disagreement for the sake of heaven
I gave this d’var Torah at Nehar Shalom Community Synagogue on February 12, 2016. I share it today, the 9th of Adar on the Hebrew calendar, for reasons that are explained below.
A mishnah in Pirkei Avot tells us:
Every disagreement that is for the sake of heaven will continue to exist, but one that is not for the sake of heaven will not continue to exist. Which is the [kind of] disagreement that is for the sake of heaven? Such as was the disagreement between Hillel and Shammai; and which is the [kind of] disagreement that is not for the sake of heaven? Such as was the disagreement of Korah and his entire congregation.
Today begins the Jewish Week of Constructive Conflict, so designated because of the holiday that falls in the middle of it, a Jewish holiday you’ve probably never heard of, on the 9th of Adar. One source tells us that the rabbis declared the 9th of Adar a fast day, because on that day several millennia ago, a longstanding, healthy disagreement turned destructive.
The mishnah records the divide between Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai. They disagreed about almost everything — but, the mishnah notes, they engaged in these debates in a healthy and constructive manner, via machloket l’shem shamayim, or “disagreement for the sake of heaven.”
Ironically enough — or perhaps completely fittingly — our sources disagree about what exactly happened on the 9th of Adar: Some say it was simply that Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai disagreed in a way they hadn’t before, in an unproductive manner, while others report that they actually came to blows, and thousands died. One rabbi says he has never even heard of the fast. And then, alternate dates are offered for these events: the 3rd of Adar, the 4th of Adar, the 7th of Adar. It turns out, we can’t even agree on the details of this famous disagreement.
But the prevalence of the Hillel and Shammai debates throughout the mishnah attests the depth of their disagreement. Nonetheless, the mishnah calls their relationship illustrative of machloket l’shem shamayim, “disagreement for the sake of heaven.”
Frustratingly, the mishnah never spells out the characteristics that made the Hillel and Shammai debate machloket l’shem shamayim. So later commentators hazard some guesses.
One notes that the houses of Hillel and Shammai maintained close relationships, their followers marrying each other and eating in each others’ houses. We’re also told that their motivations were beyond “winning” — they wanted to solve problems. And each listened to the other side and were open to admitting mistakes. Finally, it is said that each equally spoke “the words of the living Gd,” even though they held opposing views.
So this week, and especially the 9th of Adar, is dedicated to increasing public awareness around the values and skills of constructive conflict, modeled for us through the relationship of Beit Hillel and Beit Shammai — both in its brilliant success over generations, and in its utter failure on one 9th of Adar.
Recently I joined the Community Hevre Kadisha of Greater Boston. Hevre Kadisha is generally translated as “Holy Society.” It’s a group of volunteers who are on call to prepare a deceased person for burial according to Jewish tradition. The Hevra Kadisha’s ultimate concern is to care for the deceased with respect and kindness. I have been privileged to assist a team of women a couple of times over the past month in what is called tahara. There are several principles involved in this purification ritual that have felt deeply meaningful to me, and especially relevant to this week as I learn these ancient rites and commemorate this Jewish Week of Constructive Conflict.
The ritual of tahara begins and ends with the attendants asking forgiveness of the deceased person (meyta in Hebrew) for any indignity that we might inadvertently cause. We declare that all that is about to happen, or that has happened, is for the sake of her honor. A main consideration during tahara is not to turn our backs to the meyta, as well as not pass anything over her body, as we move around the room to prepare her for burial. All of these practices remind us that death has not diminished her essential value as a human being, as one created b’tzelem Elohim, in the image of Gd.
As I recently stood at the head of a meyta — a position that is always meant to be occupied — I thought about applying these standards to our interactions with each other. What if we always attempted to engage each other with an intention of dignity? What if we strove never to turn our backs on each other? What if we tried never to pass each other over? What if we committed to remaining present with each other? What if we treated the living as we do the dead?
