Earlier this week, the Israeli Supreme Court made a firm ruling on the ongoing turmoil of women wanting equal access to the Kotel, the Western Wall. The situation has recently reached a boiling point, including a failed plan to compromise last year. This court decision is firmly on the side of organizations like Women of the Wall, that argue that current policies discriminate against liberal or egalitarian religious practices.

In case you missed it, the ruling essentially says:

• Access to Robinson’s Arch (around the corner from the main part of the Wall) does not count as access to the Western Wall.
• It is illegal to search women’s bodies for “contraband,” as in Jewish ritual objects.
• Women may wear tallitot and tefillin at the Kotel. Most of all, they may read from the Torah (yes, out loud,) there.

But it’s not over, yet! The government has thirty days (less now) to present “good cause” to protest this ruling.

Wow, that seems like a toughie. We feel bad for the government and Western Wall administrators (particularly one Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz), who have to come up with something in only a month. And so, we here at Jewcy have decided to lend a helping hand, and help them brainstorm.

Feel free to use any of these as ways to articulate why the court’s decision was wrong:

• The women’s side of the Wall is simply too small to handle that level of activity. It’s a shame that no one can expand the section of the wall that is about 20% of the space for 50% of the population.
• In fact, because of manspreading, men need at least 90% of the Wall.
• Women have cooties. Praying out loud makes them spread faster. Have you seen World War Z? It’ll be like the scene where the zombies pour over their mechitza.
• Allowing women to read from the Torah at the Kotel violates the way worship originally occurred at the Temple of which the Wall was once a part. Only animal sacrifices should be permitted. And most people should really only go there three times a year.
• If women can bring religious artifacts into the religious site, what’s next? Bringing copies of The Red Tent? Birth control? There’d be no space in their purses to keep extra garments to cover up their bodies, in accordance with Kotel dress codes.
• Letting liberal Jewish groups have religious autonomy is a zero sum game, and the slightest change weakens the ultra-Orthodox stranglehold on standards of religious life in Israel.
• Furthermore, some men will feel Sad and Scared if they can hear women pray in a way they don’t like. And if men feel a way, you should let them make rules about it.

You’re welcome! See you at the Kotel!

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

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After a lot of recent excitement about the new arrangement for the Western Wall, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that no, never mind, what, who said anything about a deal, quick look over there Iran looks suspicious!

What Bibi actually said was that “several difficulties arose” in establishing an “egalitarian” area at the wall, many of those difficulties taking the form of right-wing officials, including Kotel Rabbi Shmuel Rabinowitz who had originally acquiesced to the deal, and Minister of Religious Affairs David Azoulay refusing to accept it in the first place in a way that smacks of Kim Davis. For them, apparently the idea of legitimizing women reading Torah and laying tefillin anywhere in the vicinity would be an abomination (seriously, Azoulay made comparisons to not committing murder).

Netanyahu asserted that he’s not giving up, and appointed his bureau chief David Sharan to try to work out a solution over the next couple of months, but obviously progressive Jewish groups are discouraged, if not infuriated.

I’m on record as disliking the deal anyway; it was too little for the women who want the right to pray in a way that they find meaningful in the main women’s section of the Wall (a section that is also too small and oppressive, while we’re on the subject).

But the fact that Netanyahu couldn’t even accomplish that is pretty telling.  Once again, he acts powerless in the face of pressure from the religious right, like when he reneged on action that would make Haredi Jews more beholden to Israel’s mandatory military draft.

The odds that Sharan is going to come back with a better deal than the previous one are smaller than the constrained women’s section at the Kotel (which would be 20%, by the way. The women’s section of the Western Wall is one-fourth the size of the men’s section).

See you 60 days to explore further disappointment!

Photo credit: Wikipedia

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On paper, Sarah Silverman and Susan Silverman could not be more different. One is a famously provocative comedian living in L.A., the other an activist rabbi living in Israel. (“I’m godless and she’s godfull,” is how Sarah succinctly and irreverently puts it.) But a profile in The Daily Beast reveals that the sisters share a political sensibility which runs in the Silverman family—one that has led Sarah, 43, to launch two Great Schlep campaigns, and Susan, 50, to become a prominent member of the Jewish feminist group, Women of the Wall:

“Our mom is a big brain—very passionate and opinionated,” says Sarah. “She always had buttons on her purse and her overalls (yes, overalls) that said stuff like ‘question authority’ and how the military should have a bake sale and schools should be funded, ‘We have met the enemy and they are US’—you know, that stuff.  And our Dad is also outspoken, very liberal, very funny.  He calls himself a reverse snob. He’ll heckle people: ‘Nice Rolex. That could probably feed a whole town in India—but good for you. I love my Timex—it was $35 and it can go underwater!'”

