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568 l JUDAISM Community in the Interwar Years (1990); Pamela S. Nadell, American Jewish Women’s History (2003). JEWISH WOMEN AND RITUAL Hasia R. Diner OVER THE COURSE of the 350 years that Jews have lived in North America, the nature of Jewish women’s involvement with ritual has changed. By and large, it has been the history of expanding Jewish women’s participation in the realm of public ritual. By the end of the twentieth century a majority of Jewish women, through the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements, have not only stepped into public roles for the performance of rituals that had traditionally been the sole province of men, but they have also had a hand in creating new rituals for themselves. At the same time, a set of religious rituals that had for centuries been the domain of Jewish women and were associated with the practice of “traditional Judaism ” have fallen by the wayside. Orthodox Jewish women, their families, and their communities, who constituted approximately 10 percent of American Jewry in the 1990s, maintained these practices and continue to do so. Many of the observant have reinterpreted the meaning of those rituals in light of new conditions. However, the majority of American Jews found increasingly less meaning in the practice of women’s ritual roles inherited from earlier times. Women’s rituals that continue to be practiced within the Orthodox communities work on an inner assumption that gender is an important divide and that men and women, by nature, have different roles to play in the performance of religious life. The differences between men and women expressed in different ritual roles represent, according to Orthodox Jews, divine decree, canonical texts, and Jewish law that can be reinterpreted, not changed. Those who maintain rituals consider that the fixed nature of laws renders them beyond the ability of “ordinary” Jews to change or abandon. Where modi fications have crept in, Orthodox Jews, particularly women influenced by feminism, have claimed that the changes did not violate otherwise unchangable practices. The evolution of Jewish women’s ritual practice in North America requires some explanation of Judaism, its definition of ritual, and the role of women in these practices. To begin, the word ritual has no Hebrew equivalent. Within Judaism all practices that are defined as obligatory, as mitzvoth—commandments—might be considered rituals, since their enactment often involves appropriately staged ceremonies and liturgically mandated language. Much of Jewish ritual grows out of basic Judaic legal practice and is governed by halakah, literally, “the way,” the corpus of Jewish law. Normative Judaism, canonized in the Torah and the Talmud, and adumbrated by later codes, has for most of Jewish history been considered fixed. Most Jewish rituals involve the performance of those behaviors, the mitzvoth, that require particular acts accompanied by particular words. That system specified three different kinds of mitzvoth , in terms of gender and gender role. Some mitzvoth apply to men and others only to women. Still, a vast complex of obligations governed both sexes. Keeping the Sabbath, observing the dietary laws, giving tzedaka, assistance to the needy, welcoming strangers, fell upon women and men alike. But the vast range of obligations that govern the public performance of Judaism falls into the category of male mitzvoth. One of the most potent barriers to women’s active participation in traditionally constituted Judaic public ritual, men’s domain, involved the ban on the hearing of women’s voices during prayer. Perhaps because considered as a source of sexual temptation, the woman’s voice, kol ishah, had to be eliminated from communal prayer so as not to divert men’s attention from the obligatory and lofty task at hand. Historically Jewish women received relatively little education in Jewish matters outside those associated with the home, further keeping them unable to serve as the voices of their communities . But the synagogue was not necessarily the place most intensely related to the observance of Judaism, Jewish communal life, or the fulfillment of Jewish obligations. The home functioned, for much of Jewish history, as an equal, possibly more significant place in which Jewish ritual took place. All the practices associated with food, sex, family, Sabbath, and the like, began in the home. Here women joined men in ritual peformance. They had different but symbiotic roles to play in the enacting of basic Jewish practices. As one example, one can cite the centrality of kashruth, the dietary laws, to the functioning of the...

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