"Fixing God," by Arna Kazin: A Critical Reading (Column 639)

A few days ago I received an article by Arna Kazin, containing her critique of Judaism. From things of hers I’ve read in the past I gathered she’s an intelligent woman, and even in this article—setting aside the connections and linkages she makes to the present (which are skewed by her political outlook)—her treatment of Judaism and the arguments she raises seem, at first glance, to be substantive. These arguments come up quite often among many people (from within and without), and reading them gives the impression of a genuine and balanced search; I thought they merited a serious and systematic response. In the end, I reached the conclusion that the impression I’ve just described is quite mistaken.

The article is titled “Fixing God,” and appears on the website HaZman HaZeh. It’s long, and I will quote extensive passages from it to clarify my remarks. Nevertheless, I recommend reading it before reading my critique.

The opener

In the opening, Kazin makes initial linkages to the present. She attributes many of the flaws in the conduct of the State of Israel and Jewish society within it to Judaism’s sources. Some of what she says I can agree with, though that by itself doesn’t invalidate the historical sources but mainly demands caution in applying them today; other parts I agree with far less.

The following sentence of hers, which sums up the matter, strikes me as odd:

And just to clarify: I don’t mean that I’m asking to disavow belonging to the Jewish nation. I’m happy to be Jewish in the sense of “a Jew,” like my grandparents before me, like my aunts. I just prefer at this stage not to be jewish. I may belong to the Jews, but I wish to keep my distance from the jewish.

I really don’t manage to understand this sentence and the relation between its parts. First of all, how can one disavow a fact? By her words, she belongs to the Jewish nation by definition. Can I disavow being human, a breathing creature, or a descendant of Abraham? I can perhaps be angry at my family members, at their deeds or views, but I can’t disavow the fact of my belonging to them. Moreover, already here, and even more so later, it becomes clear that she truly is angry at the “jewish”—that is, at people who hold to Judaism (as culture or religion), so what exactly does she mean by saying she does not wish to disavow? For that she does disavow—and one cannot disavow facts. Very strange.

I also don’t understand what it means to be happy to be “a Jew.” What is there to be happy about in a factual belonging to a particular family? If you identify with the deeds and views of that family or nation, I understand that you can be happy about belonging to them. But if you are angry and do not identify with the group’s thoughts and deeds, then what exactly can gladden you about your belonging to it? That, too, seems odd to me.

I assume she intends to speak of belonging to the present-day Jewish people, but with no connection to the Jewish religion and tradition (to “Jewishness”). Perhaps she is glad and does not wish to disavow belonging to modern Israeli literature or to contemporary theater and music—but in my view that has no meaning (and it is not Judaism in any essential sense). Of course, to each their taste. I assume that if she were operating in a different environment she would be equally glad in the culture (or in its finer parts) of that environment. I don’t think she means to say that there is something better in contemporary Jewish culture than in any other culture in the world. In short, as I understand it, the opening paragraph consists of a collection of oxymorons and/or trivialities.

The framework and the motivation

Immediately thereafter she writes that all these are initial, intuitive feelings, but she has no knowledge and no coherent content to which she is referring:

It’s important for me to emphasize: this is only a gut feeling, and it has no basis. I imagine I don’t know enough what it is to “be a Jew,” and certainly I don’t know what it is to “be jewish,” and therefore I cannot at this stage form an opinion, certainly not reject outright a complex and rich culture, which surely contains both the good and the bad.

I know that most people who recoil from feminism, for example, have never read worthy feminist thought in their lives. They don’t know that foundational feminist texts hold one fundamental goal: cooperation between women and men in leading humanity—cooperation that allows us to realize the full human potential in order to preserve the world and save it from its destroyers. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote, for example, in the final lines of The Second Sex:

Humanity must establish the reign of freedom within the given world. And to win this supreme victory it is necessary, among other things, that men and women, beyond their natural differences, unambiguously establish their fraternity.

Already here there is room to note that a general claim about the foundational feminist texts is not sufficient to dismiss critiques of feminism. First, the critique can be about different applications in the practical world and not about the foundational thought. Second, it’s not certain that what she calls the foundational thought is indeed the foundational thought. There are different feminist conceptions and different bodies of thought (foundational?). She can, of course, choose her direction, but at the same time also understand (even without agreeing) the critiques of the progressive phenomena of recent years. At the very least, she should concede that these are not the same thing.

I say this because when she comes to critique Judaism she does not settle for reading the foundational texts, but moves very quickly to religious politicians and religious parties—that is, to very particular applications and interpretations of them. With such a view one could critique feminism as well, even if one accepts her claims about its foundational texts, yet there she chooses to focus on the foundational texts and ignore their expressions and interpretations. It is apt to mention what I wrote in Column 517, as part of “Michi’s Laws”—that we all have a tendency to critique the other’s theory while ignoring their applications, and with respect to ourselves the reverse: to be willing to critique the application but leave the theory pure and pristine. I view myself theoretically and the other practically. That is precisely what she does regarding feminism and Judaism. Incidentally, you can also find there opposite laws (at times I examine the other’s theory while ignoring their practice; see, for example, Column 507). All these “laws” describe a selective treatment that leaves us looking as good as possible and the other as bad as possible. The choice of plane of reference is subject to that trend. That is precisely what appears throughout Kazin’s article.

