A Letter to the Despairing “Fedlaho’shit” (Column 390)

With God’s help

Disclaimer: This post was translated from Hebrew using AI (ChatGPT 5 Thinking), so there may be inaccuracies or nuances lost. If something seems unclear, please refer to the Hebrew original or contact us for clarification.

Operation Guardian of the Walls almost made me forget that about two weeks ago there was a post by someone named Devorah (apparently a nickname?) who founded the Facebook page of the “Fedlaho’shiyot” (an acronym for “Religious Feminists Without a Sense of Humor”), announcing the page’s imminent closure. For many members of the group (this is the last time I will double-gender my language—chauvinist that I am—just so you’ll understand that there are also some male members), this is a very significant event. I gather that this page influenced and was formative for many women who belong to that reference group. It gave them a platform and a sense of belonging and sharing, a place to vent tensions, lay out reflections, and share insights, while neutralizing male hegemony and dominance. Apparently the page has changed the religious outlook—and the outlook in general—of quite a few of its participants (men too), by their own testimony.

Here I wish to relate mainly to the above post, not to the group as a whole (which I don’t know. I’m off Facebook and don’t understand it much). Nor do I intend to address one of the main issues in the debate that arose after the post was published, namely the moral right of the founder of such a page to close it (especially when it already has about 17,000 members—about half a Knesset seat!!!). That is certainly an interesting question, but it is not our topic. For me, this post expressed difficult feelings, justified at least in part, and as I understand it they are shared by quite a few men and women, especially those among us who are straight-shooters. Therefore it certainly deserves serious and substantive attention, and that is what I’ll try to do here. Lastly, I’ll note that there were also various, less categorical statements following the publication of this post. Some other admins did not want the closure, and there were those who wanted it for other reasons. There were also critiques and rebukes about the post’s fanaticism and its unwillingness to compromise with “lite” feminism. In my view it’s an honest post that bravely and candidly expresses the writer’s personal feelings, and she has every right to express that sharply as she understands it. Anyone who feels differently—that is also their right, and so I disagree with those critiques. But I won’t address any of that here.

A bit about the group

Still, we can’t proceed without at least a little background on the group. The group was established inspired by a previous page of feminists not necessarily religious, and the names of these pages are based on (echo?) the stereotype that many have about feminists—that they are serious and heavy and lack a sense of humor (whiny?).

At the top of the page appears the “About,” which teaches a bit about its background, and here it is:

You can gather that there is a rather strict guiding hand here, and I’m not sure this page deserves a tolerance-and-openness award. But naturally, as a resident of Mars I have not experienced the point of view of those living on Venus, and in particular not of feminist Venusians. After hearing these points more than once from various opinionated women, I tend to believe that indeed male discourse is too domineering for them and does not allow them to express themselves,[1] and therefore this policy is apparently necessary so that they can converse there freely (I have remarked more than once on the number of women who participate in discussions on my Martian website).

The post in question

Here is the body of her words (without the thanks at the end) in full:

Initial reflections

These are, to my mind, very powerful words, clearly coming from a pained heart and said with great candor. I must say that my own heart ached quite a bit as I read them, and it was clear to me they required thought and response. Despite my being a Martian, I can fully understand these words. If I belonged to a group that has been discriminated against and excluded for many generations and is led exclusively by the discriminating group, I would probably feel similar feelings. Even if the Sages are ministering angels, still the feeling of a group that ends up disadvantaged when all the rules are set by the other group is likely to be harsh.

I have said more than once to my students at the Graduate Beit Midrash for Doctoral Students at Bar-Ilan, where I teach, that if I were a woman (to the extent such a description has meaning—if I were a woman I would not be me), I very much doubt that I would be faithful to halakha today, unless they also managed to suppress my critical sense. If I had grown up in a society that did not allow me to learn and understand for myself what I do and what I am required to do, and I had no possibility to influence and to make decisions, I probably would not do it. I am a great believer in a person’s right and duty to decide their fate and set their path and worldview. Especially in our time, when women earn doctorates, lecture and conduct research at universities, serve in government and on supreme courts, and yet are asked to accept statements from men—who are not all very sharp pencils—without reasoning and without having any possibility to critique and examine matters and form an opinion on their own, a case of “we shall do” without “we shall hear.” This is absurd regardless of the trust I have in the sages who set these rules. Even if they are outstandingly wise and moral men of the highest order, they are setting rules for a huge population (50% of the public) that has nothing to say on the matter and whose mindset they do not truly understand. And they do so in ways far from objective, unequivocal, and self-evident, leaving even more room for the halakhic decisor’s personal influence on the halakhic outcome. How can an autonomous, intelligent woman have confidence in such a decision-making process?! I, as a man, am not prepared to accept the sages’ decisions without criticism, and they are supposed to understand me quite well (after all, they too are from Mars).

However, the description I offered in the last paragraph concerns women’s learning, and that hurdle we have more or less crossed today (not entirely, of course). Devorah, by contrast, speaks about the outcomes of learning, namely religious life. There the solution is much harder. Seemingly, it’s a road with no exit. One who is faithful to the halakhic tradition and is not Reform or heretical cannot rebel against it and cannot change it. Either way: either you are faithful to the system as it is, and then you doom yourself to remain excluded and on the margins (sorry: better than all the men, and therefore “all your glory is inward”), or you want to change and then you are Reform. You understand that the inevitable conclusion is that being a religious feminist is an oxymoron. Devorah expresses this in very strong and painful words:

If you want to be a woman who is equal, free, with sovereignty and agency over her body, her womb, her sexuality, her health, her love, her joy—then a religious framework is not the place for that. The oppression of women in Judaism is not a minor element that can be removed cosmetically or ignored as if it never was. It is at the base. Without it, everything falls.

