[Previous sermon: "May 26, 2006"] [Next sermon: "Rosh Hashanah Morning 5767- Saturday Sept 23, 2006"]
June 16, 2006 - Be'ha'alotecha
This week, I celebrated the 24th anniversary of my Bat Mitzvah, so now you know exactly how old I am. My portion, this week's parsha, Be'ha'alotecha, is one of the longest Torah portions in the entire Chumash. Besides all the preparation for me, it must have been something else to have been in the congregation for such an extensive amount of chanting as I did due largely to a superior day school education. And yet, when it was all over, no one said to me at my Bat Mitzvah kiddush, as I distinctly remember them saying to my older brothers, "Did you ever consider becoming a rabbi, like your father?" I indirectly got the idea to pursue the rabbinate not from my community of Jews, but rather from the unequivocal message from both my parents that I was going to be well educated and have a professional career, just exactly like my brothers. And when it became evident for me personally that I wished to devote myself to and lead the Jewish community, well, the rest is history. In one way, I became a rabbi in spite of the Jewish community I knew.
The other rabbis and important Reform movement leaders I knew and learned from at camp and in my community were all men. And in another way, I am sure I was influenced by my mother, and the other women in my congregation of origin who were way ahead of their time, striving to transform themselves from invisible supporters of Jewish life at home to being active players in the life of the synagogue. These women were even experimenting with egalitarian God-language while the original Gates of Prayer, Blue version, was still hot off the press. I can remember the contest between our male cantor and these women, who could sing louder during Aleinu when the prayerbook said "Let us adore the ever living God and render praise unto HIM," while the women wanted it to say "...and render praise unto YOU." They were, without even knowing it, making the ground fertile for me to come to the decision I did quite naturally. If God, our ultimate leader, wasn't necessarily a man, then a rabbi didn't have to be either. Truthfully, I didn't think about gender very much while applying to the Hebrew Union College or even while I was there, except as something I would figure out in the field.
And I didn't really have to for that five years of school because half of the students in my class were women and half were men. We were an equal opportunity world in miniature and gender issues played out in a like manner. Fast forward now 15 years, and what you will find at the Hebrew Union College are classes that are 30 percent male and 70 percent female. I had the occasion to be at a conference hosted by the New York campus of HUC, and was astonished by the meager male presence at the school and even more stunned about how I felt about it. All at once, I was uncomfortable, worried and sad. As staunch a feminist as I am, I will say plainly my female colleagues and I didn't forge into the relatively unchartered territory of the rabbinate to be deserted by those who were already inhabiting it. Women entering public Jewish life was never supposed to be a take over but rather an attempt to share a partnership. A few weeks after my HUC visit, I received in the mail a copy of an essay entitled Fighting the Flight of Men: A Modern Day Crisis for the Reform Movement, written by the executive director of the National Federation of Temple Brotherhoods, Doug Barden. In that essay, Mr. Barden lays out the statistical trend that exists not only in the rabbinate but in the Reform world.
Jewish camping and Temple youth groups which are the natural feeder experiences to later leadership in our movement are also seeing the same kind of gender imbalance - as kids grow older, the average participation in camp and youth group is about 30-40% male to 60-70% female. His argument is that in the last three decades, our movement has sought to meet the needs of women on a variety of liturgical, programmatic, and leadership opportunity fronts, and has inadvertently ignored those same needs for men. What he ultimately suggests is that synagogues need to reclaim male-only activities and find ways to be more sensitive to gender specificity in all our decision making so that men feel more at home in the synagogue and not shut out from it. As the other half of an exclusively female clergy team at Temple Emanuel, all of this has sent me soul searching. Last Shabbat at dinner, I seized the opportunity when I was seated next to a male student who just returned from spending his first year at the Hebrew Union College to pick his brains about his experience of what Barden calls "male flight." Although he didn't give me any grand insights, he did say it was both real and palpable, and in response to it, the men in his class had made some attempts to meet regularly and seek support from one another.
But that the group floundered a bit and disbanded as the demands of school life pressed on them.
