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[1] (D.H. Lawrence, "A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover." In Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore, editors, Phoenix II: Uncollected, Unpublished, and other prose works by D.H. Lawrence. New York: The Viking Press, 1968). [2] Song of Songs, Chapter 7, translation by Rabbi Shefa Gold

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Rabbi Shefa Gold is a leader in Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal and received her ordination both from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. She is the director of C-DEEP: The Center for Devotional, Energy and Ecstatic Practice in Jemez Springs, New Mexico and is also on the faculty of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. She is the author of "Torah Journeys: The Inner Path to the Promised Land" released in 2006 and "In The Fever of Love: An Illumination of the Song of Songs" released in 2008.

Photo is of the Jemez Mountains, courtesy of visitusa.com

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Just in time for the holidays, Zeek editor Jo Ellen Green Kaiser talks to B’nai Jeshurun leader Rabbi Marcelo Bronstein about the declining role of men in congregational Judaism.

Born in Buenos Aires in 1954, Marcelo Bronstein was educated in Israel, Argentina and the United States. He holds an MA in Hebrew Letters from Hebrew Union College, where he also received his Rabbinical Ordination. He also holds a MA in Clincal Psychology from Belgrano University, Buenos Aires. In addition to his duties at B’nai Jeshurun, Rabbi Bronstein serves on the advisory boards of Human Rights Watch/Americas, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, Soaring Words, and South Wing to Zion.

ZEEK: A recent study by Sylvia Barrack Fishman and Daniel Parmer (Matrilineal Ascent/Patrilineal Descent, Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, Brandeis University, 2008) seems to show that men are leaving Jewish congregational life. Do you see that trend at B’nai Jeshurun?

Marcelo Bronstein: Women participate much more than men in our congregational life. Don’t misunderstand me: we have a full congregation, full of life. But the core of what we are about is thanks to women. If not for our women, we wouldn’t have hazzanim, daily minyan, shiva minyanim, or chevra kedisha.

I am a product of the feminist revolution, so the fact that women lead most of the activities of our congregation never bothered me. I have always thought that the people who want to get involved, will get involved. I never paid attention to whether those people were men or women.

But suddenly, I began to hear people talk, and began to listen to others and even pay attention to what it was in front of my eyes.  Also recently, I participated in a conversation at NYU on gender and education. Speakers said that finding a male educator, a male teacher in New York, would be very soon like finding a diamond in the street. They are that rare.

ZEEK: So, where are the men? Why aren’t they participating?

MB: Well, that’s what I wanted to find out. So I started talking to men.

When you ask men who have left the congregation, men who have married outside Judaism, they say that Jewish women are too strong. They say they want to find Golde, the old-fashioned Jewish woman, but they can’t find any Jewish women like her, so they turn to Asian women, women from other cultures.

Several men told me that, which confused me. I replied that the Golde in Fiddler on the Roof was very strong. They say, yes, strong but loving. Well, that is another conversation, a conversation about what men want or think they want in a woman. I felt that the answers they were giving me represented their emotional feelings, but maybe were not the whole answer to why they left.

When women were not happy with Judaism, they stayed. They stayed behind the mehitzha until they tore it down. But men are leaving. I am very concerned about Judaism. I don’t think this is good for men, for women, for anyone.

ZEEK: What can you do about that, as a congregational rabbi?

MB: Well, I started a men’s group, not because the men asked, but because I noticed these things. When I started, six men signed up, but at the first meeting, sixty came. They didn’t want to sign up, but they wanted to come. Since then, we have held the group once a month.

I should say that creating a men’s group at my synagogue, a very politically progressive synagogue in New York, was very politically incorrect. I thought someone would cut my head off. I was afraid of my feminist members.

So, before starting the group I went to talk to a feminist friend. I told her I wanted to start a men’s group, and asked her opinion. She said, I love what you are doing. Why, I asked. She said, In the beginning, feminists chopped the testicles off men. That was a necessary act of war. Afterwards, when we achieved some equality, we sat and cried. Where are the men? They oppressed us, so we castrated them. So I like that you are trying to celebrate the differences without imposing power.

