A topical confession
Hi everyone. My name is Lawrence, and for the life of me, I can't understand gender politics.
This has been fermenting in my brain (yuck) for a few weeks already, and Elf's recent response to the controversy surrounding Lawrence Summers's alleged comments at a Harvard conference has given me what should be sufficient motivation to finish another little essay.
A rather significant portion of my energy as a gabbai goes toward assigning `aliyyot* on Mondays and Thursdays. The process is simple enough: hand the prospective `oleh** a little wooden card with a Hebrew word written on it, check to make sure that this is cool for all parties involved, and move on. The only truly complicated bit is making sure that people get their fair share of `aliyyot. I mustn't automatically gravitate toward close friends, and I need to walk the length of the room***.
Except that there's another complication, of course. I study at one of the world's few egalitarian† yeshivot, and some of my fellow students are, for reasons unknown to me, rather insecure with regard to the stability of egalitarian philosophy. There seems to be a pervasive notion that if an equal number of men and women do not participate in the service today then the disparity will grow tomorrow and the day after, until finally we divide the building in two and call the smaller portion a seminary††.
The crazy thing is that people insist on this standard in an environment that is roughly 70% male. In the pursuit of this particular definition of equality, it is not unheard of for every woman in the room to be given some part in the service, only to be followed by grumbling that more men participated than women. I cannot remember the last Torah reading day in which women were not overrepresented — at least with reference to the number of them in the room — among the potential ten participants. (There is also an insistence upon appointing both a female and a male gabbai, which may get complicated in the next few months as candidates are exhausted.)
When I mentioned the issue of intrayeshival demography to one of my fellow students, the response was a bitter "Yeah, and we're supposedly egalitarian." I can only assume that this was meant to be a comment on the yeshiva's admission policies — a criticism suggesting that there is a guiding force behind the 70:30 ratio. This is true, of course, and here it is: fewer women apply to come here. What's more, four of our female students are here primarily because their husbands are JTS or UJ students in the midst of their year in Israel†††. (Why such a discrepancy exists is a subject worthy of examination, but it has to be recognized first.)
I've heard a great deal of discussion about how important this matter is, and how we have to show that we are egalitarian. Apparently, the sign on the door reading "Welcome to the Conservative Yeshiva" is not a sufficient reminder.
*More properly, birkot `aliyyah, or blessings of the `aliyyah. An `aliyyah is the reading of a passage from the Torah, of which there are three on ordinary Mondays and Thursdays. Being asked to recite the berakhot before and after one of the readings is considered to be an honor.
**Person who recites the berakhah. `Oleh is the masculine and general form, `olah being female-specific.
***I tend to stand in the back during services, and there's a tendency to give out `aliyyot to people in the neighborhood.
†In this case, "egalitarian" means that men and women have, with one exception about which I may post at some later point, equal opportunities in prayer, Torah reading and study.
††"Seminary" has come to be used by the English-speaking orthodox Jewish community to refer to a school of religious studies for women, as opposed to the term "yeshiva," which tends to be reserved for men's schools. It goes without saying in most circles that seminaries do not offer the same educational opportunities as yeshivot.
†††We do have one male student who is here because his wife is a UJ rabbinical candidate.
This has been fermenting in my brain (yuck) for a few weeks already, and Elf's recent response to the controversy surrounding Lawrence Summers's alleged comments at a Harvard conference has given me what should be sufficient motivation to finish another little essay.
A rather significant portion of my energy as a gabbai goes toward assigning `aliyyot* on Mondays and Thursdays. The process is simple enough: hand the prospective `oleh** a little wooden card with a Hebrew word written on it, check to make sure that this is cool for all parties involved, and move on. The only truly complicated bit is making sure that people get their fair share of `aliyyot. I mustn't automatically gravitate toward close friends, and I need to walk the length of the room***.
Except that there's another complication, of course. I study at one of the world's few egalitarian† yeshivot, and some of my fellow students are, for reasons unknown to me, rather insecure with regard to the stability of egalitarian philosophy. There seems to be a pervasive notion that if an equal number of men and women do not participate in the service today then the disparity will grow tomorrow and the day after, until finally we divide the building in two and call the smaller portion a seminary††.
