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The 'Orthodox Feminist Revolution'

1/26/2009

by Rachel Levitt

Gender equality is a constant source of controversy within Orthodox Judaism. According to tradition and interpretation of the Old Testament, women must remain separate from men in synagogue and cannot go anywhere near the sacred scrolls of the Torah. They also do not count as part of the minyan, or quorum, needed to conduct services.

The latest issue of Moment —a magazine of independent, Jewish thought—profiles Tova Hartman, the "Orthodox feminist revolutionary" who cofounded Shira Hadasha, a traditional Orthodox synagogue that allows women privileges unthinkinkable for most Orthodox communities: the right to handle and read from the Torah. And to lead services—in front of men.

Hartman's progressive ideas were born of her own experiences. When Hartman was 15 years old, she moved with her family from Montreal to Jerusalem. Back in Canada, she'd always felt at home in her family's shul. Once in Jerusalem, however, her family began worshiping at a traditional Orthodox synagogue "where women were relegated to the balcony," and Hartman realized that she could not truly feel at home in a temple where women were so ignored.

For her ideas, Hartman has come up against plenty of resistance, both in Israel and abroad, but she's also found ample support. As Jessica Ravitz writes for Moment: Hartman is "smack in the middle of what some have called the 'Orthodox feminist revolution.' "

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Moment - Jewish Politics, Culture, Religion

http://momentmag.com/Exclusive/2009/2009-02/200902-Tova-Hartman.html

January/February 2009

An Orthodox Feminist Revolutionary

Tova Hartman is the co-founder of Shira Hadasha, an Orthodox synagogue where women can read from the Torah and lead services—in front of men.

By Jessica Ravitz

As a girl, Tova Hartman loved being the rabbi’s daughter and adored her family’s shul. Her father, David Hartman, led a modern Orthodox synagogue in Montreal that she remembers as being very “homey and warm.” The holy space, she says, felt like a “second home.”

When she was 15, Hartman, her parents, her two brothers and two sisters moved to Jerusalem, where her father traded in the pulpit to found the Shalom Hartman Institute, a Jewish think tank. The family became part of a traditional Orthodox synagogue where women were relegated to a balcony, and for the first time, Hartman began to see inequality in what had always been sacred. She was influenced by her mother, Bobbie, who instilled feminism in her children, banning Barbie dolls—which she viewed as “evil incarnate”—from the household. “My mother was an artist, not an activist, but feminism was happening in the world. It just hadn’t come to the Orthodox sphere yet.”

Without a shul to call home, Hartman set out on a decades-long search for a synagogue that felt right. It was a journey that would eventually lead her to join forces with like-minded Orthodox Jerusalemites, and in 2001, to co-found Shira Hadasha, which means “new song” in Hebrew. It is, she explains, “an attempt of a group of men and women to give the system and the tradition another chance.” Located in Jerusalem’s International Cultural Center for Youth in the German Colony, the volunteer-run shul gathers for Shabbat, holidays and community events. Due to its practices—and success—Hartman, a professor of education and gender studies at Bar-Ilan University, finds herself smack in the middle of what some have called the “Orthodox feminist revolution.”

It’s Shabbat morning, and Hartman, 51, her thick, dark tresses uncovered, is milling about at Shira Hadasha on the women’s side of the mehitza, the barrier that separates the sexes in an Orthodox sanctuary. She’s doling out hugs, greeting strangers and leading women to available seats.

Shira Hadasha’s mehitza runs front-to-back so that both men and women can see the bima and have equal access to it. The mehitza is made of a thin, sheer fabric that allows everyone in the congregation to see one another.

The shul is packed (200 to 300 on an average Shabbat) with equal numbers of men and women, including visitors who sometimes arrive en masse on tour buses. The men include those in the signature modern Orthodox knitted kippot and at least one dressed in the haredi, black-hat style. “We are not interested in being a women’s group that is separate from the community,” says Hartman. “People said you’re never going to be able to get men to come and I’d say, ‘You really underestimate men.’” Sprinkled into the mix are babies cradled by their parents and toddlers darting up and down the aisles, chomping on chips. Young twins—a boy and a girl—stand side by side on the bima.

