Preisand Prejudice

...It is on this point that American and Jewish traditions part company...

...In more than a few instances, rabbis have taken advantage of their newly discovered (or recovered) charms...

...The Nazi Holocaust put an end to the messianic illusions that the nineteenth century had aroused and that the melting-pot ideals of turn-of-the-century America had seemed to reinforce...

...She is the perfect first woman rabbi...

...Reform Judaism began to regret some of the violence with which it had earlier repudiated ethnicity and tradition...

...copyright, Ohio State University Press, 1978...

...Artists, poets, and musicians have always been allowed emotionality, of course, but at the risk of having considerably greater doubt cast upon their manhood than have clergymen...

...and for still another group the event may prove disastrous...

...magna cum laude, teacher of creative arts...

...Then, the folklife of Jewish tradition includes what might be characterized as a genuine fear of a woman's innate power...

...They are supposed to find sex dirty and embarrassing...

...There were no women ordained as rabbis—Conservative, Orthodox, or Reform—before June 1973...

...It is fairly easy to surmise how unpleasant it is to learn that, by aspiring to what has been historically the most desirable Jewish male role, one has done so at the expense of one's American masculine image...

...If it is true that members of Jewish women's organizations fear the aspects of Women's Liberation that relate most poignantly to their own lives, wherein lies their obvious affection for the woman rabbi...

...What a woman rabbi represents within Reform is an impulse toward novelty, democracy, and timeliness...

...David Goldberg and no longer Alice Schwartz, B.A...

...There is evidence, I believe, that as yet Jews have not entirely accepted American sexual role assignations...

...Her existence provides the Jewish public with the notion that its religious institutions are changing to meet the needs of which Jewish parents are so painfully aware...

...It never attempted to push her on the Jewish public, nor was she given nearly as much institutional publicity as had been lavished in the past on a Japanese candidate for the Reform rabbinate...

...It is precisely within the context of their rejection of militant Women's Lib that Rabbi Sally's tremendous appeal finds its center...

...In other words, a Jewish institution would not exclude a Jewish physician or lawyer from membership on its board of directors merely because he publicly flaunted religious norms...

...From its founding until World War II, Reform could be certain that emphasis on the rule of reason and universalism and a corresponding de-emphasis on emotionalism and particularism represented the direction in which all intelligent Americans were heading...

...In fact, to this day seminaries are among the few graduate or professional schools that demand rigorous psychiatric and psychological screening of their applicants, which grew out of a fear on the part of laymen that seminaries were magnets for homosexuals...

...There is, however, another reason for their increasing anxiety about their children, because they can no longer guarantee that proffered inducements will lure their children back to the values of the parental institutions after a few wild oat sowing years...

...It was in this period of exuberance and confidence that Reform went on record in favor not only of the full equality of women, but even of the logical outcome of such equality, a woman rabbi...

...She is feminine without being coquettish, and she in no way inspires male disclaimers as to her sexual identity...

...It is clear, we have seen, that there is a growing anxiety on the part of parents that their children are being lost to the Jewish community...

...Within one generation, for example, Jewish family size shrank from an economically burdensome 7 or 8 children to the much more manageable 2.2 children of the upper-middle class...

...On the contrary, she viewed history as an obstacle to her calling...

...simultaneously, however, she and other women candidates for the rabbinate call attention to the fact that Reform Judaism is not simply a less authoritarian version of traditional Judaism (the image Reform would like to project in Israel...

...Who, the American male layman must ask himself, would want to do woman's work if not a "queer...

...It is, to a large degree, similar to Reform's internal struggle over mixed marriages, the rites of conversion, and other points of divergence between Reform and the other branches of Judaism...

...For a brief period in these women's lives, they were the ones with the careers, while their husbands confronted the sometimes degrading anonymity of graduate and professional school...

...Jews, including non-Reform Jews, simply don't know what Reform rabbis should do, for they fear that refusing to give the blessing of Judaism to a child who is marrying a non-Jew will break what they know to be at best a tenuous tie to the Jewish group...

...What do clergymen do...

...If the participation of Jewish males in the interpretative professions such as the arts and literature is any indication, it appears that conflicts of sexual identity are not produced in Jewish males around the linkage of emotionality with femininity...

...It is from within the ranks of Reform Judaism that one would have expected the first woman rabbi to emerge, as indeed she has...

...Among the traits American folk wisdom has ascribed to women are emotionality, mercy, sensitivity, intuitive-ness, and the prerogative to be inconsistent ("a woman has the right to change her mind...

...All rights reserved godsend to the media...

