My Father the Feminist

Being Jewish doesn’t automatically make you a feminist. But it helps!

Susan in high school; Susan (the one in the bonnet) as a toddler.

From “My Father the Feminist” (1997)

Traditional Judaism is patriarchal. It would be an anomaly within dominant Western cultural traditions if it were not. But there is an element within Jewish paternalism that seeds its own deconstruction. While trying to cram as much learning about Judaism as I could into one weekend of preparation for writing this essay, I found this amazing story "from the time of the Romans" in a book about Bar Mitzvah-the Jewish ceremony signifying a boy's becoming a man:

A group of rabbis were arguing an issue of religious law.

Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus offered an opinion. It was rejected. Rabbi Eliezer protested the decision. *I am right and I can prove it. If my opinion is correct, let the stream outside this study house flow backward."

The stream began to flow backward.

Rabbi Joshua ben Hananiah, who led the majority, said, "A stream doesn't prove anything."

Rabbi Eliezer continued, "If my opinion is correct, let the walls of the study house prove it."

The walls started leaning toward them.

Rabbi Joshua held firm, and told the walls to go back to their place.

Finally, Rabbi Eliezer said, "Let Heaven itself bear witness that my opinion is the correct one."

A voice came from out of the sky. "Why do you reject

Rabbi Eliezer's opinion? He is right in every case."

To which Rabbi Joshua responded, "The Torah is not in heaven. We pay no attention to voices."

Pay no attention to God's voice? I read this story aloud to my Protestant husband and his mouth fell open. But then, so did mine. The association of Jewish scholarship with radical and ongoing disputation and debate is not new to me, of course. I have no schooling in Judaism, but I know that Jews consider the Torah-God's covenant with Israel, given to Moses at Mount Sinai--a much more extensive and flexible body of literature than the classic pictorial version of Ten Commandments indelibly burned in stone. Far from ten straightforward commandments, the Torah includes not onlyall the rules, obligations, history, poetry, and literature contained in the first five books of the Bible but also all subsequent interpretations and adaptations.The latter, known as the Talmud, is the subject of continuous interpretation and contestation among scholars and theologians.

Within popular culture, too, the Jewish enjoyment of and limitless capacity for tenacious argumentation has been a motif of many Yiddish jokes and humorous self-depictions of Jewish life. In Barry Levinson’s wonderful “Avalon,” the family engages in a running debate about the most efficient route from New York to Brooklyn, jousting with each other in the same combative, stubborn style as Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Joshua. The implication is that if we don't have something serious to debate, we will invent a dispute around something trivial, just to satisfy the itch for argument.

The same idea figures as well in less affectionate, arguably Anti-Semitic depictions, such as Mousorgsky's musical sketch, in Pictures at an Exhibition, of "Two Jews, One Rich and the Other Poor." In that sketch, two musical voices yammer at each other argumentatively, one bossy and the other whining ("kvetching," as Jews would say), stubbornly unable to come to agreement.

The Eliezer/Joshua story, however, is not about how Jews love to argue. Eric Kimmel reads the story as signifying that "the Torah is a living document ... not the property of mystical fanatics. Reason and logic could be used to adapt its teachings to changing times and conditions."

In my opinion, this reading does not go far enough; the message of the story is far more radical than an authorization of temporal human "adaptation" of eternal teaching. It is a parable about where to look for truth. In the narrative, a contest is staged, ostensibly between two competing human interpretations (Rabbi Eliezer's and Rabbi Joshua's), but actually between human argumentation and Immutable Law as two genres of knowledge.

The dramatic way in which this contest is depicted is extraordinary. First, the physical world confirms Rabbi Eliezer's opinion, producing miraculous occurrences (the stream flows backward, the walls lean) that we expect to function in the story as proofs of the authority of the one who has called the miracles up. Readers of the Bible are used to the sea parting for the righteous, not for the errant or the erring. So Eliezer seems positioned, by narrative convention, to be the ultimate victor of the debate. This victory seems inevitable when God himself comes out on Eliezer's side.

