The Lilith Blog

July 15, 2013 by Sonia Isard

Lamentations for Trayvon Martin

In preparation for tonight’s Tisha B’av services, I’ve been re-reading Eykha (Lamentations)—the text we chant each year to mourn and commemorate the destructions of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem.  It’s one of my favorites of the canonical texts—there’s always something I’ve never noticed before, some new line jumps out and gets stuck in my head.  The poetry is dramatic and compelling, rich with imagery and shading. 

Reading over my JPS translation this weekend, one eye on my book and one eye on my Twitter feed, it was almost too easy to read the Trayvon Martin case into the text. Too easy to feel that, in addition to commemorating the Temples of old, we should be in mourning for the justice system of today.

I saw Trayvon Martin in the lines about suffering at the hands of unjust tormentors.

My foes have snared me like a bird,
Without any cause.
They have ended my life in a pit
And cast stones at me.

I read the failure of our courts in the tales of Jerusalem’s crimes and punishments.

Jerusalem has greatly sinned, 
Therefore she is become a mockery.
All who admired her despise her,
For they have seen her disgraced;
And she can only sigh
And shrink back

I heard echoes of my own disillusionment in our justice system.

To deny a man his rights
In the presence of the Most High
To wrong a man in his cause—
This the Lord does not choose.

In anger and in sadness, I’ll be thinking about Trayvon tonight.  Anger because I have witnessed unabashed disregard for the way racism continues to permeate our American systems. Deep sadness because Trayvon died so young, amidst such venom.  Fury because George Zimmerman killed a young black man and was acquitted. Our American justice system endorsed this injustice.

My children are forlorn,
For the foe has prevailed.

Sonia Isard is Lilith’s associate editor.

The Lilith Blog

July 11, 2013 by Nathalie Michelle Gorman

My Forbidden (Mechitza) Love Story

image via meaduva

I grew up Reform in a synagogue that “sat mixed.” In fact, many of the members of my community wouldn’t have immediately understood the phrase “sitting mixed,” because as far as we were concerned, that’s how normal, modern people sat in synagogue—men and women together. Anything else would have been considered at best exotically retrograde and at worst outright oppressive. So it came as something of a surprise to me when, as a college student, I started davening in an Orthodox minyan and fell in love—with the mechitza.

It happened like this: I was interested in learning more about traditional Judaism, and I liked the students in the Orthodox minyan a lot, so I started going to their services on Fridays. And going to their services meant a mechitza.

I thought that sitting in the women’s section would require me to be really brave, because I was convinced doing so would evoke acute discomfort and a sense of horrible degradation. Instead, from the first moment I took my place on the left side of that wood and plexiglass screen in the fluorescent-lit basement room where we met every week, I felt something completely unexpected: Peace.

The Lilith Blog

July 10, 2013 by Wendy Wisner

The Poetry of Birthing at Home

In light of recent news about the high cost of giving birth in the United States, let’s hear from the authors of Home/Birth: A Poemic, which was reviewed in Lilith’s Fall 2011 issue.

Wendy Wisner asks co-authors Rachel Zucker and Arielle Greenberg about the book and their experiences.

Wendy Wisner: Home/Birth: A Poemic was published in  2011, and you both have been reading from it at venues throughout the country.  The idea of birthing at home is troublesome and frightening to many people.  How have readers/audiences reacted to the book?  Has anything surprised you?

Arielle Greenberg:  My sense is that most of the people who’ve come so far are already interested in the subject of homebirth, if not rabid about it.  So at these readings, there’s a palpable sense of relief, that the unpopular opinion we hold and put forth in this book—that the current birthing system is disempowering and potentially harmful to women and babies, and that women deserve to experience their births in a very different way—has been spoken aloud, and that this community of mothers and midwives and other birth workers who feel this way exist, are visible. 

But of course not everyone who has come to our readings has been of this mind, and we’ve been grateful that at each Q&A we’ve held, there have been folks who have questioned and challenged our statements, people who had very different experiences or feelings about their own births or choices.  Those disagreements and the discussions that have followed have been some of the most meaningful moments for us.

Another gratifying response has been from people we didn’t expect would read the book: younger women who have not yet decided if or how they want to give birth, poetry readers who would not normally read a book about birth.  We’ve heard from people who have changed their minds because of reading our book: changed their minds about how they want to plan their next birth, changed their minds about whether they even want to give birth at all.  And this is extremely surprising and extremely gratifying.

