thanks to the delightful sonia from pickled politics, i ended up in a jolly discussion over at butterflies and wheels on feminism and religion. they seem to have closed the comments for some reason, but i still thought it was an interesting subject and thought i’d continue it here if anyone (like ophelia benson or amy clare) was interested. there are some unresolved questions. amy asks:
“Do Anglicans, even moderates, really think of G!D as a sexless being? I was under the impression that most moderate religious people still think of G!D as male. People could use the singular ‘they’ and refer to a ‘parent’ if they were really that bothered.”
i think she could with some justice aim this question at judaism, but it is, nonetheless, a bit of an old chestnut. the best way i can answer it is that in the same way that we deal with anthropomorphism in the text: G!D Isn’t male any more than G!D Has a “hand”, or a “back”, G!D Forbid. when the Text speaks in these terms, it is only to be understood as the way *we* understand the interaction, not the *actual reality* – hence, when we speak of G!D as “Father” or “King”, these are merely the interactions and relevant relationships that are being described, not the Ultimate Reality of the Divine. by the same token, a number of incredibly important Divine Names and interaction/relationships are *female*, such as “E-L ShaDaY”, which comes from the word ShaDaYiM (breasts) and “Ha-RaHaMaN”, which comes the word ReHeM (womb), not to mention the considerable symbology of the Divine Feminine in kabbalah around the SheKhiNaH (Divine Presence) and “Matronit” and the male-female interrelationships actually *within* the G!DHead. one might also mention the idea that the “community of israel” is synonymous with G!D’s “bride” on some level, so that would require one of us to be “male” and the other “female” in that particular situation.
“And then there’s Jesus – no-one could lead themselves to believe he was genderless. Judaism has Moses, Islam has Mohammed – all these prophets are male. How does a person get around that one?”
perhaps by mentioning the seven major jewish prophetesses, sarah, miriam, deborah, hannah, abigail, huldah and esther – (talmudic reference: BT megillah 14a)? according to the great authority rashi, rebecca, rachel and leah should also be included.
a more serious criticism, i believe, is the following:
“If one accepts and follows traditions without question purely on the basis that they are traditions, this leaves the door wide open for all kinds of nasty things. In general, it silences and disables those who disagree with the traditions and would like to do things differently. It’s those ‘harmless’ traditions which can make people feel stifled and like there’s only one right way to do things. At the very least, they discourage creativity, critical thinking and independence.”
this is certainly a position with which we at the spittoon can identify – certainly within judaism (and, i and others would argue, within islam as well) the idea that there is One True Way Of Doing Stuff is a corrosive and oppressive idea not borne out by a truly insightful examination of the texts involved. however, the accompanying analysis is flawed:
“One can usually assess how harmless a tradition is by examining what the penalties are, if any, of not following it. In your example, I would imagine that a Jewish/Muslim pork-eater would face many negative reactions from their community, plus residual religious guilt, and that this is probably the real reason why they ‘like following the tradition’.”
now, this might be a perfectly adequate summary of how the uneducated “feel” about the law in question, in fact, the penalty in halakhah is the indication of exactly how important the principle incurring the penalty is in the first place. in fact, halakhically, the penalty is thirty-nine lashes, a comparatively light penalty compared to breaking shabbat, which is a stoning offence. now, before you get all bent out of shape on how unpleasant it is to get lashed, you’d have to also consider the standard of evidence, which required five further tests before the lashes could be administered:
- the pork-eating in question would have to be done in front of two kosher witnesses (many, many difficulties in establishing what one of these looks like)
- the two witnesses would need to have absolutely no discrepancy in their statements.
- the pork-eater would have to receive a warning from the witnesses that by so doing, he would incur a penalty of lashes.
- the pork-eater would have to respond that he had understood the warning and the penalty, reiterating precisely what they both were.