ZEEK: Woah.

MB: Yes. In the beginning, I called some guys about coming to the group’s first meeting, and they laughed. They said, Ok, we will come, but this can’t be a rosh chodesh group. We are not going to talk about feelings, we are not going to cry. I put that in the advertisement. It became a kind of joke.

ZEEK: What did they want?

MB: They wanted to daven. They wanted to hear just male voices. So we met at mincha, Shabbat afternoon. We daven together, and then have whiske–a very good single malt scotch whiskey–and crackers and cheese. And then we have a conversation. At first, we did Torah study, but I realized that these men really wanted to talk. Recently, we talked about Esther Perel’s book, Mating in Captivity.

She came to talk to the group. Men were mesmerized. Some men were crying, because they felt they were being understood and not judged. They wanted more of that.

I think Jewish men have not found themselves. This is something women did during the feminist movement. Women learned how to find themselves. In the Jewish world, women met in rosh chodesh groups, created rituals. They gained equality but also found a way to be Jewish women.

ZEEK: Yes, including writing liturgy for women’s lifecycle events like menstruation and menopause. Lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Jews are doing that now as well, with queer retreats like Nehirim and new LGBT siddurim. But men, well, men used to be the ones to say kiddush while women lit the candles. Now, women say kiddush. What is left for men to do? What is their role?

MB: Jewish men are lost. It’s not clear to men what it means to be a man. If they listen to women, what it means to be a man is to be bad, aggressive, fascist. All their good qualities–tenderness, compassion, empathy–are called their feminine side. So what is my masculine side, what is good there?

I feel comfortable, personally, as a man, so I was surprised when a male congregant said I was a feminine rabbi. Why do you say that? I asked him. Well, he said, you cry, you talk about feelings, you hug. I can’t relate to that. I was stunned. So I was thinking, what is a male role model?

ZEEK: That question reminds me of the poet Robert Bly, who wrote a memoir titled Iron John about his need to recover his inner warrior. Feminists criticized him for believing that the only way to be masculine was to be aggressive, a warrior. Can’t men find a way to be manly without masculinity being associated with aggression and dominance?

MB: That is what I don’t know. I do think, though, that we have an imbalance in Jewish life. I believe that men don’t see a place for themselves in Jewish life. Men are not needed anymore basically for anything–not for the minyan, not for the reading of the Torah, not for witnessing. In life in general, men are not needed not as providers, or even as the ones that will impregnate women. Sperm banks do that too. If the paradigm of the provider, the hunter, the dominant one is past, we men have to generate another paradigm that is liberated from patriarchal weight.

ZEEK: Western culture tells us that men are violent, aggressive and women are peaceful, submissive. Why does that binary have to define us?

MB: Well, what do you think, as a feminist, that men could learn from the feminist movement?

ZEEK: I’m thinking about the physical body. The early feminists, the first wave, often hated their bodies because they saw the female body as soft and vulnerable and what they wanted was to gain power. But once women began gaining more power in culture, we were able to embrace our bodies. I wonder if that is what men need to do? If they need to–well, to be graphic–to reimagine the penis not as a weapon, as a symbol of power and dominance, but in some other way? To find a way to be proud of hardness and strength without it being tied to dominance?

MB: Maybe. What we need is a role model for that. 

ZEEK: Yes, perhaps someone like King David, who was warrior and lover, king and poet.

MB: I love the David imagery. Yes he was a poet, a lover and a king, though for some, he was not a very good king–he was too controlled by his passions. David was human.

The issue that we cannot escape from is the issue of power.

Are men disappearing from Jewish life or from the world of education, social work, etc, because women came in? Because we men don’t know how to be without being in control? If that is the case we desperately need to change the paradigm, because nobody is going back to the caves of inequality; that was a human’s rights war and it was won.

