The Gendered Rhetoric of Sukkah Observance

Much feminist work has been done in exploring the exemption of women from positive ritual commandments governed by time as outlined in mKidd 1.7.¹ The history of scholarship on this mishnah runs in two familiar directions. Some scholars redeem the rabbis and interpret mKidd 1.7 as offering women religious sanction to value familial duties as foremost.² On the other end of the spectrum are those who condemn the rabbis for being exclusionary.³ Women, they claim, are being demeaned; an exemption turns them into second-class citizens. However, scholars have not capitalized on the fact that this mishnah, and the talmudic discussions that comment upon it, also expose us to the way the rabbis think about the rites themselves. Ritual exemptions, offered as they are within the confines of a religion that is defined by the performance of commandments, allow us to read for the gaps in rabbinic ideology with respect to ritual observance. When certain members of the Jewish community are exempt from a requirement and, in this regard, have the option of inclusion or exclusion from it, this choice upsets conclusions drawn by contemporary ritual theorists that ritual produces social cohesion, that its practice factors out variability, and that ritual acts order daily life.⁴ Exemptions prevent rites from achieving a sense of definitiveness. For example, in the case of the exemption of women from the sukkah, the character of the sukkah transforms depending upon whether women are present within its walls or not, as we will see below. An analysis of talmudic material about this exemption offers us great insight into what a ritual exemption tells us about the rabbis' understanding of this rite and heightens the importance of moving beyond what these texts say about the image of women themselves.

The Problem with the Sukkah

In an analysis of the writings of the Confucian ritual thinker Xunzi, Robert Campany observes that when ritual is seen as problematic, ritual thinkers step outside of the arena of the ritual of concern in order to think from a (presumably)⁵ "more secure" or more familiar foundation.⁶ He argues that theoretical thinking about ritual "entails giving an account of ritual from a point of view outside ritual, using a language and a framework of understanding that are not derived from the ritual world but in terms of which that world is nevertheless described." Paralleling his observations, the Bavli employs the socially constructed image of the husband/wife relationship in order to stabilize the exemption of women from the sukkah. In other words, in the wake of strong attempts to require women to perform this commandment, the rabbis prevent the exemption from being overturned by considering the relationship between husbands and their wives. Reference made to this relationship marks the rabbis' shift beyond the framework of the sukkah-rite itself and enables them to grapple with what is problematic about sukkah observance, that is, its relationship to the act of "dwelling" as conveyed in Leviticus 23.

Leviticus 23.42-43, which represents the latest biblical conceptualization of the festival of Sukkot, suggests that the commandment of sukkah commemorates desert dwelling in booths following the Exodus from Egypt. While other biblical source material correlates the celebration of Sukkot with the end of the harvest season, this holiday is ultimately transformed into a domestic reenactment of the sojourn of the Israelites in the desert. Jeffrey Rubenstein argues that "this historical explanation is somewhat strange in that the Pentateuchal narratives of the Exodus trek never place Israel in booths; . . . [this is] an historical event unknown to the rest of the Bible."⁷ However, the notion culled from Lev 23, that the Israelites dwelled in booths, greatly influences the early rabbinic (tannaitic) conceptualization of the sukkah. The sukkah is transformed into one's home during the seven-day holiday, as the following source found in bSuk 28b iterates:

Mishnah:

All of the seven days [of Sukkot] a person makes his sukkah...