| Letty Cottin Pogrebin is an author, journalist, lecturer and social justice activist. |
I grew up in the 1940s in a family steeped in Judaism and awash in the pride of people-hood. Every Friday night and Saturday morning, I could be found at synagogue. By 10, I could chant most of the Sabbath service… I learned to read Hebrew soon after mastering Dick and Jane. I wore a Star of David around my neck. I was the proverbial “good Jewish girl.”
…In 1952, I was among the first girls in the Conservative branch of Judaism to undergo the female equivalent of the traditional male coming of age ceremony... At our synagogue, bat mitzvahs took place in the main sanctuary which was still unusual for this ground-breaking ritual. But the bat mitzvahs happened on Friday evenings not Saturday mornings because the Sabbath morning service includes a Torah reading and girls were not allowed to chant from the Torah, only from the haphtarah. [A section from the prophetical books.] In 1952, Saturday mornings and sacred texts were reserved for boys.
That inequity escaped my notice at the time as did the paucity of women in the bible and Jewish history, or the absence of women on the bema [speakers’ podium], or among the heroic figures immortalized on the magnificent stained glass windows illuminating our sanctuary. In 1952, I questioned nothing and accepted everything. My faith and my people could do no wrong. Yet, with all my education and childhood piety, by mid-1955 I had turned my back on Judaism and Jewish life.
…In 1952,[my fathers] skills were put to use tutoring me for my bat mitzvah…The Jewish dimension of my father’s life was more important, I think, than his law practice or his wife and child. If my mother’s Judaism was personal, home-based, aesthetic, mystical, and idiosyncratic, his was scholarly, formalistic, community-based, institutionalized, and authoritative – with a strong overlay of ego and performance…
So this was the original tension in my life: emotional mother at odds with rationalist father. As a child, I wanted what both of them offered but sensed through their festering conflicts and ongoing tension that I was expected to choose only one. In all candor, I don’t know what would have happened to their marriage – or my forced choice – had my mother not died when I was 15.
One night during the shiva period [the first seven days of mourning which are marked at home by daily memorial services], my father began counting for a minyan [quorum] - the minimum ten Jews required for congregational worship and the recitation of the mourner’s caddish, the prayer for the departed. In 1955, ten Jews meant ten men and though our house was packed with Jewish visitors that night, it happened that only nine of them were male.
“We need one more,” said my father.
“Count me, Daddy!” I said. Though I knew that Jewish law prohibited women from the minyan, I was also aware that my father cut legal corners when it suited him, smoking on the sabbath, for instance, because he refused to interpret the similarly proscribed act of making fire as a law against flicking his Bic.
“Count me in the minyan!” I begged. “I’m a bat mitzvah. I can say the caddish. She was my mother!”
My father scowled. “You know, it’s forbidden,” he replied and he dialed the synagogue and asked them to send a tenth man. The guy who showed up at our house a short time later couldn’t read Hebrew. He had never met my mother. For all we knew, he’d never been bar mitzvah. But that didn’t matter. He passed the physical.
…For me, it was epiphanic to not be counted. Being excluded from the minyan, especially at a moment of deep grief and vulnerability when I needed an intimate connection to my faith, made me understand for the first time that I did not count as a Jew. Literally. No matter how much I knew, what I felt or how fervently I believed, I would not be counted in the minyan because I did not count as a real Jew, and I did not count because I was a woman. Rather than wait for the next time someone would exclude, reject, or discount me, I decided to count myself out. Thus it was that at the age of 15, I left the Jewish people.
Soon after my sixteenth birthday, I went off to Brandeis University, a Jewish-sponsored nonsectarian school where I dated mostly gentile athletes and never went to synagogue… I rejected the things Jews belong to: synagogues, Jewish Community Centers, communal organizations, Israeli support groups and Jewish charitable groups. Since I no longer felt I belonged, I stopped belonging…
After graduating from college in 1959, I moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village, worked in the book publishing business, and had virtually no contact with my faith community. I didn’t keep kosher or observe the Sabbath…
During the next fifteen years, I married and had three children. Since my husband was raised in a secular leftist family whose “faith” was Yiddish culture and Marxist philosophy, the decision to affiliate religiously was up to me. I opted out, remaining an outsider to the Jewish world. No synagogue, no Hadassah or UJA, no Hebrew school or bar or bat mitzvahs for the kids. The only Judaism I sustained in our home was my mother’s – sabbath blessings, holiday celebrations, and a nod in the direction of the Evil Eye.
Things began to change in 1970 when a couple of Jewish men in Saltaire, our mostly gentile summer community on Fire Island, decided it would it be nice if they didn’t have to go into the city for High Holy Day services. They’d hatched a plan to have Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services on somebody’s back deck and had begun organizing other Jews to help out… At some point in the planning process it occurred to the men that they had no one to run the service. All had been bar mitzvah but none remembered his Hebrew and none felt him able to lead us. For some reason – nostalgia? community responsibility? rising to the challenge? spiritual hunger? – I volunteered.
This was in 1970, mind you, years before there was a Ms. Magazine or a national women’s movement; before the ordination of a single woman rabbi or cantor and before Jewish feminism was a twinkle in its founders’ eyes. But necessity is not only the mother of invention but of revolution. Despite being a woman, I became the chazzan [leader of the chanting – feminine form, “chazanit”] of our congregation of 32 adults and about as many children, which we dubbed B’nai Saltaire. At bottom and apart from whatever psychological motivations determined my act, I assumed the role because I knew how to do it, a standard that carried no weight in official Judaism but was all that mattered to our little band of displaced Jews.