The crazy thing is that people insist on this standard in an environment that is roughly 70% male. In the pursuit of this particular definition of equality, it is not unheard of for every woman in the room to be given some part in the service, only to be followed by grumbling that more men participated than women. I cannot remember the last Torah reading day in which women were not overrepresented — at least with reference to the number of them in the room — among the potential ten participants. (There is also an insistence upon appointing both a female and a male gabbai, which may get complicated in the next few months as candidates are exhausted.)
When I mentioned the issue of intrayeshival demography to one of my fellow students, the response was a bitter "Yeah, and we're supposedly egalitarian." I can only assume that this was meant to be a comment on the yeshiva's admission policies — a criticism suggesting that there is a guiding force behind the 70:30 ratio. This is true, of course, and here it is: fewer women apply to come here. What's more, four of our female students are here primarily because their husbands are JTS or UJ students in the midst of their year in Israel†††. (Why such a discrepancy exists is a subject worthy of examination, but it has to be recognized first.)
I've heard a great deal of discussion about how important this matter is, and how we have to show that we are egalitarian. Apparently, the sign on the door reading "Welcome to the Conservative Yeshiva" is not a sufficient reminder.
*More properly, birkot `aliyyah, or blessings of the `aliyyah. An `aliyyah is the reading of a passage from the Torah, of which there are three on ordinary Mondays and Thursdays. Being asked to recite the berakhot before and after one of the readings is considered to be an honor.
**Person who recites the berakhah. `Oleh is the masculine and general form, `olah being female-specific.
***I tend to stand in the back during services, and there's a tendency to give out `aliyyot to people in the neighborhood.
†In this case, "egalitarian" means that men and women have, with one exception about which I may post at some later point, equal opportunities in prayer, Torah reading and study.
††"Seminary" has come to be used by the English-speaking orthodox Jewish community to refer to a school of religious studies for women, as opposed to the term "yeshiva," which tends to be reserved for men's schools. It goes without saying in most circles that seminaries do not offer the same educational opportunities as yeshivot.
†††We do have one male student who is here because his wife is a UJ rabbinical candidate.
posted by Lawrence | 12:42 PM
7 Comments:
Doesn't the Reform movement have a disproportionate number of women in clerical training? Maybe you should see if you can set up a strategic alliance...
I remember at Brandeis there was some thought that there should be both male and female gabbaim, just because they were the face of the minyan to the world and tended, for whatever silly contextual reasons, to represent different faces of egalitarian conservatism to some groups and people. A male gabbai was someone the minyanim to the right could understand and who could represent egal at any sort of joint service; a female gabbai showed that the minyan was in fact egalitarian, and meant that there was at least one person in charge who could personally understand the actual experience of not being counted by some of the other groups. This wasn't sufficiently important that it decided who got the job, and as you know it sort of vanished somewhere along the line. (You probably also disagree, but all I'm saying is that it was a line of thought, and one with actual ideas behind it other than, "hey, we should be equal!")
Maybe the people you daven with haven't realized that a rotating job among people who are always there is completely different than the college-leadership sort of role?
One- footnote 1, you somehow wrote Wednesday rather than Thursday: might you want to change that if such is possible?
Secondly- I think the insecurity with egalitarianism and the need to demonstrate it in that way is that it's still a new enough thing that people are still making it second-nature. Once it is (a time period probably measurable in generations, knowing us Jews), it'll be less pressured and anxious. Myself, I think it's important to show when there are new people- I know that the first Friday night service this year, all men lead, and a couple of freshmen asked me if it was an egalitarian service or not, and could they wear their tallitot in the morning, etc.
I do find it a bit odd that the gender ratio is that unbalanced. Is this a fairly stable ratio, or does it change greatly from year to year? I don't see so much of a rationale for it. In fact, I'd think it would be the other way around- since involved Conservative men would be much more comfortable, presumably, in an Orthodox yeshiva than Cosnervative women would be in an Orthodox seminary. Maybe this is also related to the newness of this sort of egalitarianism in the Jewish communal mindset...