In the equation of equal but different there is an answer, but I don’t know which one is yet.

ZEEK: Thank you, rabbi.

**

The opening image for this essay is Tom Drury as Tevye in a 2003 production

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Beth Kissileff, a visiting assistant professor at Carleton College, writes the Sabbath Voices column for the New York Jewish Week and  is finishing her first novel, Questioning Return. 

Image courtesy the Unorthodox Jew

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4. Isenberg’s Film Film is not the best medium for philosophy; those wanting to get a sense of his philosophy are much better off reading his books, preferably about four or five times since each additional reading will undoubtedly yield something new. The aim of the film instead is the impact of the man. What works so well is the combination of audiovisual sources, of sound and imagery. The footage of Bolsheviks on galloping horseback on their way to wreak destruction; the photos of the young Rav as a bold and dark-eyed, handsome clean-shaven student, minus the yarmulke and his beautiful wife to be, Tonya,  in round spectacles who, at the time he met her, was earning her doctorate in education; the narration by multiple-award-winning actress Tovah Feldshuh; the jazz score in combination with photographic cityscapes of Berlin. In the midst of all this, the audience learns about the debates his father had with his students about the Maimonides, debated the Rav overheard as a child; his years as a philosophy student in Berlin; his move with his wife and daughter to New York City where his father was teaching; his clashes with ultra-Orthodox Jewish leaders who opposed Zionism on the religious grounds that the messiah had not yet comes; the kashrut scandal in Boston in which he exposed for the world to see both the exploitation of factory workers and the reality that kashrut standards were not followed; his fights with the Boston Jewish to create a Jewish day school at a time of rife anti-Semitism; and his insistence on girl’s and women’s education in the Orthodox community.  The details covered, that might have well been dizzying in the hands of an inferior filmmaker, could not have been more smoothly employed under Isenberg’s direction. In simple terms, regardless of religion or religious orientation, the film is a joy to watch. In terms of his philosophy, can it have an impact outside the Modern Orthodox Jewish community?  Yes, if one is willing to suspend religious skepticism long enough treat Adam the first and Adam the second as archetypes. Should the modern reader subscribe to the Documentary Hypothesis, the very theory Solovetichik rejected, he or she can gain a greater appreciation through Solveitchik for the beauty and artistry in which "the redactor," the mysterious person who compiled these disparate Adam stories together, knit them into a single text. The redactor, acting in the capacity as a modern editor, allowed for the full nuances of ambiguity to be explored, culminating into Solveitchik’s brilliant and poetic casuistry that can enrich Jews of all intellectual and spiritual orientations, so long as the said reader can let go of the idea of there needing to be a completely consistent text.  

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Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is an author, educator, midrashist, myth-weaver, and ritualist. She is the director of Tel Shemesh, a website and community celebrating and creating Jewish earth-based traditions, and the co-founder of Kohenet: The Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is the author of two books: Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women (Jewish Publication Society, 2001) and The Jewish Book of Days (Jewish Publication Society, forthcoming 2006). She is a poet and essayist whose work has been published in many journals and anthologies such as Lilith, Bridges, Response, Natural Bridge, Zeek, The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion,The Jewish Spectator, Biblical Women in the Midrash, and The Women’s Torah Commentary. 

