Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (review)

Volume 9, No.2 lVLnter 1991 83 is portrayed as a crafty and unreliable opportunist, and others-the US, the Palestinians, etc.-are no more capable of providing a way out of the dilemma. Schiff and Ya'ari, however, conclude with an elaborate scheme of their own based on a combination of Palestinian political freedom, Israeli security controls, and a federation of Israel, Jordan, and the Palestinians. Don Peretz Department of Political Science State University of New York at Binghamton Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, by Judith Plaskow. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. 282 pp. $21.95. Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective is a book remarkable for its clarity and its comprehensive account of feminist responses to Jewish life and thought. As such, and as the first book-length feminist Jewish theology, readable and sophisticated, provocative and judiciously presented , Standing Again at Sinai will be an essential resource to all who are struggling with the question of women's place in history and in modern life. It should also quickly find its place on syllabi for courses in Judaica at every level of study.. The details of Plaskow's feminist critique of Judaism are not new. What is new is that these ideas are gathered in a sustained argument that begins by establishing the importance of theology as the place where many of the unarticulated assumptions about Judaism reside. "So long as theology is dismissed as unimportant," writes Plaskow, "the sexism built into certain basic Jewish ideas is aided and abetted by the neglect of theology" (p. 22). Focusing on Torah, Israel, and God as Judaism's central categories, Plaskow challenges the assumption that Judaism is a non-theological tradition and therefore emphasizes theology over law and biblical rather than rabbinic Scripture in her analysis of authority in Judaism. She demonstrates that classically Judaism has spoken to and about men, excluding women altogether or regarding woman as Other, part of what must be managed by the systems that men control. Plaskow's powerful criticism nevertheless compels her readers to proceed towards a Judaism that is inclusive of all Jews. Beginning with the point that for herself she discovers no non-patriarchal space to which she can retreat, as a feminist and a Jew she finds that the next task is to speak the silence that occupies the place ofwoman in Judaism. The metaphor of speaking silence informs the whole of this analysis. Plaskow rehearses now familiar examples of women's exclusion, first citing 84 SHOFAR Exodus 19:15, the passage in which Moses warns the people that in preparation for receiving the law at Sinai no one should "go near a woman" (p. 25) and including example from ritual (such as circumcision) and liturgical life. A woman's experience of Judaism is contradictory: Torah speaks sometimes as if woman was not there, as if she did not exist to receive revelation at Sinai, but Jews also believe that woman was there; the myth of universal Jewish presence at Sinai is as Jewish a myth as the Torah passages that presume only male receipt of law. With similar contradiction, Jews believe that God is neither male nor female, but the images used to describe the Jewish divinity in prayer are almost exclusively male. Plaskow demonstrates the need for new ideas of Torah and of God, suggesting, for example, that Torah be recognized as a male product so that one is free to stand again at Sinai and remember or invent the experience of Jewish women. Plaskow impresses upon her readers the need to reimagine the community of Israel, recover women in history through scholarship or through story, recover and reassess women's writing and practices, and reinvent the language that talks to and about God either by recovering the goddess imagery in the tradition or by establishing a supplemental and inclusive rhetoric and poetics, a new liturgy. These recommendations-and they are loosely formulated in the book, leaving room for varieties of solutions and acknowledging the variety of situations of Jewish women-are finally problematic. To negotiate the difficult border between devastating criticism and commitment to a living religion, Plaskow relies on Elisabeth Schussler...