RABBIS' WIVES:
BEHRMANN, JOAN
RABBIS' WIVES: The Case of the Shrinking Pedestal JOAN BEHRMANN In Marlene Schwartz's sunny kitchen, the breakfast bacon simmers on the stove next to a refrigerator where a tattered headline, torn...
...Women marry men who decide they want to be rabbis — and their wives receive no call, study at no seminary...
...Night meetings, weekends of services, congregational simchas, retreats, leave little time for family...
...Part of the congregation calls him rabbi, and part calls him by his first name...
...Her husband's freewheeling ways have occasioned much criticism in his community, and triggered a split-off by dissidents who formed a new congregation...
...They quarrel over contracts, mispronounce words, leave out yahrzeits, forget to visit the sick, have affairs, even divorce...
...In her mid-fifties, she is no revolutionary...
...Both Marlene and her husband are secure enough in their relationship to allow for give-and-take, compromise and conciliation...
...Will he wear a beard and a long coat and look peculiar when my parents visit...
...He doesn't speak from the bimah, he dresses informally, he closes his eyes and davens in a Reform temple...
...On one hand, Anne loves the prestige, the extra consideration and concern she receives as the rabbi's wife...
...In most congregations there are fights about mixed seating, but this is not central...
...II_ When the winds of change blow, it may be easier to stay where you are than to move forward...
...Marlene puts it more bluntly, "Hearing 'woman of valor' makes me want to throw up...
...In the social sphere, "I determine what I do," she says...
...Anne occasionally allows herself a flash of bitterness...
...Nobody really chooses to be a rabbi's wife...
...I try to show that I'm human . . . some people like that and some distance themselves...
...And then there's the time at home when, closeted with books, the rabbi is studying, or thinking, or perhaps, escaping...
...For the aggressive, competitive Jewish woman who happens to be married to a rabbi, there's a lot of reining-in...
...They were predisposed to love him...
...Yet she says, "I do not hold office in the temple...
...Marlene, the wife of a Reform rabbi, giggles...
...Women will someday create certain symbolic gestures that are meaningful to them, but the meaning has to be intrinsic...
...What's really wrong is the lack of Torah training for women...
...There was too little theory, too much practice," she says...
...They don't have the power over the rabbi that they once had...
...The headline reads, "Restrictions Ease for Clergymen's Wives...
...His" wife...
...Janet has a high opinion of her husband as a spiritual leader...
...These were all family decisions, according to Janet, arrived at after much discussion, with the mutual goal of protecting the little time they have as a family...
...Despite her years of experience as a rabbi's wife, Anne finds it hard to deal with the loneliness she feels...
...Men have a minyan, they daven, they wear tallit and t'fillin, we want to do it too...
...She attends services every Friday night, although she admits there are times she'd rather stay home, "but I enjoy hearing him...
...In 33 years, Anne has learned the art of restraint, and now limits herself to areas where she and her husband will not compete...
...But beyond the relationship between rebbitzin and congregation is a still more basic pairing to which she must attune...
...When we were in a small community, we had more of a marriage," she says...
...Solutions come with time," she adds...
...and with the soft-voiced women who want to see the rabbi for a private talk...
...I confused it with Chanukah...
...Even an aliyah — I don't want that...
...And then there are nameless women, rabbis' wives whose characteristics of wit, shrewdness or talkativeness were used to make a Talmudic point...
...Anne, married to a Conservative rabbi for more than 30 years, found it more comfortable to share her husband's life than to make her own...
...I won't make 10 calls to find out if everyone's wearing a long dress...
...of her life where she consciously plays the role of "rabbi's wife," Janet thinks a moment, and then says, "OK, you can't be mean to people...
...The wife of Rabbi Akiva, the famous Rachel who sacrificed so that her husband could study...
...Later there was a lot of intermarriage in that congregation — I wonder if I contributed to it...
...Pressed to find some small aspect Their rabbinic "call" may feed into a natural arrogance that makes even a simple statement seem like the eleventh commandment...
...Among the Orthodox, women find it quite likely that they will marry a rabbi, since so many of their crowd, the group that they grew up with, become ordained...