In any case, because of this ignorance she wants to go out and examine things more deeply:

I therefore turn down to a low flame my revulsion from Judaism and set out to inquire and understand. I ask my Facebook friends: what do you love about your Judaism? And I receive hundreds of answers. From all of them wafts a true love for the Jewish religion, its culture. My friends on Facebook—secular, traditional, and religious—love, above all, Judaism’s social arrangements: the mourning practice of the shivah, the observance of Shabbat, the sabbatical year. I am persuaded that these truly are wonderful arrangements: the gathering of friends and family members, at varying degrees of closeness and distance, with the mourners for seven days after the burial of a loved one; observing the day of rest for the benefit of workers, for the benefit of the soul that needs quiet, a pause, for the benefit of family gathering; letting the land lie fallow—letting it renew, releasing it once every seven years, and also, in the jubilee year, freeing male and female slaves, returning liberty to those from whom it was taken.

Friends who love Judaism tell me it is a communal religion—ten are required for prayer, and a study partner is desirable—and that it revolves entirely around reading and interpretation and debates and thought: they especially love Pirkei Avot, a tractate of the Mishnah that deals with ethics and good character traits, with wise sayings more or less like “Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: the world stands on three things—on justice, on truth, and on peace”; or “Rabban Gamliel used to say: provide yourself with a teacher, and remove yourself from doubt”; or “Rabbi Yose says: whoever honors the Torah, his person is honored by people; and whoever desecrates the Torah, his person is disgraced by people.” Or Hillel the Elder, who used to say: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And when I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?”

In general, those who love Judaism among my friends are convinced that the Jewish religion contains supremely moral texts. See, for example, they tell me, the attitude toward the stranger. Look, the commandment to love the stranger—“and you shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”—appears 36 times in the Torah. Not to mention the foundational ethical verse of Judaism, a great principle in the Torah: “And you shall love your fellow as yourself.”

How could I possibly object to all this?

Well, ostensibly everything is wonderful. And yet, a further examination of things arouses doubts for her. So here is the first step.

Today’s religious politics

She begins her journey by expressing reservations about contemporary religious politics:

And yet, my suspicion is not allayed. I think of the Noam party which, according to its website, acts “to correct all the damage caused by years-long infiltration of postmodern winds into the public systems of the State of Israel, and to strengthen the Jewish identity of the state.” I think of Avi Maoz, the party leader, who seeks to establish the “Authority for Jewish National Identity,” and it seems he is succeeding. In a Knesset speech after October 7, Maoz quoted from a song by Ishay Ribo that states: “So what sets my people apart from all other peoples? That among all the nations their idols neither see nor hear, and the people to whom I belong—the Lord is their God.”

Also the Religious Zionism party, in its platform, states that “the people of Israel is not like other nations,” and in the chapter on “Jewish identity” the authors devote a central place to distinguishing between Jews and non-Jews, and promise, for example, to bring about the erasure of the “grandchild clause” in the Law of Return—so that grandchildren of Jews will not be able to immigrate to Israel under the law as if they were Jews, if in fact they did not grow up as Jews.

How can one reconcile “And you shall love your fellow as yourself” with the Jewish supremacism of Noam and of Religious Zionism, wholly committed as they are to strengthening Israel’s “Jewish identity”? Does the Jewish identity mentioned above contradict the Judaism of “And you shall love your fellow as yourself,” or do these two Judaisms draw from the same spring, drink from the same well?

And what about Rabbi Eliyahu Mali, for example, head of the “Shirat Moshe” Hesder yeshiva in Jaffa, who in early February 2024 called for genocide in Gaza? “The basic law in a war of mitzvah, in this case in Gaza, is—‘you shall let no soul live,’” he said. In calling to kill every child, man, and woman living in Gaza, does Rabbi Mali violate the great principle of the Torah—“And you shall love your fellow as yourself”—or rather affirm it? “‘You shall let no soul live’ is based on ‘If someone comes to kill you—rise early to kill him first’ […] even regarding the next generation,” he clarified. “And even regarding those who produce the next generation. For truly there is no difference.”

And not only the extreme right-wing religious Jews come to mind in this context. Does the Jewish identity of the Israeli mainstream—ordinary Jews in the media, in the police, on the street, who equate empathy for Palestinians in Gaza with treason against Israel; who assume that solidarity with Palestinians is tantamount to heresy against Judaism; Jews who tear Palestinian flags from the hands of demonstrators; Jews who seek to remove from her position a school principal of the highest caliber in Tel Aviv because she wrote on Facebook about the hunger crisis in Gaza; Jews in the police, in the government, who seek to ban anti-war protests, who vehemently oppose the call for a ceasefire—does this Jewish identity contradict the great principle of the Torah, “And you shall love your fellow as yourself,” or does it derive from the deep nationalist essence of that very great principle?

In other words: is it possible that supporters of the religious Jewish parties who call to kill Gazans—men and women—wherever they may be, and the TV news editors who refuse to show us what the IDF is doing to Gaza’s residents, and ordinary citizens who assault demonstrators protesting against the occupation—is it possible that all these assume that the fellow, the other, whom one is commanded to love as though he were oneself, is exclusively a member of your own people, a Jew like you, as in the original commandment in Leviticus: “You shall not take revenge and you shall not bear a grudge against the children of your people, and you shall love your fellow as yourself, I am the Lord”? And as Maimonides interpreted, it is a commandment “to love every person of the covenant, as it is stated, ‘And you shall love your fellow as yourself,’” and as he phrased it elsewhere: “It is a commandment upon every person to love each and every one of Israel as himself, as it is stated, ‘And you shall love your fellow as yourself’”? Is it possible that this great principle in the Torah is merely a call to strengthen solidarity among Jews (perhaps even only among Jewish men) and nothing more?