Women play a major role at Shira Hadasha. Services can’t begin until there’s a minyan, a quorum, which in Shira Hadasha means 10 men and 10 women. Women can take the Torah in and out of the ark—and even dance with it—long the exclusive province of men in the Orthodox world. Hartman remembers a woman in her 80s who showed up for the first time one Simchat Torah. The visitor had grown up in Mea She’arim, Jerusalem’s ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, and had come to mark the Jewish holiday that celebrates, often with unfettered dancing, the end and beginning of the annual cycle of public Torah reading. Dance this haredi woman did. Her sheitel, or wig, thrashed about wildly as she sobbed, whirled around the hall and refused to let anyone else near the scroll she clung to her chest. “She started telling me her story,” Hartman says. “As a little girl, she had always wanted to dance with the Torah, lead services and do things that weren’t available to her. She cried, ‘When did we stop wanting what we wanted? When did we give up?’”

Though considered the norm in the Conservative and Reform Jewish worlds for nearly four decades, the pièce de résistance at Shira Hadasha is that women here read Torah in front of the entire community and are honored with aliyot, invitations to stand before the entire congregation and say prayers before and after the Torah is read, bucking a 2,000-year-old tradition. Emotion commonly washes over older women like the Simchat Torah visitor when they step up to the bima. As they dissolve into tears, doing something they never dreamed was possible, other women exchange knowing glances, nods and whispers: “First time, huh?”

There is no officiating rabbi. As is common in what are called partnership minyanim, services are run by members of the community. Shira Hadasha takes this one step further by including women. Women lead what the shul’s ritual committee has deemed halachic: The Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat service, but not the Arvit service that follows it; the Shabbat morning service, including Pesukei Dezimra, the group of prayers that are recited early each morning, but not Shacharit and Musaf. What is off limits is led by men. “The committee is studying what else women can do,” says Hartman. “After all, this is a process, and we don’t know where it will bring us.”

Elie Holzer is an ordained but not practicing rabbi who teaches education at Bar-Ilan University and is one of Shira Hadasha’s founders. “Knowing what I know about Jewish law and the possibilities we have there, I cannot be honest standing before God while saying to women ‘shut up,’” he says. For Holzer, 46, a father of three daughters, the congregation is less about taking a feminist stand than it is about creating a holy and spiritually fulfilling space, an environment where, as he says, “no one feels invisible.”

In an attempt to balance her love of Judaism and her belief in feminism, Hartman studied Jewish philosophy at Hebrew University, then taught civics to Orthodox high school girls, dragging her students “to every kind of protest there was. I wanted to educate them about how political and social change takes place.” She then steeped herself in feminist theory as an academic, completing a doctorate in human development and psychology at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education.

But when Hartman walked into a traditional Orthodox synagogue, she checked her feminist spirit at the door. “I was able to separate my praying self from my inner self,” she says. The dissonance between her worlds grew deafening after she married and became the mother of three girls. When the oldest, Nomi, was approaching her bat mitzvah, the activist in Hartman suddenly swung into action. The modern Orthodox norm in Israel had been that if a girl wanted a bat mitzvah, she would join a women’s prayer group—which met in small, separate rooms—essentially leaving the shul community. Because Hartman believed there was nothing wrong with a female reading from the Torah, even in front of men, she made her own plans. She rented a hall and sent invitations for Nomi’s big day.

When some of the boys in Nomi’s school said that they wouldn’t attend and hurled insults, Hartman’s daughter showed what she was made of. “God bless her, she called them all back and told them they weren’t invited,” Hartman says with a broad smile. Being the first bat mitzvah in her community to read from the Torah before a mixed-gender crowd “wasn’t easy,” recalls Nomi Hartman Halbertal, now 23 and a dancer. “But I respect my mother totally for what she does, and I’m very proud of her. She does what she believes.”

By the time Hartman’s second daughter, Racheli, had her bat mitzvah two years later, several girls in the community had had ceremonies similar to Nomi’s. And all the boys came out to see and hear Racheli read from the sacred scroll.

Hartman continued struggling to find a religious community that fit. It had to be Orthodox and have a mehitza. Hartman is passionate about the mehitza: She sees it as a great equalizer, a way to get rid of the “pews of family order.” For people who don’t have nuclear families to sit with or who just lost a spouse, the mehitza helps them find a seat, a place where they belong. Although grateful for and empowered by Conservative and Reform Judaism, which were the first “to bring feminism into their space,” she never wanted to give up on Orthodoxy. “This is my home,” she says. “I wasn’t ready to leave my home.”

