A Question of Boundaries: Toward a Jewish Feminist Theology of Self and Others

Vol. 6, No. 3. 1991.

As boundary-crossers, ivrim (Hebrews) are bridgers of worlds, makers of transition. The name ivri is not resonant of self-perception. It reflects the perspective of those native to this side of the river, those who are at home. Those who do not cross the boundaries may view the relocations of the ivri as transgressions against a fixed cosmic order, trespasses into the anomalous and the chaotic.

In our narratives, however, it is God who demands that Abraham and Sarah become ivrim. A people rooted in one place experience a God rooted in a particular place. A people that has known transience can experience the translocal nature of God. It is the revelation of a God who is present in every place that makes possible the moral universe of the covenant, where relatedness rather than location becomes the ground of ethics.

If our story about our beginnings as God’s ivrim were not enough to give value to the project of boundary-crossing, our master-narrative about crossing the boundary from slavery into freedom, and about bridging the boundary between creature and creature in the transaction of covenant has done so. We have valorized these boundary-crossings in our tradition; they shape not only our memories of the past but also our actions in the present and our visions for the future. We are obligated to regard our liberation and our covenant not simply as legacies from our unique history as crossers-over, strangers and slaves, but as events that radically transform the meaning of boundaries in the world; they demonstrate the potential for all objectified others to be reconstituted as subjects similar to ourselves. There is nothing inevitable about this moral understanding of our communal identity. Our special liberation and covenant make equally powerful justifications for subjugation of the other. The admonition in Exodus 23: 9 warns us not to adopt this second interpretation. “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” By itself, this commandment could be read as a directive to merge with strangers and to idolize in them the image of our own history as stranger. Instead, Torah demands that we extrapolate from our bond with the stranger to include familiar deviants within our own communities, with whom we may be more reluctant to identify:

You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the fatherless; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and that the Lord your God redeemed you from there; therefore do I enjoin you to observe this commandment.

(Deut. 24: 17-18)

I mean to argue that the central narrative of Judaism thus embodies an implicit challenge to the polarized thought structures of patriarchies—even though patriarchal thinking is embedded in Judaism as it is in the rest of Western culture. This is not to claim that either ancient Israelites or rabbinic Jews had modern sensibilities for dealing with those defined as other. Such a contention would be both anachronistic and demonstrably false. I do claim, however, that the unfolding of the ivri identity and its experience of covenant locates at the core of Judaism an implicit challenge to an ethics of alienation and dualism that perceives the world outside its borders as threatening and chaotic. The Torah of self and other that we first encountered as ivrim, and later internalized through liberation, covenant, and prophetic admonition erodes and must eventually obliterate the fixed, impermeable boundaries that define the world of patriarchal dualism. By recognizing a self in all others with a potential like our own for transformation, this Torah transforms the boundaries between self and other and deconstructs the justification for patriarchal boundaries. Contrast, for example, Aristotle’s notion that slaves and barbarians had fixed natures suitable to their condition, and that these natures made them qualitatively different from Athenian gentlemen. The subjugation of these inferior beings is justified by their nature as objects—a...