Without entering into the details of the arguments here—most of which I have already written about in the past (I accept a certain part of them, and very much do not accept a great deal)—it is important to note the asymmetry in the critique, as I pointed out above: feminism is discussed according to its foundational texts while ignoring its contemporary expressions, whereas Judaism is discussed first and foremost according to some of its contemporary political expressions. Beyond that, I quite doubt whether her attitude toward Islam, for example, would be similar—i.e., whether she would allow herself to critique it in light of its violent expressions in the present and ignore its foundational sources and other, more moderate interpretations.

But this is only the opening section. Immediately thereafter she really does move to discuss the foundational sources (in the chapter “God without a Phallus”), and here my column truly begins.

The same contradiction again

At the beginning of the chapter “God without a Phallus,” Kazin actually brings other interpretations of Jewish sources—by women knowledgeable in the Jewish bookshelf, as she describes them: feminist, pluralist, and humanist (and charismatic), secular and religious. But here, for some reason, she is not persuaded and chooses to return to the foundational sources and critique them. Again, this problematic selectivity: the darker representatives are, for her, sufficient basis to critique Judaism, but the enlightened representatives are not accepted because they do not truly represent it. In common parlance: too good to be kosher (incidentally, to my taste those groups are usually selective and unrepresentative; they tend to choose sources and interpretations very selectively so that things fit the contemporary ear and their heart’s desires).

Be that as it may, if we are already going back to the sources, it’s better to approach them directly and leave aside the representatives and interpreters who each pull things a different way. In any case, these are only interpretations and there’s no reason to be bound to them. She, like anyone else, can adopt Judaism in the interpretation that seems right to her. Why should she care about others who err or drag the sources toward darker directions?! If so, it is now appropriate to move to her critiques of the sources themselves.

Critique of the sources

Here is the first example:

Even though the verses of Ecclesiastes are truly beautiful to me, and like the author I too sometimes tend to feel that “vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” and that “there is nothing new under the sun,” and that “a time to seek and a time to lose,” nonetheless I keep reading and see that the author of Ecclesiastes leads his depressive and ambivalent existentialism to the bottom line, which is: “The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God and keep His commandments.” Perhaps someone, some later author, added this line to set all the heretical thoughts back on track? In any case, I feel defrauded.

I truly don’t understand why she feels defrauded. Ecclesiastes simply writes that the entire world is vanity, and what remains for us is commandments and the service of God. One can agree or disagree, but why assume that the ending contradicts the book itself (to the point that it is a later addition)? What exactly disappoints her? Apparently she expected that in the eyes of Ecclesiastes the Torah would be “vanity of vanities,” not the world—but those are the musings of her heart, not the book of Ecclesiastes.

Next:

We study Tractate Kiddushin 29a, where it is taught: “All commandments of the son upon the father—men are obligated and women are exempt; and all commandments of the father upon the son—both men and women are obligated.” I fail to take genuine interest in the discussion that arises in light of this rule and in the attempts to interpret it: who is it that is obligated to keep the commandments and who is it that is exempt, and what are these commandments that do not necessarily apply equally to women and men. I read an interpretation by a certain Rabbi Yehudah, who said: “A father is obligated toward his son to circumcise him, redeem him, teach him Torah, marry him to a wife, and teach him a trade; and some say, also to teach him to swim.” I understand the historical, anthropological, scholarly interest in such texts. I understand the intellectual curiosity about how people thought once upon a time, ages ago, and established traditions for thousands of years. I understand studying the Talmud as a historical text that attests to the narrow-minded culture of its time. But I don’t understand: why are we expected to return to these vacuous texts and use them as a basis for thought and conversation?

Here there is a critique of halakhic chauvinism, and there is certainly something to it. But when judging halakhah in the light of its time this comes off as somewhat childish and anachronistic. Did she expect halakhah to operate according to the norms of the 21st century? True, her critique is couched gently. She doesn’t claim something against the text so much as wonder why we today need to resort to it as a basis for thought. She assumes as self-evident that this text is supposed to be a basis for a discussion of feminist thought. But halakhic texts were not intended for feminist inquiry but for halakhic discourse. The messages do not have to be what she and her pluralistic friends are looking for (as I noted about them above), but rather a halakhic message. She expects the sources to serve her feminist agenda (as is common in those circles), and all she wants from them is to reinforce her existing conceptions.

I must say that if that were the situation, I actually would not understand what the point is in resorting to these sources. To learn what I already know?! I have always wondered what secular, pluralist, modern people (“the Jewish bookshelf” types) find in engaging with halakhic and Talmudic sources. They always find in them what they want to find, and what doesn’t suit them they throw out. Either way, they come out exactly as they went in, without learning anything new. So what is the point of all this?! One can and should, of course, critique the sources for the chauvinism found in them, or at least argue that today the halakhic instructions should be applied differently (and I have often pointed out that this is a perfectly legitimate halakhic critique and not necessarily Reform), but that does not render halakhic study superfluous. This applies both to the chauvinistic statements themselves, which should be studied before applying them differently in our time, and to the other materials that are not related to the status of women (there is the occasional line in the Talmud that does not deal with debasing women or their status at all).