Shofar image courtesy of Ahuva.com

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The henna ceremony is traditionally part of the fertility rituals that take place on the eve of a wedding, either in the mikveh or at the bride’s home.  The Hebrew word for henna (hina) encompasses the essence of the compact between God and the bride that is made on the wedding eve. The letters of the Hebrew word allude to the three commandments in which women are obligated, with the addition of the name of God-het, for challah; yod, for Hakadosh Baruch Hu; nun, for niddah; and heh, for lighting Shabbat candles (hadlakat nerot).  If a woman devoutly fulfills the three commandments given to her by God, he will safeguard her from all evil entities, increase the fruit of her womb, and enhance her beauty. Henna is made from the leaves of the kofer, a small shrub or ornamental tree with fragrant flowers that grows primarily in Egypt, India, and North Africa.  The dried green henna leaves are ground and soaked in water, which turns them red, and then cooked into a thick paste. The paste is placed in the center of a tray decorated with green leaves and candles.  After the bride has immersed, her mother lights the candles, lifts the tray over her own head, and dances a fertility dance to the sound of beating drums.  Wiggling her hips, she makes her way to the bride and holds the tray over the bride’s head.  All the women trill "Kululululu!" The bride takes the tray from her mother, raises it over her head, and dances with it until she reaches the woman she wishes to bless and holds the tray over her head.  The tray lit with candles is passed from hand to hand, above the heads of all the women.  The whole time, the women dance to the beat of the drums and are swept into a state of ecstasy.  Each time the tray is lifted over the head of the chosen woman, the rest erupt into a joyful "Kululululu!"  After all the women have received the blessing, the eldest of the group, the grandmother, dips her fingers into the paste and paints a circle on both of the bride’s hands.  In the center of the circle she places a blue candy, to ward off the evil eye.  Then the grandmother does the same for all the other women. The henna leaves a prominent reddish-brown stain imprinted on the skin for many days, preserving the memory of the compact while displaying for all the world a seal of approval for the women’s sexual relations with her husband. All the women who receive the mark of the henna are made witnesses to the pact of fertility, love, and loyalty that was sealed in the ritual immersion in the mikveh. The dry, infertile material symbolizes the virgin girl who is not yet a woman; she is an unripe fruit. Through the moistening and cooking process, the dry, green henna is transformed into moist, red henna, symbolizing the fertile woman brimming with life and vitality.  The henna turns red, the color that symbolizes the fertility of Mother Earth-red like the blood that is crucial for the renewal of fertility. Symbolically, the transformation process undergone by the henna is identical to what happens to the bride’s body in the mikveh.  She arrives from her mother’s home "green" and unripe, and after immersing in the warm water, becomes "red" and ripe.  The male side is represented in this "cooking" process by the mother-in-law, who prepares the henna, symbolically strengthening her son’s fertility by accelerating the bride’s fertility potential. The henna ceremony also highlights the community’s involvement in the bride’s physical and symbolic transformation.  An important part of the henna ritual is the cooking of festive foods by the women themselves, which enhances the joy derived from the preparations for this traditionally all-female event.  Nowadays, the henna ceremony may be a large celebration geld at a fancy banquet hall or other venue, with many guests of both genders.  This party is usually held about a week before the wedding, and thus is not connected with the bride’s immersion. "The real henna ceremony is when the bride returns from the mikveh and puts on the henna," Aunt Sophie explained to me.  "Then the groom is not around, whether he’s Yemenite or Moroccan or Ashkenazi.  Not only in the mikveh is the groom forbidden to come near his bride, but also that whole night and the day before the wedding.  But these days very few people obey the prohibition against being together.  Most ignore the custom, and the bride sees the groom after the henna celebration." Sophie also tells me about the magical properties of the henna.  According to the traditional Jewish superstition, demons lie in wait during times of transition, when humans are weak and sensitive.  The wedding eve is a perilous time for the couple, who are separated from one another, because the demons, who need humans in order to reproduce, try to mate with each of them.  The word "henna" itself is thought to contain a special magical quality that keeps the demons away. "They used to put this green, magic powder in all the corners of the house, to keep the demons away from the people," Aunt Sophie said excitedly. "The henna fights off the evil spirits." "Why don’t they leave the henna around the house in Israel like they did in Morocco?" "Because this party they throw today is not a real henna night. It’s like a separation party from the family, from the friends and neighbors.  The real henna ceremony is when the bride comes back from the mikveh, when they put the henna on her, tie a cloth around it, and her parents lock up the house and sleep there with her, to guard her from the demons.  The groom does the same thing in his house.  His mother brings a little of the henna  from the bride’s house, puts it on him, covers it up, and he sleeps there with it the whole night, together with his best man, who’s accompanied him for all seven days before the wedding.  The two of them share the same bed.  That was the custom in our community."