But in this story, remarkably, even God's opinion is put in its place, subordinated to the authority of human reason. Rabbi Joshua has the final word. It is by adjudicating scholarly conversation on its own terms-that is, by evaluating the rigor and validity of the respective arguments, not by seeking external validation from God-that we decide which opinion is right.

Nothing is written in stone. Not even, presumably, the authority of patriarchal laws and institutions. Come up with a good argument against them, and then we'll see. This is indeed what I grew up believing. So apparently, too, did many of the voung Jewish women who formed the core of feminist politics in the late sixties and early seventies. We thought we had an unanswerable argument, its logic evident,thought we had an unanswerable argument, its logie evident, its claims for justice compelling; many of us were sincerely baffled when husbands and boyfriends just didn't "get it."

How did we come to believe this? Isaac Bashevis Singer's short story, "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy" describes a family situation that is not uncommon in Jewish families, especially in families without sons:

[Yentl's father,] Reb Todros ... had studied Torah with his daughter as if she were a son. He told Yentl to lock the doors and drape the windows, then together they pored over the Pentateuch, the Mishnah, the Gemara, and the Commentaries. She had proved so apt a pupil that her father used to say:

"YentI-you have the soul of a man."

"So why was I born a woman?"

"Even Heaven makes mistakes."

But heaven’s mistakes are not life sentences. While within traditional Judaism. it is sons who are the preferred recipients of the father's wisdom and knowledge, even within traditional Judaism, a father's recognition of a daughter's ability and his own desire to have a challenging conversational partner (or a good listener) can overcome convention.

One day I noticed how my father, at that point nearly eighty-years old, long-since remarried after my mother’s early death and the inheritor of several grandchildren by his (third) wife, talked to his five-year-old granddaughter. He conversed. Really. No baby-talk nor condescending monosyllables of faked comprehension and distracted nods. My father’s gaze was steady and focused. He listened attentively and questioned when he didn't understand. He spoke in full, grammatical sentences. He created the impression that this conversation about the rights and wrongs of a minor disagreement that the child had just had with her brother was as complex and thought-provoking as a discussion about the pros and cons of nuclear disarmament.

I watched this conversation, an equal dialogue transpiring between an 80-year-old man and a five-year-old girl, and I suddenly knew-did not exactly remember, but knew--that he had once had such conversations with me.

Later in his life, when his three daughters were all grown up, my father might feign suffering over our unconventional lifestyles and failure to conform to traditional feminine ideals. But actually he was extremely proud of his brainy girls. "My daughters," he'd moan, shaking his head mournfully but barely suppressing his laughter, "They can't dance. They can't sing. All they can do is think." But smart thinking and good talking was what he admired most of all.

Everyone in our Newark neighborhood knew that Yosh was smart; it was the one part of his identity that never really failed him. He was a spellbinding storyteller, an avid reader, and an acute analyst of political affairs. His razor-sharp wit could turn his depressive, self-indulgent moods (and ours) around with the snap of a droll and surprisingly sophisticated and self-aware comment. Yosh liked to use his humor as a sneak attack on our expectations of him, and against threatening rifts, and he was deft at it. A master Scrabble player, he could do the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in one morning in ink

I grew up believing that my father was passing a legacy on to me—in the form of a lack to be filled. His own writerly ambitions had been cut short by the Depression. He’d wanted to be a journalist; he’d been an A-student in high school; he’d planned on going to college. Instead, he was forced to take a low-paying, bottom-of-the-ladder job as a salesman for a candy business owned by wealthier relatives. I grew up constantly reminded of my father’s disappointments in life—and I was almost desperate that he understand that he was responsible for my becoming a scholar, and then a writer. I thought that this would somehow heal his hurt. It did not. However, he kept the note I had slipped between the pages of my bound doctoral dissertation (in philosophy!):