- the eating would then have to occur within 3 seconds of this response.
incidentally, to be binding, the verdict would also have to be handed down by a properly constituted and duly authorised religious court – and there hasn’t been such a court for approximately 1500 years, but considering the re-establishment of such courts is a religious duty, i personally would prefer to rely on the other safeguards. even so, i hope you can see from the standard required that anyone who actually meets it is clearly out to make a point. oh, and, incidentally, if you ran away before the verdict was carried out, you couldn’t be re-arrested. in such a case, the negative feeling from your community is likely to be the only sanction.
another interesting challenge is made here:
“To what extent, for a religious person, is their holy book really their holy book, if they disregard most of its teachings (or haven’t even read it all the way through)?”
for jews, as we were born into a covenantal relationship, we are as subject to it as to the laws of the country we were born into. the same obtains with UK law. presumably amy’s not suggesting that i’m not obliged to follow the regulations of her majesty’s revenue collectors despite the fact that i may never have read them or heard of their provisions? by the same token:
“To align oneself with a movement, an organisation, that one disagrees with at least in part, knowing that in doing so you are giving it power – numbers at least, and in many cases, money too?”
i am not sure how this is different from being a citizen of a country whose policies you may or may not agree with – you’ve still got to pay your taxes.
as part of this discussion, i analysed deuteronomy 22:29 in its context. this provoked a number of further responses including:
“Regarding the Deuteronomy verse (22:29), it says that ’she shall be his wife, because he hath humbled her’ – humbled? That’s rather chilling, no? Is that a mistranslation too?”
not only that, but it is also misrepresenting what the text says, which is ‘AiNah” – “forced”, but not in a *physically* violent way, as in verse 25, more in such a way as to give her no choice but to marry him. i would say that this represents bringing about a marriage by “putting the woman in a compromising position”; if you know pride and prejudice, it’s what wickham does to lydia bennet to get money out of the family; he has to be bribed to marry her. the Torah is trying here to prevent the woman becoming unmarriageable; there is nothing to say that she can’t *then* divorce *him* (after betrothal and before final marriage), thus retaining her autonomy and a hefty divorce payout; it is just that *he* is forever prevented from divorcing *her*, not the other way around. i would understand this verse as a face-saving exercise.
amy then goes on to say:
“Regardless of whether rape occurred or it was ‘just sex’, isn’t it a bit sexist to generally suggest that it’s okay to buy a woman in this way?”
now, i’m not sure you can really project your attitude back to the bronze age as if human values and relationships have always been the same; i mean, that is the same sort of point of view that would reduce shakespeare’s “merchant of venice” to simple antisemitism. the initial audience of the Torah (as opposed to G!D) wouldn’t really understand what you’re getting at here. the thing is, you aren’t “buying a woman”; you’re contracting for procreative services, as it were, which can only be done by ensuring exclusivity on the woman’s part. the woman must enter into the contract without coercion and of her own free will and can exit it at her discretion on virtually any grounds (including bad breath) and is, for the duration of the contracted marriage, entitled to a statutory level of maintenance (and alimony), clothing, housing and sexual satisfaction, breach of which by the husband is, needless to say, grounds for divorce. this quite simply was revolutionary within the context in which the Torah was given; not only in that the woman had to agree, but that she maintained her rights, her property and right of cancellation. in fact, it compares positively to modern civil law in most respects – most people agree that merely falling in love is a rather worse basis for marriage than shared values and clear responsibilities on both sides! both sides contribute assets – the wife’s contribution is *not* a dowry, but her reproductive capabilities, hence:
“(Following your interpretation, it’s a bit like having to pay for something you broke in a shop – fair enough if it’s a vase, but a person? Why does having sex make you a broken person?)”
well, it doesn’t, nor is this implied, although permit me to observe, tongue-in-cheek, that most of us would pay more for new underpants than for second-hand. the statutory levels, in any case, are nominal – in reality, these would in the past have been negotiated, in the case of a woman who had emancipated herself from her father (or previous husband by divorce or widowhood) possibly by the woman herself. and there’s more:
“If God is a supremely knowledgeable being, with ultimate powers, and is perfectly good and moral, why couldn’t he send a clear message – even in the bronze age – that women are people, not property?”
the same reason that G!D also didn’t send the clear message “don’t drive on the wrong side of the road” – it wouldn’t have made sense at the time, only now. the clarity would in fact have been precisely the opposite.
