Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism (review)

Close to twenty years after The Feminine Mystique propelled women's issues to the national agenda, Betty Friedan wrote The Second Stage, a critical reassessment of the movement she had helped launch. In this work, Friedan challenged the prevailing culture of the feminist movement to think beyond gender politics and to refocus its energy on issues that affected the lives of men and women alike: better work/fam-ily balance, accessible child care, job satisfaction beyond just "getting ahead," less hierarchical models of leadership. The first stage of the feminist movement, she claimed, had generated its own "feminist mystique," the obsessive careerism of feminists who forswore motherhood or of "superwomen" who struggled to master both work and family. The challenge of the second stage was to examine the root causes of the unhappiness that had first spurred women to action and to promote new definitions of power and fulfillment within society at large.

The Orthodox Jewish feminist movement has traced a decidedly more cautious trajectory than its secular counterpart. On top of the challenges posed by the conservative nature of their community, Orthodox feminists have found themselves hampered—ironically—by the very freedom that inspired them: women who found Orthodoxy's gender roles too restricting simply opted out of the system altogether. The result has been a movement that has progressed in fits and starts, whose agenda often seems a patchwork of specific issues with no well-articulated ideology. Yet a generation after feminism began making inroads in the Orthodox community, there are indications that the tenor of the debate over women's role within Orthodoxy has shifted and that Orthodox feminism is entering its own "second stage."

If the second stage of the secular feminist movement came from a feeling that the pendulum had swung too far in the other direction, Orthodox feminism's second stage reflects a sense that things are moving too slowly, a growing impatience with the handful of "women's" issues and a desire to explore the conceptual underpinnings of the movement. In this last regard, few have shown themselves to be as passionate and eloquent as Tamar Ross, an associate professor in Jewish thought at Bar-Ilan University and a longtime faculty member at Midreshet Lindenbaum in Jerusalem. Ross's first public addresses on this topic in the late 1990s sent shockwaves through the Modern Orthodox community and placed her squarely at odds with its rabbinic and intellectual establishment. Expanding the Palace of Torah collects and expands upon Ross's earlier writings and represents the most comprehensive and mature work on Orthodoxy and feminism to date. This is a timely and important work.

It is also, on many levels, a deeply satisfying one. In a debate where tired platitudes and anecdotal observations often substitute for well-reasoned arguments, Ross's thoroughness and intellectual rigor are refreshing. Equally admirable is the book's strong sense of balance: Ross engages an impressive range of views with the same measured tone, never allowing her earnestness to devolve into stridency. If there is a fault with Ross's overall presentation, it is her failure to "find her audience": large sections of the book will prove too sophisticated for the average lay reader while overly simplistic for an academic audience; indeed, it sometimes feels as though we are listening in on Ross's personal musings. (Her penchant for excessive categorization only exacerbates the problem.) Yet it is also Ross's distinctive personal voice that lends the book its particular force. As a well-educated Orthodox woman who is also an accomplished academician, Ross struggles with the conflict between feminism and Orthodoxy as a matter of self-definition. Even the structure of the book reflects this personal tension: though Ross organizes the book according to (her sense of) the logical progression of the feminist critique, it might be more accurate to say that Ross first approaches her topic from the perspective of an insider to the Orthodox community, then engages it from the...