I've Had Nothing Yet So I Can't Take More
Adler, Rachel
"I'VE HAD NOTHING YET SO I CANT TAKE MORE" When the rabbi says Jews, does he mean all of us? Is the Covenant meant for Jewish women? RACHEL ADLER "Take some more tea," the March Hare said to...
...The feelings of alienation, otherness and exclusion described here are not peculiar to Orthodox women...
...pain of other committed Jewish women lies in the discrepancy between our internal and external realities...
...A man, reunited with his wife after both had been in concentration camps, discovered that she had been impressed into a Nazi army brothel...
...This is what is being affirmed in the oft-quoted morning blessings of the traditional prayerbook...
...I then cannot talk about God's goodness or God's holiness without talking about mine or about yours, because your face, too, is a place in the universe where I can see God...
...As a psychotherapist working with sexual abuse victims, I frequently see women recount, or in some way relive, their childhood sexual abuse, and I have never heard one compare the experience to putting her finger in her eye...
...The Sifre uses the g'zerah shavah to posit that, just as the phrase in verse 15 refers to witnesses, so does the one in verse 17, and since the word "two" is in the masculine in both places, witnessing is a masculine obligation...
...I would maintain that she was not considered to have covenanted...
...All he could do was use those categories to prove the woman's innocence...
...3. If the content of the tradition is in question, how will we retain our sense of commandedness, and how will we determine what we have been commanded...
...You mean you can't take less, "said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing...
...It is she who ceases to stand within a man's sacred circle...
...No Doors, No Guards: From Jewish Feminism to a New Judaism," Menorah 4, March 1983, pp...
...A modern case which is particularly striking was submitted to Rabbi Ephraim Oshry after the Second World War had ended...
...This paper was originally delivered at a conference of Chevra at the Brandeis-Bardin Institute, June 1983...
...Deborah's song, Mitzrayim and Y'tziat Mitzrayim, matzah, the journey-bread of a traveling woman...
...In it I have my tallit over my head, and I am hearing that voice and praying with it...
...You try to set that aside, to be caught up once more in the majesty of revelation, the thunder and lightning, the shofar, the flames, but you are jarred as the commandments are proclaimed, one after another, in the masculine singular, ending with the commandment not to covet a neighbor's property or livestock—including his wife...
...Both can be acquired through monetary purchase, through a purchase document and through a third method involving their use—for women intercourse and for slaves chazakah, which includes the performance of service...
...The problem of methodolatry cannot be dismissed as an "Orthodox problem" or even as a halachic problem...
...And I am standing in the main section of the shtiebl where I have in reality never set foot...
...My purpose here is not to do an exhaustive search of the tradition to prove whether or not women contract the covenant...
...It is a meta-halachic problem, touching all Jews who believe the tradition possesses some relevance to modern Jewish life...
...This is the area where women can most easily disrupt the careful codification of God and man, by behaving as if their bodies belonged to them rather than to the appropriate representative of the patriarchy...
...My favorite of the talmudic names for God is "HaMakom," "The Place...
...Tradition, Number 14, Fall 1973, P-19...
...We begin to ask, "Who are we, really...
...That is .what is so important about affirming that I am made in God's image...
...We did not participate in making the rules, nor were we there at the beginning of the party...
...Non-Jew, slave and woman are, in ascending order, the lower statuses of a hierarchy in which the supreme degree of Jewish-ness and hence of obligation, entitlement and enfranchisement belongs to the male Jew...
...These questions in turn beget other questions, propagations from the same family...
...Are women Jews...
...I am asking, "Are women Jews in the Bible...
...In its plain sense (p'shat), the verse clearly refers to litigation...
...RACHEL ADLER "Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice very earnestly...
...Rabbi Oshry wrote a beautiful and moving responsum in which he utilized the legal distinction between rape and seduction (a distinction that depends upon the woman's having resisted) to prove that the woman was permitted to her husband and to maintain that the woman was not to be disrespected for her victimization...
...The problem is not with the formulation of the question, nor with the inadequacies of my scholarship, although this is where the traditionalist will lay the blame...
...But when, on the Sabbath, I sit among women in my traditional shut and the rabbi speaks the word 'Jew,' I can be sure that he is not referring to me...
...But (accepting Eliade's contention that every ritual is a re-enactment of a primary event), the woman's purpose in being present this Shavuot morning must be to re-enact through this reading the first covenant of her people...
...A model of Jewish marriage and divorce in which men and women are equals could be constructed only by uprooting those entire categories of the tradition...