...Now, after Auschwitz, Jews everywhere began to see themselves as survivors rather than as Elijahs announcing the imminent arrival of the Messiah...

...Clergymen have for a long time been the only American males permitted to wear vestments, robes, and cassocks and to manifest emotional responses to situations and to such so-called feminine things as poetry without having their masculinity called into question...

...They work with small children...

...By 1971 its seminary was enlarging its new Jerusalem branch to accommodate the requirement that all Reform rabbinical students spend their first year of study in Israel...

...It may also partially account for the tremendous ambivalence she has towards her children...

...Failure as a mother would mean yet another jolt to her identity...

...In other words, they would rather have the rabbi write poetry than be a tennis champion, and they would prefer him to blush at off-color jokes rather than attempt to top them—even though they themselves have come to view poetry and sexual diffidence as somehow unmasculine...

...This is one reason why the Reform rabbinate might view its newest achievement, Rabbi Sally, as something of a mixed blessing...

...2) the emergence among committed Reform Jews of a strong drive toward ethnic identification, centered around the State of Israel...

...Part of this anxiety stems from the visible increase in the rate of mixed marriages, with or without conversion...

...The appearance of a woman rabbi is thus an anomaly...

...To begin with, women are accorded a legal status comparable to that of Jewish slaves and minors...

...She can by her very presence arouse a male and (at the least) take his mind off his sacred obligations, if not lead him to even greater sins...

...While she recognized the historic significance of her action, she could never be faulted for selecting her career on the basis of this significance...

...They are not even supposed to know about it...

...How much more abrupt, then, must be their encounter with the realities of suburban life...

...Others, however, will see nothing problematic in the emergence of a woman rabbi...

...Finally, there is the strong possibility that the very fact that there have been no women rabbis before in America is what non-Orthodox American Jews regard as the anomaly...

...It was the woman who was supposed to be pragmatic, unro-mantic, functionally illiterate...

...It took synagogues no more than one generation to acquire clean-shaven English-speaking rabbis and decorous religious services that would suit the sense of propriety of an Episcopal deacon...

...Being treated as a lady is threatening to the new male rabbi and creates an identity conflict that he may attempt to resolve, but only in counterproductive ways...

...In addition, her appearance is neither that of a Gloria Steinern nor that of one who eschews the feminine role...

...They are well educated...

...Although Jewish women are by Jewish law exempt from the obligation to obey commandments that require a fixed time for their performance, there is no legal obstacle to a woman's carrying out any commandment she so chooses...

...the men were to be the dreamers, the writers, and even the teachers of very small children...

...They visit the sick...

...She has the power to lead even the most pious Jewish male astray...

...Rabbi Preisand, then, from the point of view of a group hesitant to confront the implications of Women's Liberation for their own lives, is the perfect instrumentality for acting out in a nonthreatening way whatever sympathies these women might feel for Women's Liberation...

...In male-dominated America, all of the above activities are thought to be the activities of women, especially of ladies...

...Although this coincidence between an individual's sacred calling and historical reality is, Rabbi Preisand has insisted, sheer accident, it is certainly a happy accident both for the media and, I believe, for Jewish organization women...

...There is no clear Jewish legal argument against a woman's becoming even an Orthodox rabbi (unless one accepts the highly dubious dictum that minhag has halachic force...

...One other characteristic, although it is not in the same category as the above, should be considered: the right to wear regularly skirt-like garments and to don colors in the pursuit of one's livelihood...

...It is only males a woman can render impure, not the ritual objects that a rabbi handles...

...On the other hand, to Jewish clergymen who for the first time have found their masculinity impugned by their career choice, die actual existence of a woman rabbi may serve once and for all to confirm what they have often been warned: that being a rabbi is no job for a Jewish boy...

...It is likely that, in a country that has feminized the clerical role, the actual emergence of a female rabbi represents a very minor shift from mental image to physical reality...

...Certainly this is true of women who, typical of the pattern in this country in the fifties and early sixties, got married either while in college or immediately thereafter and then embarked on careers, ostensibly to support the family while the husbands prepared for a profession...

...Indeed, responses that the first woman rabbi evokes are marvelous: On the one hand, she is hailed by the media and by large numbers of American Jews as a truly remarkable individual...

...This, of course, imposes on her children a burden that makes her role as a mother potentially explosive...

...As early as the 1930's, it had begun abandoning its objections to Jewish nationalism and searching for ways to move back into what it now felt was normative Judaism...

...Some of its leaders were urging the CCAR (Central Conference of American Rabbis) to repress colleagues willing to officiate at mixed marriages...

...This is a difficult role for Reform to play, and most Reform rabbis would just as soon not be reminded that Reform is expected to play it...

