To be perfectly honest, I had to Google the term “Traditional Egalitarian” when I decided to write this piece. If admitting that hasn’t robbed me of all of my credibility, allow me to make it worse: the results were sparse and mostly unhelpful, so I had to then call my own personal Google, my dad. He admitted to knowing little about it, so I just pieced together various sources until I understood enough to feel comfortable writing about my experiences at Yeshivat Hadar, the self-proclaimed “first egalitarian yeshiva in North America.” Being a yeshiva girl myself (I attended a high school named Yeshiva of Greater Washington, and currently attend Yeshiva University), seeing that word made me feel much more at ease than the one directly before it.
When I first settled into the sanctuary in West End Synagogue a couple weeks ago for part two of a three-part lecture series (I missed the first part) and took a good look around I was pleasantly surprised to see that everyone around me looked more or less like the ModOrth crowd I’m used to. (This was after my friend made a crack about it being my first time in a Reconstructionist synagogue to make me feel truly at home. Hadar is actually far from Reconstructionist, but they rent the space they use as the yeshiva from this synagogue.) Then I was surprised at my surprise. Did I expect them to have horns simply because they might identify as Reform or Conservative? I might have been expecting more women with pink yarmulkes and purple tallitot, or maybe they would just skip the subtleties and put on neon signs with their religious affiliation. Either way, they looked like the Jews I know. I felt more comfortable than I thought I would.
The lecture itself was thought-provoking and interesting enough to make me come back the next week for the final installment in a lecture series. But I think it was more than the lecture that got me to come back. The people there were welcoming and friendly, coming over to introduce themselves and play a little Jewish geography (a game, it seems, that spans the sects). They were all there out of a legitimate desire to increase their knowledge and appreciation of Judaism. And, yes, it was more than a little fun to think that I was being slightly rebellious by stepping outside the tight borders of the ModOrth community.
It’s slightly unnerving to realize just how ignorant I am as a result of growing up in my community. Ask me the difference between Reform and Conservative Judaism, and I’ll go straight back to Google. Clearly, the ModOrth community disagrees with some of their principles, but for what reasons? We should be taught the differences and explained the reasons. If we can have classes on Jewish-Christian polemics, why not classes on the various sects of Judaism? We should be made to expect Jews when we see Jews of other sects, not surprised to find out how much we have in common. And I fear this is a problem which goes in one direction. I can’t prove it, but it seems to me that everyone I meet from the “other side”–those who are Reform or Conservative or even Traditional Egalitarian–knows more about me than I do about them.
We’re all on the same team, here. It’s time we got to know each other.