…On Yom Kippur Eve which ushers in the holiest day of the year, I communicated with God in my mother’s fashion – with a personal plea:. “If you don’t want me to chant the Kol Nidre prayer, let me know it.” Perhaps because I was reared in close proximity to the mystical I find I usually get an answer to such supplications, a sign, a message. Nothing happened, which was reply enough. So I chanted the Kol Nidre on a soft purple evening in early autumn and as I sang the words a vision came to me of harmony and peace, a profound almost ecstatic sense that what I was doing was not just okay in God’s eyes but good. Good for our community whose association with the Days of Awe had been made more personal and participatory than any of them had experienced when they showed up as “audience” for the overflow service. Good for me in that it proved Judaism belonged not just to my father or the men who made the rules but to any woman who takes the trouble to claim it. And, dare I say, good for God who gained from the ingathering of the strays. Above all, I felt that God understood. Not just why I had strayed but what had to happen to bring me full circle – a radical act of inclusion, an opportunity for spiritual expression, proof that I counted as a real Jew.
Becoming the founding cantor of B’nai Saltaire marked my first step back. For 13 years, I chanted the Hebrew prayers for my neighbors and friends, ceding my role in 1984 to another woman who has been the chazanit to this day… Each year I felt myself reaching more deeply toward my roots though some distance remained before I would attain that old sense of “belonging.”
…It took another ten years for me to find my spiritual home… At B’nai Jeshurun [they], established a policy of inclusion and equality – of women, gay people, married couples and singles, disabled people, young and old – and an atmosphere where a joyful, ebullient Judaism found its expression in song, dance, study, prayer, and a strong commitment to social action. I had found my home.
While privately in search of a simpatico synagogue, I was publicly engaged in the secular Women’s Movement in whose ranks I noticed a disproportionately large representation of Jews, or rather feminists who happened to be Jewish. By this I mean they were either not religiously inclined (though they didn’t hide their ethnic origins) and evinced no particular interest in women’s status within their faith community or, like me, they viewed their religious affiliation and spiritual struggle as private and personal.
I see these women as “Jewish Feminists,” the J-word being a demographic modifier of the F-word in the same sense as Jewish-American or African-American modifies the larger category -- United States citizens. For this group, feminism was the overarching identity... Many of us recognized that those passions originated in our Jewish upbringing or in Judaism itself; and that the social ethos of our faith community – intolerance for injustice, empathy with the oppressed, belief in collective action, commitment to progressive politics – dovetailed perfectly with women’s struggle for equality. But with or without this awareness, we weren’t interested in sexism in synagogue; our purview was the world. Bottom line: Jewish Feminists acted out their feminism as women not as Jews.
In contrast, there was a second group of Jewish women I call “Feminist Jews.” For them, the F-word is a philosophical modifier of the J-word, their primary identity. To continue schematically, Feminist Jews are Jews who happened to be feminist. Having been exposed to the same secular Women’s Movement as the rest of us – you couldn’t miss it in the 1970s and early ‘80s – these women, who had never left the fold, brought their raised consciousness into their faith community and began shaping up Judaism from within. They formed a specifically Jewish women’s movement that targeted sexism in the religion and the institutions of the Jewish world.
Joining the tools of feminist analysis with the legacy of Talmudic disputation, Feminist Jews challenged their brethren to not just talk the talk of justice but to walk the walk when it came to Jewish women. Feminist Jews worked to expand women’s roles in synagogue, home rituals, and communal activities. Poets and liturgists de-gendered God-language and prayer books. Educators created nonsexist, women-inclusive curricula for Hebrew schools. Advanced scholars drew upon the sages and sources to prove women’s right to wear phylacteries or a tallit, serve as rabbis and cantors, have an aliyah (recite the blessings that book-end the Torah reading), and count in the minyan.
Some Feminist Jews concentrated on combating gender discrimination in the staffs of Jewish communal organizations where the most virulent bias often existed in the leadership ranks. Other activists demanded that the community welcome lesbians (and gay men). Still others advocated for women whose issues were not being adequately addressed by the community’s social service agencies – problems like poverty, domestic violence and sexual abuse which were rarely acknowledged to happen to Jews because of the shame factor; and problems like breast cancer or child care, which were often overlooked because they were seen as “women’s problems.” And in every nook and cranny of the Jewish world Feminist Jews were creating new ceremonies.
In 1976, I was invited to join a small group of knowledgeable women – foremost among them, Esther Broner, the author of The Women’s Hagaddah, and Phyllis Chesler, the psychologist-author of Women and Madness – who were organizing a women’s seder that would not be a parody but a profoundly respectful feminist adaptation of the traditional service. The difference was that women were made present, at the “table” (actually a huge cloth on the floor), in our rituals, in our minds and hearts… Like B’nai Saltaire on Fire Island, the women’s seder in Manhattan – which will celebrate its 28th anniversary this year (2003) – showed me I could be a fully expressive and participatory Jew despite being a woman. More than that, because I was a woman, I could glean even more from my tradition once I was willing to take rightful ownership of its rich legacy and explore its intrinsic possibilities for female enrichment and feminist transformation…
This essay is included in the book: Transforming the Faiths of Our Fathers: Women Who Changed American Religion, Ann Braude, editor, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.