...I'm resentful of time," she says, "particularly when he's so involved...
...Brave words — or bravado...
...Yet almost all — 89 percent — thought their husbands enjoyed their work, and even more — 94 percent — saw their husbands as generally appreciated by most who knew them...
...Adding to her lot, she lives with a man whose call to the rabbinate is a special kind of ego-gratification...
...A group of Reform rabbis' wives were once asked if they would like their husbands to choose the rabbinate — "if they had to do it all over again...
...But she's read much of the current literature, and her comment is, "I never find the problems raised are central to the basic issues...
...Marlene was established in her own college teaching career long before she met her husband...
...But Marlene is not typical, and it took time, and thought, and some therapy, to get where she is today — "semi-liberated" and able to laugh at herself...
...My own focal point is in the world of ideas...
...It may reflect on us as a couple...
...We have almost 600 families and they expect him to be clairvoyant about illnesses . .. ." When she first met her husband-to-be at a summer camp, Anne thought it was "amusing" that he planned to be a rabbi...
...In the early years of her marriage, Anne had a tendency, she says, to involve herself too much in her husband's work...
...Five hundred families in her town know to the penny how much her husband makes, how much of that is taxable income and how much is parsonage allowance...
...Sometimes at night, when my husband is at a meeting and after the children are asleep, I go downstairs to my darkroom and work...
...In her early fifties, she's caught in the most difficult generation for American Jewish women — born too late to be a true partner to her husband — born too soon, now too settled to feel part of the new feminism...
...Much of their social life is tied up with a group of people who, by chance, happen to be their congregants...
...On the other hand, she chafes at what she feels is unjust criticism heaped upon her husband...
...He loves being a rabbi...
...They don't know how to talk to us...
...As the wife of a rabbi, Marlene's Jewish-woman dilemma is intensified...
...We get grandiose ideas about women in the minyan and about women davening, but these, too, are peripheral matters...
...I'm living next to a Holy Man...
...This suited Janet, who turns a cool eye on ceremony...
...That point is a milestone along a road that leads from biblical days, back through the years of being what Rabbi Stanley Davids calls a "social schizophrenic — elevated to the loftiest heights by law and custom, and simultaneously bitterly degraded by innuendo and by mindless statutes...
...I think I'm really proud of my husband...
...I stop and talk in the supermarket to people that I might not — I guess we all accommodate in some way...
...Yet even Hannah has been radicalized to some degree by the climate for change...
...Now he's blooming again...
...It's so quiet there...
...We have talented, able people whose position I would be replacing...
...If they are Orthodox (or Conservative, for some) they must live within walking distance of their shul...
...He has "his" congregation, "his" temple, "his" calling...
...And little Janet, wife of the radical Reformer, says, "I don't know what it would be like to be married to someone else...
...Caught in a self-made trap, she enjoys being asked to sit at the head table at a temple affair, but doesn't want to lead the hamotzi in payment...
...I'm part of a team, but I'm the vice-president...
...People have so many expectations of him...
...In circles where the rabbi is revered, a rebbitzin must keep a tight hold on her sense of reality...
...Not only are they pushing — and being pushed — by the women's movement into a new feminist consciousness, but they are also attempting to deal Jewishly with their new awareness...
...Janet and her husband don't attend any bar or bat mitzvah social affairs...
...With an excellent background in both Judaic and secular studies, Hannah at first did graduate work in counseling and guidance, but didn't enjoy it...
...Traditionally, the rabbi's wife, like other Jewish women, had permission to be part of the material world while being denied the spiritual one...
...If there's a luncheon after services, from 1 to 5, they may stop by at 5:15, in their jeans...
...Says Marlene, "He wilted during the years he was not with a congregation...
...it would be different...
...My God, they'll be praying and carrying on late at night...
...Barbara, tall, cool, sophisticated, with an executive manner and a wardrobe to match, runs a large household for her Reform rabbi husband while studying for a master's degree in business administration...
...the Baal Shem Tov's wife, who freed her husband to pray...
...Rabbi and Synagogue in Reform Judaism, Theodore I. Lenn, 1972...
