Judith Plaskow Library of Contemporary Judith Plaskow Jewish Philosophers Feminism, Theology, and Justice

Editor-in-Chief Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Arizona State University Edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes Editor Aaron W. Hughes, University of Rochester

Volume 6

Leiden • boston The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/lcjp 2014 Judith Plaskow

Feminism, Theology, and Justice

Edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

Leiden • boston 2014 Cover illustration: Courtesy of Judith Plaskow. Photographed by Richard Fish. The series Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers was generously supported by the Baron Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Judith Plaskow : feminism, theology, and justice / edited by Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes. p. cm. — (Library of contemporary Jewish philosophers, ISSN 2213-6010 ; volume 6) Includes bibliographical references. Summary: “Judith Plaskow, Professor of Religious Studies Emerita at Manhattan College in New York, is a leading Jewish feminist theologian. She has forged a revolutionary vision of Judaism as an egalitarian religion and has argued for the inclusion of sexually marginalized groups in society in general and in Jewish society in particular. Rooted in the experience of women, her feminist Jewish theology reflects the impact of several philosophical strands, including hermeneutics, dialogical philosophy, critical theory, and process philosophy. Most active in the American Academy of Religion, she has shaped the academic discourse on women in religion while critiquing Christian feminism for lingering forms of anti-Judaism”— Provided by publisher. ISBN 978-90-04-27979-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-28000-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-27980-3 (e-book) 1. Plaskow, Judith—Philosophy. 2. Women in Judaism. 3. Women and religion. 4. Feminism—Religious aspects—Judaism. 5. Judaism—21st century. I. Tirosh- Samuelson, Hava, 1950– editor. II. Hughes, Aaron W., 1968– editor. BM729.W6J84 2014 296.3092—dc23 2014022388

This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2213-6010 ISBN 978-90-04-27979-7 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-27980-3 (e-book) This hardback is also published in paperback under ISBN 978-90-04-28000-7. Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Contents

The Contributors ...... vii

Editors’ Introduction to Series ...... ix

Judith Plaskow: An Intellectual Portrait ...... 1 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms in the Study of Religion ...... 27 Judith Plaskow

Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective ...... 45 Judith Plaskow

Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist Reflections on Good Sex ...... 69 Judith Plaskow

Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation ...... 83 Judith Plaskow

Interview with Judith Plaskow ...... 97 Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

Select Bibliography ...... 139

The Contributors

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Ph.D., Hebrew University, 1978) is Irving and Miriam Lowe Professor of Modern Judaism, the Director of Jewish Stud- ies, and Professor of History at Arizona State University in Tempe, AZ. Her research focuses on Jewish intellectual history, Judaism and ecology, science and religion, and feminist theory. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters in academic journals and edited volumes, she is the author of the award-winning Between Worlds: The Life and Work of Rabbi David ben Judah Messer Leon (1991) and the author of Happiness in Pre- modern Judaism: Virtue, Knowledge, and Well-Being in Premodern Judaism (2003). She is also the editor of Judaism and Ecology: Created World and Revealed World (2002); Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy (2004); Judaism and the Phenomenon of Life: The Legacy of Hans Jonas (2008); Building Better Humans? Refocusing the Debate on Transhumanism (2011); Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (2012); and Jewish Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century (2014). Professor Tirosh-Samuelson is the recipient of several large grants that have funded interdisciplinary research on religion, science, and technology.

Aaron W. Hughes (Ph.D., Indiana University Bloomington, 2000) holds the Philip S. Bernstein Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Roch- ester. Hughes was educated at the University of Alberta, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Oxford University. He has taught at Miami University of Ohio, McMaster University, the Hebrew University of Jeru- salem, the University of Calgary, and the University at Buffalo. He is the author of over fifty articles and ten books, and the editor of seven books. His book titles include Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, 2012); Muslim Identities (Columbia, 2013); The Study of Judaism: Identity, Authenticity, Scholarship (SUNY, 2013); and Rethinking Jewish Philosophy: Beyond Particularism and Universalism (Oxford, 2014). He is also the Editor-in-Chief of Method & Theory in the Study of Religion.

Editors’ Introduction To Series

It is customary to begin studies devoted to the topic of Jewish philosophy defining what exactly this term, concept, or even discipline is. We tend not to speak of Jewish mathematics, Jewish physics, or Jewish sociology, so why refer to something as “Jewish philosophy”? Indeed, this is the great paradox of Jewish philosophy. On the one hand it presumably names something that has to do with thinking, on the other it implies some sort of national, ethnic, or religious identity of those who engage in such activity. Is not philosophy just philosophy, regardless of who phi- losophizes? Why the need to append various racial, national, or religious adjectives to it?1 Jewish philosophy is indeed rooted in a paradox since it refers to philosophical activity carried out by those who call themselves Jews. As philosophy, this activity makes claims of universal validity, but as an activity by a well-defined group of people it is inherently particularistic. The question “What is Jewish philosophy?” therefore is inescapable, although over the centuries Jewish philosophers have given very different answers to it. For some, Jewish philosophy represents the relentless quest for truth. Although this truth itself may not be particularized, for such individuals, the use of the adjective “Jewish”—as a way to get at this truth—most decidedly is.2 The Bible, the Mishnah, the Talmud, and related Jewish texts and genres are seen to provide particular insights into the more universal claims provided by the universal and totalizing gaze of philosophy. The problem is that these texts are not philosophical on the surface; they must, on the contrary, be interpreted to bring their philosophical insights to light. Within this context exegesis risks becoming eisegesis. Yet others eschew the term

1 Alexander Altmann once remarked: It would be futile to attempt a presentation of Judaism as a philosophical system, or to speak of Jewish philosophy in the same sense as one speaks of American, English, French, or German philosophy. Judaism is a religion, and the truths it teaches are religious truths. They spring from the source of religious experience, not from pure reason. See Alexander Altmann, “Judaism and World Philosophy,” in The Jews: Their History, Culture, and Religion, ed. Louis Finkelstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1949), vol. 2, 954. 2 In this regard, see Norbert M. Samuelson, Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008), e.g., 10–12. x editors’ introduction to series

“philosophy” and instead envisage themselves as working in a decidedly Jewish key in order to articulate or clarify particular issues that have direct bearing on Jewish life and existence.3 Between these two perspectives or orientations, there exist several other related approaches to the topic of Jewish philosophy, which can and have included ethics,4 gender studies,5 multiculturalism,6 and postmodernism.7 Despite their differences in theory and method, what these approaches have in common is that they all represent the complex intersection of Judaism, variously defined, and a set of non-Jewish grids or lenses used to interpret this rich tradition. Framed somewhat differently, Jewish philosophy—whatever it is, however it is defined, or whether it is even possible— represents the collision of particularistic demands and universal concerns. The universal or that which is, in theory, open and accessible to all regardless of race, color, creed, or gender confronts the particular or that which represents the sole concern of a specific group that, by nature or definition, is insular and specific-minded. Because it is concerned with a particular people, the Jews, and how to frame their traditions in a universal and universalizing light that is believed to conform to the dictates of reason, Jewish philosophy can never be about pure thinking, if indeed there ever can be such a phenomenon. Rather Jewish philosophy—from antiquity to the present—always seems to have

3 See, e.g., Strauss’s claim about Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, perhaps one of the most important and successful works of something called Jewish philosophy ever written. He claims that one “begins to understand the Guide once one sees that it is not a philosophic book—a book written by a philosopher for philosophers—but a Jewish book: a book written by a Jew for Jews.” See Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to study The Guide of the Perplexed,” in The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), vol. 1, xiv. Modern iterations of this may be found, for example, in J. David Bleich, Bioethical Dilem- mas: A Jewish Perspective, 2 vols. (vol. 1, New York: Ktav, 1998; vol. 2, New York: Targum Press, 2006). 4 See, e.g., David Novak, Natural Law in Judaism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Elliot Dorff, Love Your Neighbor and Yourself: A Jewish Approach to Modern Personal Ethics (New York: Jewish Publication Society of America, 2006). 5 E.g., the collection of essays in Women and Gender in Jewish Philosophy, ed. Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004). 6 E.g., Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid a Clash of Civilizations (London: Continuum, 2003); Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Schocken, 2007). 7 E.g., Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004); Elliot R. Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009); Elliot R. Wolfson, A Dream Interpreted within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (New York: Zone Books, 2011). editors’ introduction to series xi had and, for the most part continues to have, rather specific and perhaps even practical concerns in mind. This usually translates into the notion that Judaism—at least the Judaism that Jewish philosophy seeks to articulate— is comprehensible to non-Jews and, framed in our contemporary context, that Judaism has a seat at the table, as it were, when it comes to pressing concerns in the realms of ethics and bioethics. Jewish philosophy, as should already be apparent, is not a disinterested subject matter. It is, on the contrary, heavily invested in matters of Jewish peoplehood and in articulating its aims and objectives. Because of this interest in concrete issues (e.g., ethics, bioethics, medical ethics, feminism) Jewish philosophy—especially contemporary Jewish philosophy—is often constructive as opposed to being simply reflective. Because of this, it would seem to resemble what is customarily called “theology” more than it does philosophy. If philosophy represents the critical and systematic approach to ascertain the truth of a proposition based on rational argumentation, theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and the articula- tion of the nature of religious truths. The difference between theology and philosophy resides in their object of study. If the latter has “truth,” however we may define this term, as its primary object of focus, the former is concerned with ascertaining religious dogma and belief. They would seem to be, in other words, mutually exclusive endeavors. What we are accustomed to call “Jewish philosophy,” then, is a paradox since it does not—indeed, cannot—engage in truth independent of religious claims. As such, it is unwilling to undo the major claims of Judaism (e.g., covenant, chosenness, revelation), even if it may occasionally redefine such claims.8 So although medieval Jewish thinkers may well gravitate toward the systematic thought of Aristotle and his Arab interpreters and although modern Jewish thinkers may be attracted to the thought of Kant and Heidegger, the ideas of such non-Jewish thinkers are always applied to Jewish ideas and values. Indeed, if they were not, those who engaged in such activities would largely cease to be Jewish philosophers and would instead become just philosophers who just happened to be Jewish (e.g., Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Karl Popper). Whether in its medieval or modern guise, Jewish philosophy has a tendency to be less philosophical simply for the sake of rational analysis and

8 A good example of what we have in mind here is the thought of Maimonides. Although he might well redefine the notion of prophecy, he never abnegates the concept. On Maimonides on prophecy, see Howard Kreisel, Prophecy: The History of an Idea in Medi- eval Jewish Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 148–56. xii editors’ introduction to series more constructive. Many of the volumes that appear in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will bear this out. The truths of Judaism are upheld, albeit in often new and original ways. Although Jewish philosophy may well use non-Jewish ideas to articulate its claims, it never produces a vision that ends in the wholesale abandonment of Judaism.9 Even though critics of Jewish philosophy may well argue that philosophy introduces “foreign” wisdom into the heart of Judaism, those we call Jewish philosophers do not perceive themselves to be tainting Judaism, but perfecting it or teasing out its originary meaning.10 The result is that Jewish philosophy is an attempt to produce a particular type of Judaism—one that is in tune with certain principles of rationalism. This rationalism, from the vantage point of the nineteenth century and up to the present, is believed to show Judaism in its best light, as the synthesis or nexus between a Greek-inflected universalism and the particularism of the Jewish tradition. What is the status of philosophy among Jews in the modern period? Since their emancipation in the nineteenth century, Jews have gradually integrated into Western society and culture, including the academy. Ever since the academic study of Judaism began in the 1820s in Germany, Jewish philosophy has grown to become a distinctive academic discourse practiced by philosophers who now often hold positions in non-Jewish institutions of higher learning. The professionalization of Jewish philosophy has not been unproblematic, and Jewish philosophy has had to (and still has to) justify its legitimacy and validity. And even when Jewish philosophy is taught in Jewish institutions (for example, rabbinic seminaries or universities in Israel), it has to defend itself against those Jews who regard philosophy as alien to Judaism, or minimally, as secondary in importance to the inherently Jewish disciplines such as jurisprudence or exegesis. Jewish philosophy, in other words, must still confront the charge that it is not authen- tically Jewish. The institutional setting for the practice of Jewish philosophy has shaped Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse. But regardless of the setting,

9 This despite the claims of Yitzhak Baer who believed that philosophy had a negative influence on medieval Spanish Jews that made them more likely to convert to Christianity. See Israel Jacob Yuval, “Yitzhak Baer and the Search for Authentic Judaism,” in The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, ed. David N. Myers and David B. Ruderman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 77–87. 10 Indeed, Jewish philosophers in the medieval period did not even see themselves as introducing foreign ideas into Judaism. Instead they saw philosophical activity as a recla- mation of their birthright since the Jews originally developed philosophy before the Greeks and others stole it from them. editors’ introduction to series xiii

Jewish philosophy as an academic discourse is quite distinct from Jewish philosophy as constructive theology, even though the two may often be produced by the same person. Despite the lack of unanimity about the scope and methodology of Jewish philosophy, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers insists that Jewish philosophy has thrived in the past half century in ways that will probably seem surprising to most readers. When asked who are the Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century, most would certainly mention the obvious: Franz Rosenzweig (d. 1929), Martin Buber (d. 1965), and Emmanuel Levinas (d. 1995). Some would also be able to name Abraham Joshua Heschel (d. 1972), Mordecai Kaplan (d. 1983), Joseph Soloveitchik (d. 1993), and Hans Jonas (d. 1993). There is no doubt that these thinkers have either reshaped the discourse of Western thought for Jews and non- Jews or have inspired profound rethinking of modern Judaism. However, it is misleading to identify contemporary Jewish philosophy solely with these names, all of whom are now deceased. In recent years it has been customary for Jews to think that Jewish philosophy has lost its creative edge or that Jewish philosophy is somehow profoundly irrelevant to Jewish life. Several reasons have given rise to this perception, not the least of which is, ironically enough, the very success of Jewish Studies as an academic discipline. Especially after 1967, Jewish Studies has blossomed in secular universities especially in the North American Diaspora, and Jewish philosophers have expressed their ideas in academic venues that have remained largely inaccessible to the public at large. Moreover, the fact that Jewish philosophers have used technical language and a certain way of argumentation has made their thought increasingly incomprehensible and therefore irrelevant to the public at large. At the same time that the Jewish public has had little interest in professional philosophy, the practitioners of philosophy (especially in Anglo-American departments of philosophy) have denied the philosophical merits of Jewish philosophy as too religious or too particularistic and excluded it entirely. The result is that Jewish philosophy is now largely generated by scholars who teach in departments/programs of Jewish Studies, in departments of Religious Studies, or in Jewish denominational seminaries.11

11 See the comments in Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson, “Introduction: Charting an Alternative Course for the Study of Jewish Philosophy,” in New Directions in Jewish Phi- losophy, ed. Aaron W. Hughes and Elliot R. Wolfson (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2010), 1–16. xiv editors’ introduction to series

The purpose of the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is not only to dispel misperceptions about Jewish philosophy but also to help nudge the practice of Jewish philosophy out of the ethereal heights of academe to the more practical concerns of living Jewish communities. To the public at large this project documents the diversity, creativity, and richness of Jewish philosophical and intellectual activity during the second half of the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, showing how Jewish thinkers have engaged new topics, themes, and methodologies and raised new philosophical questions. Indeed, Jewish philosophers have been intimately engaged in trying to understand and interpret the momen- tous changes of the twentieth century for Jews. These have included the Holocaust, the renewal of Jewish political sovereignty, secularism, postmodernism, feminism, and environmentalism. As a result, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophy intentionally defines the scope of Jewish philosophy very broadly so as to engage and include theology, political theory, literary theory, intellectual history, ethics, and feminist theory, among other discourses. We believe that the overly stringent definition of “philosophy” has impoverished the practice of Jewish philosophy, obscuring the creativity and breadth of contemporary Jewish reflections. An accurate and forward looking view of Jewish philosophy must be inclusive. To practitioners of Jewish philosophy this project claims that Jewish philosophical activity cannot and should not remain limited to professional academic pursuits. Rather, Jewish philosophy must be engaged in life as lived in the present by both Jews and non-Jews. Jews are no longer a people apart, instead they are part of the world and they live in this world through conversation with other civilizations and cultures. Jewish philosophy speaks to Jews and to non-Jews, encouraging them to reflect on problems and take a stand on a myriad of issues of grave importance. Jewish philosophy, in other words, is not only alive and well today, it is also of the utmost relevance to Jews and non-Jews. The Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is simultaneously a documentary and an educational project. As a documentary project, it intends to shape the legacy of outstanding thinkers for posterity, identifying their major philosophical ideas and making available their seminal essays, many of which are not easily accessible. A crucial aspect of this is the interview with the philosophers that functions, in many ways, as an oral history. The interview provides very personal comments by each philosopher as he or she reflects about a range of issues that have engaged them over the years. In this regard the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers editors’ introduction to series xv simultaneously records Jewish philosophical activity and demonstrates its creativity both as a constructive discourse as well as an academic field. As an educational project, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers is intended to stimulate discussion, reflection, and debate about the meaning of Jewish existence at the dawn of the twenty-first century. The individual volumes and the entire set are intended to be used in a variety of educational settings: college-level courses, programs for adult Jewish learning, rabbinic training, and interreligious dialogues. By engaging or confronting the ideas of these philosophers, we hope that Jews and non-Jews alike will be encouraged to ponder the past, present, and future of Jewish philosophy, reflect on the challenges to and complexities of Jewish existence, and articulate Jewish philosophical responses to these challenges. We hope that, taken as individual volumes and as a collection, the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will inspire readers to ask philosophical, theological, ethical, and scientific questions that will enrich Jewish intellectual life for the remainder of the twenty-first century. All of the volumes in the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers have the same structure: an intellectual profile of the thinker, several seminal essays by the featured philosopher, an interview with him or her, and a select bibliography of 120 items, listing books, articles, book chapters, book reviews, and public addresses. As editors of the series we hope that the structure will encourage the reader to engage the volume through reflection, discussion, debate, and dialogue. As the love of wisdom, philosophy is inherently Jewish. Philosophy invites questions, cherishes debate and controversy, and ponders the meaning of life, especially Jewish life. We hope that the Library of Contemporary Jewish Philosophers will stimulate thinking and debate because it is our hope that the more Jews philosophize, the more they will make Judaism deeper, durable, and long-lasting. Finally, we invite readers to engage the thinkers featured in these volumes, to challenge and dispute them, so that Judaism will become ever stronger for future generations.

Judith Plaskow: An Intellectual Portrait

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Judith Plaskow is perhaps the most famous and influential Jewish feminist theologian. For the past four decades she has been a preeminent voice among Jewish feminists, contributing to the profound transformation of contemporary Judaism. With a passion for justice that took its inspiration from biblical prophets, Plaskow has substantiated the claim that Judaism is a patriarchal religion based on inequality and injustice and, in its place, has called for the creation of feminist Judaism. Plaskow was the first feminist to argue that the problem of women in Judaism is neither sociological nor political but rather theological. Because the sacred texts of the Jew- ish tradition have been composed, transmitted, and interpreted by men alone, they have constructed a male-centered God-language that ignored women’s experience, made maleness normative, and created a Jewish society that subordinated and marginalized women. If contemporary Judaism is to achieve the prophetic vision of justice, Jewish God-language has to change; the three pillars of Judaism—God, Torah, and Israel—have to be reinterpreted; and new religious rituals have to be composed. Plaskow’s reconstruction of Judaism in accord with feminism is truly revolutionary.

The Feminist Vision: Methodology, Critique, and Reconstruction

Wishing to end millennia of male dominance which has been harmful to all women, including Jewish women, Plaskow offered a radical liberation theology. It is “radical” in the original sense of the term, namely, going back to roots. Since the revelation of the Torah at Sinai is the root experience of Judaism, Plaskow has shown how Jewish men have written the experiences of women out of the tradition by simultaneously silencing women and excluding them from the process of interpretation. The only way to respond to this profound injustice is to move women from the margins to the center, making it possible for women to become equal interpreters of divine revelation whose wisdom matters. The recognition of women’s full humanity has implications for all aspects of society (e.g., law, politics, economics, religion, education, and culture), but it is most poignant in terms of human sexuality. The unequal power relation between men 2 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait and women is the mark of heterosexuality, which has become even dou- bly oppressive because it was posited as the only normative form of relationship. To be fully liberated from male oppression it is necessary for humanity to recognize all forms of human sexuality—lesbian, homosexual, bisexual, and transgendered—as valid and treat those who manifest nonheterosexual behavior with dignity and respect. Plaskow’s radical liberation theology is thus inseparable from her woman-centered sexual ethics and her social activism. Although she has more recently rejected this dichotomy as overly simple, Plaskow’s critique begins with the basic feminist distinction between sex (i.e., biological differences between men and women) and gender (i.e., socially constructed roles and expectations of men and women). In patriarchal society gender and sex overlap: a given trait or mode of behavior is considered “masculine” when it relates to power, control, and prestige; conversely, traits associated with marginal social locations are considered “feminine.” Moreover, in patriarchal society “masculine” terms stand for what is human and male, while “feminine” terms connote only femaleness, as if the female is a less-worthy variant of the male standard. From a feminist perspective, the imbalance between the “masculine” and the “feminine” operates throughout culture, giving rise to unequal and unjust gender-based social practices. This aspect of patriarchy is especially perni- cious when we consider religion, which expresses our ultimate concerns. If God is conceptualized in masculine terms (e.g., “lord,” “master,” “king,” “judge,” and “warrior”), we not only privilege the male over the female, we also sanction these relations of domination to be normative, since humans (especially Jewish males) are supposed to imitate God. To uproot injustice to women we must repudiate male-centered language and construct a new God-language that comes out of women’s experience, offering metaphors that facilitate nonhierarchical, egalitarian relations and that reflect an understanding of power as “power-with” rather than as domination. Plaskow’s life, career, and academic writings demonstrate the ambiguity and complexity of the term “Jewish philosophy.” If by “Jewish philosophy” we refer to reasoned reflections about the Jewish religious beliefs, authoritative texts, rituals and practices, and historical experience, Plaskow is undoubtedly a Jewish philosopher. When she subjects Judaism to a scath- ing feminist critique, she weighs the relative merits of various arguments, points out the logical flaws of various claims, and generalizes about what is right, good, and true. However, if by “Jewish philosophy” we refer more narrowly to an academic activity of engaging a well-defined body of philosophical literature (by non-Jewish and Jewish philosophers), then defining Plaskow as a Jewish philosopher is more complex. Although Plaskow holds judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 3 a B.A. in philosophy, her graduate training and academic career took shape not in the discipline of philosophy but rather in the discipline of religious studies. At Yale Divinity School she was trained in systematic (Christian) theology and (to a lesser degree) the comparative study of world religions and her conversation with Jewish and non-Jewish philosophical texts was shaped by feminist concerns. Occasionally Plaskow refers to (male) Jewish philosophers, but her point of departure is always feminist, that is to say, she concerns herself with ideas of male philosophers only to the extent that they are relevant to her feminist analysis. She is not interested in the philosophic exposition of other people’s thought (be they Jews or non- Jews) for its own sake. Indeed, Plaskow never refers to herself as a “Jewish philosopher,” but sees herself as a “Jewish theologian,” or more precisely as a “Jewish feminist theologian,”1 and she regards her work not as “Jewish philosophy” but as “Jewish theology” or “Jewish thought.”2 As a theologian, Plaskow is concerned primarily with the interpretation of sacred texts, explaining how the canonic tradition shaped the social location of Jewish women over the centuries. Plaskow’s theology is quite different from that of other Jewish theologians, because hers is a grass-roots theology. Her point of departure is not the received texts but the lived experience of the texts’ interpreters, the women who refused to accept their exclusion from the act of interpretation and who courageously began to confront the canonic tradition. Feminist consciousness-raising groups forged this experience in the 1960s and 1970s, in which Plaskow took very active part. That group experience has shaped the style of Plaskow’s writing: instead of promoting her own individual originality, Plaskow always speaks in the name of a larger vision—religious feminism—and as part of a larger group, be they women, feminists, or Jewish feminists. More specifically, Plaskow forged her fusion of Judaism and feminism in the context of B’not Esh (Daughters of Fire), a feminist “spirituality collective,” as Plaskow defined it, that she co-founded in 1981. Writing as a spokesperson of a larger group to which she belongs, Plaskow always acknowledges the work of others with whom she forged

1 Judith Plaskow, “Judith Plaskow: Jewish Feminist Theologian,” in Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion, ed. Ann Braude (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 219–26. 2 See Judith Plaskow, “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, ed. Lynn Davidman and Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 62–84; Judith Plaskow, “Jewish Feminist Thought,” in History of Jewish Phi- losophy, ed. Daniel H. Frank and Oliver Leaman (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 885–93. Whether Jewish philosophy is necessarily theological has been debated by historians of Jewish philosophy as well as by constructive Jewish philosophers. 4 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait her revolutionary vision and to whom she is intellectually indebted. Plaskow’s feminist theology is thus a collective endeavor rooted in collective experience and not just the musing of an individual philosopher. As a feminist, Plaskow’s primary loyalty is to other feminists, but her theorizing as a feminist reflects the influence of several philosophical strands, especially hermeneutics, dialogical philosophy, critical theory, and process philosophy. The hermeneutical tradition in western philosophy was rooted in the activity of Scriptural interpretation. From the Greek verb herme- neuein, “hermeneutics” means “to interpret,” “to exegete,” “to explain,” or “to translate.” Named after the Greek god Hermes, the messenger of the gods, hermeneutics was understood as a way to communicate knowledge, but the knowledge conveyed was not simply theoretical or abstract; rather the knowledge is intended to instruct and to direct the recipient of knowledge toward living rightly, very much as Torah does. Positioning itself against scientific Positivism, philosophical hermeneutics articulated the theory that explored the conditions and possibility of interpretation not only of literary texts but of all “texts,” including art and artifacts. Plaskow’s feminist project is thoroughly hermeneutical, although she does not devote her energy to the exposition of the leading figures of philosophical hermeneutics (e.g., Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Paul Ricouer). Plaskow’s project is hermeneutical because she wishes to understand what transpires between texts and interpreters and how the act of interpretation shapes lived reality at the same time that social location shapes the act of interpretation. In agreement with philosophical hermeneutics, Plaskow’s feminist hermeneutics is based on one crucial philosophical point: understanding is not possible without pre-understanding, or pre- judgment. Best expressed by Gadamer, this insight is her point of departure: to theorize as a feminist requires one to be acutely self-aware of one’s own positionality, one’s own prejudices, and one’s own horizon of meaning. Acknowledging positionality entails that no matter how abstract the pursuit of truth is, philosophy is always historically grounded and socially embedded, and it requires the thinker to declare where she stands rather than hide behind the “veil of objectivity,” as male philosophers or nonfeminist female philosophers tend to do. This is why Plaskow openly discusses her biography and intellectual development to shed light on her feminist reinterpretation of Judaism.3 For Plaskow, philosophy does not consist of

3 Judith Plaskow, “Intersections: An Introduction,” in The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003, ed. Judith Plaskow and Donna Berman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 5–19. judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 5 disembodied, value-neutral theorizing; rather, philosophizing begins with lived historical experience, be it the experience of all women or specifically the experience of Jewish women or a Jewish woman, herself. The emphasis on positionality is linked to yet another theoretical claim: all knowledge is linguistical, contextual, and inseparable from a tradition. Although Plaskow is not a philosopher of language per se, her feminist project presupposed a certain understanding of language: language does not mirror or reflect reality because language is not transparent. Rather, language construes reality, especially social reality in interhuman relations. If we want to change social relations, especially the relations between men and women, we must first be attentive to language, in particular the language about the ultimate reality we call “God.” How we (or more precisely the men who construct and control social reality) have imaged God tells us not about the nature of God, who is beyond description or understanding, but about the nature of human beings and their values, ideals, and norms. The linguisticality of human existence means that not only is knowledge always refracted through language, but that all social reforms must begin with language since it frames how we think, speak, and act. Human claims to knowledge are always socially embedded, emerging out of lived experience and in specific sociocultural conditions. These conditions necessarily reflect underlying (but often unacknowledged) power relations, including the power imbalance between men and women within the context of patriarchy. Patriarchy, Plaskow charges along with other feminists, is neither “natural” nor “divinely ordained,” although she does not regard sexism as more fundamental than racism or ethnocentrism, as other feminists have argued. For Plaskow, patriarchy is a set of social institutions that emerged at a certain point in human development, privileging men over women. Once in place, patriarchy has pervaded all aspects of society and culture, making maleness the norm of being human: women are the Other, defined only in relations to men, against which they are found want- ing. In the words of Aristotle, women are “incomplete males,” a perception that persisted since antiquity to our own day. Since patriarchy has shaped all aspects of culture, the feminist must realize that all cultural products, including canonic texts, reflect the assumptions, values, and norms of patriarchy. Therefore, the feminist must approach all texts with the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that subjects all expressions of patriarchal culture, especially canonic texts, to close analysis in order to show their inherent partiality. Even when these texts claim to speak truth about God, the world, and human beings, they in fact speak only about men and for men, because these truth claims were made by men. The hermeneutics of suspicion is thus a hermeneutic of refusal, namely, 6 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait the refusal to accept what men have said as authoritative and normative, even though the men-centered tradition has presented itself as such. By expositing the exclusion of women from the formation of the tradition, by demanding inclusion, and by offering alternative readings of the canonic texts, the hermeneutics of suspicion and refusal is the first step in the liberation of women from the oppression and abuses of patriarchy. As historical entities human beings are necessarily “children of tradition,” as Gadamer aptly put it. Tradition itself, with its unique religious symbols, beliefs, ritual practices, ethical norms, moral sensibilities, and social ideals, shapes the human horizon necessarily and inescapably. To be immersed in tradition means that feminists, especially those who define themselves in religious terms, cannot critique “religion” in general; rather, they must carry out the critical project within their own particular religious tradition. To critique a given religious tradition from within means that feminists must engage not only in “hermeneutics of suspicion,” but also in “hermeneutics of remembrance.”4 As a Liberal/Progressive Jew, Plaskow defines herself in religious categories and feels deep connection to Judaism as a religious way of life. After several years of engaging in feminist critique, Plaskow realized that she is not just a religious feminist who critiques the abuses of patriarchy but a Jewish feminist who cares deeply about Judaism and Jews. The feminist revolution that Plaskow sought to accomplish had to take place from within Judaism, by focusing on the interpretation, exposition, and application of the canonic sources of Judaism, first and foremost the Bible and secondarily the rabbinic corpus. The task of the feminist philosopher is thus dual: critique and analysis as well as recovery and reconstruction. Standing within the Jewish tradition, she insists on rereading the canonic sources against their male-centered grain, exposing their biases, gaps, and silences.5 The feminist reading of the traditional sources is not simply an

4 The dynamics between “hermeneutics of suspicion” and “hermeneutics of remembrance” is discussed in Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 13–15. Both terms and their methodologies were developed by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, with whom Plaskow has worked closely since the 1970s. See, for example, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Transforming Vision: Explorations in Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011). 5 Feminist hermeneutics has some overlap with postmodern philosophy, especially its post-Structuralist strain, articulated by Derrida’s Deconstruction and Michel Foucault’s critique of power/knowledge. However, on the whole, I do not consider Plaskow as a post- modernist thinker for the simple reason: she believes that it is possible to generalize about and reconstruct “women’s experience” and she wishes to reform society in light of feminist ideals and for the sake of women. Plaskow’s feminism is somewhere between modernism judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 7 act of claiming to decipher what God wants the Jews to be and to do; it is rather a reflexive and critical reading of Judaism that calls Jews to recon- sider everything they take for granted about it. To be a feminist, then, entails taking a critical stance toward a socially constructed reality constituted by language and a particular historical experience. This posture makes Plaskow’s thought critical in the broad sense of the term, even though she does not engage the leading thinkers of Critical Theory (e.g., Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Walter Benjamin) in sustained analysis. As a critical theorist she weighs, evaluates, judges, and adjudicates claims, situations, and texts with the intent of exposing their distorting “blind spots,” gaps, and silences of the ruling ideology (i.e., patriarchy). This critical engagement with the patriarchal Jewish tradition exposes the injustice done to women when they were silenced, excluded, or marginalized by Jewish men who claimed to be the exclusive interpreters of divine revelation. Since in rabbinic Judaism the act of interpreting Torah is the very activity by which Jews communicate with God and reach the ultimate end of human life, the exclusion of women from the act of interpretation is not just morally unjust but also religiously harmful. The feminist interpreter cannot limit herself to uncovering that truth or theorizing about the past; rather, she must act within the social spheres that reform and transform the social reality that brought about the marginalization, exclusion, and subordination of women. With the feminist recovery of women’s experience and the restoration of the female voice to the Jewish tradition, Plaskow offers Jewish philosophers a different way of philosophizing: philosophy begins with the lived experience of the philosopher, engages pressing social issues, and leads to action in the social world. As a critical activity, the task of philosophy (like the task of feminism) is ultimately practical: to make the world into a just place by ending oppression, exclusion, or marginalization of individuals and groups. To philosophize as Plaskow calls us to do is to engage in tikkun olam, the very lofty rabbinic goal to which Plaskow gave a new feminist interpretation.6

and postmodernism: it endorses the modernist, democratic notion of individual rights but eschews generalization about humanity; conversely, it endorses the social constructivism of postmodernism but rejects its consequent relativism. 6 Appropriately the final chapter of Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai is entitled “Femi- nist Judaism and Repair of the World.” See Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 211–38. 8 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait

Biography and Career

Judith Plaskow was born in Brooklyn on March 14, 1947, into a family of Jewish professionals.7 Her mother, Vivian Cohen Plaskow (1920–1979) was a teacher and her father, Jerome Plaskow (1918–2002), a certified public accountant. With the suburbanization of the Jews in the postwar years, the family moved to West Hempstead on Long Island where she grew up during the 1950s and 1960s attending the local public schools. Religiously the family identified as Reform and belonged to Nassau Community Temple, whose spiritual leader at the time was Rabbi Sidney Ballon (1912–1974). Classical Reform in those decades stood for three main tenets: the essence of Judaism is ethical monotheism; the task of the Jewish people is to serve as “a light unto the nations;” and Jews must improve the world by working tirelessly to attain social justice. Accordingly, as Plaskow herself tells us, she believed that “Jews had given the world the purifying vision of belief in one universal God”8 and that Jews had an obligation to translate that vision into just social relations. Growing up in the postwar years, Plas- kow became intensely fascinated and even obsessed with the Holocaust, recognizing that it raises profound theological questions about God and his relationship with the Jewish people as well as about the meaning of victimhood. Because she viewed Jews as victims she was led “to identify with other victims of oppression, especially African-Americans.”9 She became increasingly informed about the plight of Africans and African- Americans and was deeply and personally transformed by Martin Luther King’s speech “I Have a Dream” on October 16, 1963. That transformative experience has launched her career as a social critic, religious reformer, and feminist activist. Plaskow was educated in America’s top institutions of higher learning. She received her B.A. from Clark University majoring in Philosophy and an M.A. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) in Religious Studies from Yale Divinity School. At Yale she studied systematic Christian (mainly Protestant) theology and wrote a doctoral thesis later published under the title Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul

7 For a short and very useful overview of Judith Plaskow’s life and works see Rachel Adler, “Judith Plaskow,” in Jewish Women’s Archives: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclo- pedia, http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/plaskow-judith. Additional information about Plaskow’s life and intellectual development is available in Judith Plaskow, “Intersections: An Introduction,” in The Coming of Lilith, 5–19. 8 Plaskow, “Intersections,” 5. 9 Ibid., 6. judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 9

Tillich.10 Written under the supervision of Julian Norris Hartt, this revised version of the 1975 dissertation is an early feminist attempt to understand “women’s experience” and show that when (Christian) theologians speak about human nature, human sin, or human need for grace, they in fact have in mind men only. The uninformed reader cannot tell that the author of the book is a Jew, let alone a committed religious Jew; the critical perspective adopted in the book is feminist rather than Jewish and the methodology is that of systematic theology as practiced in (Christian) divinity schools. Plaskow, then, began her intellectual career not as a Jewish theologian or a scholar of Jewish studies but as a scholar who subjected Christian theology to feminist analysis. The experience at Yale Divinity School formed Plaskow as a feminist theologian. She entered Yale Divinity School in 1968 at the height of the feminist transformation of American society. A year later women were admitted to Yale undergraduate college, setting the stage for the transformation of American higher education at large. She joined the Yale Women’s Alliance, a group engaged in consciousness raising as well as in various issues related to the life of women at Yale, where she became friends with Carol P. Christ and other feminists who subjected their own religious traditions to sustained feminist critique.11 In retrospect, Plaskow defined the exposure to feminism as a “conversion,” an intense personal experience that shifts the way one sees one’s place in the world. Married at the time to Robert Goldenberg, a rabbi and scholar of rabbinic Judaism, she realized that as a woman she occupies a secondary, marginalized place within Judaism. The new feminist self-awareness brought her to realize that in traditional synagogue services “her presence was irrelevant to the purpose for which we have gathered.”12 As a woman she was not counted in the minyan, was not called to the Torah, and was not involved in the interpretation of the received tradition. Refusing to give up Judaism for feminism or live as a woman whose identity is split between the two, Plaskow would gradually seek to affirm herself as a “Jewish feminist and a feminist Jew.”13 That project

10 Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin and Grace: Women’s Experience in the Theologies of Reinhold Niebhur and Paul Tillich (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980). 11 With Carol P. Christ, Plaskow edited Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979) and Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989), anthologies that survey feminist religious writings from the 1970s and 1980s. 12 See Standing at Sinai, xi. 13 Ibid. 10 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait took place within the contours of the discipline of religious studies and its leading professional organization, the American Academy of Religion. Already as a graduate student she became the Co-Chair of the Women and Religion Group (1972–1974) and later was a member of its steering committee once it became regularized as the Woman and Religion Section. During the early 1970s she worked closely with other feminists and women’s studies scholars, first as a research associate in Women’s Studies at Harvard (1973) and later in the New York Area Feminist Scholars in Religion (1974). With Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, the Catholic, feminist, biblical scholar, Plaskow co-founded the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and served as its co-editor (1983–1994),14 a position that made Plaskow both intimately familiar with feminist scholarship and in a position to shape its direction. In the 1980s and 1990s Plaskow became a household name in the disciplines of religious studies and women’s studies. Benefitting from the growth of both disciplines, Plaskow moved smoothly from Assistant Professor of religion in Wichita State University in Kansas (1976–1979), where she taught courses on feminist studies in religion, and thereafter in Manhattan College, a Lasallian Catholic institution, which she joined in 1976, rising steadily from Assistant Professor (1976) to Associate Professor (1984) and finally to Full Professor (1990). At this Catholic institution, Plaskow, the Jewish feminist, was clearly the Other, albeit a respected Other who had a voice.15 Her impact on the field was exercised through the American Academy of Religion where she rose to positions of leadership: she served two terms as Associate Director (1992–1994 and 1998–1999), a term as Vice President (1995–1996), President-Elect (1996–1997), and President (1997–1998). As a Jewish feminist she has had more influence on one of America’s leading academic institutions—perhaps more than most Jewish members of the organization, with the exception of Jacob Neusner. The more Plaskow engaged other feminist academics, both Christian and post-Christian, the more she became aware of her own Jewishness and her need to reconcile her Jewish and feminist identities. In part that awareness grew out of the realization of the “persistence of anti-Semitic stereotypes in feminist literature” and the need to confront “Christian feminist

14 For an overview of this professional relationship and the history of the journal see Judith Plaskow, “A Short History of JFSR,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion: 20th Anni- versary Issue 21, no. 2 (2005): 103–6. 15 This is based on Plaskow’s own self-description in a personal e-mail communication, December 4, 2013. judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 11 anti-Judaism,”16 a point to which we shall return below, but it also grew out of the need to fully express herself. During the summer of 1980, five years after writing her dissertation, Plaskow taught her first course on Jewish feminist theology at the first National Havurah Summer Institute, and that transformative experience launched her new attempt to integrate her feminist and Jewish identities.17 Against other Jewish feminists who defined the problem of women in Judaism in sociological or political terms (e.g., Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, or Cynthia Ozick), Plaskow argued that the problem is theological, requiring feminist reinterpretation of Judaism.18 As she began to integrate her feminist and Jewish identities, she joined forces with other Jewish feminists, including Martha Acklesberg, Marcia Falk, Drorah Setel, and Sue Levi Elwell, women who were members of the Jewish feminist group, B’not Esh.19 Gathering at the Grail Retreat Center in Cornwall-on- Hudson, this group of originally sixteen (now thirty-two) Jewish feminists was determined to create a feminist Judaism, and saw themselves as a “new Yavneh” of sorts. In this context they not only talked about feminism but also enacted changes that will transform the Jewish community at large. Characteristic of feminist consciousness-raising groups, this “spiritual collective” shaped her methodology: truth comes out of lived experience through empathetic encounters with others and with the intent of making a difference in the life of Jews. The women-centered experience of B’not Esh led to personal changes as well. In 1984 Plaskow came out as a lesbian and her marriage ended in divorce. From then on her theological reinterpretation of Judaism developed in two complimentary trajectories: first, she directed her critical stance toward compulsory heterosexuality, showing its inherently unjust nature and the need to find a place for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and trans gender people within religious communities. Second, she applied the critique of power not only to traditional Judaism but also to the policies of the

16 Judith Plaskow, “Feminist Anti-Judaism and the Christian God,” in The Coming of Lil- ith, 100, 101. 17 Plaskow, “Intersections,” 11. 18 Judith Plaskow, “The Right Question Is Theological,” in On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Schocken book, 1983), 223–33; reprinted in The Coming of Lilith, 56–64. 19 For a full list of the women involved in the early years of this group see Martha A. Acklesberg, “Spirituality, Community and Politics: B’not Esh and the Feminist Reconstruc- tion of Judaism,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2, no. 2 (Fall 1986): 109–20; the list is on p. 109. The composition of the group has changed repeatedly over the years and today it consists of thirty-two women. 12 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait

State of Israel, especially toward the Palestinians.20 A regular contributor to the Left-leaning magazine, Tikkun,21 Plaskow emerged as a prominent voice of self-critical, liberal Judaism taking a stance on a variety of hotly contested social and political issues, such as the rights of homosexuals and the Israeli presence in Lebanon. For Plaskow, the ideal of justice could not be limited to women; it had to be applied to any group that suffers oppression and injustice. Precisely because she was committed to justice and truth, she could not ignore the fact that some Christian feminists tried to make the case that “Jesus was a feminist” by drawing on traditional anti-Jewish themes. Others uncritically rejected Yahweh as the God of patriarchy, perpetuating the dichotomy between Jewish “law” and Christian “grace,” which has been implicated in the history of anti-Semitism. She took her Christian sisters to task by exposing and confronting feminist anti-Judaism.22 A cou- rageous critic, Plaskow speaks truth as she sees it, even when the truth goes against accepted conventions of Jews, Israelis, and even feminists.

Jewish Feminist Theology

Plaskow’s life work is governed by one overarching and purposeful vision: to create a feminist Judaism. This mission has been articulated in numerous essays and public addresses but its most systematic expression is Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (1990). Based on over two decades of sustained work as a feminist theologian, scholar of religion, editor of an academic journal, and social activist, this powerful book has transformed contemporary Judaism, generating a robust examination of Judaism in light of feminism among academics and nonacademics, Jews and non-Jews, men and women, and across the religious spectrum of Judaism. No one writing about feminism and Judaism

20 Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai, 107–19. 21 For a representative sample of articles see Michael Lerner, ed., Tikkun Reader: Twen- tieth Anniversary (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007). Judith Plaskow’s essay, “Burning in Hell, Conservative Movement Style: Beliefs that Jews and Homosexuals Deserve Eternal Punishment” (ibid., 77–82) illustrates her role as a public intellectual critical of America’s political Right. 22 Judith Plaskow, “Christian Feminism and Anti-Judaism,” CrossCurrents 33 (Fall 1978): 306–9; reprinted as “Blaming the Jews for the Birth of Patriarchy” in Lilith 7 (1980): 11–12, and in Nice Jewish Girls, ed. Evelyn Torton Beck (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 298–302; Judith Plaskow, “Christian Feminist Anti-Judaism: Some New Consideration,” New Con- versations 9 (Spring 1987): 23–26; “Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation,” in Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorneza (New York: Crossroad, 1993), 117–29, reprinted in this volume; Judith Plaskow, “Feminist Anti- Judaism and the Christian God,” in The Coming of Lilith, 100–109. judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 13 since then has ignored (or could have afforded to ignore) this compelling book; by the same token, no one today could deny that Judaism has been profoundly transformed because of the feminist vision, most powerfully articulated by Judith Plaskow.23 Let’s look more closely at Plaskow’s seminal work, presenting her feminist theology in her own words.24 As stated above, Plaskow was the first to argue that the problem of women in Judaism is first and foremost theological, because “theology surreptitiously affects many aspects of Jewish practice” (Sinai, 23). Since all aspects of Jewish society and culture have been shaped by theological presuppositions that have normative power, all Jews today, no matter how religious or secular they are, must pay attention to theology, if they wish to address the marginalization, exclusion, or subordination of women in Judaism. Plaskow names this theological enterprise, “Godwrestling” (Sinai, 33), a term coined and popularized by Arthur Waskow, a fellow, Left-leaning Jewish theologian.25 Godwrestling is an invi- tation to Jews to ask poignant theological questions and not to shirk from inconvenient truths about inherent injustice within Judaism. As much as Jacob’s wrestling with the angel transformed him into “Israel,” giving birth to a nation, so will contemporary wrestling with problematic Jewish theology give rise to a more just and egalitarian Judaism. The feminist critical engagement with Jewish theology, however, does not begin with exposition of Jewish sacred texts in an attempt to fathom what they say and what they mean. Rather, the feminist theological critique begins with historiography, precisely because human beings are temporal beings who live in history. Understanding how the past is recorded, transmitted, and interpreted is precisely the point of departure for feminist theology. In patriarchal Judaism that task was the exclusive privilege of men: only men composed the sacred texts of Judaism; only men interpreted their meaning for all Jews; only men translated that meaning into normative legislation; and only men created and staffed the social institutions which turned law into daily practice. Thus, even though the Jewish People, or Jewish society through the ages, comprises of both men and women, the experience of Jewish women did not shape the tradition.

23 This point is well stated by Debora Nussbaum Cohen, “Judith Plaskow is Still Stand- ing, Twenty Years On,” in Forward, January 28, 2011, http://forward.com//articles/134754/ judith-plaskow-is-still-stading-twenty-years-on. 24 Given the large number of citations, the references to Standing Again at Sinai will be listed in the text rather than in the notes. 25 Arthur Waskow, Godwrestling (New York: Schocken Books, 1978). 14 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait

By “women’s experience” (a topic analyzed already in her doctoral dissertation) Plaskow refers to “the daily, lived substance of women’s lives, the conscious events, thoughts, and feelings that constitute women’s reality” (Sinai, 11). Women’s experience, Plaskow reminds her readers, is “not an essence” or “some innate capacity of women” (ibid.). Rather, women’s experience is a “product of culture” and as such needs to be and indeed can be recovered through historical research, once we acknowledge the partial nature of the records we have at our disposal. Yet, that partiality does not mean that women were historically absent. Indeed, women were and always are present in Jewish society and collective experience, but they were made to be silent, their voice taken away from them. Feminism has restored voice to Jewish women,26 enabling them not only to express and share their present experiences, but also to recover the experiences of women through the ages, beginning with the root experience of Judaism: Sinai.27 “Standing again at Sinai” is thus the most appropriate symbol for the task of Jewish women: they need to reassert the historicity of women’s presence as recipients of divine revelation and they must engage in the reinterpretation of the entire Jewish tradition in order to create a Judaism in which women are active and equal participants. The creation of feminist Judaism required the reinterpretation of the three pillars of Judaism: Torah, Israel, and God.28 “Torah” does not refer just to the Five Books of Moses, the Bible in its entirety, or even to the Bible as interpreted by the rabbinic tradition. “Torah” is that and more because it consists of the memory and traces of the root experience in which Torah was given to Israel at Sinai. The Torah, namely, instruction, that Israel received at Sinai included also “women’s words, teachings and actions hitherto unseen” (Sinai, 28), the rich and diverse women’s experiences which the Jewish tradition has silenced, occluded, and marginalized. To recover the full meaning of Torah we must use the modern historiographical method “of careful and critical sifting of sources” (Sinai, 35) in order to

26 It is no coincidence that the title of a major feminist Orthodox journal in Israel is called Kolekh (Your Voice). 27 As Plaskow acknowledges, presenting the Sinai event as “root experience” is indebted to Emil Fackenheim, God’s Presence in History: Jewish Affirmations and Philosophical Reflec- tions (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 8–14. 28 It is interesting to note that this formulation was first articulated by medieval kab- balists, for whom the dominant metaphor for God is Shekhinah, the female aspect of God. Jewish feminists have been quick to appropriate Shekhinah symbolism into their Goddess- language but the appropriateness of that move is not without problems. judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 15 recover what Yosef Haim Yerushalmi called “Jewish group memory.”29 Although Yerushalmi was no feminist, Plaskow shows how his analysis of Jewish history and Jewish memory is precisely the method that Jewish feminists adopt when they recover the full meaning of Torah. As feminist historians look “at history from a woman-centered perspective, they have tried to reconstruct independent women’s cultures developed within or over against the prevailing assumptions of patriarchal society” (Sinai, 37). Plaskow makes clear then that her interest in historiography is “theological rather than historical” because she is “concerned with the way in which feminist historiography can open up our understanding of Torah by offering as Torah a new range of sources” (ibid.). Feminist biblical hermeneutic begins with the awareness that men’s editorial work read women out of existence. Even though the biblical records themselves are therefore partial, they can provide information about “patterns and ideologies of sex roles, evidence that might shed some light on the social and religious situation of the mass of women in a given time” (Sinai, 40). Feminist biblical scholarship offers an entire new way of reading the biblical narratives written in the early periods of Israelite history, uncovering the leadership role women played in ancient society as well as “women’s religious lives outside of ‘normative’ structures” (Sinai, 42). When the Bible is read through a feminist lens we “see a larger Torah behind the Torah, a Torah in which women’s experience is rendered visible, and the social and religious forms to which they adhered are depicted in their complexity and power” (Sinai, 43). Thus the feminist “reconception of Torah,” “reveals another world around and underneath the textual tradition, a world in which women are historical agents struggling within and against patriarchal culture” (Sinai, 50). Once we recognize that women’s experience is part of “the fuller Torah we need to recover,” we can no longer take “any Jewish text as given, as having emerged organically from an eternal, unambiguous, uncontested religion vision” (Sinai, 50). The feminist approach necessarily relativizes the normative tradition, reminding us that the Judaism we have is not for all Jews but only “the Judaism of the male elite” (Sinai, 51). Judaism is much “richer, more complex and more diverse than either ‘normative’ sources or most branches of modern Judaism would admit” (ibid.). From this critical and incontrovertible argument follows the constructive or reconstructive dimension of feminist Judaism. All Jewish women,

29 Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle: Univer- sity of Seattle Press, 1982), 94; cited in Plaskow, Standing Against at Sinai, 35. 16 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait but especially the feminists among them, must become actively engaged in the reconstruction of Torah, of Jewish collective memory, and of Jewish social and religious life. They must (as indeed they have done) be engaged in composition of new midrashim,30 new rituals, and new liturgy that express their religiosity, spirituality, sensibility, and values. Plaskow celebrates and promotes feminist creativity and inventiveness, through the innovative ceremonies of Rosh Hodesh, feminist haggadot, feminist welcoming of a baby girl, and Sabbath liturgy. The new feminist rituals, however, could not remain mere feminist fancy, whim, or intellectual entertainment. If they are to transform contemporary Judaism once and for all, they have to become regarded as legally binding. Halakha, much more than midrash or liturgy, is the real challenge to feminism and its innovative, progressive spirit. So long as halakha is presented as an unchanging and in principle unchangeable divine revelation to be interpreted by expert men, a feminist Judaism will remain untenable. Plaskow addresses the halakhic challenge in two ways. First she invokes Martin Buber’s philosophy of relation or dialogical philosophy in support of her view, since Buber insisted that divine-human relations are not law- governed. Law belongs to the functional and instrumental I-It relations, whereas true dialogue between the human “I” and the “Eternal Thou” is direct, unmediated, and in principle not amenable to systemization. Divine revelation, then, cannot be reduced to law and halakha must not replace God as the center of Jewish life. Second, and more importantly but pro- vocatively, Plaskow challenges the very assumption that halakha as we have it is authoritative. Halakha, like all legal systems, is a human product, the work of human beings who operated within certain historical conditions. The human origins of halakha, Plaskow asserts as a Liberal/Progressive Jew, means that halakha is inherently subject to change, reinterpretation, and reformation. Rabbinic Judaism was itself a novel interpretation of Judaism and the rabbis “believed that their interpretations gave the true meaning of Scripture,”31 but the rabbis represented their own views and not the views of the community in its entirety. Precisely because religious authority, Plaskow argues, always rests “in a community of interpreters” the definition of the interpretative community must be as inclusive as possible so

30 Plaskow’s feminist appropriation of ancient Jewish midrashim on the female demon, Lilith, exemplifies the role of midrash in the construction of Jewish feminist theology. See Judith Plaskow, “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology,” in Womanspirit Rising, 198–209, reprinted in The Coming of Lilith, 23–34. 31 Judith Plaskow, “It Is Not in Heaven: Feminist and Religious Authority,” in The Coming of Lilith, 123–27; quote on p. 126. judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 17 that the halakhic tradition must continue to respond to “the experience of ever-widening communities.”32 In the ideal, future feminist Judaism, laws that govern human relations, especially the formation and dissolution of relationship, will have “to acknowledge women’s full agency” and women will have to be active participants in the interpretation of the halakhic tradition and the process of decision making about women. Plaskow does not exclude halakha from the ideal future but she maintains that “any halakha that is part of a feminist Judaism would have to look very different from halakha as it has been” (Sinai, 72). Needless to say, most Orthodox Jews, including Orthodox women, would not endorse Plaskow’s understanding of Jewish law. However, there is no denying her point that feminist theology is inseparable from feminist legal theory and that the debate about women and gender touches the most fundamental aspects of Jewish religious self-understanding. Plaskow’s understanding of “Torah” is inseparable from her understanding of “Israel.” Plaskow puts it succinctly: “If Torah is Jewish memory as it lives in and forms the present, Israel is the people that remembers and transforms the memory” (Sinai, 75). The feminist reconstruction of Judaism demands a new understanding of “Israel,” the recipient of divine revelation. To begin, Plaskow argues for a new understanding of human selfhood, or personhood. Contrary to the dominant trend in modern philosophy since Descartes, the human person is not an autonomous entity that is the bearer of human rights by virtue of rationality, but a relational being whose “personhood is shaped, nourished and sustained in community.” Plaskow’s emphasis on the relational or social nature of the human self is indebted to Buber’s philosophy of relation no less than to Judaism’s belief that God entered a covenant with Israel. The covenant means that the “Jewish relationship to God is mediated through this community” (Sinai, 80); a Jew cannot have a relationship to God outside the community. Because “God is fully present only with and among the community” (ibid.), it is necessary to define the community inclusively rather than exclusively and remember that the community of “Israel” has continued to evolve in history. The rabbinic understanding of “Israel,” alas, is inadequate because the rabbis excluded women from Torah study, exempted women from time- bound commandments, forbade women to lead public prayers, and regu- lated women’s place within the patriarchal family. In so doing the rabbis underscored the Otherness of women. Plaskow’s analysis of Otherness is indebted mainly to Simone de Beauvoir and it stands in contrast to the

32 Ibid., 127. 18 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait interpretation by Emmanuel Levinas, the philosopher who made Otherness the center of his Jewish critique of Western philosophy. Whereas for Levinas Otherness is understood positively, the Other is the source of ethical obligation, for Plaskow, following de Beauvoir, Otherness is understood negatively; the Other is always the one-who-is-not-the-norm, the one who is less-than-the standard, the one who-has-no-selfhood. The reason for Plaskow’s preference of de Beauvoir over Levinas is quite obvious: whereas the French non-Jewish female philosopher offers a vantage point for the critique of patriarchal Judaism, the French male Jewish philosopher perpetuates the traditional stereotypes of the female in Judaism, which Plaskow calls into question. Plaskow’s feminist redefinition of Israel has far-reaching consequences for contemporary Judaism, because she insists that “women’s contributions to Jewish community are not driven underground, thwarted, or distorted, and men’s are not given more weight and status than they ought to enjoy” (Sinai, 87). The feminist revolution empowers women to define themselves, reassess the causes of their oppression, and restate how women differ from men. The more women take ownership of their life and their place in the society the more they have to struggle with the problem of difference, diversity, and hierarchy. After all, Judaism insists on the inherent and inheritable difference between Jews and all other nations and interprets the covenantal relationship with God in hierarchical terms of being the Chosen People. In the morning prayers the observant male Jew expresses gratitude to God for not being a Gentile, a slave, or a woman, three groups who are either pre- cluded from the observance of Jewish law, or excluded from some aspects of the Jewish law. As a feminist Plaskow is justly troubled by the hierarchical understanding of chosenness and endorses the Reconstructionist theology of Mordecai Kaplan who explicitly rejected such concept. Plaskow’s project is to show the interconnection between the “rejection of chosenness and the rejection of women’s Otherness” (Sinai, 103). Jews were eman- cipated because of the assumption that they possess humanity, but they were denied their particularity as Jews. Plaskow flatly rejects the notion of “generic humanity,” because she maintains that selfhood is always communal, but she also argues that communal identity does not necessitate the negation of other groups. The challenge for Jews today is how to continue to see themselves as covenantal people, without interpreting the covenant with God in hierarchical and exclusive terms. As a religious person and a theologian, Plaskow rejects a strictly secular understanding of Jewish existence, because the root experience at Sinai was profoundly religious. To reconstitute Judaism as egalitarian, nonhierarchical, and pluralistic is a religious project that requires first the critique of judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 19 male-centered God-language and then the creation of a new God-language. Traditional Judaism images God as a masculine, albeit asexual, deity. This has far-reaching consequences for women: “When God is pictured as male in a community that understands ‘man’ to have been created in God’s image, it only makes sense that maleness functions as the norm of Jewish humanity” and “when maleness becomes normative, women are necessarily Other, excluded from Torah and subordinated in the community of Israel” (Sinai, 127). Androcentric God-language is wrong not only because it inevitably marginalizes women, but also because of its understanding of divine power as domination, or as “power over” (Sinai, 130). Whether divine power is asserted over nature, over history, over other gods, or over humans, this understanding of power is itself the cause of injustice because it is perpetuated in human “schemes of dominance.” To construct a just and egalitarian Judaism, it is necessary to articulate a new, nonhierarchical, pluralistic God-language that expresses fluidity, multiplicity, and movement in God as the source of all being. The first generation of Jewish feminists (e.g., Marcia Falk, Lynn Gottlieb, Elyse Goldstein, and Maggie Wenig among others) have done precisely that when they wrote their own midrashim, liturgy, and rituals. Plaskow embraces the work of other feminist theologians who called for employing feminine imagery (e.g., “bride,” “queen,” “mother,” etc.) when one prays to the Goddess, or nonpersonal, nature-based symbols (e.g., “fountain,” and “source”). Her own preference is to retain a personalist language of God, but to think about God not as a “dominating Other” but as a “friend, lover, companion and co-creator” (Sinai, 164). God’s power should be understood not as dominion or domination but as “empowerment,” and God is understood not as the Other who stands over us but the one “who is with us . . . a partner in dialogue who ever and again summons us to responsible action” (ibid.). Plaskow’s alternative God-language resonates with Buber’s dialogical philosophy as well as with process philosophy, although Plaskow herself does not engage process philosophers systematically. That task was accomplished by Carol P. Christ, Plaskow’s long-term academic collaborator, whose influence on Plaskow is unmistakable.33

Justice and Sexual Ethics

The feminist project is guided by the pursuit of justice for women who have been subject to male dominance. In the above section we saw how

33 See Carol P. Christ, She Who Changes: Reimagining the Divine in the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 20 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait

Plaskow exposes the injustice to all women and to Jewish women in particular and how she proposes to deal with it within the contours of Judaism. Whereas her feminist critique of male-centered Judaism so far focused on the category of gender, Plaskow’s revolutionary project goes a step further by rethinking human sexuality in order to do justice to sexually marginalized groups in society in general and in Jewish society in particular. It is usually asserted that Judaism, in marked contrast to Christianity, views sexuality positively, rejecting celibacy and celebrating sexual reproduction within the institution of marriage. In Jewish society the heterosexual family is the smallest social unit within which the rhythm of Jewish religious life is experienced. Going beyond the feminist critique of patriarchy, Plaskow turns her critical gaze toward heterosexuality, both exposing its inherent limits and calling for celebration of nonheterosexual forms of human sexuality (i.e., homosexual, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender). Human sexuality itself (and not just women) has to be liberated from the constraining and narrow understanding of “compulsory heterosexuality,” allowing for a freer, pluralistic, and playful understanding of human sexuality. An expansion of her feminist pursuit of justice, Plaskow’s discourse on human sexuality blends philosophical, theological, social, and ethical considerations, applying them to sexually oppressed and marginalized groups and carving space for them within Jewish society. Plaskow’s point of departure is that human sexuality, like gender, is socially constructed; it is neither biologically determined nor divinely ordained. Human beings are indeed biological creatures that must engage in heterosexual intercourse to reproduce the human species, but procreation by no means captures the significance of sexuality for human beings. How sexuality is perceived, interpreted, and applied within a sociocultural context is no less and perhaps even more important than biological sex, and those perceptions are socially constructed not biologically determined. Because the act of social construction takes place within a given sociocultural context, it necessarily manifests underlying power relations. In patriarchal society where men have dominion over women, conceptions of human sexuality are necessarily refracted through the male lens. Men created “compulsory heterosexuality,” which has not only perpetuated the unequal relations between men and women but also made same-sex sexual attraction to be “deviant,” “abnormal,” or “unnatural.” To experience the full range of human sexuality, it is necessary to liberate society from oppressive and unjust “compulsory heterosexuality.” Within patriarchal Judaism underlying the ideology of normative heterosexuality is a deeply negative perception of women’s sexuality. Rabbinic judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 21

Judaism, according to Plaskow, expresses deep anxiety and fear of women’s sexuality which it seeks to control within the institution of marriage. Summarizing a lot of feminist research on this point, Plaskow calls for artic- ulation of a “new theology of sexuality.” To accomplish this goal it is necessary first to redefine “the legal framework of marriage” in accord with the “feminist refusal to sanctify any hierarchical relations” (Sinai, 200). Second, this new theology will situate biological sex in the broader category of the erotic. Erotic energy expresses itself in “our capacity for intimacy, for sharing, for touch,” which flows from the very fact that humans are communal beings who seek connections with others. The erotic is an expression of “fundamental life energy” (Sinai, 202) that manifests itself through the body but is not reduced to the body. In contrast to Western (largely Christian- Platonic) philosophy, which has denigrated the body as the prison of the spiritual soul, Plaskow (along with many other feminists) celebrates the body as the locus of spirituality. The erotic aspect of human life is spiritual, because it expresses the power and desire for communication, and it demands that relationship will be based on “mutuality, responsibility, and honesty” (Sinai, 207). A feminist theology of sexuality thus rejects all relations that are based on control, domination, and hierarchy, while honoring diversity, choice, and plurality of sexual expression. The ability to choose how to express one’s innate sexuality stands at the heart of Plaskow’s inclusive social vision that seeks to carve space for sexually marginalized, oppressed, or denigrated groups in Jewish society. For the past three decades the Jewish community, as the rest of society, has debated the social and religious status of gays and lesbians. Within non- Orthodox forms of Judaism the debate crystallized around the admission to religious seminaries and the ordination of gays and lesbians as rabbis. Although Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist strands of contemporary Judaism have resolved the issue in favor of admitting gays and lesbians to rabbinic seminaries, the issue remains controversial and full social acceptance of sexually marginalized groups is still a desideratum. Plaskow’s writings on human sexuality go beyond the demand for inclusion of gays and lesbians.34 Unlike other “religious liberals” who opened the room for inclusion of gays and lesbians by arguing that homosexuality is an inborn trait over which one has no choice, Plaskow claims that “the liberal position is riddled with contradictions” and calls for all to recognize

34 Several of Plaskow’s essays on human sexuality are available in The Coming of Lilith, 165–219. 22 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait

“the complexity of sexual orientation” and “situate the issue in the larger context of a reexamination of sexual identity and sexual ethics.”35 Human sexuality is much more diverse, fluid, and porous than the binary distinc- tions between “heterosexuals” and “homosexuals” and men and women allow for. Gender dualism does not do justice to bisexuals, transsexual, and transgender people who deserve respect and inclusion in Jewish society. In order to go beyond constraining and unjust gender dualism, the feminist critique and the feminist theology must be extended. The rabbis themselves, Plaskow persuasively argues in a more recent essay, have made this expansion possible in their discourse on the her- maphrodite, the androgynous person that subverts simple dualism between men and women. Building on the extensive work of feminists as well as Talmudic scholars such as Daniel Boyarin and Charlotte Fonrobert, Plaskow offers a much nuanced understanding of human sexuality which continues and expands the feminist revolution. She succinctly summarizes the connection between feminism and expansive understanding of human sexuality as follows: Feminists have argued that we can experience the reality of a God who transcends maleness only by using a wide variety of gendered and non-gendered images. Calling on God as Goddess, she, mother, queen, Shekhinah, birth- giver, wellspring, source, and so on breaks the hold of dominant male images of God in a way that cannot be achieved through theoretical discussion. Similarly, we can fully understand the inadequacy of the gender binary only by beginning to name the many ways of being in the world that fall outside the dual gender version of reality. The rabbis were our forerunners in this regard in that they were at least willing to think about the existence of persons who threatened their gendered universe. Our awareness of gender and sexual inequalities enable and requires us to go well beyond their tentative and male-centered experiments with expanding gender categories.36 Plaskow challenges us to imagine “sex and relational intimacy in a world of many, and possibly shifting, genders.”37 This democratic vision may not be comfortable to all Jews, but it will definitely be the morally right thing to do.

