Imagine a child comes home from his first day of school with a dejected look on his face. The parent asks, “what is wrong?”
The child replies, “it is not fair!”
The parent probes further, “what is not fair?”
The child blurts
out, “almost every other kid in the class got to wear glasses, and I didn’t!”
The parent, hard
pressed to keep from laughing and losing an empathetic touch, responds, “it is
actually the other way around, you are lucky that your eyes were made perfectly
while everyone else’s eyes were not”.
We’d like to think
that conversations like the one above are relegated to the arena of parent and
child, but unfortunately, this conversation is happening among adults. To what
am I referring to? To the claims that
traditional Jewish prayer is discriminatory towards woman-they don’t count for
a minyan and they don’t get to wear the same fancy prayer uniforms (tallis)or
use the same prayer tools (tefillin) as men. And what is maddening is that the women’s
side is smaller at the Kotel! So is traditional Jewish prayer discriminatory?
This misperception stems from a
wider misperception on how we can understand the first verse of this week’s
parsha. A woman has a baby and she
herself is rendered impure from the experience. But what is hard to understand
is that she is more impure (impurity represents a spiritual blocakage that
prevents a person from connection to G-d. The word impurity, טמא, is טמ-א, the א or G-d
iniside is blocked, טמ) when she gives birth to a baby girl than to a baby boy. She gets
fourteen days of impurity for a girl versus seven days for a boy and she has to
wait an additional 66 days until she can go visit the temple for a girl and 33
days for a boy. These verses indicate that there is an endemic problem on how
Judaism views woman.
That is if one does not
understand the reason for the impurity in the first place. There are three
major impurities in the world. There is an impurity that results from over
expressed arrogance whose manifestation is through evil speech and an impurity
that is expressed from over indulgence in base desires. The third impurity is
an existential one. Once Adam sinned, our souls lost the verve they once hand,
so inherently, we never live up to our full potential. This loss of potential is a major cause for
spiritual blockage or impurity- we cannot connect to G-d like we used to.
It follows, then, that the greater
the loss of potential, the greater the impurity. In other words, if a thirty volt bulb is
dimmed to fifteen volts it feels darker than when twenty five volts falls to
fifteen volts. If a woman is impure for
longer, it means that her inherent spiritual quality is greater because there
is a greater loss when she is not able to fulfill it. With a higher
natural connection, she does not need prayer uniforms (tallis) or prayer tools
(tefillin) and she does not need formalized prayer like men do to connect. And if there is no need for it, then
certainly she does not need as much space for it. And she also can’t count in a
group for a person who needs to be there for the prayer to be effective, namely
a man, just like a kid who puts on fake glasses can’t count in a classroom
survey as a child who wears glasses. In
case it is not obvious enough, these women of the wall are essentially
complaining that they want glasses too! What they don’t realize is that they
don’t need them. They have thereby denied their greatness as a female in their
desire to be male- is that feminism?
