Jewish Musings, Wednesday, February 1

[louise]

What’s on your mind — how to make kugel? This week’s Torah reading? Life goals? Prayer? We are all engaged in weight loss/weight maintenance journeys and we are all Jewish or at least interested in Judaism. We like to eat, we like to discuss. It is our goal here to provide each other support on our journeys, to share experiences, to call on our rich cultural heritage and texts, and to help each other grow spiritually.

Some of us take weekly turns starting the thread:
Frieda (hopefully)?
Holly
Lee
Louise
Lynne
Peachy

And for those of you who stop by to read this thread without posting — you are welcome to, but you are also welcome to chime in. Don’t be shy!

[louise]

We have all heard before about Moses saying before Sinai 'not to go near a woman'. I came across a d’var torah on the parshah (Yiro) by Daniel Nevins from JTS. I’m going to quote a chunk of what he wrote because I thought it was so well written and perhaps provocative enough for us to extract a topic for the day.

“Are women Jews? This shocking question, first phrased by the feminist scholar Rachel Adler, is linked by Judith Plaskow to our portion in her 1990 book, Standing Again at Sinai. When Moses descends from the mountain to prepare the people for revelation, he tells them, “Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman” (Exod. 19:15). Sexual contact makes one temporarily impure, and God wanted the people to receive the revelation in a state of purity. As Plaskow notes, Moses could have said, “men and women do not go near each other,” but instead he addresses only the men (my own note here would be that he is only addressing straight men). She writes, “In this passage, the Otherness of women finds its way into the very center of Jewish experience.” 

“Because of the significance of this passage, it becomes paradigmatic of later Jewish writings in which women are often discussed as objects rather than speaking as subjects in their own relationship to the divine. The Talmud contains an entire division called “Women.” Much of it relates the actions taken by men to marry, divorce, or otherwise control the bodies of women. In the Jewish canon, women are rarely addressed by God, their voices are seldom heard, and their status is dependent, much like domestic servants, or even children. They are not required to study Torah and are relieved of responsibility for many positive commandments.”

He offers a lot of good scholarship on the subject (https://www.jtsa.edu/torah/expanding-the-circle-of-revelation/) and comes to this wonderful ending:
“As we prepare to stand again at Sinai, to hear the revelation recited in our own communities, we recall the divine instructions to Moses….We should stand together, expanding the circle of revelation until it includes every person who is prepared to study and to practice the holy ways of Torah.”

[lee058]

Good morning everybody. Hope you are all well and SAFE! Please pray for Israel.

Re today's topic: My main reaction was a loud GRRRRRR! I detest every attempt to make women feel less than human and less important than men. I vote for GRRRRRRRLLLLLLLL POWER instead!

Have a peaceful day, Lee

[gazelle18]

One way to look at this is :

1. God may have inspired the Torah, but it was written by mortals (men.)
2. The understanding of men about the equality of women , at the time the Torah was written, was, obviously not fully developed.
3. But some scholar/scribe (male) had to put the words of the Torah into something understandable for those hearing it. (Men.) So naturally, women are treated in the Torah as the objects they truly were in the society of the time.
4. As humankind (men AND women) has evolved, and our our view of the equality of the sexes has expanded, we can either reject the Torah outright as anachronistic and irrelevant, or we can choose to expand it, reinterpret it, etc.
5. Back to God: God understands all of the above, and has been waiting for us to expand (that is, make ourselves more and more in God’s image.)

[louise]

18 people have signed up for my zoom presentation already. Very relieved. Will be even more relieved when I write it!

[peachymom1]

"5. Back to God: God understands all of the above, and has been waiting for us to expand (that is, make ourselves more and more in God’s image.)"

I love this.