“What stopped him from telling these citizens in no uncertain terms that it’s okay for women to have sex, they don’t have to be virgins until they’re married, and it’s not right to buy and sell them?”
the fact that this wasn’t a student dorm at berkeley, it was bronze age canaan – and if you hopped behind a bush with someone, you’d be liable to end up with your throat slit, or sold into slavery, thus precipitating a blood feud; it wasn’t like there was a police force and cctv; this was the wild fecking west! people took what they could get and, like it or not, if a woman didn’t have protection from a father, guardian or husband, she might be fair game, unless she stayed within the protection of the law. to be honest, this feels somewhat anachronistic reasoning, based on a very different axiomatic substructure, as the following statement identifies:
“I find it quite convenient that you’re explaining away misogyny as mistranslation, and contradictions as just not knowing the ‘right’ context of the verses in question. You seem to be taking it as your a priori assumption that there can’t possibly be any real inconsistency in the texts, there can’t possibly be any real misogyny. Why not? Why can’t there be?”
the answer to this is that if, axiomatically, one believes, as i do, that the Torah is a Divine document, any inconsistency in the texts is there to teach us something and the basis of traditional methodologies is the ability to identify the root cause of the inconsistency in order to illustrate the teaching point concerned. this has certainly been our approach as long as we can remember -and, more to the point, this is documented quite a long way back. secondly, in the conception we have of G!D it would make no more sense for G!D to Be a “misogynist” than it would for G!D to have a “hand”, or to “be angry”; these things are simply expressions of how we experience what we interpret out of the text. we believe that G!D Expects us to behave with respect and compassion to each other, not to systematically disadvantage half the human race. now, obviously, if you have different assumptions, then these might include a priori that any statement in the Torah reflects bronze age sensibility and capability in terms of gender relations, science and critical reasoning and therefore there can’t possibly be any real lessons to be learned from it. on this i suspect i might have to differ from you, seeing as how our culture is based almost entirely on this document and in most respects is generally considered to have produced major leaders in each field who are also committed to some of the same assumptions about the document. this is not to say that they are all going to agree with each other all the time:
“Why is your ‘methodology’ necessarily going to result in a clear, unequivocal message?”
because it is based on a clear set of assumptions and underpinned by a unified philosophical structure – i’m not saying that this necessitates clarity and unequivocable messaging in all cases, because it doesn’t, but in the case of this particular verse, it clearly precludes certain interpretations such as “G!D Is a misogynist” as nonsensical. there are some other pertinent questions that obtain:
“On what do you base your faith in it?”
on the fact that this way of doing things has preserved the sole remaining diaspora culture of the ancient world through several millennia of unremitting and occasionally genocidal hostility. in other words, it works.
“How do you know that the eventual interpretation is right, in any case?”
the principle we test it against is “after the majority shall you incline” (exodus 23:2) but we *also* preserve minority opinions (BT bava metzia 59b) in case eventually they become majority.
“What do you check it against?”
it’s peer-reviewed. all jewish law has been aggressively picked apart, analysed, defended or amended on this basis. that is what the talmud documents.
“Then you say that two contradictory positions can both be the word of the ‘living god’? How is that even possible – how can a creator of the universe not make his mind up?”
of course – but “it is not in heaven” (deuteronomy 30:10), so we are told we have to work it out for ourselves, on the authority of the Torah itself, so the majority opinion came down on one side at that time. G!D may well Have an opinion, but in the famous talmudic debate of the “oven of achnai” (the reference given above) the majority decision was to say “bugger off, G!D, this is a human decision now, You Said so in the Torah”.
“Not be 100% clear about his message? Do you not find it slightly odd that all this interpretation is necessary?”
no, we find it incredibly empowering that we are being treated like grown-ups responsible for our own actions, not children with no sense of right or wrong.