What’s really touching is how supportive and fond the sisters are of each other (there are four in total). Susan thinks of Sarah as someone who is “carrying on the prophetic tradition, of just pouring out truth and justice.” Sarah recalls that when Susan was in rabbinical school in New York City, “she never left her tiny apartment without a bag full of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and dollar bills.”

These days, Susan is an advocate for religious pluralism and refugees’ rights in Israel. When she and her daughter Hallel were arrested last year for wearing tallits and reading Torah at the Western Wall (something only men are permitted to do at the sacred site), Sarah tweeted her support in here characteristically ribald language: “SO proud of my amazing sister @rabbisusan & niece @purplelettuce95 for their ballsout civil disobedience. Ur the tits!”

Apparently the youngest Silverman has been talking this way since she was very little. Once, when offered some brownies by their grandmother, four-year-old Sarah responded, “Shove them up your ass, Nana.” Susan says, “She didn’t know what she was saying, really. She just knew that it was crude and her adorableness saying it was going to be funny.”

Now that’s sisterly love.

Related: Sarah Silverman: Dolls With Ridiculous Bodies Teach Little Girls They “Don’t Deserve Love”
Sarah Silverman Talks Reproductive Rights With Jesus Christ

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It’s not just on gender segregated buses that travel through ultra-Orthodox areas of Jerusalem or at the Western Wall where Women of the Wall continue to challenge the authorities over communal prayer on the ladies’ side of the partition—women’s access to communal space in Israel is limited in other settings as well. In a post for the Times of Israel, Rivkah Lambert Adler lists the ways that she, as an Orthodox woman, has encountered discrimination at synagogue classes, lectures, and even concerts where her ticket price is the same as a man’s but her seat is way worse.

I was nodding pretty vigorously as I read her post—it’s hard to disagree with Adler when she argues that she should be able to see the performer in a show she paid good money to see—until I got to this paragraph:

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that I want to wear tefillin or serve as a ba’al tefilla or be called up to the Torah for an aliyah. I’m not inherently opposed to separate seating during services. Please don’t conflate and thereby dismiss what I’m saying because my point is based on gender. I’m not revealing my disdain for being a Jewish woman and I have no secret desire to be a Jewish man.

Adler is worried about coming off as a ranting feminist (heaven forfend!) when all she’s asking for is a fair seat. So she reassures readers that she doesn’t actually want many of the things that Jewish feminists want—such as participation in public ritual.

This was wholly unnecessary. She had already made a pretty convincing case for more equitable use of public space. There was no need to bring the aspirations and goals of other Jewish feminists into the mix and imply there was something wrong with them, that they were somehow radical and improper. She could’ve rested her argument on “kavod habriyot,” simple respect for others.

Part of this is defensive. In high school, I encountered several teachers with the audacity to use the F-word—feminism—to disparage women who wished for leadership and ritual participation as wanting “to be Jewish men” instead of the Jewish uteruses, er, women, we were created to be. I wasn’t quite savvy enough to challenge the rabbis’ basic premise—that leadership and tefillin were somehow intrinsically bundled up in masculinity.

Another tactic frequently used to discredit Jewish feminists is to impugn their motives. “Do they even want to be counted in a minyan?” one teacher asked, “or are they simply insisting on it because men can be counted?” The problem here, according to these teachers, is that these women don’t want to perform the mitzvah for its own sake, but are merely trying to prove a point. This is the classic privileged argument. When you’re part of the ruling class, you never have to explain yourself. A man who walks into a shul and asks for an aliyah never has to explain why he wants it. As a Jewish male over the age of thirteen, it’s merely his right and privilege. His motives are irrelevant.

Adler clearly was hoping to head off the type of mocking I heard as a teen, convincing her would-be critics that what she’s asking for isn’t a big deal. A nice chair here, a better view there—nothing like those crazy feminists we’ve all been warned about. While I understand the strategy, I wonder how effective it is. Is it useful to downplay the work of other feminists in an attempt to distinguish yourself from them?

She may not give the benefit of the doubt to those women who supposedly wish to be men, but she gives it to the people who keep giving her shitty seats. “I’d like to assume it’s a problem of oversight rather than intentionality,” she writes.

I have no problem with that. I also don’t like to make assumptions about people’s intentions and personal motivations unless I have actual proof of what they think and feel. And it’s likely true that the organizers have no special animus towards women. But to call it a simple “oversight” is shockingly naïve when it continually happens and to just one group and all the time. This points to a more systemic cause. And in invoking the “derech eretz” argument over and over, Adler is clearly trying to avoid having that more difficult conversation.