This week, parshat T’rumah seems to encourage just that. It describes the ideal of being truly present for one another and hints at how to achieve this presence. We find this model deep within the detailed instructions for building the mishkan, or tabernacle, which the Israelites built at the beginning of their journey in the desert and that would come to be the meeting place between them and Gd. Amidst directions for the poles and the curtains and the rings and the clasps, there is the blueprint for the golden keruvim, the winged creatures that are meant to sit on the cover of the ark. Their wings shield the cover of the ark, and they are placed, we are told, p’neyhem ish el achiv, that is, with “their faces toward one another.”
Rabbi David Jaffe, whom I had the opportunity to learn from a few weeks ago, teaches this about the keruvim: Their wings spread over their heads and almost touch at the top. From the space between the wings, Gd says to Moshe, “I will be known to you there and will speak with you…” (Exodus 25:22). A place of knowing and being truly known stands at the center of this structure. This ark is the centerpiece of the mishkan and central to achieving a connection with the divine. Gd speaks from above the keruvim, who face each other in a gesture of genuine relationship.
The rabbis pick up on this powerful metaphor. They teach that the keruvim faced each other when the Israelites behaved well — and turned away from each other when idolatry and oppression reigned. The implication is that it’s only when the keruvim are p’neyhem ish el achiv, “their faces towards one another,” when the Israelites are in productive relationship with each other, that Gd can speak.
Millennia ago, Hillel and Shammai were sitting in the beit midrash p’neyhem ish el achiv, “their faces towards one another,” and both spoke the words of the living Gd. In the following thousands of years, Jews have continued to observe the rites of tahara, its practitioners standing p’neyhem ish el achiv in relationship to the dead, and affording them a last and ultimate act of dignity. And this week in parshat T’rumah we read about the keruvim placed p’neyhem ish el achiv, allowing the presence of Gd into the midst of the Israelites.
During this election year, this ideal of constructive conflict can seem like a mere fantasy. Winning is most definitely the goal, and no one admits mistakes. And there are some candidates whose words are so repugnant that I don’t believe they could belong to any living Gd.
Speaking a little closer to home, I feel similarly when the larger Jewish community tries to talk about Israel/Palestine, or questions of personal status, or the role of women in ritual, or the many other things about which we disagree. So maybe we can’t realistically hold the American political system to this high standard — but I believe we can start this work in our own communities. And that constructive conflict can have ripple effects.
The turned faces of the keruvim on top of the ark are a beautiful metaphor for the conditions of both intimacy and estrangement. This idea has powerful implications for our connections with people and with the divine. When we face each other in relationship, we allow the divine to speak.
questions in a vault
For the past three years between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur — often called “The Days of Awe,” or Yamim Noraim in Hebrew — I’ve participated in 10Q‘s question-a-day online activity. Once you sign up, the organization prompts you on each of the ten days to go to its website and answer that day’s question. (If you miss a day, you can go back to previous questions.) The questions are designed to get you to reflect on the past year and make commitments for the coming one. After Yom Kippur, your answers “are sent to the secure online 10Q vault for safekeeping. One year later, the vault will open and your answers will land back in your email inbox for private reflection.” I’m doing it again this year.
a lovely m.a. hadley plate (a family tradition) from my mom; photo by salem pearce (via instagram)
The website is not explicitly Jewish (I’m not sure why), but I can’t see the timing as anything but. I’m guessing, though, it wouldn’t occur to non-Jewish participants and might just seem like an interesting exercise, if an oddly timed one.
Update: My friend Melanie tells me that the organization behind 10Q, Reboot, intends “to make Judaism relevant to those who are secular/completely assimilated.” I think this extremely interesting, because this exercise appeals to me, too, as a religious Jew. (Plus, I am sort of fascinated by secular or humanist Judaism.)
I was pleased — and not a little surprised — when I got my answers from 2012 at the end of last month. I actually did some of the things that I wrote that I wanted to, and where I didn’t, it’s because it’s still a live issue for me. I voiced my waning support for the president, I talked about my parents’ efforts to be more involved in my Judaism, and I wrote about my ongoing struggle with my weight.