35 The Coming of Lilith, 182–83. 36 Judith Plaskow, “The Challenge of Transgender to Compulsory Heterosexuality,” in Heterosexism in Contemporary World Religion: Problem and Prospect, ed. Marvin M. Ellison and Judith Plaskow (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2007), 34. 37 Ibid., 35. judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 23

The Chapters That Follow

Plaskow is a utopian thinker whose commitment to the pursuit of truth about sex and gender is an expression of the rabbinic ideal of tikkun olam. She has had the courage to imagine ideal reality and the tenacity to turn the ideal into a social reality. Standing in the intersection of feminism, Jewish feminism, religious studies, Jewish studies, and women and gender studies, Plaskow has paved the way for a new generation of scholars and activists who are all indebted to her. Today, non-Orthodox Jewish women are ordained as rabbis, serve as cantors, religious educators, and leaders of Jewish organizations, and even Orthodox women have access to formal education, including halakhic learning, serving as legal advocates to other women in rabbinic courts and generating their own interpretation of the sacred texts.38 Within the academy, all fields of Jewish studies (i.e., history, literature, philosophy, biblical studies, rabbinics, politics, sociology and ethnography, Holocaust studies, Israel studies, and film studies) have been thoroughly transformed by feminism.39 In retrospect, then, the feminist revolution has been exceedingly successful, and Plaskow should be credited for it, even though she has not done so singlehandedly. Indeed, as she reminds her readers repeatedly, the feminist revolution is necessarily a collective enterprise. To this day the feminist discourse remains a collective endeavor expressed in anthologies more than in monographs, it forges a close link between theory and practice, it is thoroughly (though not exclusively) hermeneutical, and it is profoundly interested in challenging us to understand the complexity of sex and gender. “Third-wave Jewish feminists,” as they are now called, perpetuated Plaskow’s vision but also go beyond it and even criticize it. For example, third-wave feminists have continued to enrich our understanding of human sexuality and the place of sexuality in Judaism, but they do so with more detailed engagement

38 A representative anthology of Jewish feminist writings that indicates the impact of feminism on contemporary Judaism is Elyse Goldstein, ed., New Jewish Feminism (Wood- stock, VT: Jewish Light Publishing, 2009). The word “new” in the title suggests a desire to signify the novelty and maturation of Jewish feminism since its inception in the early 1970s. 39 A good expression of the robustness of feminist discourse in Jewish Studies is Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women’s Studies founded in 1998 as joint effort of the Jewish Theological Seminary in America and Brandeis University. For an earlier assessment of the impact of feminism on various subfields of Jewish studies consult Davidman and Tenen- baum, Feminist Perspectives in Jewish Studies, cited in note 2. 24 judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait with postmodern and queer theories,40 and some Jewish feminists have argued that Jewish feminism is not about equality and justice for women, but rather, ironically enough, “about power,” that is, the power to be in control of the tradition.41 It is doubtful that Plaskow would agree, since she has worked so tirelessly to dismantle the conceptual validity of “power over,” but there is no doubt that third-wave feminists all walk in Plaskow’s footsteps. Plaskow’s feminist revolution has also impacted the academic discipline of Jewish philosophy, despite its resistance and reluctance to take feminist philosophy seriously.42 Her feminist methodology has paved the way for doing Jewish philosophy in a personally involved, historically grounded, ethically concerned, and socially responsible manner. Philoso- phy, and especially Jewish philosophy, is not “a view from nowhere,” to borrow from Thomas Nagel; it is instead a form of personal Godwrestling. The chapters that follow give a taste of Plaskow’s life’s work. The first essay is her presidential address to the American Academy of Religion, delivered in November 1998.43 The essay spells out Plaskow’s conviction that “the academy is very much part of real life,”44 and showcases the impact of feminism on the academic study of religion, highlighting the interplay between the academy and the society at large and arguing for the socially embedded nature of feminist theorizing. The second essay, “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” presents the methodology of Jewish feminist theology and summarizes the accomplishments of the feminist theological discourse from 1970–1990, featuring Plaskow as a spokesperson of the discourse.45 The third essay, “Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist Reflection on Good Sex,” exemplifies the expansion of feminist liberation theology to the realm of human sexuality, and offers an

40 See Danya Ruttenberg, ed., The Passionate Torah: Sex and Judaism (New York: New York University Press, 2009). 41 Suzannah Heschel, “Foreword: It’s Not about Equality—It’s about Who’s in Charge!” in Yentl’s Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism, ed. Danya Ruttenberg (Seattle: Seal Press, 2001), xvi. Heschel’s claim is confirmed by the current political debate about women’s prayer at the Western Wall, a political struggle that involves women of all strands of contemporary Judaism. See Phyllis Chesler and Rivka Haut, eds., Women of the Wall: Claim- ing Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publishing, 2003). 42 For overview of the impact of feminism on the academic discipline of Jewish philosophy see Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, “Feminism and Gender,” in The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era, ed. Martin Kavka, Zachary Braiterman, and David Novak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 154–89. 43 Judith Plaskow, “The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms in the Study of Religion,” Journal of American Academy of Religion 67, no. 3 (1999): 521–38. 44 Ibid., 522. 45 Judith Plaskow, “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” 62–84. judith plaskow: an intellectual portrait 25 argument for the inclusion of sexually marginalized and oppressed groups within Judaism.46 The essay argues that the “authority for singling out the self-critical and dissident elements in our textual traditions comes not from the traditions themselves, but rather from the new possibilities envisioned and created by the particular communities of solidarity and resistance within which we participate.”47 The fourth and final essay, “Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation,”48 exemplifies her Jewish critique of feminist anti-Judaism, inspired by traditional Christology. Together these four essays illustrate how theology, hermeneutics of canonic texts, social criticism, and political activism are intertwined in the life, career, and writings of Judith Plaskow.

46 Judith Plaskow, “Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist Reflec- tion on Good Sex,” in Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World Religions, ed. Patricia Beattie Jung, Mary E. Hunt, and Radhika Balkrishnan (New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 127–39; reprinted in Body and Soul: Rethinking Sexuality as Justice Love, ed. Marvin Ellison and Sylvia Thorson-Smith (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003), 45–60; reprinted in The Coming of Lilith, 193–205. 47 The Coming of Lilith, 205. 48 Judith Plaskow, “Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretation,” in Searching the Scriptures, ed. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York: Cross Road, 1993), 117–29.

The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms in the Study of Religion*

Judith Plaskow

I find it impossible to speak here tonight at Disney World without taking note of the space in which we are gathered. I’m not sure whether to call it hyperreal or surreal, but we meet in a homogenized, sanitized, relent- lessly friendly universe, in which both nature and civilization are deprived of their sting, and human differences are reduced to a series of stereotypes whose primary purpose is to sell as many useless souvenirs as possible. That we have actually come here to work and think together seems a contradiction in this huge playground, in which even the workers are cast as players. Everything that reminds us of our everyday lives is meant to be banished from this “empire of leisure”: work, poverty, crime, litter, surliness, certainly ambiguity or complexity (Soja:100; Sorkin:208, 228, 231; quotation, Sorkin:228). To note the ways in which issues of race and class obtrude themselves into this paradise—to observe the contrasting colors of tourists and workers, or the ways in which the rough equality created by people standing in lines together breaks down at night as they go off to their hotels to eat and sleep with their own class—seems rude and curmudgeonly, a refusal to join in this celebration of the existing order of things, masquerading as escape (Sorkin:228). Although some might claim that the academic world is a similarly rarefied and unreal environment, it is my thesis that the academy is very much part of real life. It participates in the same tensions and contradictions, challenges and possibilities as the society in which it is situated, and is often a microcosm of wider cultural conflicts. Moreover—and this is the important point—our scholarship and teaching are broadened and deep- ened to the extent that they are in touch with and responsive to larger cultural currents. As I reflect on the ways in which the AAR has changed over the twenty-eight years that I have been a member, I am struck at how both the politics of this organization, and the work that we are able to do as scholars, have been transformed by and contributed to the changes that

* “The Academy as Real Life: New Participants and Paradigms in the Study of Reli- gion,” Journal of American Academy of Religion, 67, no. 3 (1999): 521–38 (1998 presidential address). 28 the academy as real life have taken place in the larger society. I want to explore the relationships between social change, organizational change, and what we are able to think as scholars and teachers, first by looking back at the last quarter century and then by turning to some issues facing the AAR and the wider academy, now and in the immediate future. Let me begin by sketching for you a few features of the AAR as it was in 1970. This was not just the first year that I attended but also, serendipitously, the first year for which the national office had a program on file.1 The mere eighteen pages of listings of information and program make clear that in terms of its leadership, its membership, and its scholarly agenda, the AAR was a white, male, Protestant organization. Of the 226 participants listed on the program, three had identifiably female names. There was not a single woman serving as a national or regional officer, or chairing a section. As for gender as an analytic category, there was a lone paper in the Philosophy of Religion and Theology Section on “The Feminine Factor” (AAR/SSSR/SBL Annual Meeting Program 1970:11). There were also no Blacks in leadership positions, but there were two sessions on Black religion in the United States (11, 21). An augury of the way in which broader social movements would soon reshape the AAR, these reflected the growing intellectual ferment among Black scholars, who, galvanized by the Black Power Movement, developed a new theological and political agenda, and brought their emerging conversation into the AAR (Peter Paris, e-mail message, September 15, 1998). Perhaps the most striking aspect of the 1970 program, however, is the fact that there were a total of only ten “discipline sections,” as the program units were then called. These reflect an organization still very much anchored in its Protestant past but also struggling to become more pluralistic and methodologically sophisticated. There were four sections mirroring the Protestant divinity school curriculum, three relating religious studies to other disciplines, and then sections on Asian Religions and History of Religions (that was one!), History of Judaism, and Roman Catholic Studies (3).2 I find it revealing of the state of religious studies at the time that the two non-Protestant traditions that had their own sections were

1 Graduate students will find more than one fascinating dissertation on the history and politics of religious studies embedded in the AAR program books. I can barely hint at their riches here. 2 Discipline sections that mirrored the divinity school curriculum were Biblical Litera- ture, Ethics, History of Christianity, and Philosophy of Religion and Theology. Those that related religion to other disciplines were Art, Literature, and Religion; Religion and the Social Sciences; and the Academic Study of Religion. On the early self-understanding of the AAR, see Hart:211–213. the academy as real life 29

“others” near at hand (Neusner:1049). Judaism had particular interest to Christians as the “Judeo” of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, while Catholicism was the other within the Christian fold.3 The named presence of these three units on the program allows us to see that the generic “religion” of the American Academy of Religion was still Protestant Christianity. In the years since 1970 the AAR membership has become far more diverse, of course, and the program has vastly expanded. The dominant paradigm has been assaulted from many directions, and incompletely decentered. Our understanding of religion has been immeasurably complicated and enriched. It would be possible to lift up any of a number of strands in this decentering process and trace its intellectual and political roots. In order to explore the ways in which shifts in AAR participants, politics and leadership, and scholarly agenda, are connected with each other and with changes in the wider society, I will focus on the area that has been most important to me personally and professionally: the involvement of women and the development of feminist studies in religion. Surely, the increase in women’s participation and the presence of feminist perspectives and gender analysis throughout the program are two of the more dramatic changes in the AAR over the last twenty-eight years. On the one hand, I do not want to argue for any essential or necessary relationship between these two developments. While throughout the 1970s papers by women were clustered in a few sections, by the mid-’80s this was far from true.4 The overall direction of two decades of change has been toward inclusion of women in almost every program unit of the AAR, and women’s interests appear as unpredictable and various as those of men. On the other hand, it was not a coincidence that the great increase in women’s involvement in this organization occurred at the moment of emergence of the second wave of feminism. In 1970, as I mentioned, there were only three identifiably female names on the program. In 1971 there were still only eight, out of a total of 237 participants. But 1971 was also the year that

3 The fact that Jews and Catholics were entering universities in greater numbers in the 1960s played an important role in the emergence of these two sections. This development is thus an earlier instance of my central theme: how larger social and demographic changes have affected what we can think in religious studies. See Neusner: 1049–1051; Mars- den: esp. 26, 34, 35. 4 When I perused programs from the 1970s, I could look at the title of a session and predict with great accuracy whether it would include any papers by women. During this period presentations by women were heavily concentrated in the Women and Religion Group and then Section; the Arts, Literature, and Religion Section; and the Academic Study of Religion Section. 30 the academy as real life the Women’s Caucus held its organizational meeting and, addressing the political and intellectual dimensions of women’s exclusion, nominated a woman for vice-president and laid plans for a Working Group on Women and Religion in 1972 (AAR/SBL Annual Meeting Program 1971:22). The existence of a substantial and vocal group of women who were committed both to making the ethos and structures of the Academy more hospitable to women and to doing serious scholarly work that placed women at the center created a political and programmatic space for women’s participation that could then develop in a variety of directions—including the freedom of women to study whatever they pleased. By 1973, despite a program cover that featured two male hands gripping each other in a, perhaps anxious, shake, fifty-nine women presented or presided at the Annual Meeting, 20 percent of the total. The Caucus and the Women and Religion Group did more than provide a context for a hitherto excluded group to find an entry into the AAR, however. They also changed what we are able to think, the questions we know to ask about religion, and the ways in which we conceptualize and teach about the field. In 1970 scholars of religion and their subject matter were both ungendered! There was no female other, in body or in theory, to question the dominant male paradigm. In one sense, the very establishment of the Women and Religion Group constituted a challenge to the hegemonic discourse—an eruption of the suppressed other who, simply by naming herself, exposed the particularity of the supposedly generic religious subject. But the Women and Religion Group was certainly not content to let its presence speak for itself; it consciously defined its task as systematically rethinking the rest of the program. I am struck in looking back at the Women and Religion Group’s first sessions by the extent to which they deliberately took up the subject matter of the other program units in order to reconceptualize the content and methodology of the various disciplines. A packed session in 1975 on “The Feminist Transformation of Religious Studies” summarized and solidified the Group’s early achievements, examining the paradigm shift from an androcentric to an inclusive model of humanity as it affected history of religions, theology, religion and literature, religion and psychology, and biblical studies (SBL/AAR Annual Meeting Program 1975:18–19).5

5 These presentations are collected in Gross 1977. It is worth noting that, in a petition to the AAR Program Committee for section status, which the Women and Religion Group was granted in 1975, the Group argued that it required a maximum number of sessions the academy as real life 31

It was not simply the AAR that the Group was intent on transforming, moreover, but also the position of women in religion and society. Its ability to bring new data, methodologies, and perspectives to bear on the study of religion was fed by participants’ commitment to larger movements for women’s liberation. The connections between feminist movements and the thinking of many members of this Academy have been so various and fruitful over the years that it is difficult to settle on particular examples. Certainly, women’s engagement in concrete struggles for increased participation in religious institutions opened up numerous areas of scholarly investigation. It provided the impetus for the recovery of women’s history in mainstream religious movements and in marginal and heretical groups. It encouraged increased attention to popular piety and devotion, to the religious practices of women as part of the common folk. It generated critical and sophisticated accounts of the ways in which religious texts are created and transmitted, and of how they construct meaning through both what they say and what they erase.6 In a very different vein, the fact that members of the AAR have participated in movements against violence against women has compelled them to bring new lenses to traditional texts and symbols. It has focused attention on the ways in which specific beliefs about women combine with underlying symbolic structures to encourage or permit violence.7 It has engendered new critical readings of particular texts and teachings, such as the prophetic metaphors of marriage and adultery, and the doctrine of atonement.8 It has given rise to multiple strategies of resistance, among them constructive efforts to rethink core symbols, laws, and teachings (Adams and Fortune; Brown and Bohn). I could give endless examples of the ways in which involvements with feminism as a multi-faceted social movement have generated new scholarly questions and perspectives that have both influenced the study and teaching of religion and fed back into particular feminist struggles to better women’s lives.

on the program because it sought to address and transform the subject matter of every other section. 6 Rather than generate a bibliography of dozens of entries, I will simply suggest that the interested reader look at Gross’s excellent book on the development of feminist studies in religion (1996). 7 Again, there is a large bibliography. Two representative collections are Brown and Bohn, and Adams and Fortune. 8 For an early example of the critique of prophetic metaphors, see Setel; for a later and much fuller example, see Weems. For one important critique of the doctrine of atonement, see Brock. 32 the academy as real life

But I don’t want simply to celebrate the Women and Religion Group and the Caucus. Their efforts to change the ethos and scholarly agenda of the AAR have met with both successes and failures. Thus papers on women, or papers using gender as an analytic category, are now present throughout the program, but this “mainstreaming” has often come at the cost of feminist critical perspectives. Work on women has been incorporated into the framework of the disciplines; it has not transformed them. And although in 1977 the Women’s Caucus successfully pressured the AAR to pass a resolu- tion to boycott states that had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment (AAR/SBL Annual Meeting Program 1978: inside cover), the Caucus has generally been far more effective in lobbying for women’s incorporation into the leadership structures of the Academy than in making the AAR more activist as an organization. But it is not just that the radical edge of the Women and Religion Group and the Caucus had to be compromised as the changes they sought were or were not incorporated into the larger AAR. The Group and then the Section themselves operated both against and within the dominant disciplinary and cultural paradigms. In seeking to take on and rethink the rest of the program, they also reproduced its exclusions. The Group was—and to a large extent, the Section remains—very western and Christian focused. It took many years before the Section began to address the concerns of Jewish women, women of color, and lesbians. It was thus inevitable that new groups would come forth that would try to decenter the decenterer, repeating the process of creating new conceptual and political space on the program and in the structures of the Academy, and both challenging the program and generating their own exclusions. The emergence of the Womanist Group is paradigmatic of a process that, with some significant variations, also led to the creation of the Lesbian Feminist Issues Group (in 1986), the short-lived History of Women in Judaism Consultation (in 1986), and a number of other feminist consultations and groups. Caught between an African-American Religious History Group that was started in 1975 but did not engage the topic of Black Women and the Church until 1980 and a Women and Religion Section that began in 1972 but did not have a full session on Black Women’s Religious Thought until 1983, a group of Black women launched the Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society Consultation in 1989. As was the case with the Women and Religion Group, the very creation of the Womanist Group constituted a critique of the exclusions of the dominant feminist, African-American, and broader academic discourses—and, also like the Women and Religion Group, the Womanist Group deliberately took up issues in teaching, ethics, literature, theology, and biblical interpretation in order to think about the academy as real life 33 them in new ways. Rooting itself in the Black church, in movements for social change, and in the struggles of grassroots Black women, the Group has explored the patterns of coping and resistance embedded in the everyday lives of the most marginalized and used them as a foundation for theological and ethical reflection. But if the Womanist Group has contributed in important ways to the assault on the dominant paradigm, it has also, until this year, accepted its Christian-centeredness, focusing on the Black church to the neglect of other vibrant religious strands in the Black community.9 Similarly complex tales, but with many different elements, could be told about the other profound changes that in the past twenty-five years have radically reshaped the AAR program: the genuine internationaliza- tion of the concept of religion; the introduction of new methodologies, approaches, and theoretical perspectives; the efforts to explore the intersection of religion with a host of social and political concerns. From ten “discipline sections” in 1970 the program has expanded to include fourteen sections, fifty-two groups, seven seminars, and six consultations, organized along an amazing variety of lines (AAR/SBL Annual Meeting Program 1998:20–22). This does not mean that the old Protestant paradigm has been completely decentered, however. It still hangs on tenaciously in places—not simply in terms of overt content but also in the more subtle ways in which religion gets defined and studied, in terms of a focus on doctrine or text, for example (Gill; Christ). Moreover, the program does not yet reflect the extraordinary growth of religious pluralism, and the challenge to Protestant hegemony, within the contemporary United States. Non-western traditions are still treated as if they belonged to others across the sea rather than to us here, now (conversation with Karen McCarthy Brown, September 8, 1998). From many perspectives, what we have at the AAR is a huge, sprawling program, laden with contradictions, in which very different conceptions of religion and how to study it compete and co-exist with each other. Welcome to non-Disney World, the academy as real life! As Gerald Graff argues in his book Beyond the Culture Wars, our professional organizations—like the academic curriculum—have “become prominent arena[s] of cultural conflict because [they] are microcosm[s], as [they] should be, of the clash of cultures and values in [the United States] as a whole” (8).

9 I say, until this year, because in 1998 the Womanist pre-conference program included an entire session on “Recovering the Asé: Womanist Dialogical Approaches to African Diasporic Religious Experience.” Moreover, the Group’s call for papers for 1999 begins by soliciting papers on “womanism and world religions” (11). 34 the academy as real life

As previously excluded groups have entered the AAR, we have brought with us the concerns, criticisms, and discord that our exclusion had kept at a distance.10 It is no accident, for example, that despite greater numbers of women than Blacks in the AAR, the conscious consideration of race appeared earlier on the program, because the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements emerged earlier on the national scene. It is no accident that Catholics and Jews, lesbians and gay men, Hispanics, and Asian Americans, as they have sought a place in the larger society, have also sought a place on the AAR program, refusing to allow “religion” and the appropriate study of religion to be defined by a small and relatively homogenous group of scholars (Graff:8). The fragmentation and conflict that these changes have brought to the AAR are part and parcel of the conflicts in the larger society among different visions of our collective life (Giroux and McClaren:xxii). And that means we experience here in condensed form the wider cultural malaise over the increasing fracturing of, and competition among, identities, the concern about where it will all end, and the desire to find something that holds us all together. Frustrating and exhausting as the unwieldiness of the program can be, it is also a sign that, unlike Disney World, the AAR is alive, that members are allowing the changes in the wider culture to nuance and deepen our understandings of religion, and, at the same time, are seeking to interpret, intervene in, and have a hand in guiding those changes. The fact that the tensions of the academy are those of real life is not a solution to the problem of fragmentation, but it does say that our efforts to grapple with diversity are part of, and contribute to, a larger context—that we have the opportunity and the obligation as scholars and teachers to speak about our own dilemmas in ways that are relevant and comprehensible to a wider community. As scholars of religion in a nation and world in which religious issues play an increasingly significant role in every aspect of public life, we are in a unique position to provide our varied audiences with frameworks for understanding and grappling productively with cultural and religious differences (Berling:15–16). As teachers, our awareness not only of religious differences but of the differences gender, race, and culture make within religious traditions helps legitimate for those who learn from us the importance of diversity in our academic institutions and our national life (Nelson 1997b:30).

10 Graff is talking about the university curriculum in general; I am applying his remarks to the AAR. the academy as real life 35

The current AAR program reflects the issues that have claimed our time and energy over the last quarter of a century. Various of us have made gender and/or racial or sexual analysis the center of our life’s work; we have made the decision to study a tradition that did not fit the old Protestant paradigm, or we have engaged in opening up new ways of looking at religion. Now, however, there are other changes coming at us of which we have been less mindful, but that are increasingly affecting the nature of our day- to-day work, and threatening the processes of broadening and decentering that I’ve been describing (conversation with Karen McCarthy Brown, June 15, 1998). I’m referring to the changing shape of higher education, the adop- tion of corporate models by college and university boards and administra- tors, and the emergence of a two-tier system of employment in academia. As those of us who were graduate students in the late 1960s and early ’70s can well attest, the job crisis is, on one level, nothing new. But we have only recently begun attending to the ways in which the extraordinary growth in the number of part-time and adjunct faculty members over the past twenty-five years is altering the face of our institutions of higher learning and refashioning the work lives of faculty members at every level. The percentage of faculty appointments that are part-time or adjunct increased from 22 percent in 1970 to over 40 percent in 1993. Between 1975 and 1993 the number of new non-tenure-track positions increased 88 percent, at the same time that the number of probationary tenure-track appointments declined by 9 percent (Statement:54–55). While adjuncts used to be mainly specialists who supplemented the expertise of the full-time faculty, they have now become a permanent underclass that administra- tors increasingly rely on to hold down costs. Not surprisingly, women, who have always held a disproportionate number of part-time positions, have been unequally affected by these changes. Although the percentage of women gaining Ph.D.s has risen steadily since the 1970s, the percentage of women with tenure has remained constant, while the percentage of women in part-time and temporary slots has kept increasing. Women hold 33 percent of full-time positions and 51 percent of part-time positions; 35 percent of male faculty hold part-time positions, and 49 percent of female faculty do (Statement:55; West:26–27; Thompson:278). This is another—and very unfortunate—way in which the academy is real life. The problems we are experiencing in our own institutions are part of a larger global reorganization of labor that has changed the nature of work for millions of people. Between 1969 and 1992 the number of part-time workers in the United States rose by 89 percent. In the 1980s the number of temporary jobs rose ten times faster than overall employment. In 1992 36 the academy as real life two out of three new jobs in the private sector were temporary (Pratt:265; Rifkin:191). In other words, across the country and around the world cor- porations are creating a two-tier system of employment—a core group of permanent, full-time employees and another staff of easily expendable temporary and part-time workers who earn substantially less money and receive no benefits for doing the same work (Rifkin:190). These changes in corporate culture are providing a handbook for how to treat part-time faculty: pay as little as possible, deny benefits and decent working conditions, and abdicate responsibility for the consequences for people’s lives. Colleges and universities are increasingly structurally dependent on a pool of cheap labor to teach many of their bread-and-butter courses, and the practice is regarded as sound financial management by many of those who oversee or vote on funding for higher education (Nelson 1997a:3–5). The percentage of part-time and temporary faculty in the academy, moreover, is more than double the 16.9 percent figure for the workforce as a whole. Most of us have experienced the corrosive impact of these developments on our own work lives. A growing number of itinerant faculty members are living close to the margins, either having to relocate every year or stringing together a series of adjunct positions that add up to more than a full-time job at a fraction of the pay, without the time or professional supports to pursue their own scholarly work (Statement:55). After struggling, at great financial and personal cost, to sustain a professional life, they find that they are often passed over for fulltime positions because their teaching part-time is taken as evidence that they are not committed to their careers (AAUP:45). Meanwhile the tasks of curriculum planning, student advising, committee work, and hiring and supervising of adjuncts, fall on a diminish- ing number of increasingly overburdened full-time faculty members who feel less and less like professionals. These parallel developments diminish the quality of the education available to students, precisely at an historical moment when, because of their often poor preparation for college, they need more time and attention from faculty members, not less (MLA:9–10; Statement:56). There is much I could say about what we can and must do to respond to these issues, particularly about the importance of forming alliances across traditional class lines. Since questions of strategy could be the subject of a whole separate address, however, let me simply say that the AAR Board of Directors has devoted a considerable amount of time over the past two years to grappling with these problems and has committed itself to addressing them through its committee structures, the regions, the annual program, and in cooperation with other scholarly organizations (Plaskow:4). the academy as real life 37

The question I want to raise here is how these changes in the structure of the academy might change the ways we think, write, and teach as scholars of religious studies. In asking this question I do not mean to turn individual and institutional crises into grist for the academic mill, shifting our attention from politics to theory. On the contrary, I would argue that the reshaping of the academy on an anti-human corporate model brings home to us wider social changes that demand new ways of thinking and acting from more members of the AAR. Just as the social movements of the last twenty- eight years and more generated and were fed by a new academic politics and new ways of thinking and teaching about religion, so we now need to deepen and complicate the insights we have gained as we respond to the current challenges we find on our own doorsteps. One of the issues raised by the reshaping of the academy is whether we will even be able to maintain, let alone deepen, the new perspectives that have transformed our thinking about religion over the last quarter of a century. In a recent issue of Religious Studies News Jack Miles argued that adjunct professors and the academically unemployed are in particularly privileged positions to produce learned writing for a lay audience, because, as members of the lay public, they may follow the twists and turns of their own curiousity rather than having to adhere to the rules of a guild (6). I certainly hope that as more and more religious studies Ph.D.s find work outside the academy, they will still have the time, energy, and will to bring their training to bear on a wide range of social and intellectual questions, and will address them in clear and accessible language geared to a wide audience. But I fear that the shrinking number of full-time tenure-track positions may equally well encourage an increase in arcane language and research as marks of academic legitimacy, that it may lead to a narrowing of intellectual interests and a retreat to traditional topics and approaches on the part of both individuals and institutions (conversation with Stephen Kaplan, June 14, 1998). I have often heard graduate students say that they are advised not to write about gender, or race, or sexuality until they have tenure. If that has been the case for the past two decades, what will happen as there is increasingly little chance of tenure and as more and more women and men live many years on the fringes of the academic world, wait- ing for the chance of a full-time position? And as departments are forced to pare down, what subjects will they define as priorities? Will new areas of research be regarded as expendable, even as the women and minorities who are their most likely advocates are getting more doctorates at a time when jobs are vanishing? In this period of retrenchment it becomes all the more urgent that those of us fortunate enough to have tenured positions 38 the academy as real life commit ourselves to the continuing processes of diversifying the AAR and our own institutions. We must insist that the work of challenging reigning paradigms is not an adjunct to the curriculum but central to the intellectual life. But how might these changes in the academy and the larger society redirect the content of our work? Given the ways in which the social upheavals of the last decades have opened questions that have reshaped our thinking, what new directions might our scholarship take as we begin to deal with the issues before us? Obviously, I cannot answer this question, any more than can any of us. The possible responses are as rich and multi- faceted as the many program units of the AAR—and the new ones that will undoubtedly emerge. I want to conclude modestly by describing two challenges I experience as I begin to struggle with these issues. The first comes out of and pertains to my context as a feminist theologian. Many years ago now, Beverly Harrison remarked that, since feminist theology is an embodied theology that understands the everyday flesh and blood world as the arena of divine/human relations, it should embrace the idea that sen- suous labor and bread are foundational to the life of the spirit (75). Also a long time ago, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza commented that, if feminist theology is to address women’s experiences in the struggle for survival, it cannot ignore the work-place (xviii–xviv). Yet despite the passage of time, the challenge implied in these observations has, for the most part, not been taken up by Euro-American feminist theologians. The great outpouring of creative and constructive theological work by white feminists working in the Jewish, Christian, and Goddess traditions— and I certainly mean to include my own writing in these remarks—has focused on the transformation of the religious sphere, its institutions, texts, concepts, and symbols. Feminists certainly have not isolated ourselves from wider social and political problems. On the contrary, as I have argued, we have been centrally concerned with the ways in which religious teachings, symbols, and rituals interstructure with and legitimate various forms of oppression and are also sources of resistance. But we have generally addressed these issues in ways that have placed our traditions at the starting point and center of analysis. We have only rarely begun with an economic or social or political analysis and brought to bear on it a feminist theological perspective. Perhaps related to this problem, we have paid lip-service to class as an analytic tool but, in reality, have largely ignored it. We have paid virtually no attention to our own class positions as graduate students or faculty members located in class-stratified institutions in a class-stratified society. the academy as real life 39

Neglect of these issues has obviously been a product of privilege, but perhaps as our privilege begins to erode the issues will become less avoid- able. Questions of economic inequality and economic justice that have long been at the center of third world liberation theologies, feminist and nonfeminist, are now at the heart of how we staff our departments. To my mind, the central challenges for Euro-American feminists in this situation are to broaden our focus from transforming religion to also bringing religious resources to bear on important social problems and, at the same time, to do so in ways that fully reflect the processes of critique and transformation we have been engaged in for the past twenty-five years. Fortunately, this work has already begun, and from several different directions. In addition to those feminist ethicists who have focused specifically on issues of economic justice, feminists in many areas of religious studies are writing about work, class, and economic relations in ways that are integrated into, or potentially contribute to, feminist theologies.11 Moreover, womanist and mujerista theologians and ethicists have been way ahead of Euro-American feminists in connecting religious and socio-economic issues. In highlighting the moral agency of Black women and Latinas both in struggles for social justice and in ensuring the survivial of their communities, womanists and mujeristas have repeatedly shown the relevance of religious resources to class inequalities.12 I am struck that no Jewish feminist has yet followed the lead of womanist work on black women activists (see, e.g., a number of the essays in Townes) and turned to the radical women labor organizers of the early part of this century as a resource for theology. Their lives and work would be an interesting starting point for a Jewish feminist theology focusing on economic issues. But the intellectual challenges posed by growing economic inequality are not limited to those of us whose work remains within western theological paradigms; they pertain to all scholars of religion. In a recent issue of the JAAR, David Loy argued that the current economic system, promising as it does a new path to happiness and salvation, has come to fill a religious function and is, in fact, “the first truly world religion . . . winning more con- verts more quickly than any previous belief system . . .” (275–276). At the same time that Loy reminds us of the intolerable and growing inequalities

11 For examples of the work of feminist ethicists, see—in addition to Harrison—Andol- sen, Brubaker, and Robb. For feminist work in other fields that addresses economic issues, see Brock and Thistlethwaite, and Peskowitz. 12 The literature is far too extensive to list in this context. For one womanist and one mujerista example, see Cannon and Isasi-Díaz. 40 the academy as real life generated by market capitalism between countries of the North and South, certain U.S. sociologists and economists are warning that, even here in the heartland of capitalism, the new religion of the market will fail perma- nently for the vast majority of people (e.g., Rifkin). The move to a two-tier system of employment in academia and many other workplaces does not represent a temporary adjustment in the market but is the foretaste of an era in which life-time employment will be a thing of the past, and we in our work-centered society will need to find “new ways of defining human worth and social relations” (Rifkin:xviii). As scholars of religion, we deal with systems of value that can offer a challenge to capitalism’s diminished understanding of the world (Loy:285) and help us imagine lives organized around principles other than the importance of renumerative labor as a foundation for endless consump- tion. We are familiar with criticisms of acquisitiveness and materialism from numerous religious perspectives. We know how people celebrate and mourn, create meaning and struggle with ethical dilemmas, even in the midst of poverty and oppression. We have immersed ourselves in cultures in which the work that women and men do in feeding and maintaining their communities is an expression of embeddedness in larger systems of value, and we have encountered many ways in which different peoples relate work and ritual, other than ritual providing a short respite from lives defined by paid employment. The question is how we connect this knowledge and insight to the real problems of society. How do we render visible these alternative universes in ways that deliberately and effectively address our own positions as workers in a global economic system that identifies value with profitability? And how do we speak about other understandings of value without either skip- ping over the realities of poverty and injustice or denying the contradictions in the traditions that we turn to as resources? In other words, in speaking a critical and constructive word to the dominance of the Market, we must not move too quickly and easily to celebrating the anti-materialist elements in the world’s religions, forgetting the fundamental importance of work in giving people access to the means of material survival (Andolsen:114–115). Nor can we neglect twenty-five years of feminist and other critical work laying bare the ways in which various traditions have created and supported, as well as resisted, the racism, sexism, and class inequalities that structure and deform the world economy. In arguing that we must attend to these economic issues affecting our lives as academics and the lives of people throughout the world, it is not my purpose to offer some new center for our AAR meetings and discussions. the academy as real life 41

I am simply urging that we give higher priority to a crucial issue that is already being addressed in places in the AAR but that, in my view, needs to be more visible throughout the program. I am commending the notion of the AAR as a space in which we allow current social and political questions to enrich our thinking, even as we seek to respond to and intervene in them. We may not be able to resolve complex social problems, and we may not even agree on which deserve our attention, but we are bound together by the opportunity and necessity of grappling with the changes in the academy, aware that in doing so we also grapple with changes in the larger world. When the AAR board of directors met at the Swan Hotel in Orlando in the spring of 1998, we joked over lunch that I should enter the room for my presidential address in a Cinderella coach: the young graduate student overwhelmed by a male academy transformed into the president of the AAR. But, of course, it was no fairy god-mother waving a magic wand that changed the make-up of the AAR or that vastly expanded its agenda. It was the concerted effort, hard work, and sustained pressure of many members of this organization—as part of the larger social and demographic shifts in U.S. society. We have the privilege and obligation of continuing that process of diversification and change, without being sure of where it will lead us, but knowing that we cannot separate real life from the academy.

References

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Sorkin, Michael 1992. “See You in Disneyland.” In Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, 205–232. Ed. by Michael Sorkin. New York: Hill and Wang. “Statement from the Conference on the Growing Use of Part-time and Adjunct Faculty” 1998. Academe 84 (January–February):54–60. Thompson, Karen 1997. “Alchemy in the Academy: Moving Part-time Faculty from Piece- work to Parity.” In Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis, 278–290. Ed. by Cary Nelson. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Townes, Emilie M., ed. 1993. A Troubling in My Soul: Womanist Perspectives on Evil and Suffering. Maryknoll: Orbis Books. Weems, Renita J. 1995. Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. West, Martha S. 1995. “Women Faculty: Frozen in Time.” Academe 81 (July–August):26–29.

Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective*

Judith Plaskow

Jewish feminist theology is not an academic field in the same sense that feminist history or literature is. Rather, it is a triple outsider to Jewish studies: first, because the place of theology in the academy is complex and controversial; second, because theology has never had an esteemed role within Judaism; and third, because it is feminist. In this chapter, I explore the implications of each of these aspects of marginality, the first two for the sake of laying to rest shibboleths that might otherwise get in the way of discussion, the third as my central concern. What is Jewish feminist theology, and what are its implications for Jewish studies?

Theology and the Academy

The place of theology within Jewish studies is part of a larger debate concerning the place of theology in the academy, a debate that emerged with the rapid growth of religious studies in the 1950s and 1960s. The founders of new religious studies programs, especially in state universities, were anxious to locate and justify these programs in the context of a religiously pluralistic culture. Arguing that they held no brief for any particular religion but were simply exploring religion as a human phenomenon according to accepted norms of university scholarship, many departments named themselves religious studies specifically in contradistinction to theology. The point of the distinction was that religious studies is serious, objective, and scholarly—concerned with a significant dimension of human thought and experience, with a clear impact on many aspects of life—while theology is particularistic, engaged, and unscholarly. Theology not only comes out of distinct communities of faith and is done from a stance of commitment, but it deals with an object—God—that can be discerned only by faith, using warrants—revelation—that are not publicly discernible or

* “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, ed. Lynn Davidman & Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 62–84. 46 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective testable.1 Although this dichotomy has been repeatedly questioned, it still shapes many responses to the incorporation of theology into the university curriculum.2 Since Jewish studies is itself particularistic according to these same criteria, it cannot hold that fault specifically against theology. Yet Jewish studies can still object to theology on the ground of its engaged stance or lack of scholarly neutrality. To the extent that Jewish studies is influenced by a Wissenschaft des Judentums (the science of Judaism) approach that sees the history, literature, sociology, and religious life of the Jewish people as data to be studied objectively and critically,3 Jewish studies—like religious studies—must be skeptical about the academic legitimacy of theology. From a science of Judaism perspective, theology can be of interest only insofar as it is studied historically or viewed as so much material on the thought of some important figure, rather than as a living and constructive art. I do not mean to deny that in practice many Jewish studies programs encourage or at least tolerate constructive questions. But given the vulner- ability of Jewish studies in the university, it is tempting to assert its respect- ability by emphasizing its adherence to canons of disinterested scholarship and critical research. When one adds to the committed stance of theology the double commitment of feminist theology, the possible place of such a subject within Jewish studies becomes even more problematic.

Theology and Judaism

The actual or potential tension between the nature of theology and the nature of Jewish studies is just one issue confronting would-be Jewish feminist theologians. Often this tension is never articulated because of a different and prior claim that theology is not Jewish or that Jewish theology

* “Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective,” in Feminist Perspectives on Jewish Studies, ed. Lynn Davidman & Shelly Tenenbaum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 62–84. 1 Edward Farley, “The Place of Theology in the Study of Religion,” Religious Studies and Theology 5 (Sept. 1985): 10; William F. May, “Why Theology and Religious Studies Need Each Other,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52 (Dec. 1984): 748. 2 For recent rethinking of the theology–religious studies polarity, see, e.g., the discussion “Religious Studies/Theological Studies: The St. Louis Project,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52 (Dec. 1984): 727–57, which includes papers by Walter Capps, Lau- rence O’Connell, Jacob Neusner, P. Joseph Cahill, and William F. May; Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Theology and the Academic Study of Religion,” Iliff Review 44 (fall 1987): 9–18; and Farley, “The Place of Theology,” 9–29. 3 Joseph L. Blau, Modern Varieties of Judaism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 34–35. Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 47 simply does not exist. The history of Jewish religious reflection from Philo on is named philosophy or religious thought. Theology is defined narrowly as the systematization of doctrines or the systematization of communal beliefs about the nature of God. Christianity, it is then asserted, rests on a common faith that makes one a Christian, a faith that theology appropriately defines and refines. What most centrally defines Judaism, however, is not beliefs but behaviors, and these are elaborated through halakhah (Jewish law). The energy that Christianity has poured into theology Judaism has poured into elaborating a legal system that encompasses every aspect of life. Insofar as Jews have reflected on the foundations or presuppositions of this system, this reflection has been more narrative or midrashic than systematic, so that, again, the term theology would be misplaced.4 It is not surprising, given these widely held assumptions, that all of us who do Jewish theology, feminist or not, find ourselves in an odd and somewhat defensive position. Many recent works on Jewish theology begin with a justification of the enterprise or describe as a goal putting theology back on the Jewish map.5 Although a full-scale defense of Jewish theology is out of place in this context, some discussion of the importance of theology and its relation to Jewish studies seems necessary, or there is little point in discussing the feminist transformation of theology at all. As Arthur A. Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr point out in the introduction to their Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, “Theology is the discipline that Jews eschew while nonetheless pursuing it with covert avidity.”6 Provided that theology is not defined too narrowly, their comment makes perfect sense. If theology is understood as sustained and coherent reflection on the experiences and categories of a particular religious tradition, and as reflection on the world in light of that tradition, then how can Jews not be

4 These sentiments are more often expressed orally—or even institutionally—than in writing. For example, when I was a graduate student at Yale, Judah Golden frequently insisted that there was no Jewish theology, so there was no possibility of our having a course on the subject. More revealing, when I began graduate work in theology in 1968, I had to study Christian theology because there was simply no place in the country to study Jewish theology. Other Jews before me had found themselves in the same situation. 5 Arthur Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr, Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought (New York: Scribner, 1987), xiii–xvii; Neil Gillman, Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1990), xviii; Louis Jacobs, A Jewish Theology (West Orange, N.J.: Behrman House, 1973), 10–12; Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 21–24; Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith: Judaism as Corporeal Election (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983), xiii. 6 Cohen and Mendes-Flohr, Jewish Religious Thought, xiii. 48 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective at least closet theologians? The practices that are supposedly central to Judaism are grounded in a series of theological claims: that God gave the law to Moses on Sinai, that revealed law is both written and oral, that the law constitutes part of the obligation of the covenant, that there is a special covenantal relation between God and Israel, and so forth. All Jewish observance rests on some sort of theological preunderstanding, some relation to these fundamental claims, however they are interpreted, modified, or even rejected. What would be the meaning of a Jewish identity that had no relation to any set of beliefs about the nature of Jewishness?

Feminist Theology

Jewish feminists have considerable experience of the extent to which the boundaries of Jewish identity are guarded by theology. I know of no Jew, for example, who would agree that “Jews for Jesus” are Jewish. Belief in the messianic significance of Jesus seems to constitute a universally agreed- upon end-point in the great spectrum of Jewishness. Jewish feminists are discovering that another such point is the belief in a Goddess. Advocacy of Goddess rituals—indeed, even mention of the Goddess—is enough in the eyes of many Jews to place one outside the Jewish pale. No one has ever asked me, when I speak on Jewish feminism, whether I keep kosher or observe the Sabbath. But I have been asked again and again whether my understanding of God is really Jewish, whether I think one can have Juda- ism without monotheism, and how far I am willing to go in expanding the boundaries of Jewish belief. Jewishness is being defined, in other words, by theological criteria. And if this is happening covertly, surely these criteria must be subject to public examination and criticism. It is not simply because they already operate on a hidden level, however, that theological assumptions need to be discussed openly. Jewish lack of interest in theology is itself a separate and significant problem. Observance of the law, I have suggested, is rooted in certain theological claims about the origins of the law. But it is also true that over time, the law becomes self-justifying and the legal system self-perpetuating. In applying the law to ever-changing situations, one does not need to return to the original situation of standing at Sinai. It is enough to study the sources, to know one’s precedents, to quote text—as in any legal system. And so it can happen that over time the relation to God that was expressed through and ani- mated the law—that was its foundation and purpose—is lost. A similar process takes place in non-Orthodox Judaism, with social action, eclectic Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 49 forms of observance, or simply a sense of community with other Jews replacing some deeper religious understanding and purpose. In either case, a profound spiritual void lies at the heart of American Judaism. American Jews do not know how to talk about God; they are embarrassed to do so. Such spiritual experiences as they have often seem to take place outside the realm of Judaism, and they do not know how to reconnect these experiences with prayer or other forms of observance. At the same time, many Jews are turning to other spiritual traditions for answers to questions that Judaism seems not to address. Theology, and in practice especially feminist theology, can help reani- mate the connection between practice and larger questions of meaning. Theology’s purpose is to reflect on the experiences and events that lie at the heart of Judaism, to reformulate or transform central Jewish ideas in response to contemporary needs, and to articulate a Jewish framework for understanding basic human questions. Jewish feminist theology approaches the tradition with both a profound critique of its sexism and a vision of the religious meaning of women’s full participation in Jewish life. It is rooted in the experience of a larger and richer way of being, which it seeks to express within and against the terms of the tradition. It approaches theology not as an intellectual exercise but with a deep stake in the outcome of theologizing, challenging other Jews to examine their religious assumptions and the way they find expression in religious practice and institutions. All this is to acknowledge that Jewish theology is not a strictly academic enterprise, that it is rooted in and comes out of the Jewish community, and, in the case of feminist theology, that it is concerned with concrete issues of communal practice, liturgy, and experience. It does not, however, follow that theology has no place in an academic program. On the contrary, theology can expose the notion of the detached, disinterested scholar as a dangerous myth. Feminist theology in particular, but other theologies as well, make it amply clear that all thinkers have special interests and that claims to objectivity serve only to disguise the interests of scholars who are generally involved in serving the status quo. Thus, those who teach Jewish studies as historical or literary “science” take an implicit stand in a theological debate about the meaning of Jewish history. Those who teach Jewish studies using the many sources that make no reference to women perpetuate the ideological contention that women have made no significant contribution to the shaping of Judaism and implicitly support a particular theological understanding of women’s proper role. Such assumptions can be examined and criticized only when the theological presuppositions of different Jewish frameworks become the subject of classroom discussion. 50 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective

Jewish Feminist Theology as Critique and Recovery

If Jewish theology not only exists but is central to the Jewish studies enterprise, where does Jewish feminist theology fit into this larger context? On the one hand, it provides one instantiation of theology. It deals with all the questions of the meaning and purpose of Jewish and human existence that any Jewish theology is called on to deal with. On the other hand, Jewish feminist theology is particularly important to the process of critical reflection, for it subjects other Jewish theology—indeed, all Jewish studies—to searching criticism. It comes at religious questions with a passion that reanimates theological discussion, but it also asks fundamental questions about the origins, nature, and function of theological discourse. It is concerned with the foundations of central Jewish ideas, the groups that generated them, and the interests they serve. It is a thoroughly critical theology, a theology as appropriate to the university as it is necessary to the reconstitution of Jewish community.7 Jewish feminist theology, although it has its roots in the Jewish community, is also part of the larger context of feminist scholarship as a critical and constructive enterprise. Feminist scholarship in many disciplines has gone through a number of stages that began with a critique of male scholarship and moved to a thoroughgoing redefinition or transformation of many fields. The first feminist works in many areas were criticisms of canonical male texts, theories, presuppositions, and images. They attempted to show the particularity of what have been accepted as universal perspectives, to expose the androcentrism of traditional scholarship, and to highlight the absence of the voices of women and other oppressed groups. This critique of male sources was often followed by an emphasis on the recovery of lost women, by efforts to show that certain disciplines, movements, and historical periods were not defined solely by men, but that women made important contributions that had been forgotten or passed over. Often in this second phase, feminist scholars accepted prevailing definitions of historical importance and sought to locate women in contexts deemed important by reigning norms. The third or constructive phase of feminist scholarship is characterized by a radical questioning of such norms, by redefinitions of “importance” from the perspective of women’s experience, and by the

7 For the notion of feminist theology as a critical theology, see Elisabeth Schüssler- Fiorenza, “Feminist Theology as a Critical Theology of Liberation,” Theological Studies 36 (1975): 605–26. Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 51 creation of theory from a feminist point of view. These phases were con- secutive in terms of a shift in emphasis over the past twenty years, but they are also concurrent in that no stage has disappeared to make way for the other. Feminist scholarship remains critical scholarship and continues to insist on the ubiquity of women’s historical agency. These stages provide a useful structure for discussing Jewish feminist theology, and for seeing how its development has been affected by the subordinate role of theology within Judaism. It is striking, especially in contrast to Christian feminist theology, that virtually no work has been done by Jewish feminists that criticizes earlier Jewish theologians. Although Christian (and non-Christian) feminists have analyzed the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and numerous other thinkers, no parallel body of work exists that discusses Saadia, Maimonides, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, or other Jewish figures.8 There is no specifically intratheo- logical dialogue within Jewish feminism. This is probably owing in part to the absence of an institutional base for such studies. The paucity of graduate programs in Jewish theology means that there are few places that might generate or encourage such work. Perhaps Jewish feminists, however, also have the sense that theology is not sufficiently central to Judaism to be worth criticizing. If one has attacked Anders Nygren’s or Niebuhr’s view of grace, one has deconstructed and unsettled a whole trend within modern Protestantism. But supposing that one could demonstrate Rosenzweig’s androcentrism, what would be the effects of that knowledge? What would it change in the nature or practice of Judaism? The transformative and communal bent of Jewish feminist theology makes it unlikely that such theological critiques will ever constitute a major part of Jewish feminist discourse. Yet there is interesting scholarly work to be done in this area. Lauren Granite has pointed out, for example, that the centrality of relation in Martin Buber’s work has led feminists uncritically to adopt aspects of his thought without thinking to analyze it from

8 For examples of a larger body of feminist work on Christian theologians, see Rose- mary Radford Ruether, “Misogynism and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church,” and Eleanor Commo McLaughlin, “Equality of Souls, Inequality of Sexes: Woman in Medi- eval Theology,” both in Rosemary Radford Ruether, ed., Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, pp. 150–83, 213–66 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974); Valerie Salving Goldstein, “The Human Situation: A Feminine View,” Journal of Religion 40 (April 1960): 100–12; Judith Plaskow, Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1980). 52 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective the perspective of gender.9 Buber’s I-You theology, however, rests on the assumption that we human beings spend most of our lives in the It-world, only occasionally experiencing moments of I-You connection. Granite suggests that “while relation is key both to Buber’s philosophy and feminist theory, it seems that it enters their experience from opposite ends: Buber works toward relation, while feminists begin with relation.”10 The relevance of a gender analysis to Buber’s work becomes especially clear in connection with his discussion of the emergence of the two modes of I-You and I-It relation. Here Buber focuses on the experience of the child and its gradual acquisition of self-consciousness without ever naming the mother as the one with whom the child is in relation or looking at the mother-child relationship from the mother’s side.11 Were the child’s development seen from the perspective of the mother, a third mode of relation might be required to capture her experience. The child is not characteristically an object to the mother—as in the I-It mode—but neither does she necessarily experience a perpetual reciprocity of relation. Her experience of care and connection even when mutuality is absent may constitute a third sort of relation insuf- ficiently accounted for in Buber’s theology.12 If theological criticism in the narrow sense awaits the attention of a new generation of Jewish feminist thinkers, criticism on a broader scale is absolutely central to Jewish feminist theology. Starting from Jewish religious practice and the communal exclusion of women, Jewish feminists have examined the theological presuppositions embedded in the Bible, halakhah, and liturgical texts and have called into question a range of basic assumptions from the normative character of maleness to the holiness of separation. This wide-ranging critique of the theological presuppositions of Jewish religious and institutional practice presupposes the broad definition of theology I discussed earlier. Once theology is understood, not just as teachings about God, but as sustained reflection on all the fundamental categories and experiences of Judaism, the normative character of maleness

9 This paragraph is based on a conversation I had in May 1990 with Lauren Granite and also on her reflections, “Some Notes toward a Feminist Critique of Buber’s Work” (June 1990, available from L. Granite). Granite is a graduate student at Drew University, who, when she sat down to prepare a comprehensive exam on Buber, was startled to find that there was no feminist criticism of his work. 10 Granite, “Some Notes,” 1–2, 10–11. 11 Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner, 1970), 76–80. 12 Granite, “Some Notes,” 10f. Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 53 emerges clearly as the basic principle of Jewish theological anthropology.13 As I argued in my article “The Right Question Is Theological”—the first sustained theological critique of Jewish women’s situation—women’s otherness is not simply a sociological fact but a fundamental assumption that underlies both the details of halakhah and a larger discourse about the nature of Israel as a people.14 Israel, in both the narrative and legislative portions of the Bible and in the basic categories of the Mishnah, is defined as male heads of households. If one asks within Judaism: What is a Jew? What is a person? What are the responsibilities of a Jew? the questions are impossible to answer in any but the most abstract way without recourse to gender differentiation and hierarchy. This is the starting point of the feminist critique of Judaism: that a woman is not simply a Jew but always a female Jew (as in “a woman rabbi”)—always the one perceived as Other in relation to a male norm. Drorah Setel makes the further point that maleness-femaleness is not the only hierarchy within Judaism, but rather one of a host of dualistic separations that together are taken to constitute holiness.15 From the very beginnings of its history, Israel saw itself as called on to separate or differentiate itself from the nations of surrounding peoples. This differentiation was made manifest both in the theological claim to chosenness and in many internal separations that were to mark the life of a holy nation: Shabbat and week, kosher and trafe, male and female.16 Since a critique of hierarchical dualisms has been central to the entire feminist project from its beginnings, Setel locates the central tension between Judaism and feminism at this point: in separative versus relational modes of understanding. Her critique raises a series of fascinating questions for Jewish theology: Why the centrality of separation as a mark of holiness, especially in those cases where separation seems to have no moral significance (as in the separation of linen and wool or different kinds of cattle)? How closely identified are separation and holiness within Judaism? Is separation itself problematic for feminism, or only hierarchical modes of separation?17

13 Judith Wegner completely misses this point when she reduces the theological status of women’s Otherness to the “male patriarchal image of God”; Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 186. 14 Judith Plaskow, “The Right Question Is Theological,” in Susannah Heschel, ed., On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader (New York: Schocken, 1983), 224–27. 15 T. Drorah Setel, “Feminist Reflections on Separation and Unity in Jewish Theology,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 2 (spring 1986): 113–18. 16 Plaskow, Standing Again, 96; Setel, “Feminist Reflections,” 116. 17 See Marcia Falk’s response to Setel in the same issue of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 15: 121–25. 54 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective

Seen in the context of these other issues, the image of God as male in Judaism is not the only locus of feminist theological criticism but one important aspect of a larger pattern. Jewish feminists have pointed out that the overwhelming preponderance of male images for God in biblical and rabbinic texts and in the traditional liturgy correlates with the normative status of maleness. Since God in the fullness of God’s reality is ultimately unknowable, our images tell us more about our social arrangements—in this case the subordinate status of women—than they do about God.18 Moreover, the image of God as a being outside ourselves ruling over and controlling the world fits into the pattern of hierarchical dualisms that Setel identifies as central to Judaism. God as the locus of holiness, meaning, and value is infinitely more than the world “he” created. The idea that this God has chosen Israel supports the dualistic separation between Israel and other people. The idea that this God is male supports the normative character of maleness.19 These points do not exhaust the feminist theological critique of Judaism. The fundamental nature of women’s otherness, of hierarchical dualisms, and of the male image of God has implications for the concepts of revelation and Torah as well as for other issues. What is the source of Jewish understandings of self, world, and God? Why is it that these understandings seem so clearly to reflect a patriarchal social order? What is the source of Torah, and what are its parameters? If women’s voices and experiences are excluded from Torah as it has been handed down, does it need to be expanded? Is there a “woman’s Torah”? How do we recognize it, and what would it include? A full theological critique of Judaism is beyond my scope here, but even a brief outline of feminist criticism serves to suggest the range and significance of a feminist probing of Jewish theological foundations and its importance for the critical study of Judaism. If we turn to the second stage of feminist scholarship, the recovery of women’s history, we find that it has been similarly affected by the status of theology within Judaism. Although it may well be that time will turn up medieval or other women theologians whose names are as yet unknown to us, there is no dense history of theologizing among Jews in whose twists and tangles women can be easily lost. What feminists have attempted to recover, therefore, is not necessarily full-blown theologies, but the history

18 Rita Gross, “Female God Language in a Jewish Context,” in Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds., Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979), 168–71. 19 Setel, “Feminist Reflections,” 117; Plaskow, Standing Again, 123–35. Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 55 of women’s spirituality—understandings of God and Jewish life embedded in ritual and prayer, memoirs and sermons—that may at some point be incorporated into theologies by contemporary Jewish women. In seeking out the history of women’s spirituality, feminist theologians are dependent on the work of women in other areas of Jewish studies who have examined ancient sources, studied archaeological remains, and searched for new documents in modern women’s history. Since, particularly for the early periods of Jewish history, few sources are interested in the religious lives of women, hints concerning women’s experiences must be carefully ferreted out from narratives, prophecies, and legal texts focused on other matters. Biblical scholars, for example, have argued that the scant sources concerning Miriam suggest that she was probably an important cultic leader in early Israel.20 What exactly was the nature of her contribution and role? Or, in a different vein, Genesis tells us (34:1), “Dinah . . . went out to visit the women of the land.” Does this bespeak some kind of connection on the part of Israelite women to Canaanite religion? Prophetic texts accusing women of worshiping the Queen of Heaven (Jer. 44) or bewailing Tammuz (Ezek. 8:14), son of the Goddess Ishtar, imply that women may have been more resistant than men to giving up the worship of female dei- ties. What are the implications of this resistance for our understanding of both paganism and Israelite monotheism? From the rabbinic period, the stories about Beruriah in the Talmud suggest that a small number of women found pleasure and religious purpose in the study of rabbinic texts, in the same way that an elite group of men has.21 Jewish women’s spirituality apparently has both diverged from and flowed into the mainstream of Jewish spirituality. As we get into the modern period, texts written by women provide evidence of both a distinct religious outlook and one shaped by the role of women within patriarchal Judaism. Chava Weissler, for example, has discussed the tkhines, or petitionary prayers of early modern Eastern European Jewish women. These prayers, written for women and some by women, reflect a spirituality structured by private events and experiences. Unlike

20 For example, Rita J. Burns, Has the Lord Indeed Spoken Only through Moses? A Study of the Biblical Portrait of Miriam, Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 84 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), chap. 2, esp. p. 40. For development of these themes, see my Stand- ing Again, 36–51. 21 David Goodblatt, “The Beruriah Traditions,” Journal of Jewish Studies 26 (spring– autumn 1975): 68–85; but for the “bad end” assigned this uppity woman by the rabbis, see Rachel Adler, “The Virgin in the Brothel and Other Anomalies: Character and Context in the Legend of Beruriah,” Tikkun 3 (Nov. 1988): 28–32, 101–6. 56 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective the public liturgy of the siddur, the content of the tkhines revolves largely around women’s special commandments (lighting the Sabbath candles, taking the hallah dough, and ritual immersion), women’s biological experiences, and personal and intimate moments (a visit to the graves of the dead, the illness of a child, the desire to raise children well). Although these prayers connect women to the larger tradition and occasionally even subtly transform it, they most strikingly convey the emotionality and intimacy of women’s piety and its relation to ordinary life. If the God of Jewish women was the “God of our fathers” and of Jewish history, God was also the God of the matriarchs, domestic routines, and biological experiences particular to women.22 Interestingly, these same themes of the importance of religious feeling and the presence of God in everyday life also come through in the work of those modern women who have most claim to the title theologian, in that they developed a coherent religious vision, which they shared with others. Ellen Umansky has examined the sermons and addresses of Lily Montagu, founder of liberal Judaism in England, and Tehilla Lichtenstein, cofounder and leader of the Society of Jewish Science, to see whether and how the religious visions of these women differed from those of the men they saw as their mentors and teachers. Umansky finds that although the women understood themselves as simply promulgating the teachings of their mentors, in fact both saw religion as emotional and personal and grounded their sermons in their own life experience, feelings, and perceptions. Thus, although Claude Montefiore, Montagu’s inspiration, preached about abstract concepts like beauty, truth, and justice, Montagu rooted her sermons in specific plays, movies, poems, books, and people that to her embodied the principles of liberal Judaism and allowed the discovery of these principles in everyday life. Similarly, although Lichtenstein’s husband, Morris, spoke in general terms about human character and the capacities of the mind, she always tied her discussions of Jewish science to concrete examples, most drawn from her experiences of motherhood, marriage, and the home.23 Whether this focus on the concrete comes from a specifi-

22 Chava Weissler, “The Traditional Piety of Ashkenazic Women,” in Arthur Green, ed., Jewish Spirituality from the Sixteenth Century Revival to the Present (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 247–49, 266–67; “The Religion of Traditional Ashkenazic Women: Some Method- ological Issues,” AJS Review (June/July 1987): 87–88; “Voices from the Heart: Women’s Devo- tional Prayers,” Jewish Almanac, ed. Richard Siegel and Carl Rheins (New York: Bantam, 1980), 544; “Women in Paradise,” Tikkun 2 (1987): 43–46, 117–20. 23 Ellen M. Umansky, “Piety, Persuasion, and Friendship: Female Jewish Leadership in Modern Times,” in Paula Cooey, Sharon Farmer, and Mary Ellen Ross, eds., Embodied Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 57 cally women’s perspective or is simply the product of the restricted role of women in Judaism, there is an interesting continuity between the work of these modern women and the spirituality of more traditional women. The search for the gaps and silences in traditional texts and for devo- tional and sermonic material by women suggests a broadening of the definition of Jewish spirituality. Spirituality is found not simply in the products of a male elite but in the experiences and testimonies of women and ordinary men whose religious lives and theological presuppositions have generally been neglected. One could even argue that to understand the range of women’s spiritual expression in the modern era, it is necessary to move beyond the realm of texts altogether. The female social reformers of the late nineteenth century, the founders of religious schools, settlement houses, and Jewish women’s organizations, as well as participants in Zionist and Bundist activities saw themselves as serving God through moral and social action. Sharing the wider nineteenth-century belief in the innate piety of women, they believed that this piety placed a special obligation on them to worship God by helping others.24 Their activism came from a clear theological understanding that prefigured the insight of feminist liberation theology: that theological reflection must always be rooted and expressed in concrete actions.

Jewish Feminist Theology as Construction

The need to expand the definition of spirituality to incorporate women’s experience begins to suggest the constructive and transformative nature of Jewish feminist theology. A repetition or contemporary restatement of traditional ideas is impossible for such a theology because it begins with the critical moment in which all Jewish texts and ideas are viewed with suspicion for their possible collusion with patriarchy in silencing women’s voices. Louis Jacobs, in the first chapter of his Jewish theology, suggests that theological ideas are to be embraced or rejected according to their “consistency with the tradition and coherence with the rest of our knowledge. Where there are contradictions in the traditional sources the

Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 189–206; and Lily Montagu and the Advancement of Liberal Judaism: From Vision to Vocation, Studies in Women and Religion 12 (New York: Edward Mellen, 1983), 205–6. 24 Ellen M. Umansky, “Matriarchs and Monotheism: A History of Jewish Women’s Spiri- tuality,” in Ellen Umansky and Dianne Ashton, eds., Piety, Persuasion, and Friendship: A Sourcebook of Modern Jewish Women’s Spirituality (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 15–18. 58 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective contemporary Jewish theologian must try to decide which of the views is closest to the spirit of the tradition.”25 But if all the sources on which the theologian can draw take for granted the normative character of maleness, then it is impossible for the feminist theologian to root herself in the tradition without at the same time questioning some of its most fundamental assumptions. This is why the stage of criticism is never left behind in the move to construction. Rather, the transformative character of Jewish feminist theology is revealed in the back-and-forth movement between these stages. Insistence on the value of women’s experience and its integration into the tradition has ramifications for every theological question. In the rest of this chapter, I look at some of the implications of women’s experience for the concepts of God and Torah, but a similar dialectic of critique and reconstruction would characterize a feminist discussion of any theological issue. Feminist analysis, moreover, often lays bare important dynamics in the nature of Judaism as a religion, so that specifically theological questions open up into “religious studies” questions concerning the function of religious language, symbols, and rituals and the origins and consolidation of religious traditions. A Jewish feminist approach to Jewish God-language and Jewish concepts of God begins with the critique and process of recovery of women’s spirituality I described earlier. The correlation between dominant images of God as male and Jewish social and institutional arrangements raises basic questions about the nature and purpose of God-language. What are Jews saying when we attribute particular qualities or characteristics to God? Are we describing God in words that God has revealed to us? Are we projecting our own wishes or social systems onto the cosmos? Are we responding to some special dimension of our experience using the concepts and vocabulary at our disposal? Although a theory of God-language is often more implicit than explicit in feminist theological constructions, by and large Jewish feminists insist on the socially shaped and created nature of religious language, but without reducing language about God to purely social projection. On the one hand, language about God is precisely that, language about God. Everything we say about God represents a human attempt to recapture or evoke experiences sustained within linguistic and cultural frameworks that already color our experience and interpretation.26 On the other hand,

25 Jacobs, A Jewish Theology, 14. 26 Plaskow, Standing Again, 134–36. Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 59 language about God, if it is to move people and provide a sense of meaning, must come from a genuine individual or communal experience. It cannot be a product of individual fiat or scholarly consensus, nor can it be a mechanical response to a diagnosed ailment in Jewish God-language of the past. For an increasing number of Jewish women and men, images of God as a male Other no longer work. This is the communal, nonacademic basis of the feminist theological quest. The search for the God of Jewish feminism is a search for a God experienced in women’s new sense of empowerment and presence within the context of the Jewish tradition. Although feminist images of God draw on many sources, I see a fundamental experience out of which the new naming of God arises as the discovery of women’s agency in the Jewish past and present in relation to a greater power that grounds and sustains it. Women’s sense of coming to full selfhood in community—which to me is the fundamental feminist experience— is not simply self-referential but leads to a sense of participation in a reality and energy that finally enfold the cosmos and that both the individual and community can and must respond to. The sense of women’s power and agency that has propelled the Jewish feminist movement and its attempts at new God-language constitutes a new Jewish situation in discontinuity with much of the spirituality of Jewish women of the past. Gluckel of Hameln, whose memoir captures a segment of Jewish life and faith in seventeenth-century northern Germany,27 the women who wrote or recited the tkhines, even as bold a figure as Montagu, were all trying to define their own religious lives within the context of a male-defined Judaism, be it traditional or Reform. Where they departed from tradition—or in Montagu’s case, the Reform theology of Montefiore—they did so unselfconsciously. Contemporary Jewish feminists, by way of contrast, are deliberately claiming power as women to criticize the oppressive aspects of tradition and to reshape our relation to it. This means that although the history of women’s spirituality is an important resource in that it reminds us that women always have been agents within Judaism and that Jewish religious belief and practice have always been broader than male elite texts would have us believe, women’s history cannot simply be taken over whole. The relation between a self-consciously

27 The Memoirs of Gluckel of Hameln, trans. Marvin Lowenthal (New York: Schocken, [1932] 1977). 60 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective feminist spirituality and traditional women’s spirituality remains an open question that feminist theology needs to explore. Thus, although earlier generations of Jewish women spoke to the God of Jewish tradition as a God present in the details of their daily lives, for the most part they spoke to “him” using traditional images. Contemporary Jewish feminists also seek God in messy, embodied, everyday reality, but they have tried to translate this sense of God’s immanence into the very language of metaphors for God. Feminist God-language, moreover, seeks to give expression not simply to God’s presence in ordinary events and situations, but more specifically to the amazing discovery of God’s presence moving in and among women. Rita Gross’s article on female God-language, the first to raise the issue in a Jewish context, argued that if we want to reflect and affirm the “becoming” of women within the Jewish community, then everything we say about “God-He” we must be equally willing to say about “God-She.”28 Although on one level Gross’s text reads like a simple political prescription for the disease of Jewish sexism, it also clearly represents an attempt to give concreteness to the image of God as present in women. At the time Gross wrote her article, Naomi Janowitz and Maggie Wenig were compiling a Sabbath prayerbook for women that not only used female pronouns for God but also experimented with female metaphors. God was not simply the traditional deity in female form, but a mother birthing the world and protecting it with her womb. The accumulation of female pronouns and images in both their prayers and those of later inno- vators provides a wonderful celebration of women’s sexuality and power rare in the culture and still rarer in a religious context.29 Important as such language was and is as an affirmation of female selfhood in relation to the sacred, there is also a certain naïveté in the assumption that the insertion of female pronouns or images into traditional prayers provides a solution to women’s invisibility. Rather, insofar as male images of God are part of a larger pattern of hierarchical dualisms, female language introduces a contradiction into the pattern that begins to reveal and disrupt it but does not in itself dislodge the larger system of dualisms.