Or, for example, this:

In another class, I am not impressed by a Talmudic story about a certain Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya, a man who lived in the time of the Tannaim as a wicked person and repented on the day of his death: “Ben Dordaya did not leave a single prostitute in the world he did not go to.” (Once, they tell us, “He heard that there was a certain prostitute in the cities by the sea who took a purse of dinars as her fee. He took a purse of dinars and went and crossed seven rivers to reach her. At the moment of the act she passed wind; she said: just as this wind will not return to its place, so Elazar ben Dordaya will not be accepted in repentance.”) My heart does not go out to him, to this Ben Dordaya who is considered like a fart, even when he “went and sat between two mountains and hills and said: ‘Mountains and hills, plead for mercy on my behalf.’” I do not find in my heart interest or love for him, or for his storytellers, even when “he placed his head between his knees and cried out in weeping until his soul departed.”

Here I truly did not understand at all. This is a genuinely heroic story about a man who had sunk to human and religious depths, and after a time pulled himself together and repented fully and completely. A story full of lessons and optimism, teaching us that there is no such thing as a lost person with no way back. What is bad about it? Why not be impressed? Did she expect a story about a great feminist who spent his life preventing the exclusion and objectification of women—simply because that’s how he was born?!

It seems that Kazin’s narrow and tendentious world, as tiny as an ant’s, causes her, the moment she sees the use of women’s bodies, immediately to be blinded from seeing all the other aspects of the story (there are very many), and even from noticing that the story rejects that and describes repentance from that approach. At this stage of the story, it seems Kazin is no longer with us. If they made a film today about a repeat offender who suddenly pulls himself together, repents completely, and becomes righteous—would that not be a lesson of value? Would it not be worthy to love and appreciate such a person and such a film? Even regarding the use of women, it is important to view it in the light of the Talmudic era and not anachronistically through the lens of today’s culture (which, of course, is not free of this either).

A general look at the Talmud

She sums up her insights thus:

Between the lines, between these verses we study together, I find that many of our sages, may their memory be a blessing, are not necessarily particularly wise, and consequently not particularly good, or I do not find beauty in their thought. Not to mention that some of them are downright repellent in my eyes and not worthy of my contemplating their words. And consequently, apart from a woman scholar named Beruriah—clever and brilliant in everyone’s eyes—and perhaps, some say, also apart from Queen Esther, who herself wrote, together with Mordechai, the Book of Esther (but then the Men of the Great Assembly edited the scroll according to their conception)—all the speakers, the storytellers, the interpreters, the thinkers, the babblers in the Mishnah and Talmud are entirely men, who grew and acted in an era when women were denied liberty, in a period of hundreds of years when women were the property of men; and therefore everyone assumed then that women and men are human beings with essentially different attributes, and from this it follows that they have separate duties and rights, and I find that something very deep is missing in these texts precisely because of the patriarchal, misogynistic culture in which they were written.

From the entire Talmudic and rabbinic corpus she found no particularly wise people except Queen Esther and Beruriah. I wonder what words of wisdom she found in them, apart from the fact that they are women? Only Kazin has the answer. I, for my part, find quite a lot of wisdom in the Talmud. True, usually it is not the sort of wisdom that leads to feminism and pluralism, but there are other aspects of life and of my culture regarding which there are many fascinating insights there. Talmudic sugyot combine, in a wondrous way, philosophical, logical, legal, moral, and psychological aspects, in my judgment in a far more impressive way than any other text I know. Again, Kazin’s gaze is narrow and tendentious, and she sees the whole world through the prism of feminism and pluralism. I think she did not succeed even in tasting the meaning of a Talmudic sugya before pronouncing this sweeping judgment. I certainly agree with her critique of her feminist friends, many of whom have not tasted much more Talmud than she has (how many of them have studied a halakhic sugya in depth?!). Many of them extract “feminist” and “pluralist” insights from the Talmud that, as noted, are primarily the work of their own hands—and thereby earn her critique.

At a level of ignorance such as hers, her words strike me as astoundingly brazen. Without a drop of knowledge, based only on impressions from a class here or there she happened upon, to issue a sweeping, all-encompassing statement about a vast corpus of wisdom comprising hundreds of sugyot in varied fields spoken by hundreds of sages (true, all men, and many of them chauvinists and essentialists, as everyone was then), developed through ongoing study and interpretation over thousands of years, merely because it is not sufficiently feminist and pluralist—this is simply absurd and unserious.

God, male or female: on faith and violence

Later in the chapter she addresses God’s being male and wonders whether it is possible to remove His phallus. Even when it is explained to her that in Kabbalah there are also feminine elements in the divinity, she is not persuaded, since she hears verses that address Him in masculine terms. That is again anachronism. He indeed has feminine aspects in Kabbalah, and that is not a contemporary apologetic. The masculine address is also explained there, but she seems unwilling to listen. Beyond the discussion of the pointless, meaningless question of whether God is male or female (see, for example, Columns 40, 390, and more), she holds that present-day violence, nationalism, and fascism are the result of the maleness of the God in whom Jews believe and of their years-long chauvinism. The clinging to God’s gender is a very common postmodern witticism, and I see no point in even addressing such nonsense. Still, I will add that this is nonsense because there are also Amazons who are women, and because the present-day phenomena would exist even were we to treat God as female. They are the result of culture and not of such-and-such symbols, masculine or feminine. In general, not all the phenomena she describes are truly reprehensible. Moreover, even what is bad in them is the result of conservative adherence to ancient norms (such as gender and national chauvinism) without willingness to adapt them to contemporary norms. That indeed is an illness of conservative halakhic Judaism, and I have written much about it. But it has nothing whatsoever to do with God’s masculinity. It is simply the perpetuation of norms that prevailed in the world in the past, due to religious conservatism and ossification.