...Let us look for a moment at rabbinic Judaism's answer to my question, Are women Jews...
...His performance of the commandments is therefore motivated by duress...
...At a tea party where the rules are constant and have been assented to by all the guests, people can help themselves freely...
...The normative contractor of the covenant is the Jewish male...
...The exclusion of women from witnessing is tied by the Sifre to the verse, "And the two men who have the quarrel shall appear before the Lord and before the priests and magistrates" (Deuteronomy 19:17...
...Miriam's dancing...
...See her Beyond God the Father, Boston, 1974, pp...
...Saul Berman, in his excellent essay, "The Status of Women in Halakhic Judaism," explains: "In a legal system which is contract-oriented, the basic laws are those which assure the rights of individuals...
...An advantage women have is that they may be freed by the death of their husbands...
...Women and slaves are at the same level of obligation in Jewish law...
...The tradition's question regarding the case is whether the little girl's virginity is considered to have been destroyed, in which case the ketubah paid her would be only half that of a virgin...
...No one questioned the many men who were slave laborers for the Nazi munitions plants as to whether they had participated voluntarily or had been influenced by the extra cigarette ration...
...An advantage Canaanite slaves have is that they may be freed if the master does them grievous physical damage (an advantage an estimated 60,000 battered wives in Israel and uncounted others in the Diaspora would be happy to enjoy...
...Indeed, I do not think the tradition can answer such a question because it is outside the assumptions of the tradition and therefore outside its concern...
...As Heschel demonstrates, what feminism exposes is Judaism's unfinished adjustment to the relativism and pluralism of the post-Enlightenment world...
...God is the Place of the universe, but the universe is not God's place...
...Any wedding, for example, at which the groom says, "Behold, you are sanctified to me with this ring according to the law of Moses and Israel," and any divorce issued unilaterally by the husband or by a Bet Din in accordance with the rabbinic principle, Kol d'm'kadesh, ada'ata d'rabanan m'kadesh, v'afk'inhu rabanan I'kiddushin mineh (Anyone who marries does so with the consent of the rabbis, and the rabbis have cancelled his kiddushiri), is utilizing the categories of acquisition and manumission in which men are actors and women are their objects...
...nevertheless-^-given the physical disparities between grown men and little girls—penetration would occasion severe pain and, frequently, injury to a child...
...The orderly transfer of women and property from one patriarchal domain to another...
...At worst, we are only tantalized with the tea and bread-and-butter, while being confused, shamed and reproached for our ignorance...
...6. Recognizing that it is idolatrous and blasphemous to behave as if God were inherently masculine, how will we expand our God-language both for theology and for prayer so that both masculine and feminine words and metaphors will be used to name toward God...
...and, at the bottom, the woman...
...We have no appropriate ways of sanctifying the first menstruation of little girls or the event of childbirth for the woman who labored and bore the child...
...The questions about how women use their autonomy in harmony or disharmony with the law of God will center upon sexual behavior...
...Its first step is to establish that, since the phrase "who have the quarrel" obviously refers to litigants, the phrase "the two men shall appear [lit., stand]" would be superfluous unless it referred to witnesses...
...The talmudic source, Shevuot 30a, already has from its Mishnah the exclusion of women and must locate the scriptural source...
...We have no models of friendship between women or of mother-daughter relationships...
...It is most easily addressable by recourse to the halachah's exclusion of women from witnessing in rituals involving status transitions such as marriage, divorce and conversion as well as in matters of civil law...
...145-7...
...I, too, know what it is to be in exile, a stranger, an Other, in a land not my own...
...or "Are women named and treated as Jews in the life of the community...
...It is she who can be made sacred to man...
...I referred earlier to the distinction between data and non-data which is brought about by methodolatry...
...The entire area of rape is one in which women's questions differ considerably from men's...
...And then it is not I who am encountering God at all—it is an imaginary being, a dream person, the person who prayed in wholeness in the section of the shtiebl where she has in fact never set foot...
...The general rule is stated in Hagigah 4a: "Every precept which is obligatory on a woman is obligatory on a sfcwe...
...And because the text has excluded her, she is excluded again in this re-enactment and will be excluded over and over, year by year, every time she rises to hear this covenant read...
...Only upon his manumission does he become fully Jewish and eligible, at least theoretically, to help construct, testify concerning, or judge compliance with, the laws to which he is subject...
...My dilemma is that the very Judaism that gave me some names that truly reflect for me God's holiness and my own, and some frames for experience that truly reflect my spiritual experience, also can demand of me that I desert my place in order to encounter God in the place of man...