The Henna Ceremony is reprinted from The House of Secrets by Varda Polak-Sahm, Copyright © 2009 by Varda Polak-Sahm, Reprinted by permission of Beacon Press, Boston. Get your copy at http://www.beacon.org/productdetails.cfm?PC=2053

Henna Hands image by  Rashmi Nawa, Irving Texas Rashmi’s website is Heena Designs at http://heenausa.com/HeenaUSA/service.aspx

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— Zeek Editors

Gregg Drinkwater is the Executive Director of Jewish Mosaic. Jewish Mosaic has agreed to raise funds from our supporters which we will pass on IN FULL to Israel’s LGBT youth organizations. CLICK HERE to make a donation via Jewish Mosaic that will be transferred to Israel in the form of a grant for LGBT youth services. Please indicate that your gift is in honor of LGBT youth in Israel.

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Fenno tells me how he got lost in his own village

on a visit back to Kenya.

When he was a boy,

they always avoided the tangled trees

where the ancestors worshipped.

He has been in Berkeley for twenty three years,

his accent eggplant-purple in the creases

where skin meets skin, elbows, the folds of the ears,

hollows of the nose.

He didn’t want to ask directions.

They would tell him,

Are you so American that you’ve forgotten?

Don’t you know the way around your own village?

Last summer, Paul, walking his bicycle beside me

is not yet

my lover. I want to see my city

through his eyes, 

get lost in Jerusalem

near the train station, where the trains never

run, and a small house stands

in the back, as if the city grew around its creamy stones,

its poignant laundry.

Like I want to get lost in my own body

and have him point out the sights:

the garden in front of the cinematheque,

the lions’ fountain at the intersection

in a cloud of bus exhaust,

the fig trees-

reveal my immigrant’s life to me

like a tour guide, an archeologist,

or the way a bomb blows away the building above

to expose the hidden foundation.

#

Yosefa Raz is Zeek’s Poetry Editor. Her poetry, fiction, and translations have appeared in Glimmer Train, Tikkun Magazine, Lilith, Bridges, and ZYZZYVA. Her poetry book, In Exchange for a Homeland, was published in 2004 by Swan Scythe Press. Born and raised in Israel, she is currently working on a PhD at UC Berkeley on the prophetic voice in biblical poetry and its influence on the Hebrew Modernist poets.

The art that accompanies this piece is titled "Kaddish Stones" by Ken Goldman. Ken’s work may be found at http://www.coroflot.com/public/individual_work.asp?individual_id=197753&is_featured=-1&

