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  • Expanding the Palace of Torah: Feminism and Orthodoxy
  • Elizabeth Shanks Alexander (bio)
Tamar Ross Expanding the Palace of Torah: Feminism and Orthodoxy Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2004. 324 pp.

Tamar Ross's book Expanding the Palace of Torah: Feminism and Orthodoxy attempts to address what Ross sees as the key challenge that feminism poses to traditional, Orthodox belief and praxis. As Ross understands the matter, feminism's critique of traditional religion lies in its emphasis on the human, rather than transcendent, element of all cultural phenomena, including religion. One of feminism's key insights is that gender relations, generally, and patriarchal societal organization, specifically, are human constructs. To the extent that traditional religious texts (Jewish or otherwise) project patriarchal social organization as normative or use male language to depict God, they attest to the indelible traces of their human (male) scribes. Feminism, then, highlights the extensive role of the human filter in the records of divine revelation that have reached us. While it might allow for the theoretical possibility of genuine divine revelation, feminism observes that the records of divine revelation available to us have an undeniable human component.

Ross's solution to this problem is a theological model based on the notion of cumulative revelation. Drawing heavily on a theology articulated by Rabbi A.I. Kook, Ross proposes that we "view the Sinaitic Torah as merely the earthly reflection of a metaphysical Torah, which must be supplemented by history" (p. 223)—that is, the unfolding revelations of God in history. In this view, humans have no direct, unmediated access to the metaphysical "Torah" except through the cumulative unfolding of the divine will through history. Since humans cannot transcend the limitations of language or their experiences, God must be made evident in the course of human history. In each generation, God is revealed in the dynamic interaction between sacred text, official interpreters, and communal consensus. Insofar as the sacred canon is [End Page 243] interpreted in a manner that achieves communal consensus and is consistent with the patterns of meaning allowed by the sacred texts themselves and their traditional interpretation, the divine will is shown to lie behind the unfolding interpretation of each successive generation. As the word "cumulative" suggests, earlier accounts of revelation are at no point discredited as incomplete. A very important component of Ross's theology of cumulative revelation is that earlier patriarchal expressions of sacred texts and communal norms are authentically divine. Equally important, however, is the idea that once feminist ideals achieve broad consensus within Orthodox circles, they, too, will be revealed to be a manifestation of the divine will.

Ross's conjoining of the patriarchal past with a feminist future in the single unfolding process of divine revelation is an unprecedented and, I would suggest, brilliant move in the world of Jewish feminism. Typically, feminism's observation that the earliest records of revelation reflect the biases of their male transcribers leads feminists to devalue the records of revelation in their received form. For example, Judith Plaskow, the founding mother of Jewish feminist theology, suggests in her book Standing Again at Sinai that the male filter through which Sinaitic revelation was recorded has left many important aspects of women's experience at Sinai unarticulated. Plaskow proposes that feminists use contemporary midrash to supplement the lacunas. Building on the work of feminist historians who have reconstructed aspects of women's experience in biblical times, feminist midrash can creatively fill in the picture of women's spiritual experience that went unrecorded. While Torah is valued insofar as it allows access to an authentic moment of divine communication with the people Israel, it is considered an incomplete account of the experience. Thus, though Plaskow recognizes that contemporary religious meaning is most effectively constructed on the shoulders of communally sanctioned and authoritative representations of revelation, she considers the received Torah an insufficient foundation, because of its overwhelming male perspective. To the extent that she posits continuity between sacred texts of the past and the feminist vision of the future, it is continuity with a past that has been creatively reconstructed to reflect contemporary feminist ideals.

The unique contribution of Ross's theological model of cumulativism is...

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