On Day 8, I was asked and I answered:
Is there something (a person, a cause, an idea) that you want to investigate more fully in 2013?
Your Answer:
Tefillin!
Indeed, my experience wearing tefillin while praying has been one of the best things about rabbinical school for me so far.
While looking through my photos from two years ago to include in this post, I was struck by what I left out. I was definitely in the thrall of my first few weeks of rabbinical school; I wrote quite a bit about it, at the expense of other important events in my life, like my bat mitzvah! For this year’s questions, I definitely need to use my photos from last year to jog my memory, which I recently discovered is quite poor. While I was in England this summer, I saw two old friends (one from college and one from my first job in D.C.), and both of them remembered so many more things about our friendship that I did. On the plus side, it was totally amusing to hear stories that I seemed to have forgotten.
It’s not too late to join in the 10Q fun if you’re interested: we’re only on Day 5!
race and the abortion fight in texas
On Tuesday, the last day of a special session of the Texas Legislature, Texas state Senator Wendy Davis made good on her promise to filibuster Senate Bill 5 (SB5) — which would essentially eliminate clinical access to abortion in the state; Davis stood and spoke for more than 13 hours, and she and her 400-plus supporters inside the state capitol kept the Republican-controlled body (pun intended) from voting on the measure before midnight, the end of the special session. Davis became a superstar in that half-day as thousands watched a live stream of her Herculean effort; social media sites exploded with their own blow-by-blow accounts of the action.
burnt orange in solidarity with protests at texas capitol; photo by salem pearce via instagram
Today, as a result of Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s convening of a second special session, the legislature is poised to vote again. Specifically, the bill would prohibit abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, regulate first-trimester abortion clinics as ambulatory surgical centers, and restrict access to medication abortions. Make no mistake: This is not about the safety of Texas women. This is about controlling their choices and their access to reproductive care.
I wore my burnt orange today. If I were still in Austin, I would do everything I could to be at the opening of the special session, set for 2:00 p.m. CST. (I am super impressed by everyone who is making the effort to be there, especially since many of y’all were probably there last week — and both times probably had to take time off from your livelihood to do so.) In captioning my photo, I used the hashtag #standwithwendy, created last week and apparently still going strong.
I did this despite my skepticism about clicktivism (though I suppose I could make the argument that this act went one step further, since I took my “raising awareness” into the real world). I also later, after I took this photograph, added my DC Abortion Fund necklace, a silver coat hanger, which generally elicits lots of questions.
I wholeheartedly support the fine people of Texas who will turn out today at the Capitol. And I have grown distinctly uncomfortable with this project.
#standwithTX women
To the right is the graphic advertising today’s actions. Six pretty white ladies. (Included among them a pretty Jewish lady!)
Not only are these women not representative of the Texas women who will be disproportionately affected by SB5 — rich white women are much more likely have access to the resources to get an abortion out-of-state if this bill is passed — but this represents an unconscionable exclusion of the women of color who are fighting this fight, too. And have been. And will keep on doing. Because they have to. Because their communities will be devastated by lack of access to clinical abortions in a way that wealthy white communities will not.
This is not call for tokenism: The leaders of this rally should not have a woman of color featured just to feature a woman of color. There already exist in Texas women of color leading their communities in this fight. They’re not being sought out and worked with. In the modified words of a woman working on advancing female leadership in the Jewish communal professional world (which is dominated by men): If you come up with a list of leaders that is all-white, something is wrong with your criteria. The dearth is not in availability but in the scope. (The black youth project has a great post on this topic, using the example of Texas state Senator Leticia Van de Putte.)
And this issue couldn’t be more important right now, coming as it does on the heels of the Supreme Court decisions last week. While white gay and allied America jubilantly celebrated the end of DOMA and the resumption of equality marriage in California, many others were dismayed at the repeal of the key provision of the Voting Rights Act that ensured that communities of color have equal access to voting rights as do white communities. (Over at Black Girl Dangerous, Mia McKenzie elucidates this disconnect more eloquently that I could.) If you’re queer you can get married, but if you’re a queer person of color, you might not get to vote.
