The Global Citizen is a joint project of New Voices and the American Jewish World Service (AJWS). Throughout the year, a group of former AJWS volunteers will offer their take on global justice, Judaism and international development. Opinions expressed by Global Citizen bloggers do not necessarily represent AJWS.
Let’s talk about the birds and the bees.
Faigy blogged last week about the Millenium Development Goals, including the United Nations’ goal for gender equality across the globe. How can we as Jews participate in actively protesting gender oppression?
Over the summer, as I began attending a halakhically observant (Orthodox) shul for the first time in my life, I made an appointment to sit down with the rabbi and ask about women and men. “Rabbi, I feel frustrated when I see women excluded from positions of power and privilege in the shul.” To give you an idea of this synagogue: it’s an eclectic, progressive, hippie-loving, nature-loving shul. It has a population of environmentalists working to couple Judaism and ecology in a local organic garden, and it strives to welcome people of all different sexual orientations. Yet it is still Orthodox. All of the people acting out the religious service come from the men’s side. The regular members focus on recruiting men, not women or other genders, to attend weekday minyan.
As I sit meditating in lotus position in the back of the shul, I struggle with this. There is gender inequality in the world. Women across the world do a majority of farming but own less than 20% of the land. Elected officials in America, the ones running our country, are less than 5% female. Females doing the exact same jobs that men do get paid, on average, 70% of what the men receive. So how can I fight back against the gender equality that has existed in America and around the world for the past five thousand years, while still respecting the traditions that my parents and their parents followed for millenia? I don’t feel competent enough in Jewish learning to create a halakhically-observant egalitarian environment, so I rely on this halakhically observant gender-differentiated one.
But there’s still work to be done! (Hear the trumpet blasts emanating from the United Nations building in New York…) For example, the president of our shul is not a halakhic position. Nowhere in the Jewish commentaries does it say that a synagogue’s president, a secular position, must be a male. We could select a woman president, not as a way of tokenizing qualified leaders, but as a way of acknowledging that we’ve kept women out of these secular leadership positions for so long that it’s time for some affirmative action. And what can I change myself, now? When the rabbi gives his sermon about great Jewish leaders, sure, I can listen to him speak about Abraham and Moses. But I can also talk to him afterward and ask him to realize that our tradition is male-centered, male-identified, and male-dominated. Our great texts focus on the works of men, not women – women are rarely mentioned, not because they’re poor leaders, but because our male-identified tradition has minimized writing about them. We as modern folk need to work harder to celebrate and write about leadership by women. If we continue to read the texts only as people have read them for the last thousand years, we continue to perpetuate a system of gender inequality dire enough that the U.N. has made it a goal of this new millenium to fix.
I welcome your thoughts! Please feel free to comment below.