Naomi the Engagèd:
Our system is more flexible in some respects. In order to accommodate both those who insist upon Kohen-Levi-Yisrael ranking and those who are not comfortable with the idea of Jewish castes, we tend to follow the order one day and leave it alone on the other. (In the latter case, we do have to make sure that Kohanim and L'viyyim are not given improper `aliyyot.) Three of the regular attendees are b'not Kohen, and we've recently acquired a L'viyyah. The latter is particularly helpful, since prior to that we had three L'viyyim, two being staff members (one of whom isn't around on Monday mornings) and the remainder being a gabbai who would rather not assign himself honors.
We don't have any rules about t’fillin and the Torah. This is probably inconsistent in one halakhic sense or another, but no less so than allowing a woman to interact with a sefer Torah on Shabbat but not on weekdays.
Women do tend to be asked to do g'lillah, mostly because more men are capable of doing hagbahah. (I'm quite certain that more women can lift our weekday Torah scroll than think they can, the number of confident magbihot presently being zero.)
Fleurdelis:
Setting up a strategic alliance with HUC would involve approving a format for a joint service. Were someone try to do that, I would most likely avoid the meeting room in favor of a safer location, such as Damascus.
I can see the reasoning behind the points you raise, and I do wish someone had mentioned them to me while I was still in college. Still, I have rather a different estimation of the gabbai's role in the community. I'm concerned with hir ability to get us through the service without major mishaps, and much less so with hir sympathy for my past socio-religious hardships.
Debka Notion:
Thanks for the proofreading — footnote duly corrected.
I'm sure it does have something to do with the novelty of the idea, but remember that JTS started ordaining female rabbis in 1985. The vast majority of the movement is officially (and aggressively) egalitarian.
If anything, I'd say that pre-egalitarian Conservative Judaism is in its death throes. The older traditionalists just keep on getting older, and the younger ones are jumping ship in favor of modern orthodoxy. There was recently a debate at JTS over whether to continue to extend the school's clergy placement services to non-egal USCJ member congregations, with a strong but ultimately unsuccessful voice against continuation.
I have a theory to explain at least part of the imbalance: our yeshiva, like many others, primarily attracts young single people. As women tend to marry younger than men, they are less likely to be able to take a year out of their lives to study at a non-accredited institution of higher learning. (With exactly one exception, every married student at the yeshiva either has a professional interest in being in Israel or is married to someone who does. The exception is a woman who is in the process of making `aliyyah, and whose husband has found work here.)
I'd just like to point out that men are grossly underrepresented in the comments to this post.
Setting up a strategic alliance with HUC would involve approving a format for a joint service.Well, yes. But it would solve the gender imbalance...
I can see the reasoning behind the points you raise, and I do wish someone had mentioned them to me while I was still in college.Out of curiosity, howso?
Still, I have rather a different estimation of the gabbai's role in the community.I think it depends on the community. I imagine in your current context there's much less of the leadership, face-of-the-community angle and, as you note, much more of the nuts and bolts of service coordination. It's really an overbroad term, "gabbai" -- maybe someone should think of ways to indicate the major variants (chiefly: person who leads college minyan, person who organizes service, and person who stands next to the Torah and corrects people's grammar -- are there any I'm missing?)
fleurdelis:
Regarding your second point, it would have left me a bit less confused about why some people feel the way the feel. Unfortunately, I suspect that this reason for wanting a male and a female gabbai may not have been the most common one. It's sort of like the difference between egalitarianism with corresponding halakhic committments and egalitariansim because the alternative is just wrong.
Except that the idea that egalitarianism is just a moral imperative has less stupid manifestations as well.
Naomi: If that happens, just show them Richard Attenborough's Gandhi, and be sure to freeze-frame on the scene with the guy fixing a roof in the ashram while wearing a big shiny Star of David.
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