[Avodah] Women in Torah

[Michael Makovi]

I was discussing women in Torah with my friend, and she [the same
friend of mine who is suffering in chu"l] brought up pilegishim,
saying that  it was totally unreasonable, and she couldn't understand
how the Torah could allow it.

I replied that it seemed perfectly reasonable, as a time-based
concession to the yetzer hara and/or the minhagim of the time (i.e.,
up-to-date then but out-of-date now).

I related this to, for example, the Torah saying that if you go to war
and take a woman, you have to treat her  kach v'kach - Chazal already
told us this is but a concession to the yetzer hara; ideally, no man
would do this, but the Torah knows it that man cannot always live up
to lofty ideals.

Similarly, Shadal (Shmuel David Luzzatto) quoted in Nechama Leibowitz,
says that the Torah allowed the goel to kill the accidental
manslaughter until he arrives at the city, as an attempt to wean us
off Arab-style blood revenge. Had the Torah forbade the goel from
killing the manslaughter, he would have ignored the Torah and taken
revenge for his family's honor. The Torah's attempt to gradually wean
us, however, succeeded, B"H, for the Torah says "flee" but Chazal say
"exile", showing that Chazal-era people no longer entertained notions
of chasing the manslaughterer to avenge their honor.

We could add to this the fact that the Torah says "if a man has two
wives, one loved and the other hated..."; also, it is "Adam and Eve"
not "Adam, Eve, and Joan"; the Torah lets us have two wives, but it
subtly lets us know that two wives will mean marital discord, and it
lets us know what it really wants. Indeed then, Chazal tell us (if I
remember correctly) that you must have your wife's permission to take
a second, and when Shmuel's mother's husband had two wives, the
midrash says this is criticism of him. And then of course Rabbenu
Gershom banned polygamy altogether. Although the Torah lets us
practice polygamy, we eventually got the message.

However, I added to her that I was scared to wonder in many instances,
whether my criticisms of certain Torah/Chazal-ic statements (eg, women
cannot be eidim) were because the statement goes against the ethos of
the Torah, or because it goes against modern Western values.

Now then, I just saw Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits in his book "Crisis and
Faith", chapter 7, "The The Status of Women Within Judaism". He also
has a book, "Women in Time and Torah", but I have not yet been blessed
with the ability to procure that book. Anyway...

Rabbi Berkovits brings up many Chazalic statements that are critical
of woman's nature, such as that they are lazy, greedy, vain,
gluttonous, prone to witchcraft, etc. He says it is highly doubtful
whether anyone could accept these statements today.

He notes that there are no statements of what men are like, nor what a
husband means to a wife; all of Chazal's statements are male-centric.
So are the laws of the Torah - only men can be eidim, only men can
divorce their wives, only men are admitted into the center of
religious life (especially in learning).

This male-centricity no doubt contributed to the negative qualities
women were accused of - not being allowed to learn or participate in
or shape religious life, being confined to the home, was sure to make
them frustrated. Likely the "good" wife was demure and docile, while
the bright and alert and vital woman would have rebelled and been the
"bad" wife.

But he contrasts all these with many statements of Chazal much much
more favorable towards women; eg, that there is no blessing without a
wife, that a man should honor his wife more than himself, etc. He says
that the Jewish home has always had a much greater degree of love and
honor towards the wife than non-Jewish homes.

Also, despite the male-centric nature of the laws, Chazal did try to
fix certain situations disadvantageous to women; they would sometimes
compel a man to divorce his wife, they allowed only one witness, and
also a woman, to testify about a husband's death to prevent an aguna,
and various other measures.

The question then is, how to explain the negative statements and laws
in light of the positive ones? Rabbi Berkovits answers:

"There exists, then, a tension between the moral conscience of the
tradition, or, as we may also put it, between the ultimate ethos of
the Law, and its institutionalization in specific laws. There can be
little doubt that the tension is normally due to the fact that
inevitably, the actual institutionalization of the ethos is always
time-conditioned; it cannot be achieved independently of the people
whose adherence to it is demanded. This need not contradict the faith
of the religious Jew who believes that the Torah as God's revelation
has validity."

He notes Rambam that the korbanot were a concession to primitive
people. While others would dispute this, Rabbi Berkovits says the
point is that it may be a meta-principle that many Torah laws are
concessions to primitive times, and that these laws conflict with the
moral ethos of the Torah itself (NOT Western values). He also brings
up slavery, something Rabbi Berkovits is sure no religious Jew today
could live with; he says the Torah allows slavery, but attaches so
many conditions to it, that over time, we got the message and ceased
the practice.

Rabbi Berkovits says, surely this applies to woman and Torah too.
Rambam says that a wife is not a prisoner, and therefore she may leave
one or two times a month. Similarly, she must wash her husband's face
and hands, but not those of her husband's kin, for she is not a
servant. Rabbi Berkovits asks, would any husband subject his wife to
such conditions today?! He notes that as a child, his family had a
servant, but the family members were forbidden to request of her
anything additional beyond her ordinary duties, for she was not a
servant to them. If this is how Rabbi Berkovits's father treated his
servant, imagine how he treated his wife!

Rabbi Berkovits goes on to say that surely then, we can find ways to,
for example, permit women to be eidim and shoftim, and outlaw halitza
altogether (because it is humiliating; we can do this, he says, by
inserting a statement in the ketuba to retroactively annul the
marriage when a husband dies childless).

This is part of Rabbi Berkovits's philosophy of the Oral Law that from
time immemorial, the Oral Law served as a humanizing measure, to
change the preexisting law in accordance with Torah-values. He makes
it very clear that he does not mean that Western values ought to
inform our sensibilities; he says "This is not so because we are
modern Jews, nor because this is the second half of the twentieth
century. This is so because we are Jews. This has been so for many
generations, on account of what Judaism has made of us."

Rabbi Berkovits adds, "One does not ask these questions because the
Torah has become a burden and one wishes to break away from it; one
asks because one believes in the eternal validity of the divine
revelation, because one is committed with one's whole existence to the
proposition that the teaching is Torah Hayim, the way of life for the
Jew".

David Hazony in the introduction to "Essential Essays on Judaism", and
in the same article on Azure.com, there titled "Eliezer Berkovits and
the Revival of Jewish Moral Thought", notes that whereas reformers
want to bring Judaism up-to-date with Western values, Rabbi Berkovits
rather say it that halakha had to be updated to keep pace with the
values of the Torah itself.

Rabbi Hirsch wrote an essay titled "Judaism Up to Date", in which he
polemicized that Judaism has never been with the times, and it never
will be until Mashiach comes, and until then, we should never strive
to bring it up to date. Rabbi Berkovits would agree - the issue is not
that halakha is trailing behind Western values, but rather that
halakha is trailing behind Jewish values! When the Torah was given,
reality and halakha were behind the ideals and ethos of Torah, and our
task is to bring halakha up to step with the Torah's own values.

Mikha'el Makovi