28 Gross, “Female God Language,” 165–73, esp. 172–73. 29 Naomi Janowitz and Maggie Wenig, Siddur Nashim: A Sabbath Prayer Book for Women (Providence: Privately published, 1976); short sections are reprinted in Womanspirit Rising, pp. 174–78. Since Janowitz and Wenig, there have been many other prayer services using female language, many privately circulating for use in small groups. Vetaher Libenu (Sud- bury, Mass.: Congregation Beth El, 1980) and Or Chadash (Philadelphia: P’nai Or Religious Fellowship, 1989) are two generally available prayerbooks that use female language, the latter in Hebrew as well as English. Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 61

God-She can also be the supreme Other in a hierarchical system. Jewish feminist God-language has therefore also tried to address the notion of God as wholly Other, a notion that persists even in female imagery, by more radically challenging traditional metaphors and blessing formulas. Lynn Gottlieb, for example, has drawn on images from various religious traditions to create a litany of names and metaphors for God that evoke the infinite, changing, and flowing depths of God’s nature. Gottlieb is much interested in female metaphors, which she borrows from ancient Goddess traditions and develops from the feminine resonances and associations of many Hebrew terms. What characterizes her use of God-language above all, however, is not just its female imagery but its fluidity, movement, and multiplicity, its evocation of a God within and without, in women and all that lives.30 Marcia Falk works in a different way to dislodge the traditional conception of God and male images. Focusing on the blessing formula that is so central in Jewish life, she challenges not simply its maleness but its anthropocentrism. Her blessing over bread, for example, changes “Blessed art thou Lord our God king of the universe,” to “Let us bless the source or wellspring of life” that “brings forth bread from the earth.” The Hebrew word for source (ayin) is feminine, adding an “ah” (ha-motziah) ending to the word for bread that displaces the ubiquitous masculine. Beyond this, the image of wellspring or source is both natural and nonhierarchical, shifting our sense of direction from a God in the high heavens ruling over us to a God present in the very ground beneath our feet, nourishing and sustaining us.31 In some ways, it is easier to articulate the new conception of God that lurks behind this abundance of imagery than it is to find the images that express the conception. The effort to create new metaphors for God bespeaks an understanding of monotheism that rejects the worship of a single image of God in favor of a new and inclusive notion of unity. Many Jewish feminists have pointed out that the inability of most Jews to imagine God as anything but male is a form of idolatry in that it identifies a finite image with the reality of God. Jews are used to thinking of idols as stones and carved figures, but verbal images can be equally idolatrous in their fixedness—indeed, can actually be more dangerous for being

30 Much of Lynn Gottlieb’s work is unpublished, but see “Speaking into the Silence,” Response 41–42 (fall–winter 1982): 19–32, esp. 21–22, 32. 31 Marcia Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings: Toward a Feminist Jewish Recon- struction of Prayer,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 3 (spring 1987): 39–49. I discuss the new Jewish feminist God-language in Standing Again, 136–43. 62 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective invisible.32 Underlying feminist metaphors, by way of contrast, is a conception of monotheism, not as a single image of God, but, in Falk’s phrase, as “an embracing unity of a multiplicity of images.”33 Since the divine totality is all-embracing, every aspect of creation provides a clue to some dimension of God’s reality. Every image of God is part of the divine reality that includes the diversity of an infinite community of human and nonhuman life. A true monotheism is able to discern the One in and through the changing forms of the many, to glimpse the whole in and through its infinite images.34 The nature of this divine totality is developed in feminist discourse through both what is denied and what is affirmed. God is not male. God is not a lord and king. God is not a being outside us, over against us, who manipulates and controls us and raises some people over others. God is not the dualistic Other who authorizes all other dualisms. God is the source and wellspring of life in its infinite diversity. God—as our foremothers seem to have known—is present in all aspects of life, but present not just as father and protector but as one who empowers us to act creatively ourselves. God, to use Nelle Morton’s image, is the great hearing one at the center of the universe, the one who hears us to speech and is altered by the hearing.35 God is inside and outside us. God is transcendent in the way that community transcends the individuals within it. God is the God known in community, encountered by the Jewish people at Sinai at the same time they became a community. But God embraces the inexhaustible particu- larities of all communities and is named fully by none. The difficulties of translating this conception of God into metaphor— or better, many metaphors—is related to the nature of religious symbols. Since new symbols cannot simply be invented as a response to some diagnosed problem in the tradition, but rather emerge from new experiences, it takes time for experience to crystallize into imagery. Moreover, language is just one vehicle—and in many ways a poor vehicle—for expressing the nature of divine reality. The experiences that language tries to pin down are many times undergone in silence, and the making of metaphor represents but a halting attempt to translate that silence into a language that can be shared with others. Ritual, because it involves the whole self, is potentially a more effective vehicle for communicating a total conception of the sacred. Both the communal roots of Jewish feminist theology and the nature of reli-

32 Gross, “Female God Language,” 169; Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 44–45. 33 Falk, “Notes on Composing New Blessings,” 41 (emphasis in original). 34 Plaskow, Standing Again, 150–53. 35 Nelle Morton, The Journey Is Home (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 54–55. Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 63 gion make it important to look at feminist ritual as an expression of Jewish feminist understandings of God. The rejection of hierarchical leadership in feminist ritual, its preference for circles, its participatory style of prayer that seeks to empower all present, offer testimony to a feminist conception of God that is as powerful as any new metaphor. A second important focus of feminist theological discussion is the nature and meaning of Torah. Obviously, there is a connection between the concept of Torah and the concept of God, for the assertion that God is the giver of Torah is central to Jewish theology and, like many important theological assertions, justifies itself through its circularity. Because God is the giver of Torah, it reliably testifies to the nature of God, and the faithfulness of God is warrant for the believability of Torah. But if feminists are suspicious of traditional metaphors for God because they reinforce larger patterns of male domination, this suspicion in turn implies a critique of Torah as itself in bondage to patriarchy. Feminist suspicion of Torah does not stem specifically from its male God-language, but as I suggested earlier, from the normative character of maleness Torah assumes. Whether understood in the narrow sense as the five books of Moses or the wider sense as all Jewish teaching and learning, Torah defines the male as the normative Jew and perceives women as Other in relation to men. Torah is male texts—not simply in the sense of author- ship, but in the sense that its concerns are defined and are circumscribed from a male perspective. Women are often absent—“You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” (Exod. 20:14)—or nameless—Jephthah’s daughter (Judg. 11) and Samson’s mother (Judg. 13). Women’s religious experiences are passed over in silence. (What was Miriam’s true role in the Exodus community?) Women’s sexuality is strictly controlled in the interests of male heads of household.36 Torah constructs a world that orders and makes sense of Jewish experience, but the world it constructs places men at the center. It is the written record of those with the power to keep records and to interpret and define the meaning of Jewish existence. In creating a particular vision of reality, it disguises alternative Jewish realities that may have coexisted alongside it. It understands the imperatives of Jewish life from the perspective of those at the center: the prophets rather than the common people, who for centuries “whored after false gods,” and the rabbis who said that only men could

36 See Wegner, Chattel or Person? for a thorough exploration of this theme in relation to the Mishnah. 64 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective write a bill of divorce, rather than the individual women who gave themselves that power.37 The feminist relation to Torah thus begins in suspicion, critique, and the refusal to assign revelatory status to the establishment and reinforcement of patriarchy. This insistence on suspicion does not mean, however, that Jewish feminists view Torah as just a series of historical texts, interesting for what they reveal about the past but of no enduring significance. The decisions to struggle with Torah, to criticize it, to remain in relation to it, all presuppose a more complex attitude. Elsewhere, I have called Torah a “partial record of the ‘Godwrestling’ of part of the Jewish people.”38 In using the term Godwrestling, I am trying to encapsulate several assumptions about the theological status of Torah. First, I suggest that Torah is, at least in part, a record of response to some genuine encounter. To be sure, it is an interpretation of encounter encoded in patriarchal language, but still, it tries to remember and to actualize in the life of a concrete historical community the workings of a God understood to be guiding and calling a particular people to their destiny. It testifies to moments of profound experience, illumination, and also mystery, when the curtain was pulled back from the endless chain of historical circumstance and some underlying meaning and presence were traced and read from the events of Jewish history. The word suggests that Torah is incomplete because it is the nature of religious experience that no oral or written record can either exhaust it or spring entirely free from historical context. “Revelation” can challenge those who receive it and open up perspectives that are genuinely new, but Israel reached its understanding of God and its own destiny at a time when patriarchy was being consolidated throughout the ancient Near East. Its self-understanding helped to institute, support, and reinforce this historical development; it rarely disputed it. My characterization of Torah suggests, moreover, that it is the record of only part of the Jewish people because we do not know how women experienced the large and small events of Jewish history. We do not have Sinai seen through their eyes, their double enslave- ment, or their wanderings in the desert. We have the names of some of their prophets but not their prophecies. We do not know how women wrestled

37 Carol P. Christ, “Heretics and Outsiders,” in her Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 35–40; Bernadette Brooten, “Could Women Initiate Divorce in Ancient Judaism? The Implications for Mark 10:11–12 and 1 Corinthians 7:10–11” (Ernest Cadwell Colman Lecture, School of Theology at Claremont, 14 April 1981). 38 Plaskow, Standing Again, 33. My explication of the phrase here depends on my discussion in the book, pp. 32–34. Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 65 with God, or even whether, like Jacob, they would have named their experience wrestling. Although some feminists would argue that reading the traditional Torah from a new angle of vision can provide women with the history we need, others seek to expand Torah, to redefine what Jews consider revelatory and normative.39 On the one hand, there is no question that Torah as traditionally understood can be sifted and mined for more information about women. Read through feminist lenses, it can provide fragmentary evidence of women’s religious leadership, of changing patterns of family and gender relations, of women’s lives in and outside normative religious institutions. On the other hand, if we begin with the assumption that Judaism is constituted by women and men, then we must be open to finding Torah far outside the traditional canon. Archaeological evidence that challenges written sources, the writings of nonrabbinic groups, the history of women’s spirituality, literature by Jewish women dealing with religious themes, midrash “received” by contemporary women—all these become Torah in that they are parts of the record of the Jewish religious experience, of what Jews have found holy and meaningful in their lives, and of the Jewish attempt to give order to existence.40 This new content of Torah is discovered and created in a number of ways. In part, the findings of feminist historiography, when appropriated as normative, themselves come to have the status of Torah. If the tkhines, for example, were taught or recited alongside other Jewish liturgy as equally valid forms of Jewish liturgical expression, their understanding of God would eventually become part of the Jewish imagination much like the God of the synagogue service. If divorce documents written by women had the same status in Jewish legal history as the Mishnah’s view that women cannot initiate divorce, the halakhic precedents for contemporary divorce law would be greatly expanded and thereby transformed. If ancient inscriptions

39 Compare, e.g., Tamar Frankiel, The Voice of Sarah: Feminine Spirituality and Tradi- tional Judaism (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), with Sue Levi Elwell, Texts and Transformation: Towards a Theology of Integrity (Rabbinic thesis, Hebrew Union College- Jewish Institute of Religion, 1986). 40 I have in mind such things as the ancient inscriptions testifying to women’s religious leadership studied by Bernadette Brooten (Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues, Brown Judaic Studies 36 [Chico, Calif.: Schol- ars Press, 1982]); the New Testament as evidence for the right of Jewish women to initiate divorce (see n.37); the tkhines; novels like E. M. Broner’s A Weave of Women (New York: Bantam, 1978); and midrash like Ellen Umansky’s “Creating a Jewish Feminist Theology,” in Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ, eds., Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), 195–97. 66 Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective describing women as presidents and leaders of synagogues were taken as seriously as is the absence of women from the rabbinate, discussion of the ordination of women in the Orthodox community might take on a much different complexion.41 In each of these cases, historical evidence is given theological weight that serves to shift and enlarge the meaning of Torah. Yet historiography is not the only nor the best source for the feminist expansion of Torah. Jews have traditionally used midrash to broaden or alter the meanings of texts. The midrashic process of bringing contemporary questions to traditional sources and elaborating on the sources in response to questions easily lends itself to feminist use. Lacking adequate information on Miriam’s role in Israelite religion, we can fill in the gaps with midrash; lacking texts on what women experienced at Sinai, we can recreate them through midrash. Such midrash can then become part of the content of Torah, both through study and through incorporation into liturgy. Indeed, just as the structure of feminist liturgy conveys something of the feminist understanding of God, so the content of feminist liturgy is an important vehicle for communicating an expanded Torah. Such extension of the content of Torah necessarily opens and challenges traditionally normative texts and the theological conclusions we might draw from them. Insofar as traditional texts become part of a larger Torah, their authority is relativized and their claims to normativeness are shaken. Including and valuing women’s religious experience as Torah precipitates a new critical moment in feminist theology. It leads us to examine the process by which particular texts become normative, the interests they represent, and the kind of social order they support and undergird. What is more important from a theological perspective, broadening Torah broadens the historical and textual basis of Jewish theological discourse. Highlighting aspects of Jewish experience that had previously been obscured and neglected, and valuing these as Torah, offer a richer and more diverse Judaism on which to reflect theologically. The Jewish God is not simply the God of the patriarchs and rabbis, but the God of the matriarchs, the tkhines, and women who interpret and create Torah today. Any attempt to articulate a Jewish understanding of God must take account of all these sources, exploring the concepts and images of God in the women’s Torah as part of the heritage that a contemporary theology reworks or transforms. The same must be said of any theological concept. It must be grounded in a history

41 See nn. 37 and 40. Jewish Theology in Feminist Perspective 67 and present that is wholly Jewish, one that represents the Jewishness of the whole community rather than the religious experience of a male elite. The challenge of Jewish feminist theology to Jewish studies should by now be obvious. What part of the tradition does Jewish studies set out to study? Who defines what is worth studying, what is centrally and norma- tively Jewish? Whose interests does a supposedly objective and historically accurate Jewish studies support and share? Do theological judgments concerning normativeness creep in under the guise of objectivity? When and to what extent is Jewish studies male Jewish studies parading in the cloak of universality? Jewish feminist theology calls into question our basic understanding of Jewishness, the texts, the history, and the literature that Jewish studies examines. It also moves beyond critical questions to ask what Judaism looks like when we take seriously the perspectives and experiences of women as they try to understand and construct their own visions of the world. It pursues the task of shaping meaning, of making sense of being a Jewish woman and human being in the world today. In this sense, precisely as theology, it serves the central tasks of a liberal education: inviting students to encounter and reflect on difference, fostering critical self- consciousness, and encouraging the development of a personal worldview accountable to the needs of a larger community.42

42 Neusner, “Religious Studies/Theological Studies: The St. Louis Project,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 52 (Dec. 1984): 740; Farley, “The Place of Theology,” 12.

Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist Reflections on Good Sex*

Judith Plaskow

The effort to develop feminist accounts of good sex within the context of patriarchal religious traditions raises a host of methodological problems. The very formulation of the project recognizes the tensions between feminism as a social movement committed to the liberation of women from all forms of oppression, and the direction and intention of traditions that have contributed directly and indirectly to women’s subordination and marginalization in religion and society. The Good Sex project begins from the reality that women have rarely participated in the formulation of sexual norms and values in the major world religions, and that religious sexual values have seldom been conducive to the health or well-being of women.1 In bringing together a group of women connected to different traditions, the project seeks to create a space in which the participants can “think new thoughts,” reflecting on sexuality from the perspective of the concerns and experiences of women in our cultures. But at the same time, it assumes that these new thoughts will somehow remain in relation to the religions being transformed and will possibly authenticate themselves through connection to neglected or dissident strands within those religions.2 The project thus immediately becomes entangled in fundamental questions about how feminists argue for and make change, especially when the changes envisioned may radically challenge central elements of tradition.

Defining the Questions

My interest in this chapter is not so much in defining good sex from a Jewish feminist perspective as in thinking about how to think about the

* Plaskow, Judith, “Authority, Resistance, and Transformation: Jewish Feminist Reflec- tion on Good Sex”, in Good Sex: Feminist Perpsectives from the World’s Religions, ed. Patricia Beattie Jung, Mary E. Hunt, and Radhika Balakrishnan. © 2001 by Rutgers University Press. Reprinted by permission of Rutgers University Press. 1 Mary E. Hunt. “Good Sex: Women’s Religious Wisdom on Sexuality,” Reproductive Health Matters 8 (November 1996): 97–103. 2 Ibid., 97. 70 authority, resistance, and transformation issue. As a Jewish feminist theologian, I find that the task of transforming Jewish sexual norms raises questions about authority that I must sort out before I can begin to think substantively about the characteristics of good sex. The Jewish feminist movement in the United States has flourished in the context of a decentralized, remarkably diverse Jewish community, in which there are many competing visions of the nature of Judaism and many opportunities to shape Jewish life in new directions. In a situation in which the great majority of U.S. Jews have rejected or are redefining elements of traditional Jewish belief and practice, the issue of authority is crucial and has implications well beyond the area of sexuality.3 The question of how to ground and argue for criticisms or constructive reworkings of religious tradition is pressing for any theology or group that does not simply assume the validity of traditional sources of authority, such as Scripture, revelation, or centralized religious leadership.4 Yet, because sexual control of women is such a key element in broader patriarchal control, the topic of sexuality raises the issue of authority with particular vividness and urgency. On what basis can feminists advocate particular visions of sexuality in ways that will prove intelligible and convincing to others? The problem of authority arises for feminists as soon as we begin to challenge any aspect of the status and role of women. Once we acknowledge the possibility of deeply questioning any element of tradition, we seem to undermine the hope of religious certainty at a level that goes far beyond the specific issue at hand. However narrow the grounds for a particular criticism—and feminist criticisms of the treatment of women and religious sexual values are in fact deep and wide-ranging—rejecting any element of tradition throws all the rest into question. This is because, however much feminists still may value certain insights and perspectives we glean from our traditions, we no longer value them simply because they are there. Rather, we are confronted with having to self-consciously appropriate and reappropriate from the conflicted strands within each tradition those that make sense and bear fruit in our own lives, finding ways to explain our choices that make sense both to ourselves and to others. Logically, we cannot have it both ways. We cannot both deny the authority of religious

3 Only 50 percent of U.S. Jews are affiliated with any particular religious movement within Judaism. Of that 50 percent, 80 percent are non-Orthodox. This means that, to vary- ing degrees, they accept the notion of Judaism as an evolving tradition that must adapt itself to changing historical and social circumstances. 4 Cf. Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990), 18–21. authority, resistance, and transformation 71 tradition where it negates our feminist values and, at the same time, build on that authority where it seems to support those values. A lot of recent scholarship on Jewish attitudes toward sexuality inten- sifies this issue of authority in that it highlights the tensions and disagreements within Jewish tradition, denying the reality of any unitary perspective.5 Such a move is enormously helpful in deconstructing fundamentalist appeals to religious authority, in that it makes clear that all claims to authority involve selectivity, that Jewish tradition by no means speaks on sexuality with a self-evident, unambiguous voice. This scholarship is also useful to feminist reconstructions of religion, in that it surfaces minority or dissident viewpoints in the Jewish past that may counter dominant perspectives on issues of sexual values. At the same time, however, in dissolv- ing the purported unity of Jewish tradition into a series of dissonant and ever-shifting strands, it increases the difficulty of arguing for the priority or authority of one strand over any other. Jewish tradition—like all religious traditions—is characterized by continual contesting of key issues, which issues are in turn continually redefined in different geographic locations and different historical contexts. Notions of authority are also continually reinterpreted in accordance with the outcome of such contests. Claiming the authority of a specific strand, then, is not a matter of identifying the essential and authentic voice of the Jewish tradition. Rather, it is part of a contest in our own time over which voices claiming to speak for tradition will prove compelling to a significant proportion of the Jewish people. The complex and contradictory nature of Jewish teachings on sexuality, moreover, points to another problem in privileging neglected, positive themes within Jewish tradition. All too often in feminist discussion, highlighting the liberating elements of a tradition as its authoritative voice involves disregarding the strands that have been oppressive. The troublesome aspects of a tradition do not disappear, however, simply because we ignore them, but are left to shape consciousness and affect hearts and minds. Thus, appealing to the first creation story, in which male and female are made in God’s image, and ignoring the second, in which woman is made from man, leaves intact the latter account to be used by others as a

5 I have in mind such works as Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmu- dic Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), and Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Howard Eilberg-Schwartz, People of the Body: Jews and Judaism from an Embodied Perspective (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1992); Mark Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (New York: Basic Books, 1992); and Michael Satlow, Tasting the Dish: Rabbinic Rhetorics of Sexuality, Brown Judaic Studies 303 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995). 72 authority, resistance, and transformation continuing justification for the subordination of women. Similarly, appealing to those elements in Judaism that honor the importance of married sex as a value in its own right apart from procreation, while neglecting the ways in which even married sex is restricted and controlled, allows the sexual control of women to continue unexamined as part of the fabric of Jewish marriage. But if one does acknowledge and attempt to grapple with the oppressive aspects of a tradition, the question inevitably arises as to the grounds on which its nonoppressive elements can be considered more fundamental. A final problem relating to authority concerns the sources that are relevant in thinking about the subject of sexuality. Given that any reconstruction of tradition necessarily selects from the conflicting voices on a particular issue, still, what texts are even germane to a consideration of this topic? It is striking that, when issues of sexuality are discussed in religious contexts, a handful of texts are often cited and argued about over and over, as if they were the only sources relevant to shaping norms around sexual behavior. In the Jewish community, debates around homosexuality have often revolved around two verses in Leviticus and rabbinic commentary on them, while Christians add to the scanty resources in the Hebrew Bible a third verse in Romans. This approach ignores the host of other injunctions in the Bible and rabbinic tradition about forming ethical relationships, creating community, and ensuring social justice. It fails to view sexuality as just one dimension of human relationship, embedded in a constellation of familial, interpersonal, and communal connections that shape, support, or deform it. Instead, sexuality is seen as a peculiar problem for ethics, a dis- crete and troublesome domain requiring unique regulation. In addition to confronting problems around grounding sexual values, therefore, feminist accounts of sexuality also need to locate the issue in a larger social context. Building on the early feminist insight that the personal is the political, feminists need to insist that good sex on the interpersonal level is possible only in the context of just social, political, and economic relations.6

Thinking about Compulsory Heterosexuality

I would like to illustrate the ways in which some of these issues concerning authority come into play in relation to a particular dimension of sexuality,

6 This was a central and recurrent theme in all our Good Sex conversations, as many chapters in this volume bear witness. authority, resistance, and transformation 73 by reflecting on compulsory heterosexuality within the Jewish tradition as a barrier to good sex. I choose to focus on a central oppressive element in my tradition rather than on some emancipatory theme, because I believe that it is the negative aspects of tradition that most profoundly shape women’s current sexual situation, and that most require attention and transformation. In my view, the starting point for feminists in thinking about good sex must be resistance. Feminists must begin by examining and dismantling the institutions that stand in the way of women even imagining fully our needs and desires. The concept of “compulsory heterosexuality,” which Adrienne Rich placed on the U.S. feminist agenda through her well-known essay on the topic, refers to the complex social and political processes through which people learn how and are made to be heterosexual.7 The first and simplest way in which heterosexuality is made compulsory is that other modes of sexual expression are forbidden on pain of punishment or death. Such a prohibition on male/male anal intercourse appears in Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13 and forms the starting point for all Jewish discussion of homosexuality—as well as Jewish gay and lesbian resistance to traditional attitudes toward homosexuality. Although lesbianism is not mentioned explicitly in the Bible, the rabbis find a reference to it in Leviticus 18:3, “You shall not copy the practices of the land of Egypt . . . or the land of Canaan.” They interpret the practices in question as a man marrying a man and a woman marrying a woman. Both the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds also contain brief discussions of whether women who “ ‘rub’ with each other” are considered to have committed an illicit sexual act and are therefore forbidden to marry a priest.8 The rabbis’ consensus that such acts are “mere licentiousness,” that is, not real sex, and therefore not disqualify- ing, reveals another weapon in the arsenal of compulsory heterosexuality: rendering sex between women invisible by defining it as impossible.9

7 Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5/4 (1980): 631–660. 8 The Talmud is a compendium of Jewish law and lore, taking the form of a commentary on the Mishnah, a second-century code of Jewish law. Since the Mishnah was the center of study at rabbinic academies in both Palestine and Babylonia, there are two Talmuds. The Babylonian Talmud is fuller and is considered the masterwork of rabbinic Judaism. 9 For some introductory material on these issues, see Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law (New York: Schocken, 1984), 192–197; and Rebecca Alpert, Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 25–34. 74 authority, resistance, and transformation

While contemporary Jewish debates about homosexuality generally revolve rather narrowly around these verses in Leviticus and the few rabbinic sources interpreting them, I find this material less useful for understanding heterosexuality as an institution than the pervasive assumption in biblical and rabbinic texts that heterosexual marriage is the norm for adult life. In getting at this larger context of Jewish attitudes toward marriage and family relations, Genesis 3:16—“Your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you”—is far more revealing than Leviticus 18 and 20, because it names the connection between gender complementarity, compulsory heterosexuality, and the subordination of women. Gayle Rubin, in her classic essay “The Traffic in Women,” argues that, in traditional societies, the social organization of sex is built on the links between “gender roles, obligatory heterosexuality and the constraint of female sexuality.”10 Gender roles guarantee that the smallest viable social unit will consist of one man and one woman whose desire must be directed toward each other, at the same time that men have rights to exchange their female kin and control their wives in marriage that women do not have either in themselves or in men. Genesis 3:16–19, which describes God’s punishments of Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge, offers a remarkably condensed and powerful statement of the connections laid out by Rubin. In increasing Eve’s pain in childbearing and punishing Adam with having to sweat and toil to gain his bread, God assumes or ordains differentiated gender roles and, at the same time, defines them asymmetrically. Eve’s (heterosexual) desire for her husband will keep her tied to childbearing, despite its painful- ness, and will allow him to “rule over” her. My point is not that compulsory heterosexuality as a Jewish institution is rooted in this story, but rather that this myth of origins provides a lens for examining interrelationships that are spelled out at length in Jewish narrative and law. In the Jewish case, as in the traditional societies Rubin discusses, rigid gender roles support the channeling of sex in marriage. A man who is not married (the texts speak from a male perspective) is seen as less than whole, for only a man and woman together constitute the image of God. The extensive laws regulating women’s sexuality and placing it under the control of fathers or husbands

10 Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review, 1975), 179–180. authority, resistance, and transformation 75 ensure that women will be available for marriage to men who can be fairly certain that their wife’s sexuality belongs only to them. In a context in which good sex is defined as sex that is under male control, the question of what constitutes good sex from women’s perspectives simply cannot be asked within the framework of the system. For the Bible and for the rabbis, good sex is sex that supports and serves a patriarchal social order. The so-called divinely ordained laws concerning marriage and divorce, adultery, rape, and so on, allow for the regular and orderly transfer of women from the homes of fathers to the homes of husbands, or, if need be, from one husband to another. Women’s fears, desires, and preferences, their efforts to find meaning in or to resist this legislation, are nonissues and “nondata” that are also nonsense in the context of the rabbinic world view.11 As Rachel Adler points out in a powerful article about women’s role in the Jewish covenant community, the categories of a system of thought determine the questions it can ask, allowing it to pile up huge amounts of information on certain questions while rendering others invisible. The problems that receive extensive attention in Jewish law are the “status problems of marriage, desertion, divorce and chalitzah [leverite marriage] which the tradition itself created and from whose consequences it now seeks to ‘protect’ women, since by its own rules they can never protect themselves.”12 Insofar as the rabbis do attempt to “protect” women—by trying to find ways to get a husband to divorce his wife if she so desires, for example—they indicate some awareness of the limits and injustices of the system they have created and, in this sense, offer some resources for criticism. But insofar as they are willing to address these injustices only within the framework of the system that gives rise to them, they close off any possibility of women entering as subjects and reframing the issues in genuinely new terms. As Rubin’s analysis suggests, however, control of women’s sexuality is just one dimension of the institution of compulsory heterosexuality, which is also spelled out in halakha (Jewish law) in terms of property rights, work roles, and religious obligations and exemptions. In her book on the construction of gender in Roman-period Judaism, Miriam Peskowitz examines a Mishnaic passage that shows the rabbis in the act of extending a husband’s power over the property his wife acquired before marriage, so

11 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon, 1973), 12. 12 Rachel Adler, “I’ve Had Nothing Yet So I Can’t Take More,” Moment 8/8 (September 1983): 24. 76 authority, resistance, and transformation that, while the wife may continue to own property, the husband controls it and is entitled to the profits that flow from it.13 In their ensuing debate about the validity of this legal innovation, the rabbis involved presuppose that a man has authority over his wife. What they need to determine is the extent of that authority in the sphere of property ownership, much as in other contexts they will discuss a husband’s power over his wife’s sexuality. The conversation, Peskowitz argues, reveals that there are many nodes “in the construction of sexual difference,” sexual control constituting only one area in which marriage allows a man to “rule over” his wife.14 The Jewish division of religious labor also presupposes and helps construct a social structure in which heterosexual marriage is the norm. The exemption of women from positive time-bound commandments—in particular, set times for daily prayer—assumes that they are involved in household obligations that are their first responsibility and priority. In caring for small children, observing the rules of kashrut (dietary laws), and preparing for holy days by cooking special foods and making their homes ready, women free men for their own prayer and Torah study and enable them to observe the dietary laws and the Sabbath and holidays fully. For their part, women need men to take the ritual roles in the home that they themselves are neither obligated nor educated to assume. In other words, the whole series of laws that exclude women from public religious life, laws that Jewish feminists have analyzed and criticized from the perspective of women’s spiritual disempowerment, are also part of the system of compulsory heterosexuality. That system is not just about sex, but also about the organization of daily life around gender role differentiation and the power of men over women. Because compulsory heterosexuality is interstructured with a whole network of sexual, social, economic, and religious relations in Jewish law, creating the preconditions for good sex cannot end with questioning the few biblical and rabbinic passages on same-sex relationships. The material on such relationships is scanty and specific, so that those advocating expanded rights for gays and lesbians have been able to challenge it from a number of directions. Are other forms of male sexual interaction, other than anal intercourse, forbidden by Leviticus?15 Did the Torah or the rabbis

13 On the Mishnah, see note 8. 14 Miriam B. Peskowitz, Spinning Fantasies: Rabbis, Gender, and History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 35. 15 Saul Olyan, “ ‘And with a Male You Shall Not Lie the Lying Down of a Woman’: On the Meaning and Significance of Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5/2 (1994): 185. authority, resistance, and transformation 77 have any concept of homosexuality as an orientation, or were they condemning homosexual acts performed by heterosexuals?16 While such critical questions are important and useful in trying to gain acceptance for gays and lesbians within the framework of Jewish law, they never step outside that framework to confront the broader system of compulsory heterosexuality. That system controls and marginalizes all women, whether or not they are heterosexual, and whether or not they are married. It also makes illegitimate any sexual or life choice outside of heterosexual marriage, so that self-pleasuring, celibacy, singleness, cohabitation without marriage, et cetera, all constitute forms of resistance to compulsory heterosexuality.17 Once one begins to see the relationship between compulsory heterosexuality and sexism in its myriad forms, however, the questions about authority that I raised in the first part of this chapter return in all their power. How does one question this central aspect of Jewish tradition and still remain in relation to the tradition? Are there voices in traditional Jewish texts that dissent from or reveal fractures in this system, and on what basis can they be mobilized? Where do I, where does any contemporary feminist critic, stand in even raising these questions?

Starting Points

I would argue that the feminist critic must begin, not by allying herself with dissenting voices within her tradition, but by questioning the authority of tradition, resisting any framework that leaves no room for women’s agency, and then proceeding to transform tradition by placing women at the center.18 Feminism begins in resistance and vision, a resistance and vision that are not simply personal but are rooted in “communities of resistance

16 Bradley Artson, “Gay and Lesbian Jews: An Innovative Jewish Legal Position,” Jewish Spectator (winter 1990–1991): 11. 17 It is remarkable how little has been written criticizing the Jewish insistence on marriage from other than gay and lesbian perspectives. See Laura Geller and Elizabeth Kol- tun, “Single and Jewish: Toward a New Definition of Completeness,” in the first anthology of Jewish feminist work, The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives, ed. Elizabeth Koltun (New York: Schocken, 1976), 43–49. Also see the section “Being Single” in Debra Orenstein, ed., Lifecycles: Jewish Women on Life Passages and Personal Milestones (Woodstock, Vt.: Jewish Lights, 1994), 99–116. 18 I am very grateful to the group conversation at the Good Sex meeting in Amsterdam for pushing me to be clearer about the ways in which Jewish feminists have moved beyond simply resisting women’s traditional roles to creating new forms of practice, identity, and community. Mary Hunt’s concept of imagination in her chapter in this volume is a helpful way of naming this dimension of feminist method and practice. 78 authority, resistance, and transformation and solidarity” that are challenging specific forms of oppression out of concrete experiences of alternative ways of being in the world.19 Thus, the feminist and the lesbian, gay, and bisexual movements have allowed women to feel the power and potential of bonds between women; to experience an intimacy, sexual and otherwise, that often has been trivialized or undermined; and to claim our power as agents to participate fully in society and religious communities on terms that we define. This experience of the power of being, as Mary Daly described it early on, over against the institutions that have consigned women to nonbeing, does not of itself threaten these institutions or render them harmless, but it does provide starting points for imagining a different future and criticizing the forces that stand in its way.20 To my mind, this experience, rather than any dissident strands within patriarchal religion, is the authoritative foundation of resistance and transformation. Given the conflicting voices within any normative text, the decision to claim such strands must come out of some experience of their greater power to support fullness of life for a larger group of people. Out of participation in a community of resistance and transformation, one then looks for and consciously claims the resistive elements in a particular tradition, in order to mobilize them toward a different future.21 What does this mean and not mean in relation to compulsory heterosexuality? Beyond the dimension of critique, which I see as central to a feminist appropriation of tradition, there are several ways in which feminists can find resources for resistance and transformation within our religious traditions. One is by deliberately allying ourselves with the self-critical strands in texts that have been understood as normative. In her early and influential reinterpretation of Genesis 2–3, Phyllis Trible pointed out that the explicit statement in Genesis 3:16 that a woman’s “desire shall be for her husband, and he shall rule over [her],” occurs in the context of divine punishment for disobedience. Remarkably for a patriarchal society, the story does not depict women’s subordination as natural and divinely ordained, but as a perversion of the created order that is a result of sin. Trible thus reads this story not as prescribing male supremacy but as describing it, not as legitimating but as condemning it.22 For her, the insight that male

19 Sharon D. Welch, Communities of Resistance and Solidarity (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1985). 20 Daly, Beyond, chapter 1. 21 See Daniel Boyarin, “Justify My Love,” in Judaism Since Gender, ed. Miriam Peskowitz and Laura Levitt (New York: Routledge, 1997), 131–137. 22 Phyllis Trible, “Eve and Adam: Genesis 2–3 Reread,” in Womanspirit Rising, ed. Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1979), 80. authority, resistance, and transformation 79 supremacy is a distortion of creation constitutes the true meaning of the biblical text, which thus stands over against patriarchy. Given that the description of compulsory heterosexuality is part of the same passage, one could make a similar move, arguing that this aspect of social life too appears under the sign and judgment of sinfulness. But aside from the fact that such an approach would ignore Genesis 1, in which male and female together constitute the image of God, there are deeper problems with claiming to have found the true meaning of any biblical text. Just as every text was written in a specific historical, social, and religious context, so texts are interpreted in particular contexts that give rise to particular exegetical needs. The current desire to find an underlying nonsexist or nonheterosexist vision in Scripture comes out of a political and religious situation in which various forms of fundamentalism are on the rise all over the globe and are attempting to tighten control over every area of women’s lives. In the United States, the Christian Right has claimed the mantle of Christian authenticity, equating authenticity with control of sexuality and women, and the same dynamic is taking place within Judaism. As contemporary Judaism has become increasingly diverse and fragmented, issues of sexuality and women’s roles have become the battleground for arguments about Jewish legitimacy. In a religious context in which the reactionary side of an increasingly heated debate claims divine authority for its position, it is tempting to argue that the essence or fundamental core of the tradition supports a progressive stance. But this is finally to get into an irresolvable shouting match in which each party claims God on its side. It also means that feminists accept in principle the authority of texts that are at many points antithetical to women’s power and agency, and that can be used against the feminist cause as easily as for it. Although the difference may be subtle, I see the claim to have discovered the authentic meaning of a tradition as different from self-consciously drawing on the dissident voices within it, while grounding oneself in a community that is actively working to create a Jewish future in which women are full Jews and full persons. For the purposes of resistance, it can be strategically useful to point to the contradictions or moments of self- criticism within normative texts, showing how opposing positions can be justified on the basis of the same sources. Yet it is not useful to debate about which position is finally more authentic. From the perspective of the texts, the question of authenticity has no meaning; the texts encompass genuine disagreements. The argument over texts is in reality an argument over competing social visions. Whose version of the future will hold sway? 80 authority, resistance, and transformation

Who will have the right to determine the distribution of society’s goods and resources, to say whether a given social or religious system meets basic human needs? Precisely because this is the real issue in question, however, it is important to highlight the dissident strands within a sacred text in order to crack open or challenge dominant religious and social perspectives and thus enlarge the space for change. From this point of view, it is useful to notice that women’s subordination is conjoined with heterosexuality in the context of punishment for sin, not because this renders invalid two thousand years of sexist and heterosexist readings, but because it helps us to imagine an alternative future. A second way to mobilize resources for resistance and change is to look at Jewish sources with an eye to the historical possibilities that they simultaneously conceal and reveal, so that one can make visible the existence of “forbidden” sexual practices or transgressive gender relations.23 Thus, for example, the same rabbinic passages that can be read as denying the possibility of sexual activity between women can also be seen as acknowledging the existence of such activity, but regarding it as inconsequential. When the rabbis discussed the question of whether a woman who “rubs” with another woman is permitted to marry a priest, they may have been aware of the female homoeroticism amply attested in Roman sources but seen it as not worth punishing.24 From this perspective, the relative silence of Jewish tradition regarding both female and male homoerotic behavior may be construed as a form of permission. To take this view is not to deny the importance of heterosexuality as an ideology and an institution, but it is to suggest that behavior that did not threaten heterosexual marriage may not have been regarded with much seriousness.25 Reading Jewish texts in light of what we know of cultural attitudes and practices at the time they were written begins to uncover the complex historical reality masked by an exclusive focus on official prohibitions. It also broadens the sense of historical possibilities on which feminists can draw in seeking to transform the tradition in the present.