At this early stage of my thinking on this matter, it seems to me that a number of things are going on. First is that we are living during interesting times of massive social change, and the dust is far from settling around us. For nearly 2000 years, the public space of synagogue life was male-only territory for the most part. Behind a mechitza, women were not only to be visually invisible, they were for all intents and purposes by law made invisible, persona non grata. In the private domain of the household, however, women ruled exclusively. Its like that classic joke about a young boy returning home from school to tell his mother that he got the role of the Jewish father in the school play, to which his mother replies, "Oh I'm so sorry dear. Maybe next year you'll get a speaking part." If this was ever a true caricature, it all changed for both men and women when Jewish life met industrial America. Just to highlight the changes, consider that in 1900, 80% of Jewish men were working blue-collar jobs, generally in the schmateh industry.
Just 50 years later, nearly 75% of young Jewish men were attending college, and today well over 80% of Jewish men are professionals- from high powered businessmen and lawyers to professors, doctors, writers and artists.
On the whole, Jewish men have gone from being day laborers to having careers with security and status. Naturally, the effects of these changes have been felt in each family and by each man. And we know in the first half of the 20th century, it was likewise the exception for women to have higher education. Some women worked out of the home out of necessity. Even into the 1950's and 60's many women attending college were expected to give up professional aspirations for marriage and children, assuming traditional lifestyles. With the sexual revolution and the ERA, the latter half of 20th century saw the work and home life of men and women change radically. And today, fathers are expected not only to be material providers, but also to share in the carpooling, grocery shopping and household managing tasks of everyday life. And women, too, are starting to be seen by their male counterparts as being more attractive mates if they also come with equal earning potential for their families.
Even with a good amount of egalitarian forward thinking, I don't think my parents could have ever imagined the home life that I lead - with a spouse who shops and cooks and is the primary caregiver to our children and with me the full time working parent, who also shares in carpool, is in charge of laundry and bill paying. And we, like our contemporaries, are continually negotiating and renegotiating the balance of our public professional and private family lives. It is only natural that the Reform movement, the movement the most in step with modern values, popular culture, and social change, and particularly the synagogue, would be affected by the upheaval caused by these shifts in traditional gender roles. Just as men are learning their way in the private space of the home, women, through Rosh Chodesh groups, women's Torah study groups, reinventing Sisterhood have been discovering their voice the public space of the synagogue. And perhaps men need more outlets to find support as they balance the newer demands on their emotional and spiritual resources for which they have few or no role models to emulate.
When I found out my second child was going to be a boy, I began to think what an important contribution I might be making in raising a male child who would have very different role models in Mark and me to equip him for this vastly different world in which we live. But I don't want him to grow up thinking the synagogue, or Jewish life, is just for girls either. Here's what would be easy. It would be easy for men to continue to exit from synagogue life seeing it as a women's-only place and find themselves instead either spending their free time in a football stadium, around a poker table, or wielding their wallets around the power broker board tables of the Jewish Federation world, which is still, at its core a traditional, if not male dominated, institution. But I think that in the final analysis, men themselves will be shortchanging themselves. There is a growing movement among men that there is gender specific spirituality and these changing times are challenging the old forms and begging men to make new ones. Its an emerging conversation that needs to take place among men and I encourage the men at this synagogue to name it, to explore it, to find that distinctly male voice of today's man and to return to our larger community and share it with us all.
I would love to see a men's Torah study group here at Temple Emanuel which would explore how the rabbis articulated accurately the male experience, but also how men would respond differently today to our sources. Let's resurrect Brotherhood retreats to explore these issues in depth and discuss new avenues for contributing to our Temple's life which speaks to men's needs. Make the rafting trip an annual men's only event, just for fun.
Ultimately, we are all on this journey together. And if the synagogue is to survive as an institution which reflects the totality of Jewish life, we need men to be whole here. More whole than they ever were when it was a men-only place. This Sunday, on Father's day, we honor the men in our lives. They have shaped our existence personally in immeasurable ways. And thanks to them, the Jewish people has a vibrant and rich textual tradition which has nourished us for thousands of years. But living Judaism, the Judaism that goes beyond the scrolls, beyond the books, will need hear women's voices and men's voices, singing their own song, in harmony with one another and creating the music anew.
Rabbi Batsheva Meiri
