Yisro—Ceilings

There are two moments in this week's parsha central to the narrative of the revelation and transmission that establish a baseline: Torah is essentialist and binary.

(The much-touted “six genders” theory proves the binary rule: the androgynos is forced to follow the chumras of each gender; the tumtum, whose gender is undetermined, is ultimately either one or the other; the saris is male; the ailonis female.  But we digress.)

Yet it is that very binarism that makes it flexible towards what one might term either “Orthodox feminism” or “feminist Orthodoxy”.

It must also be noted that the two pesukim that set up that binary—כה תאמר לבית יעקב ותגיד לבני ישראל on the one hand, and אל־תגשו אל־אשה on the other—are often misunderstood, sometimes deliberately, by those either trying to prove that the Torah gender definitions mandate restrictive gender roles, and/or that the Torah is invariably androcentrist and/or misogynist.

The אל־תגשו אל־אשה issue has been oft overplayed to the point that a radical feminist notion of an androcentric Torah that excludes women: aside from this imperative ostensibly only being directed at men (never mind that כה תאמר לבית יעקב ותגיד לבני ישראל should indicate that not only were women included, they went first), there are actual questions raised by Tosfos in Yevamos 46a that question whether women had a “diminished” experience at Har Sinai.  Ultimately this is solved tautologically (“The women had to have immersed, because if they did not, by what method would they have entered into the Jewish People?”), but even that indicates that the conventional wisdom with regard this question is to ultimately be inclusive rather than exclusive.

The posuk כה תאמר לבית יעקב ותגיד לבני ישראל delineates an ostensibly invariably traditional approach to gender divisions in education, to the point that not only are separate schools mandated, but even the educational tracks are supposed to be divided; this comes into play most often in discussions regarding women learning Gemara.  Without going too far into the controversy that persists even today, one work in particular by a non-feminist scholar—Shoshana Pantel Zolty’s 1993 “And All Your Children Shall be Learned: Women and the Study of Torah in Jewish Law and History”—provides ample historical evidence that if there was ever a “ban” on women studying Torah sheba’al peh, it was observed much more in the breach, and for so long that the truly “modern”/“innovative”, less “traditional” approach might be the more recent attempts to ban it (and the successful bans in Chassidic circles).

The other distortion comes from the notion that a “curse”—in this case, the curses of Eve—are ipso facto directives, and attempts to alleviate them flaunt Divine will.  One wonders whether one should note that it was the Catholic Church that mandated that women receive no pain relief during childbirth until 1949 owing to Genesis 3:16 if one wants to consider how Jewish this notion is; either way, as TB AZ 22b notes, ma’amad Har Sinai (hence the connection to this weeks parsha) alleviated some of the more pervasive זוהמא (or “moral contamination”), which should indicate for propitious conditions for working towards alleviating her curses.

The irony of quoting Rav Soloveichik on this issue must be noted, as he was clearly uncompromising on certain issues regarding the metaphysical feminine; referring to metaphysical chazakot regarding women, and specifically “tav lemetav tan du milemetav armelu”, the Rav asserted that questioning that “metaphysical curses rooted in feminine personality; this is not a psychological fact, it is an existential fact” render one an apostate; yet it also must be noted that he famously taught Talmud to women, which still causes no end of controversy even today.  Regarding the metaphysical “tav lemetav tan du milemetav armelu”, beyond the question of whether a woman actually would rather want to actually either remain with “trouble” rather than be alone, it would seem that certain mekoros argue against the ontology of this interpretation, specifically (but not limited to): in an individual case, the Mishnah on TB Kesuvos 77a that delineates where a man who proves impossible to physically live with is compelled to grant a get, and what some call the “shidduch crisis gemara” on Kesuvos 82b, where women en masse revised to marry until the general terms of the kesuva were altered so that wives and there families received more equitable distributions and so husband’s families couldn’t hide the attached assets.   Additionally, the statement itself appears five times in the Talmud, expanding the parameters of its definition and application enough from within the halachic system that “more recent responsa reflect a change in the deterministic approach and construe it more flexibly. They demonstrate a venue to apply the law differently to changing perceptions and social norms.”

However, ironic as it may remain, one can encapsulate the approach towards Sinaitic binarism by paraphrasing what the Rav said about halacha: it’s not a ceiling, but a floor.  The relationship between binarism and women’s roles should follow TB Taanis 20b: “be flexible like a reed, and not rigid like a cedar”.

But don’t take my word for it:

One of the best treatments of this topic is Berel Lerner’s "The Ten Curses of Eve (an unpublishable article on women in Judaism)"; he explains: “Non-Orthodox publications refused to print it unless I made it more stringently critical of Orthodoxy, while Orthodox publications found it too hot to handle. Since I remained unwilling to change its conclusions to make it more congenial to the views of various editors, it remains unpublished.”

And his conclusion encapsulates the issues better than most:

“[A]lert and thoughtful students of traditional texts [] are bound to discover that the notion that the roles of women in Jewish life are equal in dignity and importance to those of men is an essentially modern notion formulated in response to modern concerns and conditions…One might say that full respect for the role of women is a truth of the Torah which has remained hidden from the eyes of earlier generations, waiting for us to be its discoverers. However, we cannot pretend that those earlier generations had already made this discovery. That would be a fabrication of history and a sin against intellectual honesty.”