She ends the chapter in a burst of rage:

I tell my friends in the writers’ greenhouse that I want to kill God-the-Father. I speak passionately, excited and tearful. I tell them that God and Allah hover over October 7; I say that in the name of God—the God of the Jews and the God of the Muslims—men murdered and kidnapped and raped and abused and bombed and destroyed, and they are still killing and still destroying. I say that God is vengeful and rancorous and slays. And as long as God is a scolding Father, to whom all submit, whom they seek to appease, who sets nations against one another and sets men and women at odds, and separates and distinguishes and chooses and says “this one is mine and that one I will subdue”—nothing will change. War and evil will rule.

Therefore, I tell them, I’m fed up with God-the-Father, and He must be eliminated—and if not eliminated, then fixed. We must replace God-the-Father with an abstract divinity, a benevolent, restorative, inclusive spirit that holds within it the whole world. If it is decreed upon us that so many men and women in Israel believe in God, then at least let them believe in a good idea.

I don’t know which men, in the name of the God of the Jews, murdered and kidnapped and raped and abused and bombed and destroyed. As far as I know, October 7 was the responsibility only of the God of the Muslims—or at least those who act in His name. The inane equivalences between the two sides in our conflict characterize the delusional discourse of Kazin and her friends, but they are entirely detached from the facts. They actually trample the facts merely out of subservience to her critical agenda toward Judaism.

As for the very common but utterly mistaken claim that religious faith brings about violence, cruelty, and wars—in Chapter Six of my book God Plays Dice I dealt at length with Dawkins’s claims on the matter. Here I will only say that if, opposite the religious Hamas, stood Arna Kazin and her secular, pluralist friends, I think the massacre would have been much greater. Incidentally, also on our side—for as in water face answers face. Imagine: was Fatah, fundamentally a secular movement, not involved in massacres and in the murder of multitudes of people around the world (including among their own people)?! Did Stalin, Pol Pot, and Hitler—the greatest mass murderers—act out of religious faith? On the contrary, two of them did so in the name of secularity and anti-religion. Coming back to us: the State of Israel was established by secular people (mainly from the left), and that hardly prevented the Arabs from massacring us from the start of the Zionist era, nor our injustices toward them. These were not done by the Mizrachi movement or by Haredim, but mainly by the Labor movement, and somewhat by Revisionists (by the simple rule that those who do not act do not err and do not massacre). Even today, what the state does is done by leaders and commanders who are mostly secular. True, there are nowadays quite a few religious zealots (mainly Muslims), but there are also many non-religious criminals and cruel groups. In short, that demagogic and superficial thesis should pass from the world.

Those who should pass from the world are sins, not sinners (in the words of Beruriah, her one Talmudic “wise woman”), or some of the extreme interpreters—but not necessarily the God they interpret. I would suggest she kill them, not Him (and I would dispense entirely with the circumcision-like removal of the phallus). Indeed, there are expressions of cruelty in the Bible (not all of them God’s), and that needs to be discussed on its merits. I do not claim there is no substance to her critique, but the sweeping, all-encompassing wording is childish and devoid of any rational basis.

In her next chapter (“Faith as Danger”) these equivalences recur:

I suspect that faith in God, in the face of massacres and rape and kidnapping and mass killing both among Israelis and among Palestinians, is in fact an endorsement for masculinity, for cruelty, for evil, for lordship—that they will continue to rule, to slay, to take, to rob.

Where on earth did she see massacres and rape and kidnapping and mass killing carried out by Israelis among Palestinians? She simply imposes her delusional agenda on a stubborn reality and refuses to be confused by the facts.

Racism and misogyny

In the chapter “A Misogynistic Essence” she comes to the question of racism and misogyny:

I search and still cannot find a Jewish woman who loves Judaism and is also a feminist and a humanist and is willing to erase entire passages from the Jewish texts, to disavow them, to denounce them, and above all to uproot from the root Judaism’s racist essence and its misogynistic essence. I have not yet found a pluralist Jewish woman who is willing to forgo, for example, the prayer before Shema: “Blessed are You, Lord, who chooses His people Israel with love.”

I know, I listen to the best among them: they do not understand “And You have chosen us from among all the nations” as a declaration of superiority, but as a declaration of extra responsibility. We, supposedly, bear greater responsibility than other nations to guard God’s morality. They tell me this, and I still hear the condescension in these words—condescension toward all non-Jews, who need not bear that moral responsibility, and I am not captivated.

I recall the words of Avrum Burg—scion of one of the noble families of religious Zionism, who among other things was Chair of the Jewish Agency—who in a 2020 interview with Haaretz referred to the Nation-State Law, a Basic Law that determines that “the exercise of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people,” and spoke of his desire to erase his registration in the Interior Ministry documents as belonging to the Jewish nation. “Go out into the street and ask Jews whether the Jewish people is a chosen people,” he told Ravit Hecht, “70% will answer yes. Ask them what ‘chosen’ means, then 10% will tell you that we have grand missions like humanism and tikkun olam—things that work nicely in the north, at Kibbutz Harduf. The rest will tell you it’s genetics, the Jewish brain, that God chose us—things that are blood. And now we come to the question of questions that the State of Israel has never confronted: can a chosen people maintain a system of equal democratic elections? Can elections and chosenness live together? And the answer is no.”