23 This theme of concealment and revelation kept coming up in our Good Sex conversations, in relation to recovering women’s history and experiences in many traditions. 24 Alpert, Like Bread on the Seder Plate, 29–34; Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 1996). 25 Alpert, Like Bread on the Seder Plate, 33. authority, resistance, and transformation 81

Still a third strategy of resistance and transformation that is especially important in dealing with issues of sexuality involves broadening the context of teachings on sexuality by looking at them through the lens of attitudes toward social justice. Rabbi Lisa Edwards, in a sermon on the Torah portions that contain Leviticus 18 and 20, argued as follows: We are your gay and lesbian children: “ ‘You must not seek vengeance, nor bear a grudge against the children of your people’ (Lev. 19:18); we are your lesbian mothers and gay fathers: ‘Revere your mother and your father, each of you’ (19:3) . . . ; we are the stranger: ‘You must not oppress the stranger. You shall love the stranger as yourself for you were strangers in the land of Egypt’ (19:34).”26 In reading the prohibitions against male/male sex in the context of surrounding injunctions about just social relations, Edwards risks getting drawn into arguments about which is the more fundamental or essential dimension of the tradition. But by focusing on broader social justice themes, she also makes the critical point that any choice of sources in a debate about the meaning and intent of tradition always involves selecting from conflicting perspectives. Moreover, she places the biblical passages on homosexuality in the context of the gay and lesbian community of resistance, focusing on the interconnections between sexual ideologies and social injustice, rather than on private sexual behavior.

Resistance and Transformation

I began this chapter by raising issues of authority and tradition, and the authority of tradition in thinking about good sex. To what extent can we ground ourselves in the positive resources in our traditions in thinking about good sex? How do I justify the choices that I make as I lift up certain strands within Jewish tradition and repudiate others? I have argued that the authority for singling out the self-critical and dissident elements in our textual traditions comes not from the traditions themselves, but rather from the new possibilities envisioned and created by the particular communities of solidarity and resistance in which we participate. As I reflect on the Good Sex group itself as one such community, I am struck by the extent to which our initial work together provides us with methodological clues for approaching our common project. Brought together to think

26 Lisa A. Edwards, “A Simple Matter of Justice” (sermon, April 29, 1993). 82 authority, resistance, and transformation constructively about good sex from our perspectives as women, we found ourselves focusing again and again on the ideologies and institutions that stand in the way of good sex in our different cultures. We began, in other words, from a stance of resistance, realizing that the first task in creating a space for good sex is addressing the many injustices that make good sex unimaginable for many of the women in the world. We also, however, spoke of resources in our own experiences, in our cultures, and, occasionally, in our religious traditions that provide us with glimpses of a sexuality and sensuality that we would like to make more possible, both in our own lives and the lives of others. We repeatedly return to these glimpses to authorize ourselves as we seek to find our way between what is most women’s sexual reality, and what we want it to be. Struggling with this gulf, both in our social institutions and our religious traditions, we look for energy and insight not only, and not primarily, in the positive strands of our religious traditions, but in our communities of resistance and transformation. anti-judaisim in feminist christian interpretation

Judith Plaskow

In 1885, Elizabeth cady stanton presented a series of resolutions to the Annual Convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association criticizing Christian theology for its teachings about women. Finding her word- ing too strong and pointed, the convention leadership substituted different language—language that, as Stanton put it, “hand[ed] over to the Jews what [she] had laid at the door of the Christians”: WHEREAS, The dogmas incorporated in religious creeds derived from Judaism . . . are contrary to the law of God (as revealed in nature), and to the precepts of Christ. . . . Resolved, That we call on the Christian ministry . . . to teach and enforce the fundamental idea of creation, that man was made in the image of God male and female. . . . And, furthermore, we ask their recognition of the scriptural declaration that, in the Christian religion, there is neither male nor female. . . .1 While it was the intent of the convention committee to make Stanton’s resolutions less controversial so that they would pass without dissent, some of the Jewish women at the meeting vigorously repudiated the criticisms of their tradition, precipitating the debate the committee had hoped to avoid.2 Whether or not this was the first time Christian feminists “hand[ed] over to the Jews” faults that could equally well be attributed to Christianity, the incident indicates that feminist anti-Judaism has a long history. The impulse to vindicate Christianity by laying its patriarchal elements at the feet of Judaism seems to have emerged along with Christian feminist interpretation and to have been given new currency and direction with the second wave of feminism. The hundredth anniversary of The Woman’s Bible provides an excellent opportunity to examine the continuing failure of feminist thought to deal with the enduring legacy of Christian anti-Judaism.

* “Anti-Judaism in Feminist Christian Interpretations,” in Searching the Scriptures, vol. 1, ed. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (New York, Crossroad, 1993), 117–30. 1 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences 1815–1897 (1898; reprint, New York: Schocken Books, 1971), 381 (emphasis mine). 2 Ibid., 280–82. 84 ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION

Feminism and Christian Anti-Judaism

Anti-Judaism in feminist interpretation signifies both a failure of feminism to include all women within its vision and an often unconscious appropriation of anti-Jewish themes and strategies that are as old as the New Testament itself. In Beyond God the Father, Mary Daly characterized the patriarchal ethic as the “failure to lay claim to that part of the psyche that is then projected onto ‘the Other.’ ”3 Defining women’s oppression as the old- est and most fundamental form of oppression, Daly assumed that the liberation of women from male projections would lead to the disappearance of all other forms of domination. Recent studies of racism and nativism in the woman suffrage movement and recent critiques of feminist theory by racial/ethnic feminists make clear, however, that a single-issue focus on sexism and women’s experience does not automatically encompass or address other forms of dominance.4 On the contrary, in the absence of an explicit commitment to ending the multiple, interstructured forms of oppression that shape women’s lives, feminist theory and institutions continue to support dominant racial, religious, class, and sexual perspectives. Feminists are certainly not the first Christians to make use of anti-Jewish arguments in order to forward a particular agenda. Rather, feminist interpretation adds a new complication to a mode of projective discourse thoroughly embedded in Christian thought. The ancient, deeply rooted, and tenacious character of anti-Jewish themes in Christian writing has been extensively documented.5 In fact, these themes enter into feminist thought largely through the mediation of popular works in Protestant biblical interpretation, works that communicate the inferiority of Judaism through various subtle and not-so-subtle strategies.6 Anti-Jewish motifs in Christian discourse can be schematized and understood in a variety of ways. Katharina von Kellenbach, in her dissertation “Anti-Judaism in Christian-Rooted Feminist Writings,” offers a typology

3 Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 10. 4 Two examples from a much larger literature are: Barbara Hilkert Andolsen, “Daugh ters of Jefferson, Daughters of Blackboots”: Racism and American Feminism (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986); and bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984). 5 For one important example, see Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Seabury, 1974). 6 Charlotte Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology, trans. Edward Quinn (Philadel- phia: Fortress, 1975). ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION 85 that is especially useful for analyzing anti-Judaism in feminist interpretation. Von Kellenbach suggests that “three rules of formation of the anti- Jewish myth define the Christian representation of Judaism.”7 (1) The rule of formation as antithesis sets up a set of dualistic oppositions and identifies Judaism with the negative side, Christianity with the positive side of each dualism. Oppositions such as letter versus spirit, works versus faith, and particularism versus universalism are deeply ingrained in Christian language and remain fundamental to Christian writing and preaching about Judaism, including New Testament scholarship. (2) The rule of formation as scapegoat builds on these antitheses to blame Jews for the evil in the world. The idea that the Jews are responsible for a long trail of crimes culminat- ing in the death of Jesus has its roots in the Gospels and remains central to many contemporary accounts of Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. (3) The rule of formation as prologue identifies Judaism with the religion of the “Old Testament” and thus with Christian prehistory. Insofar as Judaism continues to exist, it is only an empty relic, because God’s promises to Israel have been transferred to the church as the new elect. Scholarly use of the phrase “late Judaism” to refer to Judaism in the first century is a good example of the persistence of this theme.8 Von Kellenbach points out that while these rules of formation have def- inite theological content in traditional Christian discourse, they are also remarkably flexible, adapting themselves to the “specific needs of particular countries, classes, and ideologies.” In the last two centuries, for example, both right- and left-wing political movements have made use of anti- Jewish myths in order to gain adherents.9 It is thus possible for Christian feminists to use the same classical anti-Jewish framework to set up a new antithesis: Judaism equals sexism, while Christianity equals feminism. Moreover, while discussion of post-Christian feminism is beyond the scope of this chapter, post-Christian feminists also have drawn on this tradition to replace the traditional charge of deicide with the new charge that Jews killed the Goddess.10

7 Katharina von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism in Christian-Rooted Feminist Writing: An Analysis of Major U.S. American and West German Feminist Theologians” (Dissertation, Temple University Graduate School, 1990), 57. 8 Ibid., chap. 2; Klein, Anti-Judaism, chaps. 5 and 2. 9 Von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,” 58. 10 Ibid., chap. 4; Annette Daum, “Blaming Jews for the Death of the Goddess,” Lilith 7 (1980) 12–13; and Susannah Heschel, “Anti-Judaism in Christian Feminist Theology,” Tikkun 5:3 (May/June 1990): 26–27. 86 ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION

Jesus as Feminist and Judaism as Antithesis

While each “rule of formation” discussed by von Kellenbach finds its way into Christian discourse,11 the rule of antithesis is most characteristic of feminist New Testament interpretation. Indeed, feminist interpreters who want to prove the feminist credentials of Jesus or Paul or the nonsexist nature of the Christian vision are dependent on the rule of antithesis for the cogency of their position. The claim that “Jesus was a feminist”— a claim first articulated by Leonard Swidler and then taken up by numerous feminist interpreters—can be argued persuasively only on the basis of a negative view of Judaism.12 This is so because, while no sexist saying is attributed to Jesus, while women were present among his disciples, and while he appeals to women’s experience in some of his parables, the New Testament provides no evidence that Jesus was a champion of women’s rights in the contemporary sense. He is never portrayed as arguing for women’s prerogatives, demanding changes in particular restrictive laws that affect women, or debating the Pharisees on the subject of gender.13 The argument that Jesus was a feminist, then—rather than simply a Jewish man who treated women like people—rests on “the rule of antithesis,” on contrasting his behavior with his supposed Jewish background. Indeed, Swidler says quite clearly, “there are two factors which raise this negative result [i.e., the fact that Jesus does not treat women as “inferior beings”] exponentially in its significance: the status of women in Palestine at the time of Jesus, and the nature of the Gospels.”14 In order to depict Jesus as a man who stood over against his Jewish upbringing and environment, Christian interpreters select from Jewish sources the most negative and restrictive statements about women and present these as the reality of Jewish women’s lives in the first century. As one feminist scholar puts it, “At the historical moment when Jesus was born into the world, the status of Jewish women had never been lower.”15 The composite portrait of Jesus’ religious background that emerges from a number of feminist texts includes the following elements: Jewish women were exempt from fixed prayer and “grossly restricted” in public prayer.

11 Von Kellenbach’s thesis thoroughly documents the use of each of these rules in feminist scholarship. 12 Leonard Swidler, “Jesus Was a Feminist,” Catholic World 212 (January 1971): 177–83. 13 Von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,” 85, 88. 14 Swidler, “Jesus Was a Feminist,” 177–78 (emphasis mine). 15 Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, Women, Men and the Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1977), 10. ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION 87

They were not allowed to study scripture. Men were forbidden to converse with women in public. Polygamy was legal in the time of Jesus, although probably not widely practiced. Men could divorce their wives easily by giving them a writ of divorce, but women were not allowed to divorce their husbands. Women were limited to the private sphere, where they were under the domination of fathers or husbands. Women were unclean during menstruation and after childbirth. Women were viewed by the rabbis as light-minded, dirty, greedy, and gossipy, and girl children were seen as a bane to their parents.16 This portrait of Jewish women’s situation is then contrasted with Jesus’ attitudes toward women in such a way as to make his statements and gestures appear deliberately rebellious. While Jewish men did not normally speak even to their wives in public, Jesus spoke to a Samaritan woman stranger. While men avoided contact with women who were ritually unclean, Jesus healed the woman with a twelve-year flow of blood. While women were not permitted to study Torah, Jesus praised Mary over Martha for choosing “the good portion.” While adulterous women were supposed to be stoned, Jesus refused to stone the woman brought before him without her male partner. And so on. The issue of divorce provides a particularly nice illustration of this method of antithesis, for, using this method, feminist interpreters are able to take a problematic ruling and depict it as largely positive. On the surface, Jesus’ prohibition of divorce would seem at best ambiguous for feminists. In a social context in which patriarchal marriage is the expectation and norm, it is hardly in women’s undivided interest to have no possibility of exit from it. Yet when Jesus’ teaching on divorce is set over against the supposed Jewish position, it suddenly appears as liberating for women.17 This argument from opposition is implicit already in The Woman’s Bible and is more fully developed by a number of contemporary writers.18 Thus

16 Swidler, “Jesus Was a Feminist,” 178–79 (quotation from p. 178); Mollenkott, Women, 10–12; Constance Parvey, “The Theology and Leadership of Women in the New Testa- ment,” in Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 120; Elisabeth Moltmann- Wendel, Liberty, Equality, Sisterhood (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1977), 12–21. These sources are examples, not an exhaustive list. 17 Bernadette Brooten discusses this issue in “Early Christian Women and Their Cul- tural Context: Issues of Method in Historical Reconstruction,” in Feminist Perspectives on Biblical-Scholarship, ed. Adela Yarbro Collins (SBL Centennial Publications 10; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985), 73–74. 18 See Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Revising Committee, The Woman’s Bible, 2 vols. in one (Seattle: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974), 2:130. 88 ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION

Rosemary Ruether, after warning that Jesus’ iconoclasm toward women’s subordination should not be used as the basis of a new anti-Judaism, continues as follows: Even Jesus’ pronouncements on divorce should be seen in the context of a society where a woman, who had no means of support, could be cast out by her husband on the slightest pretext. The stricter attitude toward divorce in Jesus’ time had the purpose of providing women with greater respect and security in marriage. . . .19 Evelyn and Frank Stagg, discussing Jesus’ equation of remarriage with adultery, comment, “Whatever the harshness here, at least there is no double standard for husbands and wives.”20 Leonard Swidler paints the opposition between Jesus and Jewish practice in sharp terms: [Jesus’ position on marriage] presupposed a feminist view of women; they had rights and responsibilities equal to men’s. . . . It was quite possible in Jewish law for men to have more than one wife. . . . Divorce, of course, also was a simple matter, to be initiated only by the man. In both situations, women were basically chattel. . . . Jesus rejected both customs by insisting on monogamy and the elimination of divorce.21 There are a number of problems with this overall approach to Judaism in the time of Jesus, and with the example of divorce in particular. First of all, the approach assumes that rabbinic literature is the product of the time of Jesus, when in fact the rabbis came to power only after the destruction of the Temple (in 70 c.e.), and the Mishnah and Talmud were redacted centuries after Jesus’ death (200 and 500 c.e. respectively). Second, this approach selects from rabbinic materials precisely those customs and sayings that tend to support the uniqueness of Jesus, neglecting both positive sayings and legal rulings that seek to protect women’s rights. Thus in presenting the position of women in Jewish marriage, Christian feminists never discuss the commandment of onah—a law that protects the sexual rights of women in marriage by defining the marital dues a husband owes his wife. In discussing divorce, they assume rabbinic attitudes as normative but do not

19 Rosemary Radford Ruether, New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Lib- eration (New York: Seabury, 1975), 64–65. 20 Evelyn and Frank Stagg, Woman in the World of Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1978), 135. 21 Leonard Swidler, Biblical Affirmations of Woman (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1979), 174 (emphasis in the original). ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION 89 mention the ketubah, or marriage contract, an important rabbinic innovation that had as its purpose the protection of women against hasty divorce.22 Third, the statements and gestures of an itinerant preacher are compared to a prescriptive literature formulated in the rarefied atmosphere of rabbinic academies. It is simply assumed that this literature corresponds to the total reality of Jewish women’s lives, when, as I will discuss more fully below, there is significant evidence that it does not. Fourth, part of the evidence for Jewish women’s complex status and roles comes from the New Testament itself. For the purposes of the “rule of antithesis,” however, Jesus’ attitudes toward women are seen as evidence of his distance from his “Jewish background” rather than as evidence of Jewish attitudes and practices. At the same time that Jesus’ positive attitudes toward women are depicted as un-Jewish, Paul’s negative attitudes toward women are defined as the product of his Judaism. Katharina von Kellenbach points out that in Paul’s case, the rule of antithesis is developed as a division within the apostle, so that Paul’s feminist/Christian side is presented as at war with his sexist/Jewish upbringing.23 This strategy is already found in The Woman’s Bible, which dismisses Paul’s injunction that women should cover their heads when they pray (1 Cor 11:10), commenting that it lacks authority because it is based on an absurd Hebrew legend. According to Louisa Southworth of the revising committee, “Paul merely repeats this warning [that women should cover their heads], which he must often have heard at the feet of Gamaliel.”24 In other words, because it is the Jewish Paul and not the Christian Paul who speaks in this passage, Christian women can simply ignore it. In the contemporary discussion, the dichotomy between a Jewish and a Christian Paul is developed more fully and used to elucidate the many contradictions that plague Paul’s work. Robin Scroggs, in his “Paul and the Eschatological Woman,” describes the social context of Pauline thought about women in terms of a spectrum of Jewish attitudes. Palestinian Judaism constituted one end of the spectrum, he suggests, with women being accorded few privileges outside the family. While Jewish women’s situation was more varied in the diaspora, Scroggs feels Paul’s views are

22 For a Jewish feminist discussion of onah and ketubah, see Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: An Exploration of Women’s issues in Halakhic Sources (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), chapters 3 and 5. 23 Von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,” 89–92. 24 The Woman’s Bible, 2:158–59. 90 ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION probably closer to those of Philo, Josephus, and Palestinian Judaism than to those of freer communities like Elephantine. The remarkable contrast between Paul’s mature Christian views towards women and his probable early ideals says something important about the continuing tension in which he must have lived and worked, as well as about the transforming power on his own life of the gospel he preached.25 Paul Jewett develops the tension between the two Pauls into an opposition that can scarcely be contained in one person: To understand [Paul’s] thought about the relation of the woman to the man, one must appreciate that he was both a Jew and a Christian. . . . So far as he thought in terms of his Jewish background, he thought of the woman as subordinate to the man. . . . But so far as he thought in terms of the new insight he had gained through the revelation of God in Christ, he thought of the woman as equal to the man in all things. . . . Because these two perspectives—the Jewish and the Christian—are incompatible, there is no satisfying way to harmonize the Pauline argument for female subordination with the larger Christian vision of which the great apostle to the Gentile was himself the primary architect.26 To criticize this perspective is not to deny the apparent contradictions in Paul’s attitudes toward women, contradictions that need to be explained. But the division between a Jewish and a Christian Paul purifies Christianity from the charge of sexism by coding all arguments for women’s subordination as “Jewish” and then dismissing them as no longer authoritative. As The Woman’s Bible puts it a bit naïvely, “We congratulate ourselves that we may shift some of these Biblical arguments that have such a sinister effect from their firm foundation.”27 This position elevates Christianity at Judaism’s expense in two ways: it makes it difficult to see the “good, i.e. nonsexist Paul” as learning anything from Judaism—even though, as Virginia Mollenkott points out, Paul’s famous parenthetical remark in 1 Corinthians 11 (v. 11) exactly parallels a passage from Genesis Rabbah.28 And it makes it unnecessary to look at those aspects of the Christian tradition that are compatible with or foster sexism.

25 Robin Scroggs, “Paul and the Eschatological Woman,” Journal of the American Acad- emy of Religion 40 (1972): 290. See also Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Ran- dom House, 1979), 61–63. 26 Paul Jewett, Man as Male and Female: A Study in Sexual Relationships from a Theologi- cal Point of View (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1975), 112–13; cf. von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,” 89–90. 27 The Woman’s Bible, 2:158. 28 Mollenkott, Women, 98; The Woman’s Bible, 2:158. ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION 91

The creation of a division between a Jewish and a Christian Paul brings the theological agenda of much feminist anti-Judaism clearly into view. It is not the direct intention of feminist interpreters to prove the superior- ity of Christianity to Judaism. Indeed, while some Jewish feminists have objected to the use of the locution “anti-Judaism” as simply a polite version of anti-Semitism,29 one value of the distinction between the two terms is that it allows for the fact that feminists who are not social or racial anti- Semites still make use of anti-Jewish literary and theological motifs. Where this happens, the negative depiction of Judaism is not the result of deliber- ate hostility but of a political liberalism yoked to a theological conservatism that sees the New Testament as a source of role models for contemporary Christian behavior. If Jesus and/or Paul was a feminist, then surely the church must repent of its sexism and bring its policies and structures into line with their example. This mode of interpretation assumes, in Krister Stendahl’s phrase, that contemporary Christians are called on to “play ‘First Century Bible-Land’” and to do as Jesus and Paul did, however their teachings are understood.30 Since, in fact, however, Paul was deeply ambivalent about women’s status, and Jesus acted respectfully toward women without ever explicitly defending their cause, the two men can be turned into unambiguous feminist role models only if first-century Judaism is depicted as unrelievedly misogynist. Deeply embedded patterns of Christian anti- Judaism are thus uncritically appropriated to aid the feminist program. There are other ways too in which the “Jesus was a feminist” argument adopts conservative theological or interpretive principles for a liberal social purpose. Though this argument does not depend on explicit claims about Jesus’ unique ontological status, such claims are often quietly presupposed in order to give feminism religious legitimacy. Thus after six pages of historical argumentation for Jesus’ feminism, Leonard Swidler concludes his original article with the words, “Jesus was a feminist, and a very radical one. Can his followers attempt to be anything less—De Imitatione Christi?”31 In another vein, Christians who contrast Jesus with his Jewish background to bolster his feminist credentials simultaneously acknowledge and negate the fact that Jesus was a Jew. He was sufficiently Jewish that his supposed difference from other Jews is significant and noteworthy, yet he was not a Jew if that means his behavior should count as evidence for the nature

29 For example, Asphodel Long, “Anti-Judaism in Britain,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7 (1991): 126. 30 Krister Stendahl, The Bible and the Role of Women (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966), 40. 31 Swidler, “Jesus Was a Feminist,” 183. 92 ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION of first-century Judaism. Clearly the dilemma for feminist interpreters is that acknowledging the Jesus movement as a movement within Judaism would undercut claims about Jesus’ Christian uniqueness. If he was simply a Jew, his attitudes toward women would represent not a victory over early Judaism but a possibility within it.

Toward a More Critical Feminist Hermeneutic

Anti-Jewish themes in Christian writing are deep-rooted and tenacious, but there are ways in which feminists can address, rather than reproduce, this sorry aspect of Christian self-understanding. With prodding from women of color, feminists are beginning to grapple with the idea that racism and clas- sism are dimensions of texts and social structures that must be confronted if feminism is to become a movement committed to the liberation of all women. Given the continuing presence of anti-Semitism as a structural element in Christian culture, this insight must also be extended to anti- Judaism in a thoroughgoing way. 1. The first step in eradicating anti-Judaism is becoming aware of its existence, and this means becoming educated about the dimensions of the problem. Fortunately, there are a number of good general histories of anti- Semitism, and also narrower studies of anti-Judaism in Christian history, thought, and practice. The critical discussion of anti-Judaism taking place in the feminist community has antecedents in many Christian scholarly works. The bibliography at the end of this chapter recommends a number of relevant sources, each of which contains other bibliographic suggestions. 2. Once Christian feminists recognize anti-Jewish patterns, it is essential that they begin systematically to problematize anti-Judaism in the Christian tradition as part of a feminist analysis of Christian texts. Again, just as womanist scholars have taught white feminists that looking at racism and race relationships between women is a feminist task, so feminists must analyze “women’s relational history” in terms of anti-Judaism and religious difference.32 This means that it is not enough for feminist interpreters to avoid allying themselves with the anti-Judaism in Christian sources or even to raise in general terms the problem of anti-Judaism in

32 The term “women’s relational history” is Delores Williams’s (“Women’s Oppression and Lifeline Politics in Black Women’s Religious Narratives,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 1 [Fall 1985]: 69; see also Clarice Martin, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 6 [1990]: 41–43). ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION 93 feminist interpretation. Rather, it is necessary to signal the existence of anti-Judaism in Christian texts wherever it appears so that the problem of traditional Christian anti-Judaism becomes a dimension of feminist consciousness, and feminists begin to examine the dynamics of the relationship between sexism and anti-Judaism in Christian sources. Explicit discussion of anti-Judaism is a task for feminist writers, but it is also important in the context of the classroom. Feminist teachers of New Testament can raise questions about the anti-Jewish story line of the Gospels, just as they would raise questions about the roles and status of women in those texts. They can help students to reflect on the anti-Jewish “rules of formation” present in Christian historical materials, and their continuing impact on Christian self-understanding. Sometimes with a class that is resistant to feminist issues, it is tempting to gain student attention by claiming that “Jesus was a feminist” or was especially open to women. Teachers’ attempts to avoid negative comparisons with Judaism in this context, however, cannot prevent students from appropriating such material in the framework of an anti-Jewish heritage. That is why, in discussing women in the early Christian movement or Jesus’ attitudes toward women, it is essential to raise the problem of anti-Judaism explicitly and to examine its strategies and effects. 3. Addressing the anti-Judaism in Christian sources, because it is consciousness-raising for all parties, is probably the most important next step Christian feminists can take in dealing with the problem of feminist anti-Jewish interpretation. But sensitivity to anti-Judaism cannot of itself effect a transformation of anti-Jewish attitudes. The long history of anti- Judaism will finally be transcended only on the basis of an appreciation of Judaism as an autonomous, changing, and diverse tradition. In the specific context of feminist New Testament interpretation, this means it is impossible fully to discuss or evaluate the Jesus movement in relation to women without knowledge of feminist approaches to first-century Judaism. Feminist exploration of Jewish women’s history is a very new field. Just as feminist scholars have moved from addressing the sexism in Chris tian sources to recovering the complex reality of women’s lives within Christian history, so they have begun to reconstruct the history of women within Judaism. While it is impossible to discuss here all the methodological issues the new feminist scholarship raises for Christian interpretation, probably its most important finding is that rabbinic literature is not an accurate reflection of the diversity of women’s roles within first-century Judaism. To cite just two examples: the “Jesus-was-a-feminist” argument maintains that women played no role in the ancient synagogue, contrasting this exclusion 94 ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION with women’s discipleship in the Jesus movement. But inscriptions from diaspora synagogues referring to women as elders, leaders, and synagogue presidents suggest that women could have played liturgical or administrative roles in the synagogues of Jesus’ time. This inscriptional evidence is particularly significant when combined with the absence of any ancient literary or archaeological evidence for special women’s sections or galleries in the synagogues of this period.33 Second, the assumption that only men could initiate divorce in Judaism is challenged by a number of documents from the first centuries c.e. that depict individual women as divorcing their husbands or reserving the right of divorce in their marriage contracts. These documents suggest that there were two strands of thought and practice concerning divorce in ancient Judaism. One—which became normative Jewish practice—accorded only men the right of divorce, but the other also allowed women to initiate divorce.34 4. Two pieces of evidence for this second strand of Jewish practice are Mark 10:11–12 and 1 Cor 7:10–11. This fact points to another important strategy in overcoming anti-Judaism in feminist New Testament interpretation: reading the New Testament not as the antithesis or refutation of “Judaism,” but as an important source for Jewish women’s history.35 If the Gospels are seen as reflecting part of the continuum of first-century Jewish practice with regard to women, they tell a very different story about Jewish women’s lives than if they are read oppositionally. The absence of any overt challenge to Jesus’ treatment of or teachings about women suggests that his relation to women and gender norms might not have been so different from the relations of his contemporaries. Perhaps Jewish women sometimes divorced their husbands, moved freely in the streets and conversed with strangers, were visible in the synagogue and temple, and paid visits and received visitors.36 Such a reconstruction may not provide a simple warrant for contemporary Christians to become feminists, but it both avoids perpetuating Christian anti-Judaism and yields a more nuanced and interesting picture of women’s religious lives in the ancient world.

33 Bernadette Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues (Brown Judaic Studies 36; Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982); Brooten, “Early Christian Women,” 89. 34 Bernadette Brooten, “Could Women Initiate Divorce in Ancient Judaism? The implications for Mark 10:11–12 and I Corinthians 7:10–11” (The Ernest Cadwell Coleman Lecture, School of Theology at Claremont, April 14, 1981); and Brooten, “Early Christian Women,” 73. 35 Brooten, “Could Women Initiate Divorce in Ancient Judaism?” esp. 9–12. 36 Von Kellenbach, “Anti-Judaism,” 87–89. ANTI-JUDAISM IN FEMINIST CHRISTIAN INTERPRETATION 95

5. Finally, it is important to mention an institutional dimension to the persistence of anti-Judaism in Christian feminist interpretation. While feminists often celebrate the ways in which women’s criticism and reconstruction of religion have opened up new areas of interreligious dialogue, the reality is that much Christian feminist work takes place in isolation from the Jewish feminist agenda. Christian institutes, workshops, panel discussions, and other projects deal with key feminist issues, either without including Jewish feminists working on the same questions or inviting Jewish participation on Christian terms. Whatever the rationale for this institutional isolation, it would seem to reflect and perpetuate a lack of awareness of the Jewish “Other” that necessarily makes it more difficult to recognize and grapple with anti-Judaism in a scholarly context. Appreciation of Judaism as an independent tradition must include an openness to Jewish feminist concerns—concerns that in their similarities and differences from Christian feminism challenge Christian feminists to develop a more critical perspective on a hegemonic tradition.

Recommended Readings

Brooten, Bernadette J. “Early Christian Women and Their Cultural Context: Issues of Method in Historical Reconstruction.” In Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, edited by Adela Yarbro Collins, 65–69. SBL Centennial Publications 10. Chico, CA: Schol- ars Press, 1985. ——. “Jewish Women’s History in the Roman Period: A Task for Christian Theology.” In Christians Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honor of Krister Stendahl on His Sixty- Fifth Birthday, edited by George W.E. Nickelsburg with George W. MacRae, S.J., 22–30. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986. Heschel, Susannah. “Anti-Judaism in Christian Feminist Theology.” Tikkun 5/3 (May/June 1990): 25ff. Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7/2 (Fall 1991). “Special Section on Christian Feminist Anti-Judaism,” 95–133. Klein, Charlotte. Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975. Plaskow, Judith. “Christian Feminism and Anti-Judaism.” Cross-Currents 33 (Fall 1978): 306–9. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism. New York: Seabury, 1974. von Kellenbach, Katharina. “Anti-Judaism in Christian-Rooted Feminist Writing: An Analy- sis of Major U.S. American and West German Feminist Theologians.” Dissertation, Tem- ple University Graduate School, 1990.

Interview with Judith plaskow June 24, 2012

Hava Tirosh-Samuelson and Aaron W. Hughes

Judith, you are probably the most important Jewish feminist today.

Thank you.

You introduced gender as the category through which we should understand Judaism, insisting that we interpret the Jewish tradition through that particular lens. Before we explore what it means to be a Jewish feminist, please tell us about your intellectual trajectory. How did you come to the realization that Judaism needs to be reconceptualized from the particular perspective of gender?