...With all her complaints, Anne, too, says, "My husband wouldn't be happy doing anything else...
...Reading back through commentaries on Jewish history, one finds the same two or three names, over and over, out of a genealogy of thousands upon thousands...
...For Conservative or Reform women — or converts — the notion that one's husband-to-be wants to become a rabbi may be amusing — or terrifying...
...VI Like many professionals, rabbis are away from home a good deal...
...They may live with the security of a lifetime contract, or they may wait each year, tension rising, for negotiation of their livelihood...
...What's bothering Marlene goes beyond the malaise that's afflicting Jewish women of every age and temperament...
...They expect him to be a terrific pastor, to be socially at ease, to be great with the youth groups...
...Rabbi Meir's wife Bruria, who wished to spare her husband inconvenience...
...Her husband is a rabbi, with all the mysticism — or skepticism — her background brings to that fact...
...50 MOMENT DECEMBER 1975 "After we were married, I was forced to teach Sunday School right away...
...Luckily for her, the pedestal has shrunk...
...Although they may argue over how to spend their time — "I don't even know the kid and he wants me to go to the bar mitzvah" — in basic ways Marlene knows she is her own person...
...If given full sway, I would be taking over...
...If I thought he was a shmegege...
...Marlene Schwartz's husband left the pulpit for four years to try counseling...
...When a new neighbor asks Marlene Schwartz what her husband does for a living, and Marlene says, "He's a rabbi," and the neighbor says, "You're kidding," what does that really mean...
...I put it there as a joke," she explains, "because I can't imagine anything I wouldn't be allowed to do...
...Here some women who have been touched by the new Jewish feminism feel threatened enough to attempt to justify their beliefs...
...I had never observed the holidays, except for Passover...
...V Weighty as some of these issues may seem at the time, they become trivial compared to the gut struggles going on within Orthodoxy...
...I carry it off...
...This is the fodder of which our stereotypes are made — the saintly rebbitzin poring over the household accounts while her equally saintly husband is at the shul, poring over Torah...
...Still, Anne sums up her career and her life — "I have received total fulfillment through my husband," she declares...
...He, however, was firm in his direction...
...But rather than brazen it out, she moves her lips at the appropriate times during the prayer service, and has learned enough of the right syllables of the Kaddish to fake it convincingly...
...Now immersed in working for her doctorate in philosophy, Hannah has been doing some thinking about the role of Jewish women...
...She must deal with the member of the board of trustees who screams over the phone that her husband is finished — "Finished...
...It's your husband's major ego-satisfaction...
...Janet wasn't threatened...
...As one wife says sharply, "If 500 families thought your husband were God, and you were going to bed with God, wouldn't you need a sense of humor...
...She writes plays for the temple sisterhood, helps her husband with children's services, does book reviews...
...The Zohar made it clear, "The chief influence transforming a man's house into his home is his wife...
...What makes Anne tick...
...If you go to one, you have to go to all," she feels...
...Their rabbinic "call" may feed into a natural arrogance that makes even a simple statement seem like the eleventh commandment...
...She knows where she stands...
...I'm afraid to get too close, afraid to show weakness...
...I had to learn that certain areas were in his purview, but it was very hard to restrain myself...
...Asked to make the hamotzi or a benediction, Janet refuses — "I don't have any golden touch with God She won't sit at the head table at a temple function — "That's an archaic form of respect...
...This, rather than ceremony, is my area of greatest need...
...The central issue is that women feel a lack of symbolic identification with Judaism...
...Unfortunately, women are tuned to men's standards, Hannah believes...
...III_ Thirty years younger is tiny, bespectacled Janet...
...Just because I'm married to a rabbi," she says, "why should they expect me to know anything...
...You'd really be in trouble...
...Their small congregation never before had a rabbi, and nobody had any expectations of her...
...Her children fall under the same scrutiny, as do her dinner parties and her clothes...
...But today, the options are many, the choices harder, and the women's movement has affected even the most insulated...
