www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1046532.html -
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Published on: 12/18/2008
Last Visited: 2/21/2009
When Rachel Adler was 19, her grandmother died and, having no son, she wanted to say Kaddish for her.
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Adler, 65, presents a subversive and sophisticated reading of Jewish texts.
She goes beyond the original feminist reading, which focused on denouncing patriarchalism, and proposes new and surprising perspectives from which to understand them.
One example is how she deals with the sexuality of the elderly Sarah.
When Sarah finds out that she is pregnant at a late age, the Bible tells us that she laughs, which angers God.
Adler points out that the root of the Hebrew word for laughter (tsadik, het, kuf) also has a sexual meaning in the Bible, and she concludes that Sarah's laughter is connected with her enjoyment of her renewed sexuality.
"That is what scares men who read this story," says the Talmud scholar Ruhama Weiss, who edited the Hebrew version of Adler's book.
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Tradition, says Adler, is not static: "A tradition is not an object.
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Until now, Adler says in an e-mail interview, "Jewish tradition has always existed in social contexts that were patriarchal.
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In Adler's engrossing analysis of traditional Jewish marriage, it is a deal in which a woman is acquired, and to which, over the centuries, many complexities were added.
She shows there were periods in Jewish history during which couples lived together out of wedlock.
This emerges, for example, from the documents of a woman who lived at the time of the Bar Kochba rebellion.
Ancient writings from the Land of Israel indicate the status of women was only slightly less than that of their husbands.
For example, either side could initiate a divorce.
It was struggles between different rabbinical schools over the centuries that led to the creation of the discriminatory tradition we know, says Adler.
This background in part led Adler to present her proposal for a covenant between two people who love each other, like the covenant between God and the people of Israel, a covenant that promises exclusivity, she writes.
The relationships outlined by this covenant are prolonged relationships and are monogamous unions, whether between heterosexuals or homosexuals.
She adds, in the interview: "In the United Sates, I keep hearing from couples both heterosexual and homosexual who have married with a brit ahuvim.
A popular book about Jewish weddings has included it as an alternative, and some couples bring it to the rabbis and say, 'This is what we want.'" There is no reason, she says, for a couple who want to marry to agree to ceremonies that go against their values.
"The experience of getting married should not entail passively assenting to values the couple rejects," says Adler.
In the brit ahuvim, she explains, "men and women acquire a partnership that either partner can dissolve.
No get [Jewish divorce decree] is required.
A beit din [rabbinical court] in which three scholarly Jews would sit would simply certify that the brit ahuvim was terminated.
This could make a big difference to women who currently can be made to pay large sums of money for a get, or can be kept waiting for long periods" or not get a religious divorce at all.
The brit ahuvim, Adler says, is a proposal that could help the growing split among the people of Israel.
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Adler is a professor of Modern Jewish Thought and Feminist Studies at Hebrew Union College's Los Angeles campus.
She was born into a Reform family.
"I am a fifth-generation Reform Jew and a fourth-generation native of Chicago," she says.
"I became a ba'alat teshuva [returning to religion] in my teens and lived as an Orthodox Jew for about 20 years," she adds.
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Adler continues: "I can't really pinpoint a definitive time when I became a feminist.
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"I left Orthodoxy for several reasons," Adler says.
"First of all, I do not believe in an ahistorical revelation.
I believe God reveals Godself to us progressively and always within historical contexts.
Second, for my graduate studies in literature, I learned about the redaction and recension of manuscripts and then could not ignore signs of multiple traditions joined together in the Torah as we have it.
Third, I saw how rabbis manipulated halakha [Jewish law] to maintain their own power and to disempower women, and I decided my life was too short to wait for them to take the legal risks that would be necessary to make changes."
Adler says she is not out to blame or to destroy.
She says the holy texts are inexhaustible.
"One can go back to them over and over and come away with new insights."
These insights are not acceptable in any way to scholars of the Conservative stream of Judaism, almost all of them men, says Weiss.
"Once at a seminar at the Hebrew University, someone brought a quote from Adler's book, and the head of one of the departments, an important scholar, attacked her personally and spoke about her personal family status.
Weiss adds: "And he is considered an enlightened person."
It is customary to attack the womb and ovaries of feminists when there is no better way to respond, Weiss says.
"Conservative scholars in the field of Jewish studies in Israel ignore Adler," she says.
"In the United States, everything is much more open and her book has been awarded prizes.
The trouble is that it is very difficult to contradict her claims.
Adler is a serious Talmud scholar and is very knowledgeable both about Jewish research and about feminism.
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