Wendy: In the book, Rachel mentions her connection to Leah and Rachel from the Bible, and the special significance of her third child’s name, Judah.  How have your Jewish identities influenced your perceptions of birthing, and of women’s relationships to their reproductive cycles?

Rachel Zucker: I grew up in a non-observant home but went to yeshiva from first through eighth grade. I was always interested in the bible stories and midrash and in the study of Talmud, but most of my youth was spent rejecting observant Judaism because I felt it was sexist and patriarchal. I resented the fact that there were different expectations and requirements for men and women and that women were treated as lesser than men. I am still not an observant Jew by any means but my feelings about Judaism have shifted. This shift began, really, during my first pregnancy. I remember being flummoxed as a pregnant feminist about how to make sense of how different I felt, how separate, how vulnerable and strong at once. After years of either being pregnant or nursing I began to feel that it did make sense that I should have different responsibilities and expectations than men had. I had to figure out how to accept this while still maintaining an egalitarian relationship with my husband.

The Lilith Blog

July 9, 2013 by Dasi Fruchter

Can We Speak for Ourselves?

Image via gerardmontigny

I want to paint you a picture of my Yeshiva: Yeshivat Maharat. Piles of giant books are stacked on the table like precarious dominoes, and pens and laptops litter the table. There is a steady hum of learning with the occasional burst of “And Abaye says what?!” As it draws close to 3:30, when it comes time for the instructor to review the holy material with us, we take notes furiously and listen.

While, like in many parallel Orthodox Yeshivot, we struggle with understanding Halachic (Jewish law) nuances between great Talmudic sages, we also battle with the very nature of the text itself. There we are, day in and day out, a group of feminist scholars and leaders, in a movement seeking to change the gender landscape of Orthodox Jewish leadership. Yet we sit at our tables in front of books where the voices of women barely appear. When they do, it is certainly not as serious partners in the development of the Halachic discourse. 

So we have a jar. In this jar we put a quarter, or a dollar, or whatever seems appropriate when a woman’s voice seems egregiously absent from a conversation in the text. For example, you can walk into our classroom one afternoon as we explore passages where Rabbis discuss the nature of what was likely the uterus. One Rabbi proposes that it resembles a bag of coins with an opening at the top. No, another Rabbi exclaims, what about a home with a door?

You’ll certainly find me tossing quarters into the jar during that conversation.

This summer, I’m exploring “menstrual purity” laws, and it is in these texts that I feel particularly excluded from the conversation. This past week, I was sitting at my desk late at night, flipping through a more modern book on laws for married women around their periods. In the book, I marked the pages where the author wrote “Ask a Rabbi,” so that I could understand areas of the law about which I will eventually be consulted on. I was disturbed, however, when one paragraph advised the woman reading the book by telling her that if she was uncomfortable showing her stained undergarments or cloths to her male rabbi, she should give them to her husband to bring to the Rabbi for her. I shook my head with a familiar frustration. Here we go again, excluding women from the process. 

The Lilith Blog

June 21, 2013 by Amy Stone

Orthodox Women Rabbis
by Any Other Name

From left to right, at the June 16 Yeshivat Maharat ordination ceremony in New York: Rabba Sara Hurwitz (dean of Yeshivat Maharat), Maharat Ruth Balinsky Friedman, Maharat Rachel Kohl Finegold, and Maharat Abby Brown Scheier. Photo by Joan Roth with permission of Yeshivat Maharat.

It happened! On June 16 three Orthodox women were ordained as clergy by an Orthodox religious institution.

I am not a superstitious person but I mentally spat three times to ward off the evil eye and forestall enraged Orthodox males – and females – from attacking the three women ordained with the title of “maharat” in Manhattan on the gloriously sunny June 16 Sunday afternoon. Of course such misogynist religious violence – think the physical attacks on Women of the Wall in Jerusalem –could never happen here. Really? It could but hopefully won’t.

For sure these three women will be Orthodox role models. And for sure they’ve picked up inspiration along the road to maharat from Blu Greenberg, woman of grace and wise determination. Founder of JOFA (Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance) in 1997, for years she’s been predicting we would see Orthodox women rabbis in our lifetime. Activist Rabbi Avi Weiss turned Greenberg’s words “Where there’s a rabbinic will, there’s a halakhic way” into a new kosher reality.