Instead, she came to believe that Orthodox Judaism needed to change. There were many ways, as she understood it, that further inclusion of women was halachically permissible. “The dignity of the people was given at Sinai and this is a very deep idea in the Jewish tradition,” she says. “That women deserve this dignity is something that modernity gave to the world. Feminism enhances the Jewish tradition. It is not only about women. It is about how we as a community of men and women stand before God.”

For years she sat on synagogue committees arguing on behalf of expanding women’s roles. “Rosa Parks can be celebrated as a cultural hero and be brought to the front of the bus,” she writes in her 2007 book, Feminism Encounters Traditional Judaism: Resistance and Accommodation. “But when religious women ask to be brought up from the back to the front of shuls…far from being lauded as cultural heroes, they are repelled in no uncertain terms and branded as insatiable kvetches.”

That women could read from the Torah at Shira Hadasha set off a chain reaction of rulings in the world of Orthodox Judaism, where changes in women’s status have been slow in coming, especially in Israel, where religious matters are overseen by an Orthodox rabbinate. Orthodox women there are now educated at Torah study centers, give advice to fellow women as rabbinical advocates and, thanks to a 1988 Israeli Supreme Court ruling, serve on religious councils that oversee community religious services. But many barriers remain much harder to break.

The jumping off point for almost any debate involving women and Torah comes from the Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 23a, which essentially says anyone—including women and minors —may be counted among the seven called to read from the Torah on Shabbat. But the sages weighed in after the fact, saying that women shouldn’t read because of kevod ha’tsibur, the dignity of the congregation.

The traditional criticism of women’s participation in Torah services is that by stepping up to fulfill an obligation required of men and not of them, women are effectively embarrassing the congregation, because it makes it look as if men are not available to do the job.

This position, rooted in 300 years of discussions compiled in the fifth century, was challenged in 2000 by Rabbi Mendel Shapiro, a graduate of both Yeshiva and Columbia Universities who, though ordained as an Orthodox rabbi, practices law in Jerusalem. He argued that a congregation’s inclusion of women as Torah readers shouldn’t threaten its dignity. “If my analysis of the sources is tenable, by what moral justification may women be denied a halachic privilege if they exercise it in self-selected groups without directly impinging on others’ sensibilities?,” he wrote in a monograph presented at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance conference in New York City that year.

This article set off a boxing match of written responses. Rabbi Yehuda Herzl Henkin, an influential posek (a legal scholar who can issue decisions when questions arise), serves as the rabbinic advisor at Nishmat, the Jerusalem Center for Advanced Jewish Study for Women, founded by his wife Chana. He stepped in on the side of tradition, arguing that because women’s aliyot remain “outside the consensus,” any “congregation that institutes them is not Orthodox in name and will not long remain Orthodox in practice.” This led Rabbi Daniel Sperber of Congregation Menachem Zion in the Old City of Jerusalem to step out of his corner, taking Shapiro’s position even further. Sperber wrote that in certain cases kevod ha’beriyot, individual dignity, trumps kevod ha’tsibur, congregational dignity, and that if women are hurting in a shul community because they cannot read Torah or prayers, they should be allowed to do so. “We have to be more client friendly in our rabbinic rulings,” Sperber says. If people want to remain part of the Orthodox community, “they should not be pushed out of the Orthodox orbit. Rather than rejecting them, we should include them.”

Sperber and others point out that there’s plenty of room for different interpretations of Jewish law within the Orthodox tradition. Hearing aids can be worn on Shabbat, even though technically that constitutes “carrying,” which is prohibited. Jewish law says you’re “not allowed to take interest on loans,” a mandate that if followed would paralyze the economy, and the literal law to institute a “sabbatical year for crops” would devastate those whose livelihood is agriculture.

There’s good reason to reinterpret women’s roles because many of the old arguments just don’t hold up, says Sylvia Barack Fishman, a Brandeis University professor of contemporary Jewish life who has written extensively about them. “Maimonides [the leading medieval Jewish philosopher] said it’s not appropriate for women to thrust themselves in the public eye,” which was reflective of his time period, she says. Women standing and reading before a congregation “is no longer considered thrusting in the public eye because in today’s society women are already in the public eye.”

Nevertheless, some rabbis argue that people should be forbidden to step foot in a place like Shira Hadasha. Rabbi Aryeh Frimer, who considers himself an Orthodox feminist—“although Orthodox always comes first,” he says—has a more tempered objection. He doesn’t mind people doing what they do at Shira Hadasha; he just wishes they didn’t call themselves Orthodox and had waited and gone through different channels before opening their doors. “If someone is going to follow an isolated minority opinion because it gets you where you want to go, it’s intellectually dishonest…. We always have to be careful not to create Judaism in our image. You have to create it in God’s image.”