“Why doesn’t God reiterate his message and clear things up? Hasn’t he got the power to do this?”
well, yes, obviously, but during the “oven of achnai” debate, the position of the majority was “we do not make legal decisions on the basis of Divine Voices from Heaven”.
we still haven’t quite got to the bottom of the equality debate here, however:
“When I talk about a sense of equality, I am talking about equality between men and women – e.g. what is it that leads you to know that stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin is wrong? Would you only know that it’s wrong if you’d read all the scriptures? Or would you know that it’s wrong based on your own empathy and reasoning? I would argue the latter, seeing as I know it’s wrong, and I haven’t read all the scriptures or engaged in textual interpretation.”
i would argue that the case that you are basing it on your own “empathy and reasoning” alone is not a strong argument. nobody grows up in a vacuum. you have these attitudes because you developed them, based on your upbringing. i would argue that you *have* been influenced indirectly by them because they have influenced the society you grew up in. i can even point to the bit of Torah that it comes from: “you shall love the stranger [person who is different from yourself] for you were strangers in egypt” (leviticus 19:34) nor am i saying that my own reasoning is inoperative – obviously, i needed to use it to apply the verse to this situation, similarly the sages needed to apply it in order to get the relevant safeguards in place to prevent it happening unless it really, really, really, REALLY applied. if you’re going to do something as drastic as stoning a woman to death for not being a virgin, you’d better be really sure that’s what the text says – and that what the text says applies to this EXACT situation.
“This is what I’m talking about. A religious person reads such a horrendous verse, thinks ‘That can’t be right’ and proceeds to delve more deeply into the scriptures to find some way of justifying it.”
i don’t really understand why this should be so wrong – it is the way the Torah does thought experiments; under what circumstances might such a penalty apply? what might justify it in *practice*? are you sure? are you really, really sure? what principle is being upheld? that’s not the same as “justifying” it – you can’t be “justifying” it if you end up effectively prohibiting it, which was the actual effect – but then again, you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t know the proper context for Torah, which is as the written component of jewish law, not as a copy of “gender relations for dummies”, which is how it is so often abused by literalist protestants and bible-bashers in particular.
“I doubt that a person starts reading scriptures and then concludes ‘Well whaddaya know? Stoning women is immoral!’”
i agree – and so do the sages! although there are more morally complex issues in the Torah than this one.
amy is also good enough to address a criticism i make of her that she is generalising about religious people:
“Sure, not all religious people follow their religion in exactly the same way, but they do believe in a god/gods, and their holy texts do mean something to them. These are the two aspects of religion that I critique in my piece, and they appear to me to be pretty universal among the faithful. The rest is a critique of the arguments used by religious feminists to defend the misogyny in their holy texts, and examples of religiously-inspired misogyny. What is it that I’m generalising about? What is it exactly that you object to?”
well, i suppose what i object to is the implication that religious feminists are “defending misogyny”, because as i have attempted to show, i don’t think the misogyny is there either in intent or in application – except by people who really don’t understand either the text concerned, or who don’t follow an acceptable standard of textual interpretation. i accept that it *could* result in misogyny, because it *has* – but human beings do get things wrong from time to time and Torah is not easy.
anyway, i hope this is not too irrelevant and that there are enough interesting nuggets here for the conversation to continue here; certainly i would encourage people to take a look at the original piece.
8 Comments
I closed the comments “for some reason” – this piece illustrates the reason. There’s only so much of this kind of thing I want to host.
A woman who’s had sex is like used underpants – how fraffly amusing.
hence the “tongue in cheek” bit; obviously i don’t *really* think like that. or perhaps it’s not that obvious, excuse me. in fact, if you look at the thrust of the laws in toto and in detail, what *is* obvious is that there is an overriding theme of women being very much in charge of determining what, when and how anything happens to them, which is a considerable improvement on anything else then and much that is around now. but then again, if you categorise a reasoned and comprehensive response to generalisations about “religion” as “this sort of thing” and refuse to actually deal with what a particular text really says as opposed to what you assume it says, then i think that gives you far less right to criticise it. this reminds me of the argument that “i don’t need to read it to know it’s wrong”. i mean, really. how rude. clearly we are not in dialogue territory, here.
b’shalom
bananabrain
Fascinating stuff.