It is incumbent upon me as a white woman to say no to all-white leadership in social justice movements. Because intersectionality is a thing. Because none of us is free until we are all free, and we white people cannot make everyone free (no matter how well-intentioned we are).
If we’re going to #standwithtxwomen, as we ought, we should #standwithALLtxwomen, and that includes seeking out the female leadership in communities of color, and not being okay with a sea of white faces representing Texas.*
*And this is true at the very least because of the changing demographics of Texas, which NPR is chronicling in its special series, Texas 2020.
dayeinu
At seder on Monday and Tuesday nights, we sang “Dayeinu,” the Passover song that thanks G-d for the many, many things that G-d has done for us. It’s a review of everything that happened to get us out of slavery in Egypt and into Israel where the temple was built. (Good for G-d, the song ends before those pesky temple destructions.) Dayeinu means, approximately, “it would have sufficed!” The verses take the form of, “If G-d had just done X and not Y, dayeinu!”
So we sing, “If G-d had split the sea for us and not led us through on dry land, dayeinu!” “If G-d had led us to Mount Sinai and not given us the Torah, dayeinu!”
But these are absurd things to say. It would have been enough for G-d to create an escape route from the Egyptians but not actually vouchsafed it to us? It would have been enough for G-d point the way to a random mountain in the desert . . . for no reason at all? Many have offered feasible explanations for each of these statements. On Tuesday, for instance, my seder host shared what she had heard from a rabbi: The arrival of the Israelites at Mount Sinai marks the first time “Israel” is referred to the singular, as a collective. So Sinai represents the beginning of peoplehood, even without the Torah. But I’m not so sure we’re supposed to take the song so literally. It seems to me that we might be simply expressing awe for each of the things G-d did for us, in a series of things that ultimately led to our freedom. But each one is actually not enough.
On Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in the Prop. 8 case, the referendum that Californians passed in 2008 that outlawed marriage for same-sex couples. On Wednesday, the Court heard arguments in the challenge to DOMA, the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which restricts federal marriage benefits from same-sex couples (insurance benefits for government employees, Social Security survivors’ benefits, immigration, the filing of joint tax returns, etc.), and requires interstate marriage recognition only for opposite-sex marriages.
On Tuesday my Facebook feed turned red. Most of my friends changed their profile pictures to the Human Rights Campaign’s logo, colors changed for this historic occasion. Then the variations started: Yoda, Bert and Ernie, and an angry cat were added. The equal signs became penises, mustaches, animals, band-aids, matzah. I was over it even before the inevitable appearance of bacon. (The internet abhors a meme without bacon.)
I support marriage equality. And I didn’t change my profile pic. I put little stock in so-called clicktivism. One of my friends did post about how much it would mean to her if all her friends, especially straight ones, changed their profile pics as a sign of allyship: That partially melted my cold heart. And I did see a few people asking about its significance in comments on Facebook’s notification of changed profile pics. Which I imagine might be construed as “raising awareness,” quite possibly my least favorite phrase in the English language.
But my concern about this issue is deeper than my fear that people are substituting social media for real action. Many, many of my D.C. friends actually did actually go to the Supreme Court rallies to show support for marriage equality.
I worry that these cases, in the words of a good friend of mine, are “a gamble and a huge risk.” Marriage is a civil right — if perhaps not a strategy to achieve structural change — and there’s a chance it won’t be affirmed by the Court.
I came out in, and lived through, the post-Bowers v. Hardwick world, and it was an ugly time. The people who brought that case thought their odds were good too, but the result of their good intentions was a long period of time [Bowers was overturned in 2003 with the ruling in Lawrence v. Texas] when employers, governments, and courts (among others) could consider gay people de facto criminals in many states with the blessing of the Supreme Court. If we lose, and the high court decides that there is no fundamental right for gay people to marry our partners, I fear it could set back the fight for marriage equality in a huge way.