I became a feminist in the fall of 1969 when I was a graduate student at Yale. That was the year that Yale admitted women to the undergraduate college and prepared for women’s education by installing full-length mir- rors in the bathrooms and hiring a gynecologist in the health center. Three graduate women in the social sciences responded by calling a meeting to discuss how it was that there had been women graduate students at Yale for eighty years and no one had noticed. I was a graduate student in religious studies at the time and did not consider myself a feminist, but I went to the meeting because I was interested and curious. We started meeting weekly for both consciousness raising and activism, and over the course of that year I became a feminist. One of the other women involved in the group was Carol P. Christ, with whom I would collaborate throughout my academic career. We started asking questions about our studies. Why was it that we had never read a single book or article written by a woman? Until we became feminists, we hadn’t noticed that lacuna. My feminist awareness also had a profound impact on my Jewish life. In the summer of 1969, I married Robert Goldenberg, who was a graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary and a Conservative rabbi (though also an academic). I grew up a Reform Jew, but I began to take on more serious Jewish practice when I married. So I became a feminist at exactly 98 interview with judith plaskow the moment that I was sitting in the back of the Orthodox men’s minyan in Yale Chapel. One Shabbat morning, my husband and I were standing outside chatting with a friend and one of the undergraduates came out and asked him to come in to make the minyan. That was a very important “click” moment for me. I realized that, although I had been attending services for a year and a half, and my husband had just started, because I was a woman, I was completely irrelevant to the purpose for which we were gathered. I said to myself: “Never again! I’m never walking into a congregation that doesn’t count women.” That was the point at which I started to raise questions about Judaism, examining it from a feminist perspective.

What was the importance of the fact that you became a feminist at Yale Divinity School? How did the Divinity School and Yale University in general affect your approach to gender issues?

I’ve often asked myself that question. On the one hand, I regret having gone to Yale because it was an awful experience. It was a deeply, deeply sexist institution. On the other hand, part of me wonders whether I would have become a feminist when I did had I not been at Yale. The number of women in the program was very small (10 percent at our peak), and we were subjected to constant surveillance: were we going to make it academically? That question was on everyone’s minds, and we had the feeling that we were being watched in a different way from the male students. Here’s an anecdote that illustrates our status. In one of my courses, we were reading Schubert Ogden’s The Reality of God. It was my first exposure to liberal theology, and I was both upset by the book and intrigued by it and really struggled with its arguments. In the course of the discussion, a male student patted me on the head and said, “Don’t worry your little head about it.” That was the kind of constant paternalism that we were subjected to. And when Carol and I became feminists, it became even worse, because we were more aware of the condescending treatment and the men became more uncomfortable with our criticism. For example, every time we came to a door, the men would ask: should we open the door for them? Are they going to be angry at us? As you recall, the custom was for men to open the door for women, but feminism had challenged that social convention in the name of equality. So I think that being at Yale, an old bastion of (male) privilege, actually made me a stauncher feminist. Being a graduate student in religious studies meant that I was bringing my feminist questions to the field of religious studies and eventually to Judaism. interview with judith plaskow 99

Who were some of the thinkers (theologians and/or philosophers) that got you on the path?

Kate Millet was the feminist thinker who had the first and most profound influence on me. I found her book Sexual Politics (1969) completely liberating and mind-blowing. Two early feminist anthologies exerted deep influence on me: Women in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerless ness (1970) edited by Vivian Gornick and Sisterhood is Powerful by Robin Morgan (1970). The pioneering work of Mary Daly and Rosemary Radford Ruether, the towering feminist thinkers in the field of religion, also shaped my understanding of the sexism of religion. Carol Christ brought Rosemary Ruether to Yale and arranged for her to speak to the graduate students. That was a very exciting event. She delivered her paper, “Mother Earth and the Mega-Machine,” which laid out a lot of the central themes of her thought which had enormous impact on religion in America. So these early feminist thinkers were important influences in the field of religious studies and in my own emergence as a feminist.

Besides the feminist thinkers were there other theologians who inspired you? Were there other theologians or interpreters of religious thought whom you considered as role models?

Yes. At Yale I was studying Protestant theology. Let me explain. When I decided that I wanted to be a theologian, there was no place in the country to study Jewish theology at that time.

Can you say more about that? Why could you not become a Jewish theologian elsewhere?

It was 1968 and all the major graduate programs in religious studies came out of and were associated with Protestant divinity schools. At that time there just wasn’t anyone teaching Jewish theology at a university level. I was admitted to Yale and Judah Goldin was the one person teaching Jewish studies there. I asked permission to enroll in his seminar and told him that I wanted to be a theologian. In response he said, “There are no Jewish theologians.” 100 interview with judith plaskow

What about Jewish rabbinic seminaries such as the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Hebrew Union College? Could you have studied theology in these non-Orthodox rabbinic seminaries?

No, not really. Even those institutions did not teach theology.

In 1969 the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary also opened and it admitted women. So why not enroll there if you wanted to become a non-Orthodox Jewish theologian?

These three institutions existed, but nobody was teaching systematic theology, because it was not considered a Jewish way of thinking. The Jewish Theological Seminary hired Neal Gillman who started writing and teaching Jewish theology, but that was many years after I finished my graduate training. And at Hebrew Union College, Eugene Borowitz did teach theology, but he himself received his training in the Columbia/Union Seminary program. The same can be said of Richard Rubenstein who got his Ph.D. from Harvard before he articulated post-Holocaust Jewish theology. That was the avenue for Jews who were interested in theology.

So what were the non-Orthodox rabbinic seminaries doing if they did not teach theology? Were they simply focusing on exegetical work?

Yes, absolutely! Seminaries were engaged in the study of Bible and Midrash but not systematic or constructive theology.

In the late 1960s the liberal Jewish seminaries were not really teaching Jewish philosophy either. So, when you entered graduate school nobody was doing either Jewish philosophy or Jewish theology?

I can’t answer that question. The status of Jewish philosophy was more complicated. Had I wanted to specialize in Jewish philosophy I probably could have found someone teaching pre-modern Jewish philosophy somewhere, but I wasn’t looking in philosophy departments. As far as I know, there were no professors of Jewish philosophy who taught in philosophy departments and to the extent that they existed, I was not interested in what they had to offer. So, I’m not sure. interview with judith plaskow 101

What about the likes of Harry Wolfson at Harvard or Alexander Altmann at Brandeis University?

Altmann was mainly a scholar of Kabbalah and even though he was the leading interpreter of Moses Mendelssohn, I did not consider Altmann a constructive theologian; he was rather an intellectual historian. But the truth is that I was not looking at Jewish studies programs.

The issue of institutional setting for the study of either Jewish philosophy or Jewish theology is interesting because philosophy departments in America in the late 1960s and early 1970s were strictly analytical and had no room for either Jewish philosophy or Jewish theology.

That’s right. In the late 1960s if one wanted to become a Jewish theologian, that is, to think systematically about Judaism, one had to go to a Christian seminary or a Divinity School. As a Jew in a Christian institution I had an interesting experience. Every issue I studied in Protestant theology I tried to connect to Judaism. For example, when I took a course on Kierkegaard and we talked about “the teleological suspension of the ethical,” I immediately looked at midrashim on the Binding of Isaac to compare them to Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the biblical text. I was constantly trying to make connections between what I studied in Christian theology and what I brought with me as a Jew. With my friend Carol Christ I also organized a student-led class on modern Jewish thought. We studied Mordecai Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Franz Rosenzweig, and Martin Buber as examples of Jewish theologians. Keep in mind that the English translation of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption was published only when I was in the third year of my graduate training. In fact, William Hallo, the translator, was teaching at Yale and he gave me the galleys of his translation. So I was privileged to be one of the first readers of The Star of Redemption in English. It was both an incredibly exciting and incredibly frustrating experience, because there was no one with whom I could talk about it, since no one had yet read the book in English! To this day, I have a very clear image of myself sitting in the Assyriology Museum at Yale reading the galleys of Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption.

This must have been a very challenging intellectual experience indeed, since Part I of the Star is almost unfathomable, but you must understand it in order to make sense of Part II and Part III. So one could just imagine 102 interview with judith plaskow how you must have felt encountering the Star, yet having no one to consult with about its meaning and significance for Jewish theology.

Hans Frei, a theologian who was on my dissertation committee, had read the Star in German about thirty years earlier, and had some vague memories of it. But I could not really share my tremendous excitement with him. So who was I going to talk to?

The reception of Rosenzweig is a very interesting issue. Hallo’s translation, which you were the first to read, made possible the renaissance of Rosenzweig in the second half of the twentieth century, but it is fascinating to ponder why Rosenzweig has been so influential and how he has been interpreted by scholars of Jewish philosophy since the translation was made.

Right. Prior to the English translation of the Star there was very little available of Rosenzweig’s thought in English. There was the essay “The Builders,” which was part of the edited volume of Nahum Glatzer’s On Jewish Learning and the exchange between Buber and Rosenzweig on the nature of law and commandment.

You mentioned Hans Frei earlier. How did he fit into your intellectual development, or, to put it differently, did he have an influence on you?

I did study with him. I took a course on theological hermeneutics with him at Yale. But I’m not sure I knew any more about what theological hermeneutics was when it was over than I did at the beginning! He definitely tried to be supportive of women but he wasn’t an important mentor.

Nonetheless, he exposed you to reading the Bible differently.

Yes, although he was not a Bible scholar.

So for you the Bible became a theological text at Yale Divinity School. This is important because other Jewish scholars at the time approached the Bible either exegetically, philologically, or historically, whereas for you the Bible was first and foremost a book of theology.

Right. interview with judith plaskow 103

Do you also consider the Bible a philosophical text?

I’m not sure what a philosophical text is. I’d be interested in your take because when Judah Goldin said to me, there’s no such thing as Jewish theology and I said, “What do you mean? What about Buber? What about Rosenzweig?” he replied, “They are philosophers.” So, here is a conundrum for you: Are Buber and Rosenzweig Jewish philosophers or Jewish theolo gians? What is the difference between a philosopher and a theologian? I have a clear sense that there is one. But, I am fully aware that one could define each figure in different ways.

If you put the adjective “Jewish” in front of theology and philosophy, there’s almost no difference between these two projects, because you’re always arguing from a particular perspective, the Jewish perspective. Isn’t this so?

Yes, that’s right. I agree that a lot of the same people (e.g., Buber, Rosenzweig, Levinas) get claimed by each of these fields.

In terms of academic training, however, isn’t there a difference between philosophical training and theological training?

Yes, yes.

There are two ways to understand the relationship between philosophy and theology. According to the first approach philosophical training involves a certain type of reasoning, a certain type of analytical skills, and a certain type of theoretical questions. And those questions are not determined by the text, but are external to the text. In contrast to the philosopher, the theologian always starts with the received text; the tradition sets the point of departure for theological questioning. This is a Thomistic approach to the difference between philosophy and theology. The second approach is to see both philosophy and theology as engaging in eisegesis: they are both taking questions to the text and trying to mine the text for answers. In this approach there is no formal distinction between philosophy and theology. The Jewish philosopher has maybe a little bit more training in Aristotle or Kant than a Jewish theologian, but ultimately the questions they are asking are Jewish questions and there is always that struggle with the Jewish tradition. 104 interview with judith plaskow

So, Judith, how do you frame the difference between philosophy and theology?

It seems to me what you’re talking about is historical theology or history of philosophy. Constructive theology and philosophy are doing something quite different, precisely because they are constructive endeavors. Sometimes I joke that my main task is to sit at the computer and make things up! By that I mean that I raise hypothetical issues, I imagine situations, and I envision social worlds that do not in fact exist. That is my work as a constructive theologian. As a theologian I’m always in conversation with the text, but my starting point is not the text; I do not see myself as a text person, that is, I am not an exegete, nor am I a philologist.

Even if you are not engaged in textual analysis, aren’t you teasing out the religious meaning of the text and its application to the meaning of life outside the text?

That’s right.

But teasing out the meaning of texts is precisely what the philosopher does. Right?

Not necessarily. I think that what the philosopher does, unless you do applied philosophy, is to clarify what we mean when we say such and such. Analytical philosophy is not constructive, I don’t think, whereas theology is a constructive, interpretative enterprise.

A different understanding of philosophy, however, is offered by Continental philosophy, whose dominant strand is hermeneutics, which is all about interpretation of texts.

In other words, whether one is viewed as a theologian or a philosopher depends on a certain framing.

So you’re saying: “I’m not a philosopher, I’m a theologian, and I am very happy with this distinction.” As a theologian, what are the questions that engage you most? interview with judith plaskow 105

Most of my work has focused on feminist questions, or has begun from feminist questions. I’ve asked, “Where are women’s voices in this text, in this tradition?” “What does it mean that they are often absent?” “How does that absence shape the tradition?” “If we were to include women’s voices and perspectives, how might the tradition look different?” “How might we rethink central categories of Jewish tradition from a feminist perspective?” Those have been some of the main questions that I’ve raised. And then in the 1990s my work was more about sexuality and I was asking very similar questions from a gay/lesbian perspective. Another set of questions that is important to me revolves around what we do with those aspects of tradition that are problematic and that, in fact, seem immoral from a contemporary perspective. For example, what does it mean to sit in a synagogue that views as sacred text last week’s Torah portion that gives a husband a right to annul his wife’s vows?

The Jewish tradition is undoubtedly problematic from a feminist perspective. So, how does one remain within a tradition which is, in a sense, irredeemable from a feminist perspective?

Right.

You can’t get around the fact that Judaism is a sexist tradition, and yet you want to remain Jewish. Many, many Jewish women, say, “Well, I can’t handle this tradition, so I’d rather be out of it.” So, how do we remain in and out at the same time?

That’s the central question that I’ve struggled with as a Jewish feminist. My friend Carol Christ, who I mentioned before, was a Christian when we were studying together at Yale Graduate School and then, because of her feminist convictions, she became a Goddess thealogian. Carol introduced me to Starhawk, who is a leading voice in the Goddess movement and in ecofeminism. She was born a Jew and still considers herself an ethnic Jew, even though she is at the same time a major figure in the Goddess religion. The trajectory from Judaism to Goddess religion was a real option for me, and I could have made that choice. But my Jewish identity was too strong. I didn’t want to sunder myself. 106 interview with judith plaskow

You still wanted to “stand at Sinai,” to use the title of your own famous book.

Exactly.

Why didn’t you say “Goodbye, Sinai” Or “Goodbye, Judaism,” as so many other Jewish women who are feminists have done?

There were too many things about Judaism that I loved and I did not see why I should relinquish my Jewish religious identity.

Which aspects of the traditions were so dear to your heart that you couldn’t let go of them?

I grew up in a classical Reform congregation on Long Island. The congregation had a very strong social justice bent, and from a young age I learned that Judaism was ethical monotheism. That was deeply meaningful to me. The centrality of ethics and the connection between belief and action were very important to me. I loved the fact that as a Jew you could argue with God. That is one of the aspects of tradition that I have always valued most. So when I became a feminist, I felt that I could be angry at the tradition and that was okay. Wrestling with anger was one way of being a Jew; it didn’t exclude me. As a Reform Jew, I also learned that freedom to think or freedom to believe was a very important aspect of the tradition. The Jewish calendar, with its weekly day of rest and the seasonal holidays, was yet another very important dimension which I could not give up.

Do you mean the rhythm of life?

Yes, the rhythm of Jewish life was very much part of my identity.

To some extent arguing, or wrestling, with God, is easy. It’s the argument with humans that gets us into trouble. It is the political dimension of the philosophical or theological work that brings about backlash.

Right. Absolutely. interview with judith plaskow 107

What would you say to those who claim that feminism is the most important issue right now because it is the cause of the current division within Judaism? According to this view, feminism could bring about a schism in the Jewish world, especially in Orthodoxy. Would you agree with that assessment?

I do. It strikes me that in all the major religious traditions right now, there is a big cleavage between the liberals who endorse feminism and the traditionalists who oppose it. There is a deeper divide between ultra-Orthodox and liberal Jews than there is between liberal Jews and liberal Christians. The rise of fundamentalisms worldwide speaks to the notion of there being two completely different kinds of religion in the world. Sometimes I think that the fundamentalists of all faiths should go off together. I mean, they are increasingly bedfellows on a range of socially contested issues. For example, on the abortion issue, some Jews support antiabortion laws even when they’re in contravention of halakha, thereby becoming bedfellows with right-wing Christians. It’s astounding to me. So, I do think that fundamentalist and non-fundamentalist Judaism are two different religions.

There is definitely a rise in a certain kind of religious militancy on the religious right, but we also see a rise of secular, atheist militancy.

Yes, that is absolutely true.

But before we explore secularism, let’s continue to discuss some of the theological and philosophical conundrums. What is the relationship between systematic theology and exegesis in your feminist reinterpre tation of Judaism? Do you engage in exegesis in order to tease the theo logical meaning out of Jewish texts, or does your preconceived theology tell you how to read the received text?

My work is not primarily exegetical; that is not how I approach theology. In this regard I am very different from Rachel Adler, whose feminist interpretation of Judaism is based on exegesis of halakha and aggada. Her project of constructive Jewish theology emerges through engagement with the canonic texts. Unlike her, I don’t do close reading of texts. Usually I’m using texts more to make a point rather than asking what it is that the text says. 108 interview with judith plaskow

Doesn’t that methodology make you vulnerable to the charge that you impose your theological notions on the sacred text? To some extent, you actually don’t need the text in order to make your theological claims.

Yes. I am aware of that danger and that criticism, but I don’t really see how to avoid it. It seems to me that the Jewish tradition is rich and conflicted and filled with different voices from which we have to choose. And I do listen to the tradition; my criteria for listening to this rather than that voice itself emerged in conversation with the tradition. There was a point in my intellectual development at which I asked myself, “Am I not just imposing non-Jewish categories on the text?” And then I realized the extent to which my thinking comes out of my engagement with Judaism through my whole life. So I think there’s a circular relationship here: we engage the tradition critically by using categories outside the tradition, but our critique of the tradition itself comes from standing within the tradition. Nonetheless, I am aware of the criticism and the danger inherent in my methodology. How often do I allow the text to correct and critique me?

Could you clarify your methodology?

In all candor, I had no training in methodology in graduate school, which is really quite shocking, and I still feel that I cannot articulate my methodology systematically. I’m also very aware of Mary Daly’s warning against “methodolatry”—letting method dictate the questions we can ask. So I tend to see methodology as emerging from the questions that I’m asking rather than beginning with methodology and bringing it to the questions. So I’ll have a theoretical question, and that question or puzzle will dictate how I approach the sources. For example, I would begin with the question “Where do we see women’s voices in the text?” or “Where do we not see women’s voices in the text”? And then, I improvise as I deem necessary to answer those questions.

Engaging the tradition in this manner makes it very open-ended. As an interpreter, you engage the tradition, be it the biblical or the rabbinic text, as you see fit rather than as the tradition demands it is to be understood or interpreted. Right?

Absolutely. interview with judith plaskow 109

Since this method applies to all texts, including philosophical texts, where does one stop as far as non-Jewish sources are concerned? Is there any boundary to your Jewish theological engagement? For example, the Jewish theologian could engage the New Testament, medieval philosophy (be it Jewish, Muslim, or Christian), and modern Christian theology, such as the theology of Paul Tillich. Are all of these sources part of the scope of your Jewish theology?

It is true that I began as an interpreter of the theology of Paul Tillich, since my Ph.D. dissertation was about him. However, as someone who chooses to remain within the Jewish tradition and to do Jewish theology, I choose to engage primarily with those texts that Jews would recognize as Jewish. I probably do cite Christian thinkers more frequently than most other Jewish theologians, because those were my intellectual interlocutors; you could say that Christian theologians were the people I grew up with theologically, so to speak. As I grow older and as I spend more time thinking within Judaism, my conversation partners have become the Jewish texts. As a feminist, I try to expand the range of texts that I consider by using Jewish women’s poetry or novels or rituals, so I cite a broad range of texts, but still within the realm of Judaism.

Given the wide array of texts you consult in the construction of feminist theology, do you differentiate between sacred and non-sacred texts? Is there a difference between a text written by a feminist author, a text written by a female author who is not necessarily feminist, and a biblical text or rabbinic text which the tradition takes to be sacred texts? Do you privilege certain texts over others given your open-ended methodology?

I definitely feel a need to engage with the sacred texts of the Jewish tradition because of their central role in the Jewish community. The fact that Torah and Haftarah are read as sacred texts week after week means that I need to grapple with those texts in a different way—more critically—than I would with a poem. But your question is a good one in that I think part of the feminist project is to expand the realm of sacred texts. So I would like to see the day when a text will be read as Haftarah that isn’t from the prophets but is a contemporary text. 110 interview with judith plaskow

Do you mean that the contemporary text will be read as a Haftarah?

Yes, indeed. Contemporary texts will, I hope, eventually be read as Haftarah.

That’s very interesting, because it opens up the canonic text in an utterly new way, while conferring authority on contemporary texts. If I understand you correctly, that will mean that Judaism is not just a received tradition of authoritative texts believed to be divinely revealed, but a tradition that continues to grow through progressive revelation. Is that correct?

Yes. That is correct.

Let’s apply this notion to feminism. I am sure you would agree that feminism is not just theory; it is about changing our way of life or changing the way we exist in the world, including our rituals. So feminism also redefines the so-called realm of the “sacred.”

Right. We need to ask: “What is it that mediates the presence of God today?”

Since the God of the Jewish tradition, at least in the texts as we have them, is communicated through a male prism, and the God-language of the text is male-dominated and male-centered, what are the options available for the Jewish feminist? Can a feminist Jew continue to accept the texts of the Jewish tradition as “sacred texts” if they so deeply conflict with her values? How do you, as a feminist, stand vis-à-vis a tradition that is so androcentric and so unacceptable to feminism?

This is precisely the challenge that faces all feminists who wish to remain loyal to their respective religious traditions. I have written a lot about the androcentrism (i.e., the male-centeredness) of Judaism in general and God language in particular. There is no doubt that the metaphors Jews use to talk about God are male centered. God is imaged as a male deity, and all language about God is grammatically male, because Hebrew is a gendered language. Secondly the images that are used to describe God are over- whelmingly drawn from male experience. And I have argued, and I firmly believe, that there is a close relationship or connection between that fact and the subordination of women within the Jewish tradition. So what can we do about it? interview with judith plaskow 111

Well, we can broaden our language about God. As Maimonides argued, all our language about God is metaphorical. It’s very interesting that despite his elaborate deconstruction of anthropomorphic language at the beginning of the Guide of the Perplexed, Maimonides never deconstructs the pronoun “He,” but continues to assume that God is a “He.” But there’s no reason not to deconstruct the “He” so we can broaden our images of God and begin to think about God as “She.” This is why one of the first things that Jewish feminists tried to do in the 1970s was to use female language to refer to God. And that was pretty disturbing and uncomfortable for many Jews. For me, the mere change of gender from “He” to “She” is not sufficient because it leaves the same old God in place. So in my book Standing Again at Sinai, I advocate using female language and imagery that goes far beyond pronoun change. I think using female language is important as a temporary strategy to get people to confront their images of God. I advocate using all different kinds of images of God, gendered and non-gendered. For the past twenty years, since I published Standing Again at Sinai, I put aside the issue of God-language to focus on other issues, but now I find myself coming back to it. And now I’m much more interested in rethinking the notion of God altogether, because my concept of God is utterly nonpersonal.

Why do you think the change of gendered language to talk about God did not succeed? Jews simply didn’t endorse it, and even feminists didn’t really continue to promote the new feminine God-language. It was very jarring in the beginning, but it did not go anywhere. How are we going to rethink the concept of God and who is going to listen to this rethinking?

Indeed, that is the challenge that faces feminists and perhaps anyone who wishes to articulate a new theology.

Who’s going to be open to this new theology? For example, Carol Christ, as you know better than I do, has articulated a new post- Christian, Goddess theology (or as she called it thealogy) and she has done so by utilizing process philosophy and process theology. But in general, process philosophy and/or theology has made little impact on contemporary Jewish thought. So if we are going to reconceptualize God, what are our theoretical options?

Right. This is a serious challenge. Carol and I together are writing a book about God tentatively titled Goddess and God in Light of Feminism. When 112 interview with judith plaskow we began, we couldn’t figure out how to get into the project, so we decided to begin by writing autobiographical essays about our changing notions of God. When we started the project, it was not clear to me that we would use these reflections as part of the book. I thought to myself that they might provide a way of clarifying our thinking preliminary to describing it in more theological and systematic terms. But then I realized that what we were in fact doing was narrative theology and that it is much more interesting than systematic theology. For example, if I tell you that I imagine God as the creative energy underlying and animating the universe, it is a boring statement that could be spelled out in a paragraph. But perhaps if I talk about how I dethroned the patriarchal God and how the process of wrestling with God shaped my life, or how I experience the presence of God as creative energy, that might have more traction with people. So I wonder if this narrative theology is actually the way I’m moving into doing theology.

How do you anticipate the reception of your new book with Carol Christ? Are Jews going to accept Carol’s theology, or more precisely, thealogy? Can Jews accept a belief in female deity, especially in terms of synagogue ritual? Can Jews pray to a female deity?

This is a question that interests me tremendously. Jews don’t talk about God a lot. I mean, Jews can be quite observant and pray regularly but not really believe in the God they’re praying to; for many Jews, the words of the daily prayer are a kind of mantra. In fact, there’s very little conversation in the Jewish community about God. For example, for years I have noticed that among Christian clergy, a lot of people talk about being “called” to the ministry. By contrast, a rabbi would never say “I was called to become a rabbi,” even if she or he felt that. I am very puzzled by this reluctance and I’m trying to figure out what it’s about. But I think that the fact that Jews are reluctant to talk about God makes it even more difficult to change God-language because what’s the opening to that conversation? If talking about God is not of concern to Jews, how can you ask Jews to change their God-talk?

As you indicate, Jews today are not really excited about theological questions, which is true even for Jews who attend synagogue regularly. Their point of departure is not theological but a matter of praxis. Is it correct to say that the very emphasis on praxis explains why we Jews are theologically stuck, so to speak, and not just in regard to feminism? interview with judith plaskow 113

Yes. And yet, if you think about the huge numbers of Jews who are uninterested in Judaism, who are turned off by whatever Jewish education they had, who find the practices and the propositions boring and unbelievable or untenable, in a sense they’re the ones who are ripe for a new Jewish theology that will express an intelligent Judaism. Let me tell you a personal story. Just last night I was having dinner with an old, close friend who went to Sunday school with me for twelve years. She certainly considers herself a Jew. She has a Passover Seder and lights Chanukah candles. But she is uninterested in Judaism because she never found it to be intellectually interesting or challenging. There are many Jews like that: unaffiliated and unengaged Jews, and these people are precisely the audience for a new egalitarian, feminist Judaism. That’s where I think we have our chance. In the past two decades since I published Standing Again at Sinai, a lot of people have said to me, “Your book brought me back to Judaism.” So that has made me rather optimistic about the relevance of my ideas to other Jews and my contribution to contemporary Judaism. I know a lot of scholars of Jewish studies who are afraid of my work because they think that my feminist criticism turns people off from Judaism. But my critique of Judaism is not simply my own personal questions; many other people have these critical questions. They are grateful to see that somebody is asking them and thus giving them permission to do so. It makes it possible for them to be Jewish. The feminist critique need not turn people away from Judaism, it can also enable Jews to remain in Judaism and express themselves more fully as Jews.

Looking at feminism from a historical perspective, what would you say have been the main accomplishments? What are the failures of feminism? And what are the challenges to feminism?

I think that the accomplishments have been huge. First of all there are the important practical changes involving women’s increased access to educational and leadership opportunities across the spectrum of contemporary Judaism. Beyond this, I think that raising the whole question of women’s voices and perspectives has led to the creation of new Jewish histories and many new Torah commentaries. The new Reform women’s Torah commentary, for example, is the culmination of decades of hard work by Jewish feminists in developing their critiques and reinterpretations of Judaism. So, I think there have been a lot of accomplishments, but I do agree that things have stalled. As you said, the issue of female God-language has gone nowhere, and the whole issue of examining our conception of God has 114 interview with judith plaskow also really gone nowhere. This failure is of great interest to me. Why has there been such resistance to feminine God-language and rethinking the nature of God? I agree with you that it’s not just among the mainstream Jewish community; many Jewish feminists (and feminists in general) are not interested in the issue of God-language. However, we are only at the beginning of a process of change. Now that women are rabbis, and even in the Orthodox community they have a more elevated status as interpreters of halakha, things might begin to change. Women today have many more educational opportunities and access to leadership so it is reasonable to hope that they will continue to transform Judaism. The feminist revolution has accomplished a lot, but there are still a lot of practical glass-ceiling issues that remain. In none of the Jewish denom- inations are women properly represented. In the largest congregations, the salaries of female rabbis are significantly lower than men’s salaries. Within Jewish federations, the percentage of women in leadership positions is still shockingly low, even lower than in Fortune 500 companies! So there are a lot of issues concerning equality between men and women to which we still need to pay attention. In this regard, the feminist revolution is by no means complete. I think that the feeling or perception that feminism is passé because we’ve accomplished everything has overtaken the deeper philosophical and theological reconstruction questions. Today this is the true challenge to feminism: how does one revive the theoretical discourse?

Why do college students today feel reluctant to call themselves “feminists,” even though they have all benefited from feminism? Why is “feminism” viewed derogatorily?

My experience confirms that perception and I find it deeply disturbing. Why has feminism come to be associated or equated with the hatred of men? I don’t really know or understand how that happened. Perhaps we need to reflect on that issue by comparison to similar events within the African-American community. Here is a personal anecdote that might shed some light on the matter. My sister-in-law was at an event in Greensboro, North Carolina, at which there was a panel marking one of the key events in the civil rights movement: the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. the Board of Education. A number of people from the Black community reflected back on this ruling and said that they made an enormous mistake strategically to have thought that they didn’t need to bring the White community along first. interview with judith plaskow 115

They simply assumed that once integration was mandated by law, social integration and acceptance would necessarily follow. When I heard this, I wondered whether feminists made a similar mistake. I think we believed that if women changed—for example, if we refused to behave in accord with certain expectations such as serving men or staying at home with the children—that would be enough. Men would have to change without our doing anything else. We did not ask ourselves what it would mean to bring men along. And now, four decades into the feminist revolution, we can ponder: can women really change in the absence of greater changes from men? I think part of the skepticism about feminism is that our demands had unfore- seen consequences in that young women feel that they have to be superwomen and they resent it. But creating superwomen was never our vision. We imagined that social institutions would change in order to affect a new relationship between men and women; we expected to have a daycare center at every workplace, for example, but that did not happen. We also imagined that there would be flextime or shared jobs, and none of that happened. And so, today we have a situation in which women are expected to do everything: have a successful career outside the home as well as be a perfect mother and wife at home. That has generated a lot of resentment against feminists, who brought about the social changes in the relations between men and women. This is a real misapprehension of the initial goals of feminism. We, the pioneering feminists, were asking for and demanding structural, institutional changes, but today nobody talks about these profound changes. We weren’t talking about individuals making a life in which they could do everything.

But feminists did make a very strong point that “the personal is political,” which means that the relations between men and women in the domestic sphere have political significance for relationships in the public sphere. So feminism has politicized the personal sphere. Isn’t that the case?

I understand “the personal is the political” in an opposite way. For me and many other early feminists, that slogan meant that what we experience as our personal problems and issues is the result of or caused by social structures and political relations. Therefore, we cannot change the personal without changing the structure of social institutions and the political sphere. 116 interview with judith plaskow

It is true that the feminist slogan can be interpreted from both sides, or in both ways. To me the excitement of early feminism was realizing this isn’t only my hang-up, but rather that something much larger (social, institutional, or political) is at stake. Women used to be socialized in a certain manner so as to blame themselves. Feminism shifted the attention to social institutions and asked, How do we change them?

Feminism during the 1970s had a lot of energy and it was very positive energy because it liberated women to be much more than they thought they could be. Isn’t the loss of that energy and hope sad?

Yes, I am saddened by that loss and by the negative perception of feminism today.

Many people today regard feminism as a trivial, irrelevant, academic discourse, and miss the social significance of the movement. So can feminism rekindle the initial excitement? What should be done to enable young women to feel good about feminism rather than feel discomfort about the label?

Right. That is the challenge.

There is also an economic factor that needs to be taken into consideration. A young woman may define herself as a feminist, but with a young family and without proper daycare she cannot pursue a career. Under these conditions, to finish a Ph.D. (even a Ph.D. in, say, women’s studies) is very difficult. Without the necessary structural changes, it is much harder for women today to be feminists. Is feminism responsible for the fact that women today are overextended?

I see that very struggle in the life of my daughter-in-law. My son and daughter-in-law just had a baby who’s seven months old. They’re both attorneys and they’re trying to put a life together and balance career and family but it is by no means easy or simple.

In Israel this problem has been somewhat resolved by making the grandparents, especially the grandmothers, deeply involved in the life of the young couple. But that arrangement too has its problems because it tells older women that they have to be readily available for babysitting. interview with judith plaskow 117

Yes, when my partner and I were living in Spain the year before last, we experienced the same thing—grandmothers walking down the street with their grandchildren. In Spain this is doable because most people stay in the city in which they were born. They live near their parents, and the grandparents can be actively involved in child rearing.

From a feminist perspective, isn’t that situation problematic? Again the woman acts as the caregiver, the facilitator, and enabler, except now she is doing it for her own daughter. This is not the independent woman that feminism envisioned.

Correct. Feminism as a social revolution has hardly begun and the absence of broader social changes is very disturbing because, to me, feminism is a social movement; it’s not a personal lifestyle. But the sense of feminism as a social movement that seeks to change institutional structures and relations has vanished.

Interestingly, this has happened while feminist theory has become more and more refined and less and less relevant. So could it be that the success of women in gender studies within the context of the university has made the gender issue irrelevant to the society at large? There is an interesting and disturbing similarity between women’s studies and Jewish studies. Once Jewish studies became a department, one could argue that there is no need to teach Jewish studies courses anywhere else.

I don’t know what’s the cause and what’s the effect. In other words, did women’s studies become more arcane and insular because the movement wasn’t as powerful, or rather, did the feminist movement become less powerful because of academic women’s studies? Or has the backlash against feminism affected both spheres independently? I tend to think the last is the case.

Feminist issues are social issues, and as such they will not go away. Each and every woman and each and every family have to struggle with these issues and find their own solution. Right?

