Gender and the Wall [Tikkun]
The gender segregation at the heart of politics surrounding the Western Wall has been increasingly contentious over the last few years. In this blog from Tikkun Magazine, Joan Reiss explores the challenges often faced by the Women of the Wall, an activist group seeking the equality of women… well, at the Wall.
“Yet the U.S. of A is not Israel where the Women of the Wall battle for the right to read Torah at the women’s side of the Kotel. With the ultra-orthodox Shas party, an influential adjunct of the Netanyahu government, a law now imprisons women who dare to read or carry a Torah. Women and female children have been assaulted by the Haredim for immodest dress. On a simpler scale, I resonated with the Women of the Wall. The Jewish male-dominated tradition was represented by parents. My first political campaign confronted their existing dogma, ‘Girls do not need Hebrew school because they don’t have a Bar Mitzvah.’ Even before Gloria Steinem, this was the wrong comment for a ten-year-old tomboy. Success was guaranteed when I refused to cooperate on any task unless… ‘I can go to Hebrew school.’”
Approaching masculine “god-language” from a feminist perspective [Forward]
He’s our Fearless Leader. He blogs for us a lot. But did you know that David A.M. Wilensky is also… a feminist? We know. We’re shocked too. All kidding aside, check out this article from the Jewish Daily Forward’s Sisterhood blog, which explores the role of gendered language in Jewish liturgy, and a feminist response some might find surprising:
“There is a feminist argument in favor of maintaining this linguistic dilemma in our liturgy, a feminist argument in favor of translating God in all His Kingly glory.
When we convince ourselves that we’ve solved the problem of centuries of exclusion of women from Jewish ritual and narrative by reducing God to a cumbersome asexual matter of grammar, we do ourselves a great disservice: We sweep our people’s treatment of women under the rug. When we act like lobbing some non sequitur citrus at the Seder plate — more a symbolic act of complaint than a thoughtful ritual act — solves ages of our tradition’s troubling shortcomings, we miss an opportunity to grapple directly with them.”
What do you call the New Testament… if there isn’t an Old one? [Forward]
Fighting over semantics is, sadly, one of the biggest pratfalls of inter-faith dialogue. So when Christians and Jews are talking about their differences, how do they approach the New Testament? No, I’m not talking about Jesus (who, according to Shmuley Boteach, is kosher anyway). I’m talking about its name. New implies old. But our testament isn’t old. So what do we do? Rest assured, fair readers, Philologos of the Jewish Daily Forward’s got our collective backs:
“Should Jews shun the use of ‘New Testament’ as they should that of ‘Old Testament’? Logically, the answer would appear to be yes. After all, if ‘Old Testament’ implies the existence of a New Testament, ‘New Testament’ implies the existence of an Old Testament. And yet as a Jew, my feelings don’t agree with my logic. ‘Old Testament’ grates on me; ‘New Testament’ doesn’t.”
Click over for the rest of the excellent article.
Shabbat dinners with an unlikely couple [JTA]
They’re a friendly couple who offer Shabbat dinners to soldiers, complete with challah, wine, blessings and more. Only one thing: they’re not Jewish, they’re Evangelical. JTA sheds a light on the Johnsons, originally from Tennessee:
“The Johnsons say it’s because they believe that God has called them to help the Jewish people. Like many evangelical Christians, they say restoring a Jewish state is a prerequisite for what they believe will be the second coming of Jesus.
To do their part the Johnsons, who are both in their 50s and now live in Jerusalem, last year served more than 3,000 meals — including 600 pounds of Scott’s spicy chicken wings — to ‘lone soldiers,’ the term applied to young men and women who have immigrated to Israel to serve in the army and have no family there. An estimated 5,000 lone Jewish soldiers are in the Israel Defense Forces.”