I worry that the online activism around these cases give rise to arguments that are not good for anybody’s liberation. I’m thinking in particular about the Louis CK quote [NSFW, natch] on marriage equality, which begins with “It doesn’t have any effect on your life.” Is this really how we want to garner support for this cause? So you are free to oppose issues if they inconvenience you? I’m also thinking of the argument that gay people are just like straight people. Just gay. Again, is this really how we want to garner support for this cause? So minorities should have rights as long as they are just aspiring to imitate the majority? Equal protection goes to the non-threatening? I am also thinking of the implication that marriage is a panacea for ensuring rights. Shouldn’t everyone, regardless of marital status, be entitled to the benefits denied because of DOMA? So you’re just out of luck if for some reason marriage isn’t in your plans?
I worry that, as I’ve written about before, marriage equality is the priority of only a small, privileged group of queer folks, mostly well-off white people (just look at the plaintiffs in both cases, or the sea of white that was the supporting faction in the rallies). On a current events program on my local NPR affiliate this week, the host marveled at how quickly marriage equality has gained support (contrasting it with, say, the relative torpidity of the civil rights movement). As far as I can see, the difference is that the former has had a lot of money and power behind it.
I worry that money and power thus directed limits the same towards issues that feel a lot more pressing and a lot more damaging, particularly for poor people of color. (I recognize that it is easy for me — a straight, white, married woman — to say this with the privilege of marriage already in hand.) On Thursday I visited the inmate that I am mentoring — a queer woman of color — as she finishes her college degree as part of Boston University’s College Behind Bars program. I use the word “mentoring” because that is the formal term for our relationship, as defined by the program we participate in, but she hardly needs help with her studies. I’m basically a cheerleader, a listener, and a contact from the outside world.
She’s taking a class on race and incarceration, so we’re reading a lot of the same books. As we talked about the drug war and hyperincarceration and the dehumanizing prison system, I couldn’t help but wish for the day when all of my white friends would support drug policy and prison reforms and would proudly make those known and would go to rallies in support of court cases before the Supreme Court. As useless as I find social media “activism,” a sea of profile pics demanding an end to the racist institution of the death penalty, or protesting the “virtual ‘drug exception’ [that] now exists to the Bill of Rights” (Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow), or decrying the dehumanizing for-profit prison industry would at least mean that the issues had gained mainstream currency.
This was a hard post to write. Tuesday’s Facebook activity ultimately left me very sad and unable to organize my thoughts. (It didn’t help that I was getting sick and mourning the death of a friend.) And changing one’s profile pic is not a wrong thing to do. And one of my best friends works for a prominent gay rights organization in this fight. And many of my gay friends consider marriage equality very important.
Our collective liberation today depends on many, many steps — as did our march to freedom through the desert. And even when we think we’ve gotten there and the song ends, the temple can be destroyed. Twice.
Marriage equality is something to regard with awe. And it is in no way enough.
let the people in
When asked what she would have done differently if she’d known she was to be only a one-term governor, Ann Richards grinned and said, “I would probably have raised more hell.”
While I was at the ashram, I read Jan Reid’s Let the People In: The Life and Times of Ann Richards. I laughed with delight at the introductory chapter, and I cried with despair at the ending — at both endings. There was the end of her rather short political career in 1994, and then there was her death in 2006 from cancer.
My introduction to this bawdy, loud, wonderful lady was during her second and failed race for governor. As I wrote for my introduction when I was asked to speak during the feminist fishbowl, “Salem has identified as a feminist since 1994, when as an impressionable 16-year-old she watched Ann Richards lose her re-election bid for governor of Texas to one George W. Bush.” I remember feeling like the world was going to end that fall — and then being sure of it six years later in the fall of 2000. But here we all are.