I share her critique of the common view that the Jew is essentially different in nature from the non-Jew. I critiqued this in my book Man Has No Dominion Over the Spirit (Chapter 22), but this is a particular interpretation of “the special quality of Israel” that does not at all emerge from the sources. I showed there that this approach is baseless and suffers from many flaws: it is not well defined (since there are average differences between any two nations); it is detached from reality (we see no factual indications of its truth); it interprets the sources in an unreasonable way; and of course it leads to problematic moral consequences (racism). But again, here Kazin chooses to focus on an interpretation and on interpreters, not on the sources. The selectivity of her movement between sources and interpreters and back again threads through her whole article, each time choosing the more problematic plane. As for Avrum Burg’s delusional words about the Nation-State Law, I won’t elaborate here. I have never understood what shred of moral problem anyone manages to see in this (superfluous) law. It is one of the great mysteries to me—even within the foolish public discourse conducted in our climes.

In the next passage Kazin describes her divine utopia, in which God is an abstract, ethereal entity that relates to all of creation together, so that no one person is more or less than another—some New Age-ish thing. A sort of “God as you wish.” But I will spare you that and leave it as a personal exercise: fashion God to your heart’s content. We now proceed, at long last, to the status of women.

The woman’s wretched state

Later in the chapter she brings as an example two passages from Maimonides of the halakhah’s chauvinistic, humiliating attitude toward women. These are his words at the beginning of Laws of the Virgin Maiden (1:1–2):

One who seduced a virgin is fined fifty silver shekels of refined silver—and this is called a fine; likewise if he raped her. And this fine is a positive commandment of the Torah, as it is said, “and the man who lay with her shall give to the maiden’s father fifty silver” (Deut. 22:29). And what is a seducer and what is a rapist? A seducer—[he lay with her] willingly; a rapist—who came upon her against her will. Any [maiden] who had relations in the field is presumed to be raped, and we judge her as raped until witnesses testify that it was willingly. And any [maiden] who had relations in the city is presumed to be seduced because she did not cry out—until witnesses testify that she was raped, such as if he drew a sword and said to her: if you cry out, I will kill you.

She completely ignores the situation that prevailed at that time across the world, and the question of whether and to what extent these laws improve it. At that time, the father had to provide for the maiden because she was not then able to provide for herself. Therefore the rapist and seducer are obligated to pay the father (and not the maiden herself). Kazin could also have brought the laws that the father may marry off his daughter—even to a man afflicted with boils. That indeed sounds appalling to a modern ear, but that revulsion is anachronistic. It ignores the fact that the father was responsible for arranging his daughter’s support and establishing her household, and that was the practice then. The Torah tries to regulate this quite well. Beyond that, no one wrote that the father would receive a prize for marrying off his daughter to a man with boils. It is his right, but when the matter is unworthy and unnecessary, it is reasonable that the court would compel him not to do so. This brings us to my general claim that one should not judge halakhah according to moral categories at all, since these are two independent categories (see Column 541 and many others). This applies to all her critiques, but I will not go into it here.

It is apt to mention that she herself, at the beginning of that very chapter, describes how, in that era, women were not part of the discourse and were certainly not given a public and intellectual place:

It is important to remember and to remind tirelessly, I think, that the Jewish sacred texts—the Bible, the Prophets, the Scrolls, the Talmud, and the Mishnah—were created at the cradle of patriarchy thousands of years ago, against a humanity that held faith in a variety of goddesses and gods. And it is important to remember that only men wrote these texts. The Mishnah, it is said, was sealed in 218 CE, 150 years after the destruction of the Second Temple. The Babylonian Talmud was written between the third and sixth centuries. Hundreds more years would pass, until the second millennium, before the first women—like Hildegard of Bingen and Christine de Pizan—would take any part at all in public writing. In the years when the books sacred to Judaism were sealed—those that are repeatedly studied at Neve Schechter, at Alma, and all the more so in every Orthodox religious institution—women were not part of the human existence “that grants a name to myself, to the world, and to God,” in Mary Daly’s formulation; therefore the human, the world, and the God of these texts are necessarily partial and flawed.

In her view, a God who allows (or creates) such a picture is partial and flawed. Perhaps. But first it is important to understand that this was the situation everywhere in the world, and the Torah speaks in terms of such a world. Beyond that, a very small part of this was created by God and the Torah. Most of it was done by human beings who interpreted His words (sometimes in a truly radical way). Again, she shifts here, as is her wont, from the source to its interpretations.

Beyond that, such a critique is anachronistic to the point of childishness. Kazin expects halakhah written over the last two thousand years to be up-to-date regarding the status of women today. I too would be happy for that to happen, but that is a childish expectation. The human beings who wrote halakhah, whether men or women, were products of their time and place. One must judge halakhah in light of its era, and I think it would fare not badly at all in that regard. Of course, we should improve what can and should be improved for our time, and I too have critiques of those who oppose this. But that is not a critique of Judaism; it is a critique of a conservative interpretation of it today.

Above all, the fact that halakhah is chauvinistic and does not give women a worthy status—does that invalidate it in its entirety? Can I not learn something from Aristotle and study his doctrine because he was not a democrat? Does Athenian democracy have no value because it gave expression only to about twenty percent of Athens’s population? A mature view of sources and of an era must know how to separate the wheat from the chaff, to critique what merits critique (while paying attention to context and avoiding anachronism), and to praise and appreciate what merits appreciation.