...If it is true that there is a great deal of suppressed resentment toward the social position that Jewish women find themselves wedded to, and if this social position is a by-product of their being Jewish, then to see the rabbinate—that bastion of Jewishness and Jewish male supremacy—successfully stormed should give Jewish women some vicarious feeling of triumph...

...The occasional masculine "acting out" associated with rabbis probably can be traced to this conflict...

...It is fairly easy to see the relationship between the first two points and the ambivalence of the Reform rabbinate to Rabbi Preisand...

...Therefore, the classic argument against calling a woman up to the Torah is not that the law denies them such an honor, but rather that strangers might assume that the synagogue did not have enough learned men present to call up to the Torah...

...Jewish cowboys, though surely they exist, remain hard to imagine, not because Jews are incapable of getting along in the outdoors, but because the image of the cowboy as male par excellence is one of insen-sitivity and lack of emotion...

...Therefore, rather than confront the seriousness of the situation and attempt to come to grips with the depth of the problem, they fall back on the old solutions...

...Parents might have had to promise their daughter a trip to Europe to get her to go through with her confirmation, or they may have had to pay their son-in-law's tuition to get him to become their son-in-law rather than their daughter's roommate, but this procedure worked...

...Even the fact that menstruation makes a woman a source of impurity is no obstacle to her becoming a rabbi...

...Although a son might choose not to go into his father's scrap business, he could be counted on to affiliate with Jewish institutions modified to suit third rather than second-generation Jewish needs...

...Rabbis who see it as their responsibility to normalize the position of Reform within the framework of non-Orthodox but people-centered Judaism will tend to be uncomfortable with a woman rabbi...

...However, to mistake enthusiasm for self-congratulation and newsworthiness for sincere admiration is to underestimate the meaning that the existence of woman rabbis holds for organized Jewish womanhood...

...PREISAND PREJUDICE NORMAN MIRSKY Rabbi Sally Preisand's ordination by President Alfred Gottschalk of the Hebrew Union College— Jewish Institute of Religion at Cincinnati, in June 1973, generated more interest by the mass media in a Jewish clerical leader than had ever been the case before—an index to the impact the first American female rabbi might have on the American Jewish community...

...The association of sensitivity, emotionality, and impracticality with femininity—along with the association of femininity with lack of interest in sexual matters—is foreign to traditional Jewish custom...

...Then, because Sally Preisand's decision to become a rabbi came before Women's Liberation took shape as a movement, she was able to ignore any broader implications...

...Thus, whereas the traits associated with Christian clergymen are those that put the clergyman in conflict with the norms of masculine behavior among Americans, these same traits pose a minimal threat to a rabbi's sexual security...

...on the other hand, she is treated by Reform officialdom and in particular by her fellow students with an indifference bordering on diffidence...

...Further, a rabbi, though an expert in Jewish law and lore, is no administrator of sacraments...

...and even for clergy permitted these characteristics (probably because they need by definition to be able to interpret literature and to be receptive to the spirit) there is no little doubt cast upon their manliness...

...It may be useful to place the ordination of the first woman in the context of the American Jewish religious scene...

...Further, Rabbi Preisand has manifested so deep a commitment to other aspects of the Jewish tradition that whatever damage she has done to the precedents of tradition might even cause her some inner conflict...

...They may be well treated and even respected, but in status they are always inferior to adult Jewish males...

...The Reform movement in America is currently in the throes of a severe identity crisis that is beyond its control: (1) the collapse of the ideology of progress, with its concomitant belief in the triumph of universalism over particularism among American Jews...

...An issue of the CCAR Journal carried an article by no less a classical Reform liberal than Leon I. Feuer calling for a halt to criticism by American Reform rabbis of social problems in Israel—hardly a prophetic stance...

...But different groups within American Jewry greet Rabbi Preisand's ordination in very different ways...

...The only prerogative that the tradition may be able to deny a woman rabbi is that of validating marriage contracts...

...Yet, if we examine the literature of Women's Liberation in the light of what we know to be the socioeconomic status of Jewish organization women, the apparent lack of interest in Women's Lib is not so surprising...

...Reform in America is the branch of Judaism expected to help Jews adjust most readily and effectively to the tensions of being Jewish and American...

...and she was received with as much enthusiasm by the sisterhoods of Conservative congregations as by their Reform counterparts...

...but he is often dismayed to discover that some of his congregants find this behavior inconsistent with his career and make it known that they want the rabbi to resolve this inconsistency by abandoning precisely those activities that are the prerogatives of the American male...