...At best, a jumble of crockery is being shoved aside to clear a place for us...
...But these questions are non-data...
...Halachically, women are a unique form of property...
...Let me explain the dilemma more clearly...
...Granted that in a culture where women were resigned to being possessed by men at will, they might not have felt the sense of outrage my clients feel...
...She, too, is subject to laws from whose specification and enforcement she is barred...
...Our earliest realizations are of our otherness...
...The problem is that women will never be validated as complete Jews—moral initiators independent of their fathers, brothers, husbands and brothers-in-law—by proofs from a tradition in which, as Jacob Neusner demonstrates, women's holiness is purely contextual, depending on whether they are in correct formal status vis-a-vis some man...
...But God and man—the latter through the documentary expression of his will and intention—possess the active power of sanctification...
...Since the assumption is that the child's hymen will grow back, the ruling is that she receives the full ketubah of a virgin...
...I, too, bear within me a ruined Temple and am always hoping to rebuild it...
...Their acquisition is most analogous to the acquisition of Canaanite slaves...
...And this way, madness lies...
...Can they be Conserved or Reformed or Reconstructed...
...2. What shall be our stance toward the method and categories of the tradition, seeing that they have precluded the equality of women and men...
...Imagine yourself, for example, a woman at a Shavuot service hearing the Torah reading in which the giving of the Torah is recorded...
...That pattern is reversed in a status-oriented legal system where the basic laws are those which assure the social interests through status conferral...
...The categories determine the questions asked...
...Since, if a woman has voluntarily had intercourse with another man, her husband is not permitted to live with her, the husband—inquiring whether she was presumed to have acquiesced to intercourse with Nazi soldiers during her incarceration— asked for a halachic decision...
...It is non-data...
...This is how we all—and I do not exempt myself—conceal and excuse the weaknesses and injustices of the tradition at the expense of people and principles it violates...
...do not go near a woman'" (Exodus 19:15...
...As Susannah Heschel remarks, "The crisis has not been brought on by feminism, but feminism clearly discloses the morbid condition of Judaism that has continued untreated throughout the modern period...
...In a methodola-trous system, the choice of problems to be addressed is determined by the method, rather than the method being shaped to address questions...
...I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone: "so I can't take more...
...The woman hearing the Torah reading is not there to study social organization in the ancient Middle East...
...Thus Torah, Mishnah, Gemara, codes and responsa pile up a huge body of information on some topics, while others lie invisible and silent outside the many texts...
...It establishes that I am a place where God is...
...4. How can we fashion a method that will systematically frame and name the Jewish experience of both men and women...
...Woman, Neusner explains, is central to the content of the code but not herself an actor in it...
...We have no models for viewing women as a sanctifying community...
...I never ask myself, "Am I, Rachel Adler, a Jew...
...For him 'Jew' means 'male Jew.' "When the rabbi speaks of women he uses the expression (a translation of a tender Yiddish phrase) 'Jewish daughter.' . . . 'Jew' defines a person seen in the light of a culture...
...You are following the preparations for the revelation when, suddenly, you are struck in the face with, "And he said to the people, 'Be ready for the third day...
...Neusner confirms this in his essay on Seder Nashim in The Mishnaic System of Women, when he emphasizes that this code does not teach about women in general but concerns itself with "what is important about women to the framers of the Mishnah...
...A woman's questions about the case, then, would focus on the pain, injury and terror felt by the little girl...
...Cynthia Ozick expresses this dissonance most powerfully: "In the world at large I call myself, and am called, a Jew...
...This is not the case grammatically, but the Talmud is disregarding grammar as a consideration...
...If we review the source material for the law excluding women from witnessing, we will see how the halachah has painted itself into a corner here...
...More must be said about the abundance of women's feelings and experiences which have been non-data within the tradition and which Jewish women are only now beginning to recognize and name...
...When I was young, I used to pray at a little Chassidic shtiebl...
...When I ask this question, it is always external to myself...
...Leiden, 1980...
...Questions that do not fit the categories of the method are simply classified as non-data...
...That would have nothing to do with her...
...Jewish women of all backgrounds experience them when they turn to the basic texts of Judaism to discover the nature of their covenant...
...The question is non-data in terms of the tradition...
...He, too, however, was confined within categories which place upon women a responsibility for guarding from misappropriation the bodies that belong to their fathers and husbands...
...This interpretation is reinforced by the g'zerah shavah utilized by the Sifre...
...Jew' signifies adult responsibility...
...The struggle within the Conservative movement as to whether women may be ordained as rabbis presents similar difficulties...
