Creating Judaism

The other day I taught a Me’ah class on women and gender in rabbinic literature. My choice of readings was, to be honest, somewhat lazy: my article “‘Try to be a Man’: The Rabbinic Construction of Masculinity,” Harvard Theological Review 89/1 (1996): 19-40. If I had prepared better, I would probably have assigned something by Tal Ilan or Ross Kraemer. In any case, the article argues that rabbinic gender assumptions associate “masculinity” with self-control as a prerequisite for Torah study; women were seen as constitutionally unable to maintain self-control, much like children and non-Jews. [Note that Daniel Boyarin, Unheroic Conduct, highlights a very different aspect of rabbinic gender construction.]
I was unprepared for the violence of the class’s reaction. They were “appalled,” “disgusted,” and “repelled” at these rabbinic attitudes and the texts that I cited to support the argument. While I steered the conversation to the historical arguments and context, they were - quite predictably, in hindsight - far more interested on what they as modern Jews are to do with these rabbinic texts.

I never have had a particularly good answer to that question. I laid out a series of hermeneutical strategies that others have used: apologetics, historically contextualizing the disturbing passages, ignoring them. On a personal level I struggle with these texts, yet I cannot yet translate my own internal struggle with something that can easily be articulated. Yet while I left the class frustrated at my own inability to do this, I was also excited by the passion with which these adult students encountered these texts. They have been challenged and they too are struggling.