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In the month of Av falls Tisha b’Av, the ninth of Av, when Jews commemorate the destruction of the first and second Temples. A woman who conceives and bears a male shall be taboo seven days, just as during her menstrual period she shall be taboo.  On the eighth day his flesh shall be circumcised.  Thirty-three days shall she dwell in the blood of her purification; she shall not touch any sacred thing or enter the holy place until the days of her purification are complete.  If she gives birth to a female, she shall be taboo for two weeks, and sixty-six days she shall dwell in the blood of her purification.  When the days of her purity are full, for a son or a daughter, she shall bring a first-year lamb as a burnt offering, and a pigeon or turtledove as a sin offering, to the door of the tent of meeting, to the priest.  (Leviticus 12:2-6) Jeremiah said: When I went up to Jerusalem, I saw a woman sitting on the mountain top, dressed in black with disheveled hair, and she was weeping and wailing: ‘Who will comfort me?’  I approached her and said to her: "If you are a woman, speak to me, and if you are a spirit, flee before me."  She said to me: ‘I am your mother Zion.’  I said to her: ‘In time to come I will build you up.’ (Pesikta deRav Kahana 166) The vaginal opening is the gate of the temple.  It is the door to the Holy of Holies, the womb, where no one enters except the ones who cannot tell what they see.  The womb is the temple, but this temple is in exile. No one reveres it now, no one bows down to it, yet it stocks and restocks the world, it is adept at planting and harvest, it is an estuary of existence.  From it come the spirits of all mammalian life.  Yet when the womb gave birth the temple required of it a sin offering.  One might say that for this the temple was destroyed.  Or one might say that the temple is destroyed and rebuilt monthly, that this is the way of the world.   Or, one might say that the temple is destroyed each time there is a death.  We mourn the loss of the four walls of a soul. The tearing down of a building, this is no more than a historical fact, and a metaphor. The temple is in exile, and this may be why midwives are scarce, birth takes place in the realm of the sick, and healers know better how to cut open the womb than to deliver a baby from it.   Many labor without delivering: the gate opens too slowly.  The heart rate plunges, the emergency unfolds, the exit from the womb comes with a breach in the wall.  One-third of all births are Caesarean births.  We have lost the keys to the temple.   We have lost the sounds of the temple, the murmuring of the rituals and the voices of prayer.  Women become pregnant and they tell no one, for fear they will have to tell that there was a miscarriage.  They feel joy and do not speak.  They are sick, they vomit, they do not explain.  They go to work, they care for others. There are no stories of birth on television, only stories of doctors who bravely catch babies as they emerge from somewhere.  The temple is silent.  Who will open up this silence?  If you are a woman, speak to me.  The hospital wards are quiet because medication makes the birth less painful.  Yet speak, with your weepings and wailings, your disheveled hair, your unleashed tears of joy.  Do not flee like a ghost. Say to me, ‘I am your mother."  Tell me your story, and I will tell you mine.   Show me the small laughing life you created, the lamp at the center of the shrine, the five-branched candelabrum of sentience.  Show me the one who will build you up in a future time. We have forgotten the temple; the angel has touched all of us and made us forget, but we can remember.  We can remember the placental tree of arteries and veins, we can remember the hills and crevices of the bellybutton like the paths of the ibex through the mountains of the holy land. Jerusalem, it is written, is the navel at the center of the world.  This is a reversed prophecy: the navel is Jerusalem.  Each navel is a new Jerusalem, a new place of pilgrimage.  Remember the pain of a giant climbing from your body.  Remember the moment of emergence from the gate, the tiny swollen vagina or the snakelike phallus, the first vibration of the vocal cords.  Remember the first offering of the milk, the opening of the ducts and the welling up of golden colostrum like a libation.  Tell me your story.  I look down at my newborn daughter, arisen from the temple I will never see except in sonograms.  Inside her are ova.  When she was inside me, they were inside me, inside my temple.  Now they are seeds of a future not yet born.  In time to come, they will travel down the fallopian tube and into the world.  Exile is part of the life of the Temple.  Exile is danger and jubilation, exile is the hope of all things. Speak, if your womb is present-absence, like the holy of holies, if it is as full as pilgrimage, if your voice is a womb of poems.  Tell the story of birth, which is not only the story of birth but the story of every journey everywhere.  You have known birth, no matter who or where you are, no matter how your life has unfolded.  Your organs are priestly chambers, storing incense, rams and cows, fistfuls of white-gold flour.  Remember.  Lamentations cries: "Lonely is the city full of people."  (Lamentations 1:1) But the city is not lonely, it sings with the mitochondria of the ages, the well of generations is at its heart.  The exiled city holds us all.   The city is the earth, its basement is bones and anaerobic bacteria, its walls are xylem and phloem, its roof is tiled with cloud and breath.  The earth speaks: black soil and disheveled hair of grain, buried bones and seeds.  The days of her purity are full and very many, never complete.

# Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy of Jewish Religion, the founder and director of Tel Shemesh, a website and community celebrating earth-based Jewish traditions, and the co-director (rav-kohenet) of the Kohenet Institute, which trains women in feminist and earth-based spiritual leadership.  She is the author of many essays, poems, and stories, as well as two books: Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, and The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons. Image courtesy of www.fertilitymoon.com

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