“That’s a very nice thing to say but totally impractical because these scholars would never agree on anything,” says Sperber, a Talmud professor for 40 years, who is considered an expert on Jewish customs and was the recipient of the 1992 Israel Prize for Judaism.

“Our intention was never to argue that ours was the only way to pray but merely that it is a traditionally valid mode in which to stand before God,” Hartman says. She finds it odd that rabbis spend their time writing negatively about Shira Hadasha. “How do you have five seconds extra to look at what someone else is doing and criticize it?” she asks. “Is it bringing your community any more holiness?”

Still, she adds that there are many who view further inclusion of women as a slippery slope. “I don’t agree. However, even if I accept the slippery slope metaphor, I say that we are trying to go up the slope, toward God, toward the heavens, toward spiritual integrity, toward making things more meaningful for those who choose it.”

She also addresses fears that Shira Hadasha’s version of Orthodox feminism might split the community. “The feminist wave in Orthodoxy has split the community. The split is between people who believe feminism is a religious calling and those who think it is dangerous,” she says.

“People ask, how can you women cause a split in the community? I say splitting is not new. There’s the left and the right, the settler movement and the haredi. Jews split when Hasidism came about. The Jewish people split all the time. I sometimes make the comparison with Zionism. Zionism also split the Orthodox community. There were those who thought it would challenge and enhance the religious spirit and those who thought, ‘How can you take history into your own hands?’ The unity of the Jewish people is very important. But I believe we can be a unified people who are very different. We can feel deep solidarity with one another. In fact, we are a divided people, and in Israel this is even more intense than elsewhere.”

“One of the beauties of Orthodox Judaism is that it has room for very different ‘styles,’” says Naomi Cohen, a teacher of Talmud to women and a founding member of the Israel Women’s Network, as well as Kolech, Religious Women’s Forum. “Take synagogues like Lincoln Square on the Upper West Side, Breslov and Messianic Chabad. Though many people object strenuously to one or another of these, they all exist under the same roof and none of them have been read out of the fold.”

Daniel Sperber’s approval was good enough for Barbara Sofer of Jerusalem. A Jerusalem Post columnist and the Israel director of Hadassah’s public relations, Sofer sought an Orthodox shul with a complete Shabbat service with a secluded area for women and wanted to be a part of a community where people share her level of observance. In Shira Hadasha, she found an Orthodox shul that met her requirements. “I can live with not everybody agreeing,” she says, “as long as I have a strong rabbinic authority telling me it’s okay.”

Her interest in Shira Hadasha was born after her five children were grown, when she felt the urge to explore her own spiritual needs—a freedom, she says, to “find something for me.” The transition wasn’t seamless. Sofer was used to what she’d known, taking a seat behind a curtain, never expecting a woman to read from the Torah, accepting that men took charge. The fact that not all women dressed with the same standards of modesty threw her. On any given Shabbat, there are women in sleeveless shirts amid those fit for an inconspicuous stroll through Mea She’arim. But being in this synagogue—she says she goes more often than she ever did to her previous shul—helped her to grow and become more accepting. “When you go from one step of the ladder to the next, you feel a little unsteady,” Sofer says, referring to a passage in the Zohar, the most important of Kabbalistic writings. “But I definitely felt like this was a higher rung.”

Shira Hadasha points to a determination by both men and women to stay within Orthodoxy while responding to “new cultural values that come knocking at our door,” says Blu Greenberg, a prolific American writer and rebbetzin who co-founded the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. “Can the feminist critique enhance Judaism? Can it purify Judaism? Can it elevate Judaism and expand it without destroying it?”

These questions are core ones, and Greenberg, who prays in Shira Hadasha whenever she visits Israel, says that for traditionalists in the Orthodox community, this Jerusalem congregation will take time getting used to. “It’s strange, it’s unfamiliar, a break from tradition, and prayer is very emotional. It’s the most difficult area to institute change,” she says.