They certainly have pastoral powers but defining maharat remains a work in progress. They cannot count in a minyan or act as witnesses in a Jewish court or in signing Jewish documents. According to the head of Yehisvat Maharat, Rabbi Jeffrey Fox, “They are only permitted to lead services or read Torah within the framework of Halakha.” Will a rabbinic court (men only) determine the framework? 

The Lilith Blog

June 18, 2013 by Nathalie Michelle Gorman

Take Off That Hat:
A Message to My Subway Harasser

In the span of two weeks a few months ago, I was sexually harassed twice on the subway. The first time, an older, white-bearded Haredi [ultra-Orthodox] man drove his thumb straight into my right butt cheek. The second time, a secular-looking fellow with a mop of brown curls and a computer bag over his trench-coated shoulder flashed me, gently tossing his penis from hand to hand a few feet from me while I waited for the train.

Both these experiences were upsetting and degrading. But I found myself more upset by the Haredi man groping me than I was by the religiously-not-identifiable schlub who decided that I absolutely must see his member. And since then, I’ve been wondering: Why do I care so much more about the Haredi guy?

Was it the fact that the first experience involved physical contact, while the second was only a visual assault? That said, both the old man copping a very emphatic and unwanted feel and the middle-aged man deciding I absolutely needed to see his member registered as such profound violations that I would be hard-pressed to call one worse than the other.

Was it because one guy was a Jew while the other one wasn’t, at least, not as far as I know? That explanation definitely doesn’t do it for me. I’ve never been comfortable holding Jews to a higher level of moral accountability than I do others just because we happen to be co-religionists. For me, a person who did a bad thing is just that: a person who did a bad thing. Whether he’s Jewish or not is beside the point.

The Lilith Blog

June 14, 2013 by Julie Sugar

For My Father:
With a Suitcase in Each Hand

 “They are Americans,” my father often explained about my brother and me while we were growing up. It was a pronouncement delivered in his thick Hungarian accent, and bestowed upon us with a jumble of love and pride, distance and dissonance. I remember that after long dinners at other people’s houses, with food we didn’t like, my brother and I would want to go to McDonald’s. The proof seemed to be in the pudding (or in the fries): my brother and I were quite different from our European father, who disapproved of our preference for fast food. But what strikes me now that I’m older is that usually our dad agreed, drove us to McDonald’s, and bought us hamburgers. He wanted us to be happy, and he wanted us to be Americans.

My parents escaped Communist Hungary in 1976, and settled in New Jersey. Today, my father’s stories from his first years as a new immigrant are as well-worn and beloved as a favorite song. There was the time he was driving back with a new hairdryer for my mother; he saw a sign that said “U-Turn Next”, and turned around because he didn’t know what the word “next” meant. (My mother wryly remarked in Hungarian, when my dad finally got home, “My hair is dry now.”) Or there was the time he arrived at a house for dinner and asked if he could see their closet. His hosts were confused, but obliged. Then it was my father who was confused—in Hungarian, a common word for “bathroom” is “vécé”, which is the Hungarian pronunciation of “WC”, which comes from the English phrase “water closet”… which is not used in the United States. He needed to pee and was looking at a bunch of hangers and coats.

When I was five, my dad—a chemical engineer—was relocated to a new position in Houston. My mother had recently and suddenly passed away, and so it was the three of us who moved: me, my brother, and my father. As I grew up, the impression I formed of my father was that being an immigrant means you don’t completely fit in either place; you are a foreigner in your new country, and you’ve also become a foreigner in the country from which you came. Once when my dad visited Hungary, he wanted to buy some grapes from a man selling them on the street. When my dad asked whether the grapes had seeds (since he was used to the variety in the States), the man snapped, “Of course they have seeds, you idiot!”

The way my father has always described his sensation of displacement in both places is that he’s “internationally homeless.”