The issue of anthropomorphism about the Divine wrestles itself into the Muslim fruit-juice bar too, with endless disputes between sects, who spend an inordinate amount of time accusing each other of this. For example, Imami Shi’a hurl the accusation at followers of Wahhabi strains of Salafi Sunni – the basic thrust is that the latter’s literalism leads them into such anthropomorphism.
One of the earliest recorded wrangles between scholars concerned whether Allah sat (literally or metaphorically) upon His throne – with Malik (the great scholar responsible for one of the main schools of Sunni fiqh) weighing in with a most unsatisfactory (from my point of view) well-it-says-so-so-be-quiet type response (as readers will have gathered, I have some issues with authority of any order – pace Faisal!
).
G!d’s properties may (or may not) be comprehensible to His(?) Creation – Ibn ‘Arabi (one of the most sane and lucid of the first Sufi – and his brand of intellectual dhikr I would heartily commend) claimed that G!d’s property was Love – indeed we could best understand G!d by reflecting upon the nature of something that He imparted to us, His creation… in fact is the cause of Creation, and its DNA, so to write. There is a good article on the same on the Ibn ‘Arabi website… but I am exhausted and cannot move to find the link. Maylash.
{I could go on – but then BB would turn all Molesworth on me and accuse me of being a gastly weed, chiz chiz, who Grabber will get in the summer term at St Custards. So Peason and I will carry out experiments and then we will be whizz and topp and prove to be best at feeolojy. Oy gevalt!}
Engough – as Molesworth might have it.
Incidentally, I shall be in Uk quite shortly – should any of you want to kick the crap out of me, in person.
I agree with Ophelia: that sentiment is disgusting wherever your tongue is.
oh, fine, fair enough, if the joke is actually offensive to people i am happy to withdraw it, i am really not trying to upset anyone. i think i should be permitted to observe, nonetheless, that even “enlightened” moderns draw the line at too many prior sexual partners, so it might in fact be a matter of degree rather than principle. the “asset price” of virginity in the Torah notwithstanding, it is not an issue that is currently under consideration these days (certainly nobody mentioned it when i got married!) so one could argue that interpretation has moved with the times, making the point moot, i dare say.
b’shalom
bananabrain
You’re surprised that it could *actually* be offensive and indeed deeply misogynist to describe women as soiled underwear? Seriously? You consider 99.999999% of all adult women as being contaminated, dirty and disgusting and that’s supposed to be humour?
Of course some sexist men, whether they are whatever you mean by modern or not, prefer women who are emotionally, romantically and sexually inexperienced. Sexism is all about power imbalances. The determination of sexist men to maintain power imbalances, and in particular where the prevailing view of marriage as ‘a contract for procreative services’ (where women are service providers and men are service users with the power imbalance that implies) is what underlies hymen repair surgery, over 50% of the thousands of forced marriages in this country and god knows how many worldwide, every instance of honour-based violence, the high rates of female suicide in certain communities etc etc. The shit my organisation deals with every day. In this context your unamusing ‘joke’ (punchline: women are dirty!!!) feels like hate speech against an extremely vulnerable group.
In trying to convince me your deity is not a misogynist you have in fact convinced me that you are one yourself. I’m sure you will now marshall pages of erudite bullshit as to why you’re not but don’t trouble yourself on my account. I’m out of here.
Iron my shirt.
