversing the details, we can transfer the concept: mix mundane and sacred. Judaism is structured so that one can bring tastes of the sacred into more or less any part of one's daily activities: bringing cleaning to Torah shows us that we can bring Torah to cleaning - awareness of the Divine Awesomeness out of those two hours in temple on Shabbat morning, and into the rest of the week.

At least, I hope that's what they got out of it :)

Someone asked me: isn't it hard to write the parts of the Torah that are mean about women?

Like the ritual for the suspected wife, in Numbers 5?

Basically, if a chap thinks his wife's been screwing the milkman - or the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, as the Torah puts it - he takes her to the priest and they do a lie-detector test: they write some nasty curses on a paper and dissolve the ink in some water along with some ick off the floor and make her drink it, and if she's guilty she bloats up hideously.*

Often ruffles people's feminist feathers because it seems so jolly unfair. It always reminds me of that bit in Chicago:

I'm standin' in the kitchen, carving up a chicken for dinner, minding my own business, in storms my husband Wilbur in a jealous rage. "You've been screwing the milkman," he said. He was crazy, and he kept on screaming, "You've been screwing the milkman!"

The sotah ritual sounds as though it's intended for that kind of situation - Wilbur drags June out to the temple that very second, screaming all the way, insisting on having the lie-detector test at once - which, granted, does seem to pander rather too much to jealous rages, and doesn't seem to respect women particularly.

'Cept I don't find it particularly distressing, because first Wilbur has to find two witnesses (kosher ones - not relations, and not of dubious moral character), and solemnly inform June that she is to stay away from the milkman. Then, if he wants to accuse her, he needs to find two witnesses to testify that June and the milkman were alone together long enough to hem-hem-you-know. Then he has to cart her all the way to the temple in Jerusalem, which is a bit of a pain for your average Judean peasant, and he has to stop sleeping with her until after they've done the ritual to prove whether she was in fact screwing the milkman since he can't have it both ways. The rabbinic message says, no making accusations in a jealous rage, if you think she's screwing the milkman you go about it within the parameters of the law.

This is an example of a case where Torah provides for something and rabbinic tradition interprets the provision to suit its ideas of how things ought to be.** It's not so much that I'm greatly enamoured of the restructuring the rabbis did here; more that writing the sotah ritual is a reminder of the power rabbinic tradition has to do whatever it jolly well wants, and when I see myself as part of such a tradition, I am reminded that religion is a tool for making life more meaningful rather than an encumbrance for making it more difficult.

Course, I might feel differently if there were still a Temple and it was still actually a possibility ;-)



* There's a bit more to it than that, but that's basically it.
** Possibly simply in order to stop the temple being overrun with jealous husbands? One could posit various motivations; the point is not what they were but that they were.