And thank goodness for that, because the world that I live in is one that Ann Richards helped to create. As Reid notes,
Her greatest accomplishment was to bring to positions of responsibility and power in Texas the women, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, gay men, lesbians, and disabled persons who had been so long denied. Because of that, state government centered in Austin will never be the same. Whatever party wins the elections and controls the appointed boards that keep the bureaucratic agencies and institutions of higher education running, democracy in Texas is better because she won.
Ann Richards was born near Waco, Texas, at the end of 1933, and she was almost immediately ill suited to her time. She was a wife (to David Richards), mother (to Cecile, Daniel, Clark, and Ellen), and teacher because that’s what women did; she was honest even in her lifetime about how those roles made her just about go out of her mind with boredom. Even when she served as chief of staff for Sarah Weddington (before the latter went to D.C. to argue Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court), Richards had to negotiate a special arrangement with her boss to leave work early be able to cook dinner for her family. On the one hand, we should all be able to so organize our lives to spend more time with our families. On the other hand, of course Richards’ demanding job did not excuse her from her unpaid work, as it did her husband. Indeed, even as she began to field requests for appearances all over the country, Richards answered a phone call from Midge Costanza, the highest ranking woman in the Carter administration, with the breezy, “Hi, Midge, what do you want? I’m cooking David’s supper.”
ann richards at the 1988 democratic national convention
Richards rose through Texas politics as a campaign volunteer, political staffer, county commissioner, state treasurer, and then governor. (Her career is a good reminder that it wasn’t so long ago that Texas was not the monolithically Republican state that it’s now considered to be.) Her spunk brought her to the attention of the national scene even when she was just a local politician, but she became a star during the 1988 Democratic National Convention in Atlanta, where she gave the keynote address. She “talked Texas” and delivered the now well-known zinger about the Republic presidential candidate: “Poor George, he can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”
In 1990, Richards’s first race for governor, against millionaire businessman and good ole boy Claytie Williams, is one of the most amusingly horrifying tales in Texas history — and is chronicled brilliantly in Molly Ivins’ book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?, a collection of the columnist’s political coverage, from which Reid draws liberally (no pun intended). Richards became the first female governor of Texas since 1924, when the wife of a former governor was elected. (They are still the only two women to have held that office.)
As Reid tells it, Richards tried to do too much: Her inauguration speech included 15 massive projects as top priorities. She made progressive headway in many, but ultimately, she would preside over the largest expansion of the criminal justice system in the country, doubling the number of incarcerated persons in Texas. In so doing, she did pioneer a revolutionary model of drug and alcohol treatment for non-violent offenders (she herself was a recovering alcoholic and drug user). And in her defense, she inherited a state prison crisis that had been broiling since the early 1970s, when an inmate brought a federal case against the state for violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. Adding pressure to the impetus for change were several high profile killings, most notably the Luby’s massacre in Killeen in 1991 and the siege on the Branch Davidians in Waco in 1993. But the number of executions on her watch reached 48, and her only acts of clemency in four years were two 30-day stays. It is an indelible stain on her legacy that by the year 2000, Texas had the largest prison population of any Western democracy.
The book suffered slightly, not from its subject, but from its writing, which swung between not enough repetition and too much. The text was full of awkward segues that didn’t properly introduce new characters, and recurring characters were not given enough context to remind the reader of his or her significance. But as the author touched on a subject and later returned to it, entire passages (as for example, on the history of prison reform in Texas) would be repeated almost verbatim.
But Reid was a friend of Richards (and his wife was in her employ for more than a decade). The reader can’t help but feel his affection for her. Oddly enough, he refers to her as “Ann” throughout; it’s hard to tell whether this is simply familiarity, but it is certainly not customary in biography.
It is indeed easy to root for Ann Richards, who said on her inauguration: “Today we have a vision of a Texas where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no color — a glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people in.”
feminist fishbowl
On Wednesday I spoke on a panel — or more properly, a fishbowl — about feminism at my school’s community time (held once a week for an hour-and-a-half) in advance of our winter seminar the week before school starts again in January, which will be on the topic of feminist theology and practice. Also on the panel were a faculty member (a man) and two fourth-year students (a man and a woman).