...Jewish parents turn to their rabbis for help, but their rabbis are helpless because they are more a part of the problem than a part of the solution...

...Later on, it is not so uncommon for a rabbi to be surprised to learn that he is actually an object of sexual desire for his female congregants...

...They talk about love...

...To the extent, however, that these "macho" values have infiltrated Jewish norms of masculinity and femininity, the rabbi does suffer considerable discomfort...

...The American notion is that what a clergyman does is really woman's work that only by historical accident has become the province of men...

...She is a person with a calling...

...and (3) the emergence of the counterculture...

...Jewish women are as proud of producing a pioneer, in a period when everyone is women's rights conscious, as Jewish men would have been had there been a Jewish astronaut when America was space conscious...

...They put on flowing robes...

...They preach (contrast the ever verbal preacher with Gary Cooper or John Wayne...

...Small wonder, then, that Jewish organization women appear uninterested in contact with the more strident exponents of Women's Liberation...

...they are mere decorations when they choose to officiate, so that, halachically, even the loss of this prerogative need not mean much to a woman rabbi...

...This stems undoubtedly from a biased suspicion of priestly celibacy...

...The model man, the rabbi, was to embody these traits to an even greater degree than his lay counterpart...

...How much more difficult must be their acceptance of the relative anonymity of being a housewife...

...she was given financial assistance in her pursuit of rabbinical studies by the B'nai B'rith Women, a group not known for espousing radical causes...

...They hire advertising firms to sell their image and point with pride to the fact that Judaism is so "with it," so much in tune with the times, that there is even a woman rabbi...

...She is a heroine to nearly every non-Orthodox Jewish women's organization...

...There are many instances in which student rabbis serving their first pulpits report a desire to dress in a deliberately "mod" fashion, use profanity publicly, and become raconteurs of dirty jokes...

...Third, although Preisand's fellow students, future Reform rabbis, may not have acted toward her with hostility, neither did they express any overt joy at seeing her fulfill her calling during their tenure as rabbinical students...

...If other Jews wished to join them, it would be on Reform's terms...

...Jews have not yet come to typify American machismo, and if the counterculture, with its devaluation of machismo, becomes embedded firmly enough into the American middle-class value system, they may never have to...

...As of this moment there are fewer women rabbis than there are people who have been to the moon...

...A young executive certainly would not be kept off the Jewish Center board because he raced speedboats on Saturday afternoon...

...Today even the less overtly materialistic rewards for good conduct—a college education, for example—seem hollow...

...These groups, a check through their program calendars of the last several years shows, have devoted surprising little attention to the Women's Liberation movement— and middle-class Jewish women are usually in the vanguard when it comes to collecting information...

...First, some background: It is not difficult to surmise why Rabbi Preisand has received so much publicity...

...It is interesting to speculate on the widespread enthusiasms that Jewish women's groups have demonstrated for the first woman rabbi...

...In short, there is no valid legal reason why heretofore no American women have been ordained even as Orthodox rabbis...

...these are rabbis whose openness to innovation makes them recognize that something must be done to fulfill a mandate that more and more Jews seem to be giving to the synagogue: Save our children...

...Accordingly, one would expect them to reserve room in their organizational schedules for speakers who represent the various Women's Liberation organizations...

...Surely, such a woman must have suffered some loss of self-esteem when once and for all she found herself Mrs...

...In order to make peace with their lives, they must rationalize the conflicts built into their identities—the academic and career competence that measured their success until age twenty-five or so and that of "good Jewish wife and mother" that must sustain them from the first child onward...

...There is a distinction, however, between the ambivalence felt by the Reform movement and the threat that a woman rabbi poses to the individual identities of rabbis...

...The World Union for Progressive Judaism, Reform's international arm, was moving its headquarters to Jerusalem...

...How is one to convince a person who has viewed the sunrise after taking mescaline or watched and heard the Who while stoned on marihuana that a rabbi's sermon or a temple choir is what a religious experience is all about...

...Jewish women, particularly those between the ages of twenty-five and forty, are those for whom the call to freedom might have the greatest intellectual appeal...

...If anything has been operative in her career as a rabbinical student and an ordained rabbi, it has been a deliberate effort to do nothing that might arouse whatever latent traditionalism or male chauvinism there may be at her seminary and her congregation...

...For example, the rabbi may see nothing unrabbinic in his desire to play sports, read poetry, listen to sexual jokes, and, while still unmarried, pursue eligible women...

...Given an American public that grows indifferent even to the second man on the moon, the first anything is something of a Norman Mirsky is Associate Professor of Sociology and Contemporary Jewish Studies at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles...