Yes, I agree. 118 interview with judith plaskow

Is it fair to say that the feminist academic discourse has become some what irrelevant to what really matters to women?

Yes. The challenge is to bring theory and practice back together as they were in the beginning of the movement.

What do you say to those who see feminism largely as a rhetorical strategy as opposed to a social movement? According to this view, to be a feminist pertains to how you read a text, rather than how you live your life. Feminist is thus about holding an intellectual posture. Do you accept this view?

No, I do not. I’m struck by the number of younger Jewish feminists who’ve deconstructed me or aspects of my work. And although this is certainly okay, I often wonder why they don’t have something more substantive to talk about. I was certainly not trying to write the definitive work, I was trying to open a conversation. So I would say to young feminist authors, “Take that conversation forward. Write about some real issue that you care about. Who cares if I contradicted myself in this or that paragraph?” I want to challenge them to do something more relevant to women and to Jewish women. The future of feminism is in the hands of young feminists today; that is their responsibility. In the American Academy of Religion (AAR) I’m chair of the Committee of the Status of Women in the Profession. I was on that very committee when it was formed originally, twenty-some odd years ago, and now I am serving on it again. When I was on it the first time, women’s needs in the academy were very clear. We were still a small percentage of people in the discipline of religious studies and in this professional association. There were very few women in leadership in the AAR or in the academy at large. Today, two decades after the committee was established, we see within the AAR the same transformation that has taken place within liberal Judaism: women, including women of color, are half the presidents. So what is our committee supposed to be doing now? It seems that the goals of equality and inclusion have been achieved, although in fact, a great deal remains to be done. I already mentioned that I grew up in a Reform congregation. Although Reform Judaism ostensibly believed in equality, women did not take part in services, they were not on the bimah reading Torah except on Sisterhood Sabbath; the only ritual assigned to women was lighting the Sabbath candles. At that point it was totally clear what we needed to be fighting for. interview with judith plaskow 119

It is a lot less clear what we need to fight for today. I think ultimately, it’s the young people who need to carry things forward; they have to define the goals of feminism and they need to identify the challenges of the future.

In your writings and public activities you have demonstrated the link between theory and practice, a link that is in fact confirmed by Reform Judaism where the God-idea, or Ethical Monotheism, was translated into social activity. How should the link between theory and praxis be established today? Does activism require theorizing?

I think that there is an important link between activism and theory. Once you begin to question the subordination of women you in fact engage in theory. For example, “What are the different factors at work in creating that subordination”? “How does the notion of God feed into this subordination of women?” “How does the structure of the liturgy further enhance the subordination of women?” These are all theoretical questions that require thinking through before we begin to effect social change. Put differently, in order to understand and to create change at more than just a surface level, you need to understand the dynamics, the structures, and the ideas that support the marginalization of women.

In terms of the subordination of women in Judaism, how do you respond to an Orthodox person who might say, “Well, you misunderstand Judaism when you claim that the women are subordinate to men. In fact, in traditional Jewish families exactly the opposite is the case.” Going further, your hypothetical critic might insist that traditional Judaism has elevated the position of the woman in the domestic sphere and in society, so that the perception of subordination is only in the mind of the beholder, namely the contemporary feminist, and not in the practice of the tradition. How would you respond?

You asked me about methodology before. A very central question in my work has been the question of authority: Who is speaking? Who decides? Who has the power to decide? Who’s included in the conversation? Who is being addressed? So I think that the question I would ask someone who makes these claims is, “Who decided that the glory of women is inside”? Who decided that men and women complement each other and this is who men are and this is who women are? Have women been part of that three-thousand-year conversation through which those roles have been 120 interview with judith plaskow defined? So my retort would be to raise fundamental questions of power and authority.

The category of power, however, is a two-edged sword: it is the awareness of power that makes subordination intolerable, but that very awareness also calls the powerless to begin to use power and thus risk the injustice of power. Is it in principle possible to have human relations devoid of the dialectics of power?

Probably not, but there are different kinds of power, and there are relationships in which the power dynamics shift. Let’s take the institution of marriage, for example. I think that a marriage in which the power dynamics are rigid because one person always has more power than the other is very different from a marriage in which people have different spheres of power and in which they can renegotiate those power relations. So I don’t necessarily disagree with the claim that all human relations involve power to some extent, but I do think that a power imbalance can be more or less extreme and more or less rigid and inflexible—and more or less socially sanctioned.

What about the claim that within the traditional family, especially the Ashkenazi family, the really powerful partner is the female: she ran the household, very often she was the breadwinner, and she shaped the education of her young children, while the husband devoted his time and energy to Torah study? In the traditional family there was a certain division of labor that enabled men and women to coexist. Are Jewish families today better off because of feminism, or do they experience more strains and stresses that the traditional Jewish family did not have to cope with? What do you say to this critique of feminism?

Because of feminism the range of women’s choices has been vastly expanded and that has benefited not only women, but the Jewish community at large, including men. The Jewish community prior to the rise of feminism was much diminished because half the population of Jews was excluded from religious leadership and halakhic decision-making. The exclusion of women from the creation of Jewish culture has made the community cul- turally poorer. So the fact that today there are women who engage in the interpretation of Jewish texts and write wonderful commentaries enriches the whole community. Making Judaism more egalitarian is a matter of justice, but it also benefits the community as a whole. interview with judith plaskow 121

In terms of justice, what are the other domains in which there is patent injustice that needs to be addressed and corrected?

I’m very disturbed by the many, many passages in the Torah that call for the destruction of indigenous traditions. I am interested not only in injustice to women but also in injustice toward other groups viewed as the Other. I’m interested not just in women as the excluded and marginalized Other, but the broader question of how and why human beings constantly create Others that they then treat unjustly. I think that we see that othering very clearly in the Torah with regard to the struggle against “idolatry,” but the issue is much broader. So I’m really interested in the human tendency to create Otherness that then is used to justify maltreatment. That tendency exists also among feminists. As you know, I have noted that Christian feminists blame Jews for the creation of patriarchy, a charge that keeps emerging again and again in feminist literature, contributing to the othering of Jews and indirectly perpetuating traditional anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism. As a Jewish feminist, I have been on both sides of that line, constantly looking at myself and my own thinking to examine how I participate in the creating of Otherness or the dismantling of Otherness.

Postmodern thinkers, most notably Michel Foucault, have really made us very aware of the question of Otherness. But, is it possible to forge identity (personal or collective) without othering? For example, the emergence of Israel as a nation roughly about 1200 BCE took place when a group of people separated itself from their neighbors and constructed a narrative to justify and perpetuate the difference between “us” and “them.” That separation was not just perceptual, it involved real physical struggles against the “enemies” of Israel.

Right.

If so, is it possible to tell the story of the Jewish nation without the excluded Other? If we let go of those passages in the Bible, or excise the memory of wars from our tradition, what will happen to our collec tive identity? Can we continue to be Jewish without those memories?

To me the question is how we use that memory and how we interpret those texts. When we read those texts, we can move from simply recalling past 122 interview with judith plaskow events to raising questions about them and their meaning for the present. How do we create Others and how and why is the practice of othering going on now? What are our responsibilities to the Other? I mean, to me what’s valuable about difficult texts is that they hold up a mirror to our world. Those ancient processes are still going on and we can use the texts as a way to look at ourselves and to reflect on and decide who we want to be in the world, and how we want to act now. Thus the text becomes an opening for moral action in the present; we don’t have to imitate the ancient texts in order to tease out their deep moral significance.

In that sense, then, the sacred text is always a contemporary text, even though it’s also a historical text. For example, one could apply the biblical text to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and see the Palestinian case as an illustration of the destruction of indigenous culture.

Exactly right. Indeed, I have been quite critical of the policies of the State of Israel toward the Palestinians for that very reason.

Your political critique has placed you on the left of the political spectrum. What do you say to those who criticize the political Jewish Left for not caring about being Jewish or for empathizing with the Palestinians at the expense of Jews and/or Israelis?

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict raises profound moral questions because the claims of the two sides clash. If you care about justice, you have no choice other than to step into that struggle, trying to hear the justice on both sides but needing to make choices. The same applies to the internal Jewish struggle about authenticity (i.e., “Who is a Jew?” or “What does it mean to be Jewish?”) These debates and conflicts are not going to be resolved, because you can’t say one type of Jew is more authentic than the other, or one strain within the tradition is more Jewish than another strain. The Jewish tradition contains conflicting commands: we have the command to kill everybody who is engaged in idolatry as well as the command to pursue justice.

So the challenge is how to define “justice” and how to apply the ideal of justice to particular circumstances, and both are highly controversial.

Right. But, so what? What is the choice other than to enter into that debate? interview with judith plaskow 123

Well, the debate is problematic because it always involves the use of power.

Is it power that is always at issue or fundamentally conflicting world- views? For example, can you have conversation between fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists? I’m not sure. I’m struck and saddened by the fact that there aren’t even that many places for conversation between modern Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews. I always attend the meetings of Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA), where I’ve engaged with modern Orthodox feminists. Despite our differences, I’ve found that conversation to be very fruitful and exciting. Unfortunately, such conversations don’t happen that often, but whereas I have enough in common with Orthodox women in JOFA to have a meaningful conversation, I don’t know what space could accommodate both me and the people who stone an eight-year-old girl for not being dressed modestly. In this regard, the conflicting viewpoints cannot be bridged, and there is very little common ground.

Do you see the dichotomy between Orthodox and non-Orthodox Jews growing deeper? Is there a growing schism between these forms of contemporary Judaism?

Yes. The schism may be unbridgeable and all of us will be worse off because of it.

Is it the case that the people who stone the eight-year-old girl are com pletely intolerant, or is it that both sides in the conflict regard the other as completely intolerant?

As I see it, those who stoned the eight-year-old girl see her, her family, and all other Jews who support the girl as “non-Jews.” This is an example of the othering about which I spoke earlier and which I strongly criticize.

The pursuit of justice is clearly a principle that motivates your thinking and your social activism. Is there any other principle besides justice that guides you or inspires you?

That’s an interesting question. Undoubtedly, justice is the major value that guides my work. 124 interview with judith plaskow

What about equality?

Well, I was going to say that equality is another guiding principle, but then I was thinking, is equality really different from justice? Isn’t equality a product of justice or a concrete example of how to attain justice? There is definitely a close connection between justice and equality. Of course, when we talk about equality we need to explain what we mean by it. Does equality mean 50 percent of rabbis should be women? Or does the ideal of equality point us toward a deeper shift in power relations and in social structures? Equality is not just about parity or about symmetry.

Both justice and equality are ideals, but (in principle) can these ideals be actualized in human social reality?

I don’t believe we can actualize them fully, but we certainly can move closer to them. But again, what is equality? Does it mean sameness? That’s a huge issue that has generated intense debate among feminist theorists. In the workplace, for example, does one achieve equality by treating men and women the same way, or by acknowledging that women’s reproductive system, for example, is more sensitive to certain kinds of poisons in the workplace so that true equality for women may involve their being treated differently from men?

This example suggests that it is not just about equality and not just about justice, but rather about equality and difference, namely the desire of women to be equal and different at the same time.

I would agree, but add that it’s not as if women don’t want to be different from each other, too. The issue of equality and difference is maintained among women as well and not only in the debate between men and women. It is not the case that there’s a homogenous femaleness that’s different from maleness, because there are many groups of women whose collective identity is distinct from that of others.

But if we recognize different groups of women, each with their own distinctive identity, we in fact have reintroduced the notion of othering back into the feminist discourse.

Isn’t it possible to have difference without Otherness in the sense I have been using it? interview with judith plaskow 125

Some African-American women don’t feel that they have much in common with women who are Jewish or white. Isn’t that so?

Right.

So let me repeat the question: Is it possible for humans to live without othering, without differentiation, without hierarchy?

We may not be able to avoid the human tendency to other, but it is possible to recognize that hierarchies are always going to merge into systems of injustice. We need to work against this tendency and have as our goal to overcome or soften our social systems so that they do not become rigid.

Some people could say that rigid hierarchies are necessary for business because competition presupposes clear boundaries. These assumptions result in a “masculine” style that characterizes corporate America, which increasingly applies to academic administration. What can women do about it? If women want to be leaders, don’t they have to learn how to function within the masculine style?

One would hope that when enough women get into business or into administration, the administrative style might change.

In retrospect of four decades did the entry of women to the public sphere actually change the style of business or the academy? Did the entry of women mean more attention to justice within social hierarchies such as universities?

Unfortunately, the entry of women into the academy in larger numbers has coincided with the corporatization of the university, which is in turn the product of larger social forces. I think women’s greater presence has put certain issues on the table that were not there before, but has the university been transformed in a positive way? No.

Some people are claiming that feminism has generated political cor rectness that has become dogmatic and unjust, especially toward white men. According to this view, once women ceased to be victims, assumed power, and hold positions of power, they have become the victimizers. 126 interview with judith plaskow

How to use power justly is a challenge that everyone needs to be aware of. But it seems to me that the accusation of political correctness is often made to silence certain voices that people don’t want to hear.

The debate about the meaning and boundaries of tradition, exclusion, and injustice, and the problem of silencing or othering now revolves around the place of gays and lesbians within the Jewish community. The recent decision to admit gays and lesbians to the rabbinate in Conservative Judaism has led some to charge that the traditional Jewish view is now being suppressed by a very vocal advocacy of gays and lesbians. Is this an example of how a group that has been othered before now engages in othering in the name of political correctness? So, what is the just thing to do in negotiating conflicting notions of “correct” human sexuality?

We’re seeing similar claims emerging in the general culture with regard to the debate about birth control. Catholic institutions claim that their having to pay for birth control is taking away their freedom of religion and many religious traditionalists feel put upon or even victimized by a secular culture that is insensitive to their understanding of human sexuality.

How are we going to negotiate conflicting claims about human sexuality? What do you say to those who resist the admission of gays and lesbians to rabbinic seminaries?

That’s where the issue of authority becomes so important. I would ask, “What is the authority for the claims and counterclaims?” How are people reading the biblical texts that prohibit homosexuality? I would ask those people who say they cannot possibly in good conscience allow for ordination of gays on the basis of Leviticus chapter 18 and a handful of other passages, “Are you reading the entire biblical text?” “Do you always have that kind of allegiance to the plain meaning of the text?” “What about all the other injunctions within the same biblical text (other activities that are defined as ‘abomination’) to which you pay no attention?” Underlying these issues is a larger theoretical question: “Can adversaries have conversation about the meaning of canonic texts?” That question emerged for the Reform movement as it debated the issue of gay marriage. A committee of the Central Conference of American interview with judith plaskow 127

Rabbis (CCAR) came out against gay marriage. But the committee report also acknowledged that the fundamental assumptions of people on different sides of this issue were so different, that they could not even agree on what they were talking about. The disputing sides were just completely talking past each other. It does seem to me that in these contentious debates, philosophers and theologians have an important role to play. They can make clear what’s at stake in these arguments and lay out the different fundamental assumptions and commitments that are motivating each side. Before we can ask, “Can we bridge our differences? Can we talk to each other?” we need to know what our starting points are. But sometimes, I think that the move from one position to another is more like conversion than being persuaded through argument. It is very possible that in relation to these issues people are persuaded more by real life circumstances than by arguments. For example, think of a person who is against gay marriage, but that person has a child who comes out as gay. Would the parent’s opposition to gay marriage remain the same? Probably not. When the gay child says, “I want to marry this person that I love,” what will the parent do? So the reality of people loving each other (rather than abstract arguments) has created a shift in the attitude and perception of gay people. This is precisely what happened in American society. Public opinion is changing in this country as more and more people know that they know someone who is gay or lesbian.

In other parts of the world (e.g., Canada and Europe), it’s not simply about the face-to-face encounter with a gay person that is responsible for attitudes and perception; rather, it’s a legal issue. You can’t deny certain people their legal rights. The insistence on equality before the law has led to a greater acceptance of gays and lesbians as equals in Canadian society, although some people (for example, Canadian Catholics) have a hard time with it.

In the United States there’s always a question as to whose human rights get recognized. Who’s recognized as fully human? It’s not until the rights are given to an excluded or marginalized group that people begin to see the full implications of the absence of those rights. It’s complicated, because you have to first decide who is worthy of moral consideration. Who has the right to be recognized on moral grounds? 128 interview with judith plaskow

In your work you have shown how to extend moral consideration to excluded groups, first women and then gays, lesbians, bisexuals, or transgender people. Do you extend moral consideration to nonhumans, namely, to animals or to nature as a whole? Do you see a connection between feminism and environmentalism?

Actually, as you were talking about moral consideration what came into my mind was an article I taught for many years in a course on Native American Religion which argued for granting trees some of the rights of people. So, clearly the debate about who deserves moral consideration or who has moral standing definitely extends to the environment. Today as species face extinction, we have to discuss the moral rights of nonhumans, and indeed the moral right of our planet. So, yes, I do agree with feminists such as Rosemary Ruether who hold that the logic of feminism needs to be extended to the environment and that we must protect nature from human abuse.

The issues we have covered so far (i.e., feminism, sexual ethics, human rights, and environmentalism) are all hot topics that come out of real- life experience, but Jewish philosophy and Jewish theology are both academic discourses that are carried out within academic institutions. You have been the President of the American Academy of Religion and you have taught for many years in Manhattan College, a Catholic institution. From this vantage point, what is your assessment of Jewish studies within the academy? What are the successes, achievements, and failures of Jewish studies?

I think Jewish studies is fairly marginal in the American Academy of Religion (AAR). The History of Judaism Section in the AAR has gone through repeated collapses and reconstitutions. In part this is because many scholars of Jewish studies put their energy into the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). The responsibility for the problematic status of Judaism at the AAR falls on both the organization and on Jewish studies scholars. I have largely stopped going to sessions on Judaism because they are too insular and exclusive; participants in these sessions assume that they talk only to other Jews, and they make no attempt to address their presentations to scholars of religion more broadly. For example, very often presenters in the sessions on Judaism use Hebrew phrases without translating them; they talk in terms of “us” in a manner interview with judith plaskow 129 that is rare elsewhere in the AAR. In this regard there is some similarity between the Jewish and Muslim sections of the organization. In the emerging Islamic sessions we have presenters who quote the Quran in Arabic without translating, as if all people present are expected to know the Quran. This practice expresses the perception that sessions at the AAR (which is a nondenominational professional institution) are “our space to do our business.” This is just one side of the problem. As a past President of the AAR, I am also aware that non-Jewish members of the AAR rarely attend the Jewish studies sessions. Occasionally when we try to cross religious boundaries, for example, when we had a session on Jewish Multiculturalism sponsored by the Women and Religion Section, fifteen people attended and maybe two of them weren’t Jews. In other words, the blame falls on both sides, and I don’t know which comes first in terms of cause and effect. Is the problem caused by the fact that Jews see the sessions on Judaism as the business of Jews, and thus exclude non-Jews, or is it that the Jews with the strongest commitment to Jewish studies simply avoid going to the AAR and prefer instead to present their scholarship at the Association for Jewish Studies, or that most non-Jews aren’t interested in Judaism? This problem is less acute in the Society for Biblical Literature where the conversation between Jewish and Christian scholars about the Bible is much more robust.

Is it right to say that success of Jewish studies since the 1970s has also brought about its current marginalization? We now have enough Jewish studies scholars within the academy who can carry out an academic conversation among themselves, so scholars of Judaism talk to themselves as they did before Jewish studies was integrated into the academy.

But were we ever part of a large academic conversation? Did Jewish studies ever succeed in becoming an integral part of the discipline of religious studies? In the fields of biblical studies or rabbinics, for example, there’s more cross-conversation between Jewish and non-Jewish scholars. In other fields of the AAR it is less so.

One could say that the religious roots of the AAR are still very much intact. It is a very theological organization comprised of numerous religious individuals studying their own texts using the purported language of universalism. Perhaps the organization needs to be 130 interview with judith plaskow reorganized so as to avoid the trap of either theology or particularism. Of course, the problem is complicated because we cannot generalize about “religion” but must take into consideration specific religions or religious traditions that need to be understood on their own terms. So the question is how do we negotiate the difference between the particular and the universal?

We see the problem even in the Women and Religion Section. If there is a session on Asian women’s theology, it will be poorly attended. A lot of people who would come to a session on white Christian feminists don’t come to a session on Asian women. So it’s a matter of self-selection which perpetuates the marginalization of minority groups. In the case of Jewish studies, when a session has all Jewish presenters, it is perceived as a Jewish studies session and of less relevance to non-Jews. In short, it’s very difficult to figure out how to create those cross-conversations. These organizational issues are important to me because I’ve spent my whole career being the Jew in a largely Christian professional context (the AAR and Manhattan College). My entire academic career has been about bringing Jewish issues into a larger non-Jewish context, and most of my conversation partners have been non-Jews rather than Jews. That’s part of my commitment to being a member of the AAR, as opposed to the AJS. I wanted the Jewish perspective to matter to non-Jews and I wanted Jews to become familiar with feminist perspectives.

As you look to the future what do you think or what do you see as the most compelling or pertinent challenges, either philosophical, social, or political for Jews in the twenty-first century?

I think massive lack of interest in Judaism on the part of Jews is a major issue for the Jewish community. I agree with the mainstream community sense that Jewish continuity is an issue. I just think they’re going about addressing the issue in all the wrong ways. A lot of the mainstream discourse today tries to purify Judaism. Hence there is a growing rejection of intermarriage and a refusal to acknowledge and accept gay/lesbian and transgender Jews as part of the Jewish community. We’re trying to purify ourselves by excluding people, which is, it seems to me, exactly counterproductive. Let’s take the example of intermarriage. Some Jews who intermarry don’t care about Judaism, but others Jews who interview with judith plaskow 131 intermarry are very concerned about living a Jewish life. The future of Judaism depends on our ability to reach out to and engage anybody who’s interested in Jewish life and Jewish issues and being part of the Jewish community rather than trying to purify ourselves. I think philosophy and theology have a role to play in raising interesting, challenging questions about Jewish life and exploring the answers within Jewish discourse. What does it mean to live a full life? What does it mean to live a Jewish life? What kind of world would I like to live in? How am I going to be engaged in creating that world? Those are questions that people care about. As Jewish philosophers we need to at least raise these questions, even if we do not always have answers to them. The task of the philosopher is to make it worthwhile for people to participate in the conversation and encourage them to come up with their own answers and responses to these perennial questions.

What would you say if a student raises the question: “Why should there be a Jewish People?” or “Why should the Jewish People continue to exist”?

I see the continued existence of the Jewish people in terms taken from the environmental discourse about biodiversity and the protection of species from extinction. The Jewish People is an ancient group with a rich culture and tradition that has contributed to the world in many, many ways. It would be a deep shame to lose all that should the Jewish People cease to exist. Conversely, if the Jewish People continues to be vital and work toward making the world more just, that is a marvelous contribution. The Jewish People will fail that mission if the people who stone eight-year-old girls become representative of Judaism. Should that happen, then I wouldn’t see the value in the continuity of the Jewish People and its rich civilization.

Are you saying that the continuity of Judaism depends on its evolution? How Judaism evolves to the next level will determine whether its existence is justified.

I don’t believe that any group or species needs to justify its existence. At the same time, a Judaism that stones eight-year-old girls is not a Judaism I want to be part of. 132 interview with judith plaskow

What about those who say that the essence of Judaism is not subject to evolution because it is unchangeable? You seem to be saying that Judaism needs to change in order to adapt to changing social conditions.

Right. That is what I am saying.

Here we go back to the issue of authority, which was always raised against those who wanted to change and reform Judaism. Those who claim that Judaism has an unchangeable essence also challenge the reformer’s knowledge about the tradition as well as about the direction of desired change. If Judaism constantly evolves, how do we ensure that the evolution takes place organically? At some point it’s going to be so non-recognizable that people are going to say, “Well, that’s not a Judaism that I can identify with or be part of.” What would you say to these critics?

My answer is twofold. First, let me say that there are multiple Judaisms. I think we have to accept that we’re not working towards a singular or unified Judaism. In fact, part of the richness of the Jewish community is the multiplicity of perspectives and practices, all of which, in my view need to evolve. However, the evolution of Judaism could go in a variety of directions at the same time. Second, we need to consider the way traditions evolve. I think that the issue of female God-language is an interesting illustration of how one can make certain suggestions for change and bring them to the attention of the community at large without trying to impose them. Some things work and will be accepted by the community and some suggestions don’t work and will be rejected. Jewish feminist experimentation with ritual, liturgy, and Torah commentaries illustrates how that process can develop without imposing unity. Some aspects of feminist creativity have excited people and had staying power. For example, I belong to a small Jewish feminist spirituality collective that has generated a lot of Jewish feminist music. There are only thirty of us in the collective, but one of our songs, “As We Bless the Source of Life,” has been picked up all over the country, and I’ve even heard people singing it in Europe. This is an example of organic evolution without imposition or compulsion; people adopted the song because they love it. There are other examples of feminist rituals, such as women’s Seders, that have been picked up and used by the community at large. interview with judith plaskow 133

However, other innovative feminist practices have gone by the wayside and made little impact on contemporary Jewry. At the beginning of my career people asked me all the time, “Aren’t you creating a new religion?” But I don’t think we have the power to create a new religion. I think that certain things will work and seem Jewish to people, and they’ll be taken in and absorbed, some more quickly than others. And those things that seem arti- ficial and silly will fall by the wayside and disappear. There is no way to tell in advance what will work and what will not, and no way to tell in retrospect why something worked and another thing didn’t, or why some changes had staying power. So I’m not worried about the evolution of Judaism, provided we don’t have the fantasy that everybody is going to agree and we’re going to have one Judaism. Diversity and plurality are the mark of a living tradition that continues to breath and whose future is open-ended.

You seem to have a rather optimistic view of the future of Judaism. Is that so?

Yes, it is.

Any discussion of the future of Judaism has to consider ethical questions. So far we have discussed the idea of justice. Do you see yourself indebted to a particular tradition within philosophical ethics, such as deontological ethics or virtue ethics?

No. My ethical reflection does not come out of a specific strand within ethics. Rather, I always begin with specific issues as they are experienced in real life; my point of departure is always praxis which I then subject to analysis and questioning. My theoretical discourse is more like an improvisation.

This type of practice-driven theorizing has an organic quality because it places you, the thinker, as part of your cultural environment. Like all organisms, the interaction or exchange with the environment is selective: some things are absorbed and others are rejected, but there is no way to tell in advance how the process will take place. Is that correct?

Right. 134 interview with judith plaskow

Your optimism is most interesting given the fact that we live in a post- Holocaust era. Does the Holocaust figure in your thinking about Juda ism, and, if so, how?

Any systematic reflection on the Holocaust is really an attempt to address the problem of evil. In truth it was this problem that brought me into religious studies. I started reading about the Holocaust when I was twelve and I became quite obsessed with it. I was deeply troubled by the issue of God’s relation to the Holocaust as well as the human capacity to do evil; how could human beings do such a thing? As a kid I also asked myself “Could Jews have been Nazis?” “Was it simply historical accident that we, Jews, were the victims?” “Was there something specific about the German national character or German culture that made them the victimizers and something about Jewish historical experience that made us victims?” And in graduate school, I focused on the problem of evil and wrote three of my four comprehensive exams on different aspects of the problem of evil. Initially, I intended to write my doctoral dissertation on the Holocaust, as a particular aspect of the problem of evil. Then I decided it would be too difficult to immerse myself in such a painful subject for years. Instead, I wrote a dissertation on the concept of sin in two Protestant theologians, Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and thereafter left aside reflection on the problem of evil. When I finished the God chapter in Standing Again at Sinai I was startled to discover that I hadn’t dealt with evil. It indicated to me that my understanding of God had shifted in such a way that I was no longer asking whether God could have intervened and prevented the Holocaust or why God didn’t intervene in the last couple of years, however, I’ve realized that I have to deal with evil as a feminist theologian. The fact that my notion of God has changed so that theodicy as a formal project is no longer of interest to me doesn’t mean I don’t have to deal with evil or that I do not have more to say about the existence of evil. So, I find myself coming back to the question of where evil fits into my current concept of God even though I have a nonpersonal understanding of God. The problem of evil, of which the Holocaust is a radical example, is a very central human question. To some extent it parallels or is analogous to feminism. We can’t let go of these issues, but we always come back to them in new ways.

Does the systematic reflection on evil enable you to actually confront the existence of evil? Isn’t the existence of evil something that you have to come to terms with rather than theorize? interview with judith plaskow 135

Well, of course, but it is the very existence of evil that compels us to ask ourselves what our responsibility is in relation to evil. Theorizing about evil emerges out of the awareness that people can choose to do evil and that there are evil institutions. The praxis question, namely, the ethical question, is the most fundamental aspect of reflection about evil. This ethical dimension, in turn, is intertwined with our assumptions about God, a topic which I have debated with Carol Christ for over three decades. It matters whether you think of God as completely good, or not, because that assumption makes a difference in your relationship with evil in the world including the evil that exists in yourself. Evil is part of us and it will never go away.

The medieval philosophers saw evil as an aspect of materiality. Do you see a connection between evil and matter?

No, I see matter as ethically neutral. Of course, if one sees it as fundamentally evil, as opposed to neutral, it will have radical implications for one’s understanding of the world. I do think that one’s attitudes towards evil and evil in the world have implications for how we see and experience the world, the body, ourselves, other people who we might define as evil. And at the same time, this doesn’t address the more fundamental ethical question, “What do I do”?

How do you define evil?

I would define evil as that which is destructive of or undermines human flourishing and the flourishing of the biosphere. I find the traditional distinction between natural and moral evil both problematic and compelling. Certain types of illness and natural disaster are destructive of human flourishing but are different from evils that are willed. Of course, as we change the environment more and more, the distinction between natural and moral evil becomes less clear.

This answer, however, makes you very vulnerable to the critique of traditionalists who say that homosexuality is evil because it undermines human flourishing, since human flourishing depends on reproduction. How would you address this challenge? Does theorizing about evil really address the existence of evil? For example, poverty is an evil, 136 interview with judith plaskow but what do we do about poverty in order to deal with this social evil? It all depends how we frame evil (especially social or moral evil) in relationship to other values (e.g., equality or justice).

Not every evil has to do with the question of social justice. For example, illness is different from poverty, although some illnesses are related to poverty. In some cases, evil is related to injustice, but not all evil pertains to justice. On the other hand, many evils, such as racism, sexism, economic inequality, homophobia, and so on are structural—they are built into the institutions of our society. Addressing structural evil is the central challenge in creating a more just society.

How shall we deal with evil persons? One way is to explain it psychologically by reference to traumatic experiences in early life or more generally to the lack of love.

Right, right. I agree.

What if the propensity to inflict evil is the result of a chemical imbalance in the brain that can be fixed with medication? In this regard an evil person is a kind of pathology, which raises the question of responsibility. Perhaps pathological persons are not responsible for their chemical makeup, but they have a responsibility to take the pill that mitigates their behavior toward others. Right?

Even if evil individuals are the result of chemical imbalance, it is still worth philosophizing about evil. Furthermore, thinking about evil makes us more aware of real social problems, bridging the gap between theory and praxis. Theory and praxis should not be mutually exclusive. One can write a book about the problem of evil that deepens one’s social activism or the activism of others who are engaged on this issue.

This leads us back to the question of audience. To whom do you write and what do you want to happen as a result of your writing?

I almost never write purely for an academic audience. I have written a few essays for a strictly academic audience, but the few times I’ve done that kind of writing, I’ve bored myself to death. So I’m writing for an intelligent, interview with judith plaskow 137 lay audience, primarily Jewish but not exclusively Jewish. And my hope is that my writing will lead people to act differently.

So for you, Jewish philosophy is ultimately about praxis, namely, about changing the way we live and act? Is that correct?

My Jewish philosophy is certainly about praxis, but I don’t know that Jewish philosophy is such for everybody else.

Do you see philosophizing, or theorizing, as a means to an end?

Yes. Theorizing about the problem of justice or injustice may lead one to act in a certain way, and action, in turn, changes the way we theorize. The relationship between theory and praxis is not linear, but dialectical, because it keeps going back and forth; there is a circular relationship between reflection and action, as Liberation theology has taught us. An example is the status of women in Judaism. We have theorized that the exclusion of women from the rabbinate is an injustice and we’ve acted to ordain women as rabbis. But then we also realized that ordination of women per se doesn’t really address the issue. There are other things that go much deeper and you can’t always envision the next important issue beyond a particular goal until you’ve achieved that goal and see what its limits and its possibilities are. Thus the relationship between reflection and action is dialectical and circular, a point recognized by the rabbinic understanding of the relationship between reflection and action. The two are complementary; they support each other. I’m a theologian because I’m interested in theoretical questions of meaning and purpose, the existence of God, and the existence of evil, but other people who are not theologians are interested in changing Jewish practice.

Where does education fit into your vision and what is your view on Jewish education as it exists today?

Well, my experience of Jewish education was not positive, and I hope Jewish education has changed but fear it has not. My Jewish education was very thin, it had no substance, it wasn’t interesting, it wasn’t challenging; on the whole it was pathetic. 138 interview with judith plaskow

Was it characteristic of the Reform movement or of that particular generation?

To some extent my education was characteristic of the Reform movement in the 1950s and early 1960s but I have a feeling that a lot of Hebrew schools share the same problem: the lack of intellectual challenge and substance. Obviously, there’s a limit to what you can learn meeting once a week, but you can engage kids in real questions and expose them to meaningful issues even if you see them only once a week.

Do Jewish theologians, philosophers, and ethicists have a role to play in this regard? Can they help improve Jewish education?

Yes. Jewish thinkers can get young Jews interested in Judaism as an intellectual tradition and challenge them to be more reflective. The work of the philosopher is ultimately an educational project.

Thank you so much for taking the time to converse with us. It was a most enjoyable conversation that explored feminism, theology, justice, social activism, and education. SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Authored Books

1. Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women’s Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980. 2. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990. German edition, 1992; Dutch edition, 1992. 3. The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005.

Edited Volumes

4. (With Joan Arnold Romero) Women and Religion: 1972. Missoula, MT: American Academy of Religion, 1972. Revised edition, Missoula, MT: AAR and the Scholars Press, 1974. 5. (With Carol P. Christ) Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979. Japanese edition, 1982. Korean edition, 2011. 6. (With Carol P. Christ) Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1989.

Essays

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