It’s her approach, however, that irks me. It’s true that social change takes time and happens incrementally. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” But do we get there by asking for pittances and disparaging those that dare to ask for more?

As someone who has chosen to leave the Orthodox community, I recognize that my credibility is pretty much shot with those who still claim communal membership. (Part of the reason I lingered on the fringes of Orthodoxy for awhile was to keep some of that credibility. Ultimately, I decided it wasn’t worth it.) I don’t really have a right to tell an Orthodox woman still functioning within that community what she should demand and how she should go about getting it. She and I face somewhat different challenges and restrictions when it comes to misogyny. Nor do I have the right to tell Orthodox women how I think they should feel—angry, frustrated, revolutionary—about their present situation.

But I also don’t think that Orthodox women, in making their case for greater respect within their own communities, should disparage the aspirations of other Jewish feminists who want greater ritual participation. This desire doesn’t make them Jewish men, but rather, committed Jews.

As for Adler—may she get those front row seats she’s after. I just hope she doesn’t stop there.

Previous columns: Obsessive Compulsive Passover

David Brooks’ Orthodox Fantasy

(Image via ChameleonsEye / Shutterstock.com)

The post The BallaBuster: Misogyny in Israel—and Not Just at the Western Wall appeared first on Jewcy.

Almost immediately, a female police officer approached me with a video camera about 10 inches from my face. “Change your tallit to look like a scarf,” she said. I looked at her puzzled. I’ve prayed with Women of the Wall a few times throughout the year, and no one from security had ever made a request like that. “Change your tallit!,” she barked again. “But everyone else is wearing their tallit in a regular way,”—hanging over their shoulders—I said as I motioned to rest of the crowd. She didn’t budge, and I draped one side of my tallit around my neck. Another officer approached and said, “that’s not good enough. Make it look like a scarf.”

I got frustrated at this point. “Can you please leave me alone, I’m trying to pray.” “You have to change your tallit,” said the male officer, as he volunteered to help change the way I was wearing my tallit. I rolled my eyes and draped the second corner of my tallit over my neck, creating a cape of tzitzit. I finished praying and all of us at the Wall began to join in song, arm in arm, making our way over to Robinson’s Arch to read Torah and begin the additional musaf prayer for Rosh Chodesh.

The women’s rights struggle within the religious sphere in Israel is nothing new. Throughout my year in Israel, there have been campaigns about women’s voices being heard (literally), gender segregated buses, and public images of women allowed on posters or billboards. Women’s rights in public prayer spaces is just one of the many issues. An article about this week’s Kotel incident cites a 2001 law that states, “it is illegal for women to perform religious practices traditionally done by men in Orthodox Jewish practice at the Western Wall, such as reading from a Torah scroll, wearing tefillin or a tallit, or blowing a shofar.”

I had no idea that the police had their eyes on us, but as we moved through the security gates I made eye contact with the same female officer who recorded me and gave me the initial instructions to change my tallit. She pointed at me and said to another officer, “that’s her.” Immediately I was brought to a stairway along with two other rabbinical students.

“Israeli ID, now”

“I’m not an Israeli citizen.”

“OK, passport.”

“I don’t have it on me.” (Thank God.)

“OK, any other ID.” I handed him my Texas state driver’s license, which I’m sure meant nothing to him, and he took down my full name and address. He asked me for my phone number in Israel and my address. I hesitated, but then offered the officer my information. I was told, after a bit of waiting, that we will be contacted for further questioning and investigation, but that we were not being arrested at this point.

Behind me, I felt the support of the dozens of women and men singing, along with the spirits of all those who cry out against the injustice I am experiencing, standing there with the police. The voices behind me changed from a niggun, or tune, to the words of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, “kol haolam kulo, gesher tzar me’od, vahaikar lo l’fached klal—The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to fear at all.” These words have never felt more powerful to me.

As the officer took down our information, I sang, with tears in my eyes, “vahaikar lo l’fached klal.” Yes, this is scary. But I will not fear. The homeland we dream of, that we have dreamed of for thousands of years, is not one that arrests women for religious expression through wearing a tallit. The homeland I know we can attain is one that embraces multiple forms of Judaism to create a richer, deeper, and stronger Jewish State.

Sarit Horwitz is a second year Rabbinical student at the Jewish Theological Seminary, currently studying in Jerusalem at the Schechter Institute.

(photo: flickr)

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