In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Lessons from Mary Daly
  • Judith Plaskow (bio)

A few years ago, in a talk on the geopolitics of Jewish feminism, preeminent Israeli feminist Alice Shalvi commented that Standing Again at Sinai could have [End Page 100] been written only in the country of Mary Daly. Alice’s words were right on the mark. Mary’s work has had a profound and abiding influence on my thought. I need to state up front, however, that the Mary who made my own work possible is the Mary of the Second Spiral Galaxy: the Mary who led the walkout from Memorial Church and who wrote Beyond God the Father. I stopped reading her work in the middle of Pure Lust because I found myself deeply impatient with what I experienced as its disembodiment, dualism, and abstraction from the real possibilities open to women in this always-ambiguous world in which we actually live.

That said, what have I learned from Mary? On the most basic and significant level, Mary has kept me honest about the deeply patriarchal nature of Judaism. I can still taste my intense excitement when I heard her deliver “After the Demise of God the Father,” a précis and foretaste of Beyond God the Father, which she gave as the opening paper to the first meeting of the American Academy of Religion’s Working Group on Women and Religion in 1972. The room was much too small to hold the many people packed into it, and I have a clear image of sitting on top of a tall table that was against one wall, my mind leaping and expanding as I listened. In February 1973, four months later, I gave a speech entitled “The Jewish Feminist: Conflict in Identities” at the National Conference on Jewish Women—the first-ever Jewish feminist conference—held at the Hotel McAlpin in New York City. As I described being torn between the deeply androcentric Judaism in which I was raised and the excitement and new possibilities opened up by my experiences of feminist community, I cited Mary’s statement that women have had the power of naming stolen from us and said that we did not yet know what Jewish words might also be women’s words.1 Preparing for the session for today made me realize that there is no way to disentangle my own thinking from Mary’s influence because she was with me from my Jewish feminist debut. In 1973, the year that Beyond God the Father appeared, I was a research associate at Harvard Divinity School, working on my feminist dissertation on Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and charged with the absurd task of trying to get the theology department to integrate a feminist perspective into its curriculum. I was a kid in the belly of the patriarchal beast! Mary helped me to name that beast and also to name the alternative sources of energy and insight available through feminism that were to be my lifeline that year and in the years to come.

Obviously, I did not walk out of Judaism in the way that she advocated walking out of Christianity. When I say that she kept me honest, I mean that she made me realize that my decision to struggle as a feminist within the Jewish context could not be predicated on the claim that Judaism was fundamentally liberating. I like to think that I am sharp and clear-sighted in critiquing the patriarchal [End Page 101] elements in Judaism; that is not where Mary and I disagree. Mary quipped that a depatriarchalized Bible might make a nice pamphlet; I have argued that a depatriarchalized Bible would not exist because the warp of its patriarchal elements is inseparable from the woof of whatever liberating insights it might contain. I choose to be part of the project of the feminist transformation of Judaism because my Jewishness is a central part of my identity and because Jewish feminist community is the place where my many commitments most fully come together. But thanks to Mary I made that decision cognizant of the depth of women’s otherness within Judaism. This awareness imposes on me the obligation not to look away from...

pdf

Share