“To my darling daddy- Do you have any idea how important you have been in bringing me to where I am now? I don't think you do. When I was a little girl, I knew that I had the smartest, wittiest, most exciting daddy of everyone-a daddy who could tell wonderful stories, who could delight people with words ... It was you who taught me about the excitement of ideas, who made the world seem a fascinating place. It was you who brought my imagination and intellect to life, who made me begin to dream that someday I too would be able to charm through words and stories. It was you who turned me on to movies, books, images-who made me feel that no matter how bad things got, one could always depend on the imagination for comfort and inspiration. Now, these things I learned from you, these talents and dreams that you nurtured in me, are bearing fruit. I know, with every fiber of my being, that you are responsible for the writer that I am becoming. You were my first, best inspiration, and you put me on the road. I love you very, very much. You are my darling, darling daddy. Susan. (P.S. Estelle can read this, but please do not show it to anyone else.)”

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My father was not a feminist. He rolled his eyes skyward when I lectured my stepmother's son on the sexual politics of Passover seders, which ended (as theirs always did with the women clearing the table and the men watching football in the den. My father worried about my politics, too. He lay awake for two nights because he had let it slip to a fundamentalist broker that he had a daughter who was a feminist: he was afraid the broker would dispatch right-to-lifers to throw bombs in my window.

My father did not have enlightened ideas about men and women. When he came back from serving in the South Pacific he forbade my mother to keep her wartime job, even though we had very little money. His preferences and moods determined how we spent vacation (at the track), what relatives we got to visit (very few,) and whether it would be a good day or a grim day at our house. But those conversations I saw him have with his granddaughter and that I know he had with me when I was a little girl tell another side of the story. I know with absolute certainty that they were the foundations for my feminist self.

During the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings I received a call from my father, then about eighty years old, wanting to find out my views. This was in itself an unusual occurrence. I suspected what he really wanted was to tell me his views and challenge me to love him in spite of them. He didn't believe Hill, he told me. He clearly identified with Clarence Thomas and his struggle as a Black man to get respect from this culture. And, like many men (and some women) he was genuinely puzzled by the fact that Hill had continued to work for Thomas after he had allegedly harassed her. "Why didn't she just quit? “Why did she follow him to the EEOC?" he challenged me.

My first impulse was to want to scream or make some excuse to get off the phone. Those questions were an incessant mantra in the media, and few people seemed to be able to truly hear the answers that were given. My father often shared the editorial perspectives of his favorite male journalists and talking-heads, and none of them "got it" at all. What chance was there of this conversation having a happy resolution, of ending in anything other than making me feel crazy? I decided to give it a try anyway. As my father aged, I was inclined to grab whatever opportunities I could to communicate with him.

And I had some answers. I had been harassed myself, knew many other women who also had been harassed. and understood that mixture of intimidation, pragmaties, and training in feminine comportment that keeps one from making a fuss. I swallowed hard, girded my loins like a gladiator of the Torah, and tried to explain it all to my father--beginning with my own harassment and how it had made me feel.

After a few minutes. I suddenly sensed that he was listening with an attentiveness that I hadn't experienced since I was a little girl, when he would fix his blue eyes on me and ask me to slow down and explain some muddled childhood notion. He asked me questions. He listened to my answers. By the end of our phone conversation, my patriarchal Jewish father, remarkably, had gotten it. In the midst of that time, when so many of us had begun to doubt that there would ever be any progress made past the stereotypes of lying temptresses and women scorned, when we had begun to despair of the possibilities of communication between men and women, of women's experiences being taken seriously, my father had handed me a sweet wildcard of hope.

(From “My Father’s Body,” on BordoLines this Sunday, Subscribe now and have it delivered to your mailbox.)

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Sunday New York Times review of The Male Body:

(https://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/16/books/books-of-the-times-not-from-mars-or-venus-but-a-little-ol-planet.html?unlocked_article_code=1.yk0.Xv-1.JoFldg0afSoi&smid=url-share.)