Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation (review)

"Orthodox feminism" is viewed by some as an oxymoron, but the paradoxical fact is that contemporary Orthodox feminism has created a whole landscape of new facts on the ground in Israel, the United States, and elsewhere. In her lively and appealing new book, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation, Tova Hartman explores transformations in Orthodox women's relationship to Judaism, especially around their roles in public Judaism and synagogue life. Building on her own personal experiences in the creation of new styles of Orthodox worship, as well as scholarship in gender studies and sociology of the Orthodox community, Bar Ilan Professor Hartman brings the reader into a dynamic new chapter in Jewish life.

The Jewish male-female binary was an important component of the matrix into which Jewish life was historically embedded. Traditional Jewish societies from medieval times onward have defined public Jewish prayer, advanced education, numerous holiday and life cycle rituals and ceremonies, and most leadership activities as male responsibilities. Judaism within its religious culture clearly distinguished between religious "performers," who were almost always men, and religious "facilitators," who were typically women. As Hartman powerfully explains, "In this society, the exclusion of women from Torah study, more than anything else, meant the marginalization of women. Because this culture was so immersed and influenced by the ongoing interpretation of canonical texts, the institutional exclusion of women from yeshiva life and Torah study prevented women from becoming full and active partners in the life of the community."

Today, in contrast, Hartman's compelling story reveals that women within the Orthodox world often function as the brokers of Western values. Orthodox women have struggled to combined feminist ideals, such as individualism and self-determination, with traditional Jewish expectations, such as modest dress and family "purity" laws. Orthodox feminist innovations have been facilitated by women's new access to rabbinic scholarship. Hartman and other Orthodox feminists have rejected the concept that their behavior should be dictated by "the male gaze." They study rabbinic texts so that they can determine for themselves the full range of standards that their religious tradition can be understood to offer them.

For Hartman, access to public expressions of Jewish spirituality was equally important as acquiring the intellectual tools of Jewish learning. Her determination to construct a different kind of halakhic prayer environment led to one of the most celebrated changes in recent years: the creation of "partnership minyanim," traditional services that retain a mechitsah (visual separation between male and female worshipers) but that nonetheless allow women to perform all prayer functions from which they are not specifically prohibited by Jewish law. As Hartman explains in her account of the formation of congregation Shirah Hadashah in Jerusalem, women lead in many portions of the service as well as read from and are called up to aliyah Torah honors. (They do not lead during the Amidah services.)

Within Orthodox communities in Israel and the United States, Shirah Hadashah and its founders have come under rabbinic fire from some segments of the community for putatively breaking the rules of men's and women's respective roles in the synagogue. The amount of the animus directed against this author and the congregation she helped to found suggests that even their enemies find the partnership minyan a powerful concept.

Shirah Hadashah has influenced many outside the Orthodox community as well. Partnership minyanim, sometimes called "Orthodox egalitarian" services, have proliferated. They typically attract surprisingly large numbers of Jewish singles from Conservative and Reform backgrounds, as well as the core of Orthodox men and women who tend to create and maintain them. It is notable that Shirah Hadashah is often attended by Reform rabbinical students studying in Israel for the year. Many assert that they come because they experience the environment to be deeply joyous, moving and spiritual.

Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism is a "good read," as well as an inside look at an innovative phenomenon in...