...RABBIS' WIVES: The Case of the Shrinking Pedestal JOAN BEHRMANN In Marlene Schwartz's sunny kitchen, the breakfast bacon simmers on the stove next to a refrigerator where a tattered headline, torn out of The New York Times, is held by a magnet clip...
...Yet she admits that this is the first year she's allowed herself to wear pants to their suburban temple...
...I wondered, how can anyone be married to a rabbi and think the whole thing is garbage...
...In the glossy new Encyclopedia Judaica, there is no entry under "rebbitzin...
...It's in the outside world, with non-Jews, that the stereotype is at work...
...In younger congregations, people are more savvy about individuals...
...A knowledgeable Jew of Orthodox parentage, Barbara has carved out her own area, leading discussion groups and representing her sisterhood on women's issues...
...I am sick of that kind of stuff...
...Not for the Schwartzes...
...One Conservative rabbi's wife had such horrible memories of her own childhood rabbi's locked-in spouse that she begged her husband, "Do you have to be a rabbi...
...I think congregations are changing," she says...
...Congregations now know their rabbis as men who are all too human...
...Not wanting to keep kashrut, his wife turned to vegetarianism as a compromise with which she felt comfortable...
...At a NEFTS biennial, Rabbi Davids told the assembled sisterhood ladies that his wife had warned him, "For God's sake, don't talk to us about Sarah and Deborah and Ruth and Esther...
...Doing this, she says, "I get the accolades I need that I wouldn't get on the outside...
...In 1975, Orthodox rebbitzins study for their doctorates and begin to question visits to the mikvah...
...It was allowable to support a husband studying in a yeshivah, while keeping the light of Judaism burning at home — but the world of study was reserved for men...
...Anne calls herself a "good amateur...
...other women have initiated new rituals to celebrate the birth of a daughter...
...The New York Times, April 21, 1975...
...Only half — 53 percent, to be exact — said they would...
...Married while her husband was still at seminary in Cincinnati, Janet remembers thinking, "At HUC a majority of the wives were so turned off by the services...
...He tries to break down old-fashioned ideas...
...She is watched as he is, discussed, criticized...
...She finds it unacceptable that many of her "Just because I'm married to a rabbi why should they expect me to know anything?' sisters are not allowed to read from the Torah or be part of a minyan...
...I find an invisible barrier between myself and the women in the congregation," she says...
...Because of this, some people are afraid of us...
...Hannah is a brilliant woman, mother of five, wife of an Orthodox rabbi...
...Born to a family of agnostics, she had no Joan Behrmann is a free-lance writer and teacher of journalism at Boston University...
...IV A community may demand much or little of its rebbitzin, and in turn, a rebbitzin may heed those demands, or ignore them...
...I always have studied, but I would have liked to learn more G'marah...
...I am not an equal," she says...
...She must tread softly in any areas which might be considered his prerogatives, since most rabbinic families have room for only one star...
...But this stuff of legend is scarcely enough for the Jewish woman of the 'Seventies...
...Janet explains that her husband feels as she does, preferring that others have the experience of reciting the blessings...
...Halachah is not that clear on many points...
...Marlene would like her friends to think of her as liberated...
...Putting the rabbi on a pedestal, as some congregations still do, affords the rebbitzin an opportunity to climb right up there with him...
...The only surprise comes if one's affianced decides to take up the rabbinate as his life's work...
...Their salaries, while higher than those of most clergymen, are not of a rank with other professionals in the congregation...
...Judaic training and never learned Hebrew...
...Other female members of her husband's congregation have done so for several years...
...After years of child-rearing, she's now free to point toward a career in management...
...I'm right...
...Marlene agrees with the Jewish feminists who decry the myth that women are honored and important in Jewish life...
...Now that we're in suburbia, people sit back and say 'prove yourself — and I try to placate...
...Anne goes to all bar mitzvahs and weddings to which the couple is invited, not wanting to offend a congregant...
...I had no idea what it meant to be a rebbitzin," she recalls...
...The Sh'chinah will not forsake his house if his wife keeps it according to the ways of Israel...
...Can't you be anything else...
...He takes Mondays off now — and if someone dies on a Sunday, I'm angry...
Vol. 1 • December 1975 • No. 5