Erasure, or: the banality of the good

In the next chapter, Kazin proceeds to describe the Torah she would write. She opens again—how could it be otherwise?!—with the patriarchalism and chauvinism of the Jewish texts:

It is important for me to emphasize: the Jewish sacred texts to this day, which were written exclusively by men in a patriarchal era—that is, in a culture that extols the values of ownership, lordship, and zealotry—are problematic not only in the context of women and their status. They contain a danger to all living things on earth, because they are only half-human; they are made only of the materials of archetypal masculinity within a patriarchal paradigm—aggressiveness, the urge to conquer, victory, rationality ad nauseam, possession. They lack the variety of attributes ascribed to archetypal femininity—concern for future generations, seeing the other, moral depth, sharing, testimony—and therefore they do not suffice to see the human condition rightly. Even when we read about Miriam and Zipporah and Deborah and Yael and the daughters of Zelophehad and Pharaoh’s daughter and Ruth—even when we read about Eve and Esther and Judith—still, those who gave names to these rare female figures, who gave names and shaped their worlds and their gods, were only those male authors and storytellers at the cradle of patriarchy. And this limited narrating voice cannot suffice for us. Other voices are missing for us, other figures are missing for us, other conversations are absent from the sacred Jewish text, and it is not only loathsome for that reason; it is dangerous precisely because of all that is missing. As Gerda Lerner wrote in The Creation of Patriarchy, we waited until the feminist revolution set out in the nineteenth century to reach a state in which “we are adding the capacity for vision of females to that of males, and this is a transformative process […]. Only when both eyes look together can we achieve a full field of vision and an accurate perception of depth.”

Here she assumes that there is an essential mode of looking for women and another, essentially different, for men, and she laments the absence of the feminine point of view from halakhah and the Talmud. I share that critique (despite its anachronism), but it is worth noting that there is blatant essentialism here. I think she would absorb quite a few barbs for this from her feminist sisters and from all sorts of queers (yes yes, I know: there is second-wave feminism, third-wave, up through the nth). There are different people with different points of view, and halakhah and the Talmud would certainly have been enriched had the other half of the world’s citizens been involved in them, but mainly because of the different points of view of each woman, not because of an essentialist “feminine gaze” in general.

She then goes on to describe how she would write her Torah:

Let us imagine, then, that the patriarchal texts of Judaism will no longer be sanctified. Let us imagine that new texts will be written and enter the canon. Let us imagine that participation in the Jewish labor of tikkun also includes erasure: erasure of all the narrow-minded and hard-hearted verses. Erasure of all the verses that assume that the Jewish people is superior to other nations. Erasure of all the verses that assume that God is a male Father and is the God of the Jews alone. Erasure of a tradition that glorifies masculinity and ownership and diminishes femininity and motherhood. And consequently, let us imagine that participation in the Jewish labor of tikkun includes writing and creating and re-creating ideas and concepts and figures who speak and stories; the abstract and the concrete. Let us turn our backs on the bad Judaism—the Judaism of the Noam party and of the Religious Zionism party—the Judaism of “You shall be holy to Me, for I the Lord am holy, and I have separated you from the nations to be Mine” (Lev. 20:26), and of “And if a man lies with a male as one lies with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall surely be put to death, their blood is upon them” (Lev. 20:13), and of “And it shall be, when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your surrounding enemies, in the land which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance to possess it—you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven” (Deut. 25:19), and of “But if this thing be true—the tokens of virginity were not found for the maiden—then they shall bring out the maiden to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die, because she has wrought folly in Israel, to play the harlot in her father’s house; so shall you put away the evil from your midst” (Deut. 22:20–21).

That is, for her the Torah is a collection of universal values that add nothing new and that anyone can write with their eyes closed. Kazin seeks a Torah and a God in her own image, but then I fail to understand why she needs a Torah or a God at all. After all, she already has herself. Does she need texts that will serve as a mirror reflecting herself?! As noted, I too certainly think there is room for critique of halakhah in its current form (halakhic conservatism), but Kazin’s critique throws out the baby with the bathwater, simply because she believes in nothing beyond a narrow set of universal moral values. That is entirely legitimate, of course, but if so, I truly do not understand what point there is in speaking of Torah and God, and in fashioning these imaginary beings in the vein of “in the image of man He created them.” We already have ourselves; I have no need for fog-wrapped mirrors to reflect me back to myself.

She concludes with a chapter titled “Chapters of Mothers,” which is nothing but a banal and pathetic description of her universalist utopia. If you like—in paraphrase of Hannah Arendt—this is “the banality of the good”:

Wait a minute, you’ll ask: at this stage, instead of rejecting Judaism entirely, could I not settle for joining the path of “Emunah Left” (the faith-based left), say? A movement of activists—traditional, Haredi, religious—who seek to promote peace, equality, and justice in Israeli society? “We believe that the Holy One, blessed be He, demands from us kindness, justice, and peace,” they write on the movement’s homepage. “We believe in the demand: ‘As the Holy One is called merciful, so you should be merciful; as the Holy One is called gracious, so you should be gracious; as the Holy One is called righteous, so you should be righteous; as the Holy One is called pious, so you should be pious.’”

But does the essential problem not remain precisely in the call to walk in the ways of God? Is there not echoing just under the surface the verse from Deuteronomy: “The Lord will establish you unto Himself for a holy people, as He has sworn unto you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in His ways; and all the peoples of the earth shall see that the name of the Lord is called upon you, and they shall be afraid of you”?

Has the time not come to build together a universal Judaism that seeks to strive—as foundational feminist thought strives—for a life of universal humanity that is good for all, in a sustainable world?