...If the Jewish male is the normative participant in the covenant, the Jewish female cannot be other than a partial and diminished participant...
...The existence of hierarchy presupposes that the rights of individuals will be superseded by the requirements of a social organization which, not coinciden-tally, reinforces the privilege of those at its top while immobilizing those lower down...
...All too often, in order to feel included, we must imagine ourselves to be Jewish men...
...For years now, I have had a recurring dream...
...See Neusner's A History of the Mishnaic Law of Women, part 5 of The Mishnaic System of Women, A woman's questions about the case would focus on the pain, injury and terror felt by the little girl...
...She might ask how the man was to be held morally accountable for his behavior, and what compensation was due the child...
...I did not cause these problems by being a feminist...
...If women are "a focus of die sacred" rather than active participants in its processes, the major question about their communal participation will be, "How do we know that they are excluded...
...My pain and the Rachel Adler is a psychotherapist living in Minneapolis who has written extensively on Jewish women's religious issues...
...the question the Gemara most frequently asks the Mishnah concerning women's participation...
...Although it is hard for me to remember, I remind myself that I do not have to know how to solve them alone...
...What distinguishes him is that he has not made an autonomous acceptance of the mitzvot...
...Upon acquisition, he has had circumcision and immersion in a mikveh as a proselyte would, and is therefore no longer in the category of non-Jew...
...The rabbi's implicit assumption is that the preservation of a movement in which women are less than fully enfranchised Jews, and the preservation of the tradition which has immobilized them, are far higher priorities than the enfranchisement of women which threatens to blow it all to hell...
...the androgynos, or hermaphrodite, whose maleness is tainted by female characteristics...
...Both may be freed through the issuance of a document of manumission...
...Hence, when the tradition is brought to bear on the problems of Jewish women, it prefers to address the problems on which it has the most information: namely, the status problems of marriage, desertion, divorce and chalitzah 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...
...And what is important...
...When my rabbi says, 'A Jew is called to the Torah,' he never means me or any other living Jewish woman...
...we ourselves are terrified by the chaos that could ensue if we questioned the tradition's methods and the categories at their very roots...
...The Sifre takes the subject phrase "the two men" out of its context and, using a g'zerah shavah, links it to a phrase in Deuteronomy 19:15, "on the testimony of two witnesses...
...just as I never ask myself, "Is there really a God...
...If she were, she would accept as a given that, in the culture under examination, women held an inferior status...
...When I stand to hear the Ten Commandments, when I pray for the proclamation of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man, when I study cases of rape and seduction in the light of whether the woman's ketubah is reduced, then I must desert my place and imagine myself a man standing at Mount Sinai or studying my text...
...Daughter' defines a relationship that is above all biological...
...That is, God is not contained within the universe...
...We are confronting what Mary Daly calls methodolatry...
...Shabbat, my grandmother's dented candlesticks...
...It, too, cites Deuteronomy 19:17...
...He could not and did not protest that the question itself is monstrous...
...What the exegesis accomplishes is to lock the tradition into this historically circumscribed view of women...
...She might ask how the man was to be held morally accountable for his behavior, and what compensation was due the child...
...May the Shechinah soon be restored to her place, and I to mine...
...When our external reality is absurdity and madness, it is difficult for us to retain internal coherence...
...We have no conception of women's sexuality independent of men...
...5. How can women be included as full and equal participants in the covenant and through what sort of ritual observance will they be brought into the covenantal community...
...I, too, feel my incompleteness and seek to be whole...
...In the passage quoted, Neusner has made explicit the principles upon which Seder Nashim bases its selection of topics...
...They form the core of my selfhood...
...However, those laws are then modified to assure the highest possible level of individual rights achievable in consonance with the desired social goals...
...Being a Jewish woman is very much like being Alice at the Hatter's tea party...
...Other topics concerning women's tasks and obligations will be dealt with elsewhere in the Mishnah as they pertain within the categories being treated...
...Because we are taught to conceive of God as masculine and to pray to "Him" exclusively in the masculine, we have no instinctive sense, as men do, that we are akin to the divine...
...Let us turn our attention to some cases in the tradition where there are major discrepancies between the questions answered by the tradition and the questions of concern to women...
...Until we can answer these questions and formulate a just and consistent Judaism for our time, we must, to borrow a phrase from Adrienne Rich, "dive into the wreck...
...What makes this reasoning appear circular is that for both the Sifre and the Talmud, the disqualification of women as witnesses in law is a foregone conclusion that is not really proven by Scriptural exegesis, but which simply expresses by means of the exegesis the overwhelming precedent in Jewish life for>disqualify-ing women...
