A Jewish Woman Among Jewish Men
...or, An Unusual Situation. I spent tonight alternating between Rabbi Jeremy and Philip Roth. Quite the whiplash of Jewish masculinity have I.
Tonight's class at Ansche Chesed was, like last week's really excellent. We started mostly with the need for a balance between midrash and halakha--how midrash without acts is impotent and halakha without understanding is ignorant. I like that--it elevates Judaism out of the realm of philosophy. Rabbi Jeremy has a lovely idea about what it really is to approach Judaism with an historically-aware mentality (and the correlative awareness of sometimes fundamental differences of opinion that various scholars have held through time), that it enables a "conversation through time, without homogenization".
The conversation aspect really did get to me. It's pretty Menachem-esque, which is both unsurprising and ever-indicative of something that I'm going to want to look at more closely. Menachem was fairly enamoured of Heschel's concept of God in search of (hu)man. It's very Conservative-Judaism, but put poetically: a constant search and a constant back-and-forth and commitment to finding answers without the ultimate (and ultimately somewhat infantile) pleasure of easy answers.
We learned from this text (among many). I'm not 100% sure that I can decipher the Hebrew attribution, so I'll come back and edit another day:
"One finds in the Torah both 'And God spoke to Moses..." and 'God said to Moses...' Yet one also finds: 'And Moses said to God.' And 'Moses spoke to God.' This is like the parable of a cave by the sea shore. Sometimes the sea surges and fills the shore. And the sea water never leaves the cave, but hence forth the sea water fills the cave, and the cave water returns to the sea. So it is that God spoke to Moses and Moses spoke to God."
Beyond the simple Ecclesiastical feeling to that, it's really poetic. (And I can't tell if it's just the nature of an image of Creation as the shift that sets into motion a constant swirling of waters that keep mingling and mixing and return to mix again, sliding from cave to sea throughout the ages, but there's got to be a Yehudah Amichai poem about this somewhere.) There's something profound and almost solemn about accepting God as a partner in life--it removes the comforting clarity without undoing the ultimately unknowable aspect of the Divine. One of the women in the class was perturbed by what she perceived to be the "distancing" that building this kind of relationship entails. I guess she has a point; the relationship I have now with my parents is certainly less innocent and, in a way more "distant" now that I understand them to be gloriously fallible people than when I was sure they could do no wrong. But it's much more intimate, not to mention intellectually fulfilling, and such are the creature comforts I seek.
We touched briefly on the whole gay thing. I have much, much more to say about this, but in some possibly perverse way, I appreciated Jeremy saying he's pretty much glad it took the movement nearly fifteen years to reach the answer that everybody knows they're going to give in December. (If you don't think they're going to go with the obvious, don't say anything to me. I'm incubating some hope over here. On the other hand, I gave John Kerry a fighting chance in '04, so I've learned how to deal with bitter disappointment pretty well...) He thinks it has increased the depth and span of Jewish learning going on around this issue. Anyway, more some other time.
The really exciting news is that I got to flash my little official feminista card. In speaking about mikvah, Jeremy was repeating two of his critical points: that there is meaning to be found from doing each and any of the mitzvot (I agree) and that the mikvah passed the Rosenszweig (sp?) test of Verification; meaning that "hundred of thousands of people [meaning women, given the context, but whatever] have done it and it enriched their lives. After explaining to him that on Point A we are totally agreed, I pointed out that the Voices of the Happy-Mikvah-Goers are pretty lacking. Not because people hate the mikvah; but where are these women meant to come from, especially the "we've been dead for hundreds of years" crew. We just don't have those voices. Jeremy agreed. And ten minutes later, somebody asked if I were a rabbinical student. Awesome.
More to come when I'm awake...
kol tov.
Tonight's class at Ansche Chesed was, like last week's really excellent. We started mostly with the need for a balance between midrash and halakha--how midrash without acts is impotent and halakha without understanding is ignorant. I like that--it elevates Judaism out of the realm of philosophy. Rabbi Jeremy has a lovely idea about what it really is to approach Judaism with an historically-aware mentality (and the correlative awareness of sometimes fundamental differences of opinion that various scholars have held through time), that it enables a "conversation through time, without homogenization".
The conversation aspect really did get to me. It's pretty Menachem-esque, which is both unsurprising and ever-indicative of something that I'm going to want to look at more closely. Menachem was fairly enamoured of Heschel's concept of God in search of (hu)man. It's very Conservative-Judaism, but put poetically: a constant search and a constant back-and-forth and commitment to finding answers without the ultimate (and ultimately somewhat infantile) pleasure of easy answers.
We learned from this text (among many). I'm not 100% sure that I can decipher the Hebrew attribution, so I'll come back and edit another day:
"One finds in the Torah both 'And God spoke to Moses..." and 'God said to Moses...' Yet one also finds: 'And Moses said to God.' And 'Moses spoke to God.' This is like the parable of a cave by the sea shore. Sometimes the sea surges and fills the shore. And the sea water never leaves the cave, but hence forth the sea water fills the cave, and the cave water returns to the sea. So it is that God spoke to Moses and Moses spoke to God."
Beyond the simple Ecclesiastical feeling to that, it's really poetic. (And I can't tell if it's just the nature of an image of Creation as the shift that sets into motion a constant swirling of waters that keep mingling and mixing and return to mix again, sliding from cave to sea throughout the ages, but there's got to be a Yehudah Amichai poem about this somewhere.) There's something profound and almost solemn about accepting God as a partner in life--it removes the comforting clarity without undoing the ultimately unknowable aspect of the Divine. One of the women in the class was perturbed by what she perceived to be the "distancing" that building this kind of relationship entails. I guess she has a point; the relationship I have now with my parents is certainly less innocent and, in a way more "distant" now that I understand them to be gloriously fallible people than when I was sure they could do no wrong. But it's much more intimate, not to mention intellectually fulfilling, and such are the creature comforts I seek.
We touched briefly on the whole gay thing. I have much, much more to say about this, but in some possibly perverse way, I appreciated Jeremy saying he's pretty much glad it took the movement nearly fifteen years to reach the answer that everybody knows they're going to give in December. (If you don't think they're going to go with the obvious, don't say anything to me. I'm incubating some hope over here. On the other hand, I gave John Kerry a fighting chance in '04, so I've learned how to deal with bitter disappointment pretty well...) He thinks it has increased the depth and span of Jewish learning going on around this issue. Anyway, more some other time.
The really exciting news is that I got to flash my little official feminista card. In speaking about mikvah, Jeremy was repeating two of his critical points: that there is meaning to be found from doing each and any of the mitzvot (I agree) and that the mikvah passed the Rosenszweig (sp?) test of Verification; meaning that "hundred of thousands of people [meaning women, given the context, but whatever] have done it and it enriched their lives. After explaining to him that on Point A we are totally agreed, I pointed out that the Voices of the Happy-Mikvah-Goers are pretty lacking. Not because people hate the mikvah; but where are these women meant to come from, especially the "we've been dead for hundreds of years" crew. We just don't have those voices. Jeremy agreed. And ten minutes later, somebody asked if I were a rabbinical student. Awesome.
More to come when I'm awake...
kol tov.
posted by Di Freye Froy at 8:40 PM
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