Plenty of Orthodox women are uncomfortable with Shira Hadasha’s redrawing of boundaries. Shira Leibowitz Schmidt, a faculty member at the Haredi College for Women, visited Shira Hadasha but did not pray there. She salutes the congregation’s ability to reach out, its warmth and lack of ostentation. “These are qualities that often go wanting in mainstream Orthodox synagogues. Shira Hadasha could be a role model in these areas for all congregations.” Ultimately, however, for Schmidt, Shira Hadasha’s “basic halachic premises are deeply problematic.” The fact that women read from the Torah and receive aliyot “has placed the congregation outside the rubric of Orthodox,” she says. “Although many claim we live in a post-denominational world, if I were asked to describe Shira Hadasha, I would say it is not Orthodox-lite, rather it is Conservative-maximalist.”

The struggle to make Orthodox Judaism more inclusive of women is an uphill battle and the kind of Orthodox feminism practiced at Shira Hadasha is still quite rare. Influenced by the feminist movement and subsequent changes in Conservative and Reform Judaism, Orthodox women began pushing for more participation in the 1970s, organizing into highly controversial prayer groups that met separately from men, often in synagogue cloakrooms or in private homes. These groups, often called tefillah groups, blossomed in cities across the United States and gave women the liturgical skills and confidence that made future innovations possible, says Sylvia Barack Fishman.

Women’s prayer groups helped provide the foundation for the three-decades-old and highly successful Women’s Tefillah at Rabbi Avi Weiss’ Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in New York, and Yedidya, a Jerusalem congregation founded in 1980 that runs a mehitza from front to back. Women can only read from the Torah, however, in a separate women’s group.
“Most of what they do at Shira Hadasha, not only do we do as well, but these were our innovations,” says Yedidya’s founder, Deborah Weissman. “They have simply carried them further.”

A backlash against women’s prayer groups in traditional Orthodox synagogues has helped fuel the growth of alternative Orthodox spiritual communities. Diaspora Jews who’ve crossed Shira Hadasha’s threshold have helped spawn about 25 similar congregations around the world.

Shira, a Melbourne, Australia, community that has been around for more than three years is one such congregation. “Most of our active congregants have spent time in Jerusalem and were directly influenced by the Shira Hadasha community,” says Mark Baker, director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University and president and founder of Shira. The Melbourne congregation encountered fierce opposition, including a rabbinic ban on attendance of its services.

But attitudes are changing, Baker says. “We have now become more mainstream as this trend in Orthodoxy is spreading worldwide.” During the most recent High Holy Day services, the Melbourne congregation had some 600 attendees.

Rachel Milner Gillers, 32, is one of the co-founders of Minyan Tehillah in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was established in the fall of 2003. It was also inspired by Shira Hadasha. As a graduate student at Harvard University, Gillers discovered others who, like her, were looking for their Jewish place in the university. Some had been to Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem and came back asking, “Why can’t we do this?”

For those who are not Orthodox and might never have considered praying in or even visiting a shul with a mehitza, Shira Hadasha makes that world less daunting or strange. “It’s almost like a great ambassador for Orthodoxy,” Blu Greenberg says. “Jews are responding to this.... They’ve tasted the apple and know how sweet this can be.”

Although she herself never considered becoming a rabbi—because it was an impossible dream—Hartman would like to see other Orthodox women realize that goal. “It’s an embarrassment that half the population can’t be the religious leaders of their shuls.”

She contends that although there is room for debate about women’s participation in rituals, there is no reason why women cannot be rabbis. “Rabbis are people who have studied certain laws and are allowed to teach. That’s all they are. That women can’t be rabbis is just a social thing.” Women, she adds, also are barred from acting as witnesses for marriage, divorce and conversion. This, she believes, can and should be changed.

Aware that greater equality for women will only occur if women push for it, Hartman intends to keep stretching the boundaries of Orthodox Judaism. Still, she is delighted with what Shira Hadasha has already accomplished. On a personal level, she is pleased that she didn’t have to orchestrate the bat mitzvah of her youngest daughter, Shira, now 14, which was held at Shira Hadasha. “Fortunately, Shira has a natural community where she is growing up. It’s incredible how in such a short amount of time, Orthodox girls are taking it for granted that it is absolutely natural for them to have aliyot, to read from the Torah and have a bat mitzvah.”

Hartman feels blessed to have found a spiritual home. “My family is my biggest cheering squad,” she says. “They didn’t want to start a new shul but once it started, everyone rallied. My parents and my siblings are very supportive. This is now the shul where my family goes. I feel fortunate that I can daven with my mother on one side of me and my girls on the other, and my dad across the mehitza. We can see each other, so we really are together. It means a lot to me.”

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