We each had four minutes (!), and I was super nervous, in part because I still don’t know the community very well, and I am just not sure where people are on feminism (yes, I know). In the end, I felt that it went really well. It was such an important experience for me personally, since, as I’ve been sharing, I’ve been having a hard time with the very painful misogyny in many of the texts that we’re studying. It felt great to have my say, to share my worldview. Which is, of course, the essence of feminism.
These are the questions that I was asked to respond to, and following that is what I said (slighted edited from notes into a more readable format, and including a few sentences I had to cut on the spot in the interests of time).
1. What does feminism mean to you?
-What is your working definition of feminism/feminist practice?
-How did you arrive at this conception of feminism?
-How is feminism lived out in your life? Your relationships? Your work? Your Jewish practice?
2. Why is it important for Hebrew College, as a community, to be talking about feminism?
____________________________________________________
My feminist practice works towards the liberation of all marginalized people, not just women. I have unerring commitment to intersectionality: The patriarchy perpetuates not just sexism but lots of other -isms/privilege: racism, ableism, cisgenderism, heteronormativism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, etc. The identity of an oppressed person is not just shaped by gender.
Essentially, our world is perfectly suited to educated, wealthy, straight, white, able-bodied, cisgendered men, and there are way more people who are not that. This means that a very small group of people have power and privilege. I’d like to create a world that is suited to all people.
I can’t walk away from misogyny, so I can’t walk away from feminism. And I won’t walk away from feminism, because it is the only defense I have in world that is hostile to me – not the other way around.
I’ve never taken a women’s studies or feminist theory class. In fact, I spent my college years doing just about the opposite, studying classics (ancient Greek and Latin texts). The definition above was forged in the fires of the rape crisis center where I worked as a hotline counselor and hospital advocate for seven years; I received extensive training before I started and ongoing training as I continued to volunteer. I answered crisis calls on a 24-hour hotline, and I went to the hospital when patient identified as a sexual assault survivor. (For simplicity, I will be talking about survivors as women, but I want to acknowledge that women are not at all the only people who are raped.)
I understand the phenomenon of sexual assault in a feminist context: that is, rape is about power and control, and not desire or libido. It is perhaps the most violent manifestation of patriarchy, and it is a direct result of the “rape culture” in which we live.
Rape culture is set of beliefs that encourages male sexual aggression and supports violence against women; it views sexual violence as a fact of life, when in fact what we think of as immutable is an expression of values and views that can change. In addition to its the part it plays in the lives of women, rape culture also narrowly circumscribes men’s roles.
A few examples: rape culture is 1 in 33 men and 1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes; rape culture is encouraging women to take self-defense as though that is the only solution required to prevent rape; rape culture is the claim that sex workers can’t be raped; rape culture is the threat of being raped in prison being an acceptable deterrent to committing crime; rape culture is tasking women with the burden of not getting raped and failing to admonish men not to rape; rape culture is refusing to acknowledge that the only thing a person can do to avoid being raped is never to be in the same room as a rapist.
My feminist practice is based on the principle that the personal is political. Just to give two examples: I listen. I know precisely my experience of sexism, but that does not mean that I know what it’s like to be queer, or a person of color, or disabled, or any number of things. It behooves me to check my privilege and to listen and to accept as true others’ telling of their experiences
And on the flip side: I tell my story. As an excellent web resource says, “Because women’s stories aren’t told, it’s incumbent upon female feminists to tell their own stories, to fill that void, to be unrepentant and loquacious raconteurs every chance we get, to talk about our bodies, our struggles, our triumphs, our needs, our lives in every aspect. It’s our obligation to create a cacophony with our personal narratives, until there is a constant din that translates into equality, into balance.”
Finally, why is it important for Hebrew College, as a community, to be talking about feminism? Because we’re still asking that question.
no power in the 'verse 