And in fact, if such a Judaism is not possible, why would we want to be part of it at all? For what, in heaven’s name?

Yes, dear readers: I cannot stop recoiling from Judaism, but I know I have not finished studying it and about it. And I have not finished envisioning its repair.

I want to read, for example, alongside “Chapters of the Fathers,” “Chapters of the Mothers.” I imagine a saying by, let’s say, one we’ll call Miriam bat Miriam: “Miriam bat Miriam said: On three things the world stands—on doubt, on creativity, and on love.”

Or, let’s say, Ruth bat Ruth said: “On three things the world stands—on labor, on cooperation, and on concern for future generations.”

Or a certain woman, daughter of a certain woman, said: “On countless diverse things the world stands—among them the living and the animals, on flora and the flowering, on spirit and on motion.”

Or this one and that one said: “If I am not for myself—my friend is for me.”

For together—woman to woman, girl to girl, woman to woman—we shall create and sustain and repair; and the boy and the man will join us; and together we shall guard this land and all its inhabitants, Jews and non-Jews, Arabs and Europeans and those from Asia and those who come from Africa; and we shall aspire that all should flourish—the living and the creeping and the growing—and thereby all women and men, girls and boys, sons and daughters of all nations; for this is the responsibility borne upon our narrow human shoulders; this is our mission: to guard this place and breathe into it a good life for all. Otherwise our faces are turned toward Sheol, perdition, Gehenna; toward the abyss of all the evil in the entire world. And if to the abyss of all the evil in the entire world this Judaism takes me—still thoroughly loathsome in my eyes—I will not hesitate and will turn away from it, to another path.

I do not know how accurate this description of the “Faith-Based Left” is, but if it is accurate, then perhaps there is a left there, but there is no “faith.” Faith requires commitment to that which is above us. For one who believes in Him, God is not merely a mirror that reflects back our values. He indeed demands moral conduct from us, but halakhah is a set of additional demands from other categories that are not necessarily congruent with morality; and there are certainly contents and values beyond morality (even those that are not anti-moral may be a-moral). A secular person who wants to invent or create for themselves a God in their own image, to compose for themselves ridiculous prayers to the universe and to the holy vacuum, and to write a Torah that reflects themselves—can, of course, do as they wish. This is a free country, thank goodness, and we are permitted to do any foolish and unnecessary thing that comes to mind. But what has that to do with faith, with God, and with Torah? She is simply proposing to abolish these concepts, not to change them. So why confuse us by continuing to resort to the religious concepts while emptying them of all substantive, non-trivial content?! This is a common feature among contemporary humanist Jews, and I have often pointed it out (see, for example, Columns 425, 130, 518, the series 336–339, and many more), but I find it hard to restrain my chuckles at these feckless attempts every time anew. My sense is that people like Kazin have sentimental feelings for their ancient cultural heritage, and their way of fighting its content (which truly infuriates them) is to reinvent it entirely, thereby emptying it and all its concepts and principles of any substantive, non-trivial content. To create a secular religion—that is, to define secularity itself as a religion. What is that good for? I do not know.

Conclusion

Several times in the past I have warned against people who are gifted with expression. In not a few cases, the polished, appealing phrasing succeeds in hiding behind it a vacuum of content and thought. We are captivated by the phrasing and the apparent sincerity, and we fail to notice the vacuum behind it. I must say that on a first reading I was rather impressed by Kazin’s article, but now that I have read it carefully in order to write my critique of it, I was truly disappointed.

Arna Kazin sees the world—and the Talmud as part of it—through the tiny hole of the gender-feminist-liberal coin, and manages to ignore a vast array of insights and added values in other areas that stand right before her eyes. She simply does not see them, because that hole blinds her and hides from her all the rest of the picture—or at least colors it in a very particular and limited hue. That is apparently what led to the narrow-minded, anachronistic, superficial, tendentious, and even somewhat childish dogmatism found in her article—a pity.

Beyond that, I very much disagree with a large part of the conceptions and judgments she expressed. What she calls racism, nationalism, and chauvinism is not necessarily such. But that is not my subject here, and therefore I did not go into it. What is more important for our purposes is that even if I agreed with everything, the fact that there is a problematic component in some doctrine or in some person does not mean that there is no value in it and no point in engaging with it. By the same token, even if there are chauvinistic or nationalistic elements in the Talmud, one cannot infer from this that there is no value in it as a whole or that there is no point in engaging with it. I also fail to understand how the speaker’s gender determines the value of their words. Beruriah’s or Esther’s words are not wise just because women said them, and the words of the Talmudic sages are not devoid of value and wicked just because men said them. It seems she really projects her own flaw onto others. This is a problematic approach: ad hominem on steroids. What is it like? To the Nazis who rejected the theory of relativity as “Jewish physics,” or to the communists who rejected quantum theory as bourgeois decadent degeneration (they championed determinism). Even if they had been right and there had been some blemish here, moral or otherwise, still that does not invalidate the science involved.

After all, it is important for me to add that I certainly understand why feminism, equality, and liberalism are important to her and why racism is wrong. All this is important to me too, and I strongly identify with her desire to improve the attitude toward them in Judaism and in general. But this in no way justifies the blatant blindness, tendentiousness, and dishonesty I have described here. Precisely because I share some of the critiques and the values that motivate them, I regret that Kazin supports them with such flimsy arguments. It shoots the critique in the foot and allows the various conservatives to dismiss it out of hand.