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June 11, 2013 by Elizabeth Mandel

The Jewish Costs of Jewish Education

My husband and I long ago decided that a Jewish day school education was a top priority for us. I attended Jewish day school from pre-school through high school, and I feel that the daily immersion in Jewish texts and a Jewish environment during my formative years continues to enrich me spiritually and intellectually. My husband attended Hebrew school through his bar mitzvah. He found it stultifying, and he learned little. While he has spent time during his adult life studying, he feels like he can, in his own words, “never catch up,” the way a language learner who begins study in adulthood might feel impossibly behind next to someone who has been speaking a language since the age of three. He envies me the knowledge I wear like a second skin. And so, we decided we wanted our children to attend Jewish day to school to have the opportunity to rigorously delve into the Jewish texts, rich in their nuance and complexity; to be immersed in Jewish traditions, from the laws and rituals to the songs and symbols; surrounded by a love for Israel; steeped in the importance of giving and contributing to society. We wanted them to spend their days as part of the Jewish community. We found a school that reflected our world views, combining a liberal, progressive pedagogy with deep learning and a commitment to religious egalitarianism.

But then I became pregnant with and delivered our third child, and we became engulfed with worry about how we were going to afford tuition for all three girls. My husband and I began to examine the changes that we could make in our lives in order to be able to afford astronomical tuition costs. We already live fairly modest lives, and we knew that the change would have to be something significant, beyond cutting out the occasional dinner delivery. There were only two real places we could make such a change. We could move to the suburbs, where both living costs and tuitions would be less expensive, or I could stop freelancing as a documentary film producer, writer and editor, and go back to work full time. Since the birth of my first child I first worked part time and then moved to freelancing, with an extremely flexible schedule. This has enabled me to spend days at home with my children, as well as go on class trips and to doctor appointments, to be with them when they are sick, to be home when the babysitter is sick. It has enriched our family life and our individual lives in many ways – but not financially.

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May 22, 2013 by Bonnie Beth Chernin

The Artist’s Torah

I’m always on the look-out for commentary I can read while the Torah’s chanted in Hebrew I don’t understand during Saturday morning Shabbat services. So when I came across The Artist’s Torah by David Ebenbach, also the author of two short story collections and a book of poetry, I was grateful to have new material to delve into.

But you don’t need to attend religious services to enjoy Ebenbach’s thoughtful book. And you don’t need to be an artist. Anyone interested in the creative process will find something meaningful in this rich commentary that explores the weekly Torah readings through the gaze of understanding the creative life.

In a recent interview with Ebenbach (who crossed paths with me 15 years ago when we both attended an MFA in writing program), he said, “The intention is not that you have to be traditionally religious to find yourself in these pages,” and added, “The book wrestles with what it means to be spiritually engaged and doesn’t make any assumptions about the form that takes.”

Ebenbach poses the big questions: What is creativity? Where does it come from? How does creativity get blocked and how can blocks be overcome? He sets out to find what the sacred text of Judaism has to say in response. In addition, he presents the challenge of whether he can find insights throughout the Torah and not just in Genesis with the explicit focus on creation. 

The Lilith Blog

May 20, 2013 by Yona Zeldis McDonough

The Gifts that Mattered

Though Mother’s Day 2013 may be a wrap, it’s not too late to gift your maternal unit with a copy of What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty One Women On The Gifts That Mattered Most (Algonquin). This rich collection of essays (as studded with delectable morsels as my own mother’s walnut-raisin-cinnamon- sugar-dusted-cookies) offers a preponderance of Jewish women ruminating on gifts both tangible and not:  

She saw me hesitating over a very expensive lace Mexican blouse, picking it up, putting it down, walking away, coming back. It cost what seemed like the earth to me—maybe fifty dollars.  “Do you like it darling?” my mother asked. “It’s gorgeous,” I said…“But it’s so expensive.”   “You should always get the things you really want,” she said, and she picked it up, marched to the cash register, and bought it. 

–Katha Pollit, The Unicorn Princess

In the midst of all the joy were the flowers Mom bought me. They’d made the service feel transcendent. They’d made the lunch exuberant and elegant at the same time. She gave me more in those gusts of color and vegetation than I could have even imagined…Thank you for the roses, Mommy.

–Abigail Pogrebin, Never Too Late

…then came the plant she gave me when my first son was being born…I took out the worst of my postpartum derangement syndrome on that poor plant…Eight and a half years later, the plant still blooms in an upstairs dormer window…Even with its perilous beginnings, that plant is the most precious thing my mother has ever given me. Most of what I know about parenting and patience I’ve learned by watching it.

–Dahlia Lithwick, The Plant Whisperer

I still have my mother’s jade necklace, and I every time I touch it and every time I put it on, I think of her and I still miss her. I don’t think missing a mother ever stops. I have decided to be buried with it.

–Marge Piercy, Betrayal