@galloise blonde:
so you’re not even interested in anything that might challenge your misunderstanding of what i said? now *that’s* balanced debate. nonetheless, i will persevere, because i don’t like being labelled like that and i feel it is unwarranted.
of course that would be, but that wasn’t actually what i was implying. second-handshops do not sell *dirty* clothes, do they? even so, i’m quite happy to wear second-hand clothes, but i draw the line at underwear. it’s about where the line is drawn. look, it was clearly clumsy on my part if it can be interpreted so radically differently from how i meant it, but i assure you that i didn’t mean what you’ve just said and it shocks me to think that you might do so. perhaps i was stupid to not spot such an interpretation and, as i said earlier, i withdraw it voluntarily if it offends people; that is not what i am here to do.
[....on the other hand, i am struck by the fact that i don't see anyone withdrawing any remarks that are based on ill-informed misconceptions about my religion on the basis that it offends *me*, nor have i asked them to do so. and, frankly, i'm seeing a bit of a double standard here; apparently any attack on "religion", no matter how inaccurate, is fair comment, but a miscontrual of my intent is apparently a hanging offence, but never mind....]
i am not one of these people. i may think that people should get married younger, but i do not think there should be large age gaps and, where a couple are young, they should have proper instruction in all matters, which includes the sexual and emotional. this is the practice for us as far as i am aware, although there are sections of the community where they clearly aren’t managing this terribly well and i spend a lot of time critiquing these matters, whether you realise it or not.
i agree with you about power imbalances, because that is how the agunah problem arose, it is also very much a concern in terms of the make up of the religious courts that is only now starting to be remedied with the provision of female halakhic advisers. however, i don’t understand why a service provider/service user separation need imply a power imbalance; i mean, the NHS is more powerful than the patients most of the time. i actually think that the power balance in a jewish marriage contract has been ingeniously constructed, but i expect you would probably differ. the reason it works the way it does is this:
1. only *men* have a halakhic obligation to procreate, women do not; this means that if a man remains unmarried, he is not fulfilling this obligation, but if a woman isn’t, she is not in breach of anything. the assumption is that a woman will agree to a marriage because there are benefits to her doing so.
2. only *women* have a halakhic right to sexual fulfilment, the assumption being that this cannot be relied on without the appropriate obligation being placed on the man to keep his wife happy.
3. although both men and women can initiate divorce proceedings, the grounds for the woman doing so are far less strictly defined than they are for the man – the assumption being that given a *physical* power differential, a clear indication of the woman’s ultimate freedom to self-determination must be given.
4. in the case of laws of physical intimacy around the menstrual cycle, the determination of what happens when is 100% the decision of the woman; a man *cannot* decide for his wife when she becomes unavailable to him, nor when she becomes available to him again. he cannot pressure her to make this decision differently because of the penalty to him if he does so. she can, if she wish, make herself entirely unavailable to him and thus compel a divorce and there is absolutely nothing he can do about it. mrs bb, incidentally, points out that the rules on secondary intimacy (i.e. no touching at all) give her complete command of her personal space.
we therefore see that the relationship assumes the following:
1. men can be relied on to be sexual but not to procreate, but being sexual is considered a sufficient guarantee to ensure procreation.
2. women can be relied on to wish to procreate, but in order for them to be sexually available in the first place, their broader needs will have to be met.
3. in the event of one of the parties wishing to end the relationship, the woman is likely to find it harder for various reasons and therefore steps have been taken to ensure that this does not prevent her from doing so.
the contract, properly understood, is effectively not so much a “contract for procreative services” as it is a structure for ensuring that the needs of both partners are appropriately met and that the physical power of the man does not lead to an overall power imbalance – at least that is the theory, as we know to our cost, the agunah issue is a glaring exception. however, i struggle to see why the whole thing is inherently sexist, unless you are extremely stringent about how sexism is defined.
if you are aware of statistics on a) hymen repair surgery b) forced marriage, c) honour-based violence or d) female suicide in the jewish community which shows us at some sort of disadvantage i would be pleased to hear about it, because that sounds like something i would certainly campaign about. i’m not aware of it being an issue for us; certainly, as i pointed out, all financial incentive for the hymen to be intact has been legislated out over 1500 years ago – i would argue, obviously, that this was precisely in the interest of maintaining the power balance.
b’shalom
bananabrain