...She is, whatever pejorative connotations some might see in the word today, a lady...

...On the contrary, in certain Jewish communities where status was based on learning, nearly the opposite standards of judging masculine-feminine behavior were operative...

...They were encouraged throughout their academic careers, prior to their marriages, to compete with males and, probably to a greater extent than any group of females in history, to develop themselves as individuals...

...This, I believe, may account for some of the interest that makes the woman rabbi a celebrity...

...It is within this context that our theme of mixed blessing reasserts itself, this time in the guise of a woman rabbi...

...According to Jewish law, however, rabbis are not required as officiants at weddings...

...There is one group for whom the emergence of a woman rabbi is fortuitous—a much desired event...

...What I am suggesting, then, is that the assimilation of American Jews can, in part, be measured by the degree to which the masculine-feminine stereotype so integral to the conventional, Puritan-derived American way of life has been grafted onto the American Jewish psyche...

...This chapter is excerpted from Unorthodox Judaism by Norman Mirsky, which Ohio State University Press will publish in September...

...married women must nave their heads shaven and be kept isolated from men other than their husbands...

...Women, therefore, have to be segregated...

...When Reform was sure of the direction in which humanity was moving, it seized the image of a messianic era...

...There is, however, an even subtler reason for suspecting that the clergy would attract homosexuals...

...The objection to women rabbis stems, instead, from the social and psychological attitudes preserved by the tradition...

...Only the most gauche individual tells an obscene story in front of his clergyman...

...Still, this enthusiasm and excitement have not spread to the broader (male-dominated) Reform movement on which her pioneering activity has conferred distinction...

...American Jews have heretofore been able to hold their children for Jewish institutions through a combination of rapid adaptation and the colonial-ization of its more successful young adults...

...In America, of course, rabbis act as agents of the state at weddings, and there is nothing to prevent a woman from acting as an agent of the secular authorities...

...It would, however, be a great oversimplification to claim that the Reform movement has encouraged women to study for the rabbinate, and it would do even greater damage to the truth to suggest that only Reform Jews are enthusiastic about the ordination of "Rabbi Sally...

...These groups are American Jewish organizational women, the Reform establishment, and the American male rabbi...

...And, most important to our argument, they are not supposed to be interested in sex...

...This context—a rabbinate and a fairly large constituency of Jews seeking to strengthen ties with Jews everywhere, especially in Israel— cannot be ignored...

...Whereas all but a few psychological "hard hats" would argue against the view that there is such a thing as a biologically determined set of personality traits that are sex-linked, almost everyone would agree that, prior to the generation of the "flower children," Americans tended to characterize certain traits as masculine and others as feminine...

...for another group of American Jews, however, the ordination of a woman arouses ambivalence much more than enthusiasm...

...It is still somewhat amazing to find a Jewish hunter, for example...

...Most students know that schools do not educate, just as they know that churches and synagogues do not inspire spirituality...

...In addition, how is one to persuade young men and women who have lived in multiethnic and sexually liberated communes that a person cannot feel comfortable with any other than his "own kind...

...His work has appeared in Midstream, Judaism, The Reconstructionist and The Journal of the Academy of Religion...

...In fact, it is their very position in society that makes them most threatened by Women's Lib...

...The anxiety also accounts for the blurred message Jews are giving the rabbis with regard to their solemnizing marriages where one partner has not converted to Judaism (or, more recently, with regard to rabbinical participation in joint wedding ceremonies with Christian clergymen...

...First, although Reform Judaism has from its inception accorded women a legal status equal to that of men, it has been on record for half a century as being unopposed to women rabbis and has not hesitated to operate on the basis of its liberal, democratic impulses even when these clashed with tradition...

...They read poetry...

...Temporarily, the birth of a first child and the accolades given her as a mother by parents, husband, and synagogue might cause her to suppress the other socialization she has received...

...It may be that a woman rabbi is insignificant to all but her male counterparts...

...They are well-read...

...American Jewish adults have felt that, by accommodating themselves to American standards of success and by co-opting fashionable lifestyles, they would be able to lure their children back from wherever they might have strayed...

...Second, although the Hebrew Union College put no obstacles in Preisand's path when she was a student, it certainly made no special effort to call attention to her newsworthy ordination...

...The adults of the Jewish community felt that they knew how to manage whatever modifications were needed to ensure the loyalty of their children...

...They put on rock services once or twice a year...

...Jewish institutions, from the family to the synagogue, have been highly responsive to the needs of their members...

...What's more, Preisand's career as a candidate for ordination roughly coincided with the emergence of Women's Liberation as an object of American concern...