...Once the inherent assumptions in these principles are accepted, however, the range of possible questions about women is drastically narrowed...
...The commitment of the Jewish woman appears precisely parallel to that of the unfreed slave...
...Raba declares, "When a grown-up man has intercourse with a little girl, it is nothing, for when the girl is less than this (i.e., three), it is as if one puts the finger into the eye...
...It is just the locus of our rendezvous...
...I dive into this shattered rotting hulk of the tradition which I have loved and hated, and I salvage pieces to keep: Sarah's laughter...
...The rebbe himself always led the Shacharit service, and his voice was like the still small voice Elijah heard, a sound thin as a hair and so penetrating that it made my bones resonate...
...Patriarchal methods, says Daly, have obliterated women's own questions about the sanctification of their experience...
...I would stand next to the high wooden wall of the women's section, hearing and not seeing, almost being at one with that prayer...
...every precept which is not obligatory on a woman is not obligatory on a slave...
...1112...
...or "Are women Jews in rabbinic Judaism...
...The questions, then, are the following: 1. If the process of Judaism depends upon the continuous transformation of a body of received knowledge encompassing law, narrative, ritual and imagery to render it contextually relevant, and if this body of knowledge excludes the experiences, perceptions and concerns of women, then from where are Jewish women to derive their religious understandings and behavior, and how will these be authentically Jewish...
...Whether these semi-males share masculine obligations, which in a Jewish society are equivalent to privileges, or are excluded like women is the subject of much discussion in the Talmud...
...At the Mad Hatter's sort of tea party, however, it is not so easy to take more than nothing...
...Daughter' evokes immaturity and a dependent and subordinate connection...
...These are both facts I know from my internal experience...
...The problems I have outlined here are huge and painful, and I do not know how they are to be solved...
...No decent Jew would suggest that the many Jews who despaired or who simply chose for one reason or another not to resist violently were seduced to their deaths rather than having been murdered...
...Thus, one Conservative rabbi, voicing his objection to the ordination of women, envisions "the creation of a 'rabbinic underclass' of female rabbis in name only," whose signatures on documents of status would be "unacceptable to the vast majority of male rabbis with whom they would be serving," and prophesies (or perhaps catastrophizes) a resultant schism within the Conservative movement...
...My own synagogue is the only place in the world where I am not named Jew...
...the story of the Shechinah, because her experience is mine...
...Notes Toward Finding the Right Question," Lilith, Number 6, 1979, p. 21...
...These laws are then modified or limited only to the extent necessary to secure certain basic social interests...
...Otherwise, the less privileged party would move up to the more advantageous position...
...Clearly, "the people" does not mean you...
...See Irving J. Rosenbaum, The Holocaust and Halakha, New York, 1976, pp...
...We are being invited by Jewish men to re-covenant, to forge a covenant which will address the inequalities of women's position in Judaism, but we ask ourselves, "Have we ever had a covenant in the first place...
...Otherwise, since women's autonomous behavior is insignificant, it is non-data, just as women's feelings are non-data...
...I can only talk about God and to God out of my place...
...The g'zerah shavah is then used in successive baraitot to dispose of the rational objections offered against the interpretation...
...A Canaanite slave is, of course, a person in a peripheral status...
...Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland) The Mad Hatter, I have always felt, was guilty of a fallacy in the passage above...
...You are left standing apart as your mothers stood under the mountain, eavesdropping on the conversation between God and man, wondering if there is anything God wants you to do and, if so—why doesn't He tell you so Himself...
...The g'zerah shavah to which this generalization is tied makes clear that we learn the obligations of Canaanite slaves by their comparison to women...
...One such case is brought in Tractate Ketubot (1 la,b) and concerns a little girl less than three years old with whom a grown man has had intercourse...
...The social goal motivating the legislation on women, Berman suggests, is "family stability," by which he means the patriarchal system in which women are attached to male-headed families where their performance of maintenance activities enables men to be full members of the Jewish community...
...She sets the stage for the processes of the sacred...
...When speaking of cultic and festival observances from which the non-Jew is by definition excluded, the tradition posits a sexual hierarchy at whose top is the male, possessor of b'rito shel Avraham avinu—a circumcised penis—and, in descending order, the tumtum, or person of undetermined sex who may possess maleness...
...Just as the universe is the place where I meet God, so I am the place where God meets me...
...It is the tradition's underlying suspicion of women's lustfulness that makes a defense such as Rabbi Oshry's necessary...
Vol. 8 • September 1983 • No. 8
