Standing (Again) with Judith Plaskow: A Selective Reading of Her Essays

The publication of Judith Plaskow's The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003, offers a wonderful opportunity to once again keep company with Judith Plaskow, in this case by rereading her essays in this collection. I want first to thank Donna Berman for asking me to participate in this special section of the Journal, which began as a panel at the 2005 American Academy of Religion conference. I also want to thank Judith for her inspirational scholarship and activism and, most of all, for her friendship. Indeed, friendships and relationships with others, especially other women in both the Jewish feminist and larger feminist communities, are the creative roots and authoritative bases of Judith's theological and feminist activities. Here, I provide a mixture of personal and intellectual reflections on the character of Judith's writing, deriving in particular from my experiences as both a teacher and a scholar in Jewish and religious studies.

Besides her groundbreaking book Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, I assign my students Judith's 1982 essay "The Right Question Is Theological" (now reprinted in The Coming of Lilith) each time I teach my Women, Gender, and Judaism seminar. Judith wrote it partly in response to Cynthia Ozick's "Notes toward Finding the Right Question (A Vindication of the Rights of Jewish Women)," which was published in 1979. Whereas Judith argues that the root of the Jewish tradition's sexism is biblical, specifically in exclusively masculine notions and representations of God, Ozick regards the problem to have its source in the rabbinic tradition. "The Right Question Is Theological" beautifully exemplifies Judith's radical approach to both critiquing and reconfiguring Jewish tradition, texts, and community. Indeed, as she herself notes in the moving introduction to The Coming of Lilith, in this formative essay, Judith "was setting [her]self an agenda for the next decade and beyond" (11). Judith explains that "The Right Question Is Theological" was written after teaching a course on Jewish feminist theology at the first National Havurah Summer Institute in 1980. I therefore find it fitting that this text continues to play such a central pedagogical role, at least in my own teaching.¹

At the conclusion of each semester, Ozick's and Plaskow's essays frame the assignment for the seminar's final class. While one could certainly begin a course with these essays, a measure of their continued relevance today is that they function so effectively both to conclude the Women, Gender, and Judaism seminar and to send the students back through the semester's assignments to think about the tension and relationship between Ozick's and Judith's different claims to the "right question." What I love about Judith's essay—and, indeed, about her writing altogether—is what I have already termed the radicality of her thinking. By this, I mean that she gets uncompromisingly and clearly to the root of the matter. Over and against Ozick, Judith argues that the Halakha (Jewish law) is not the root cause of Jewish women's second-class status in Judaism. Rather, it is a symptom of an even more fundamental androcentrism embedded in Jewish religious texts: specifically, the fact that the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) and most texts that follow in one way or another from it imagine God as male. This is so even though this God is also supposedly beyond sexual difference (because God does not have a body).

God-language and theology are thus at the heart of understanding women's systematic marginality, invisibility, and otherness in Judaism. Judith further argues (contra Ozick) in Standing Again at Sinai, "In a system in which women have been projected as Other, there is no way within the rules of the system to restore women to full personhood." Feminist Judaism, Judith argues, relies on a "disruptive principle that comes from outside"—that is, the "conviction that women are fully human." "Without the presupposition of women's full humanity, there is no bridge from the male Jewish tradition to a feminist Judaism," she concludes.² In 1994, Judith...