I must say that these feelings have also stirred in me as a man (not necessarily about women’s status, but about other parts of the tradition that seemed to me utterly illogical), except that I, as a man, had the privilege to learn and to be a partner in shaping my own religiosity. I received (or took) tools that allow me to do that. A woman, by contrast, does not even have the legitimacy to acquire the tools, let alone to use them. She is forbidden to learn Torah (as if teaching her is teaching frivolity), certainly not to serve as a judge or a rabbi, not even to render halakhic rulings, or to deliver words of Torah. And after pushing her to the margins—and even if she buys into the nonsense that is sold to her (“all the honor of the king’s daughter is inward,” etc., etc.)—she remains discriminated against in the rabbinical courts regarding personal status and in religious life in general. She is supposed to obey men who decide for her without her understanding what it is based on, and in many cases her feeling is that they do not truly understand what they are talking about. They run conferences (cf. the “Puah Institute”) at which male speakers full of knowledge and importance exchange impressions about the nature of woman, her feelings, the halakhot that pertain to her—often without asking or hearing her. But who is she to rebel against the commands of the Creator of Heaven and Earth?!

I ask myself what feelings this creates in a woman (that Venusian, the one I do not understand)? I can somewhat imagine it, but not truly feel it myself. It is no accident that this situation infuriates me, and among other things that is what led me to write my trilogy in which I examine many of the assumptions that create it. But, as noted, I have the tools, and even so a man needs no small measure of courage and boldness to say things and express atypical views, or to challenge accepted foundations, openly. I ask myself what a God-fearing woman is supposed to do who feels such distress, but has no tools to examine the situation and certainly not to propose changes. Her husband, the community rabbi, and all the Torah scholars she knows and esteems explain to her that I am a heretic who understands nothing and that she must swallow her distress and be silent. They explain to her that one who says or writes things like mine is Reform, and whoever goes down these roads arrives directly at boiling excrement in Gehenna under the management of Amnon Yitzhak. She needs to cook for her husband and care for her children and be a righteous woman, and only thanks to righteous women like her were Israel redeemed from Egypt and did (the men) receive the Torah and (the men) inherit the land.

Would you not expect that many women would reach Devorah’s conclusions? And I speak specifically about those for whom these matters are important. There are many for whom this exclusion is not a big problem, because after all they are silenced while they sit and chat behind the partition and words of Torah are being said in the synagogue (“Silence in the women’s section!!!”), but what do they care?! They are only occasionally in synagogue for the folklore. They find content for life at university, at work, or in reading literature and consuming culture. So let the fools in the synagogue keep running their shtiebel. Who cares?!

But a Haredi woman does not have that outlet, and a modern religious feminist woman also does not have such an option. If religious life is indeed important to her, she is not willing to give up involvement in it. So what do you expect her to do? I must say that the small amount of abandonment by women is a wonder to me. Either religious life is not important to them, or they have lost their human image and a proper measure of critical sense, or they nevertheless find content and meaning elsewhere (as above) and shuffle along the edges of the shtiebel to preserve folklore that may even be dear to their heart to some degree. And after all this, they tell me that critical feminists do not have fear of Heaven like those righteous women who accept authority and remain silent. Wonders!

All the description presented thus far is, of course, extreme. Women in modern religious society are no longer in the situation I described. But still the exclusion and discrimination and lack of status and tools exist—certainly when viewed against their status in general society today. Anyone who deludes themselves that the matter no longer exists is mistaken and misleading. But these things are true not only with respect to women’s status; substantial components of halakha as a whole are largely anachronistic, and my trilogy seeks to take a step toward change.

I will divide my response into two parts: the first pertains to principles and the second to drawing conclusions and practical conduct.

A. A few fundamental remarks on the matter

Here I can only touch briefly and sketch the general directions, but almost all of this has already been detailed elsewhere. The most basic distinction to make here is between halakha as it is now and halakha as it ought to be. The writer deals with Judaism as it is at present, that is, the religious (Orthodox) society within which we live—Judaism as fact. About that she writes that the attitude toward women is not a marginal issue amenable to change within this framework. Yet there is still room to claim that this is not the Judaism/halakha as it ought to be. Yael Fish noted this nicely in her words about the post. Devorah describes an existing situation but does not relate to sources and what emerges from them, nor does she examine whether what happens in practice fits or is mandated by the sources. She certainly does not address the status of the sources and our ability to change from what is written in them. I suppose this stems, among other things, from the fact that she has no real access to halakhic sources and to an understanding of the methodology and ways of interpretation and decision, and of the proper relation to the different sources—exactly as I described above regarding women in general.

Alongside this distinction, it is important to make another one, almost the opposite, which I briefly noted in the previous column. As in any normative and religious system, so too in halakha there are differences between what emerges from the sources of halakha and halakhic praxis. Even if the sources of halakha indicate some (descriptively) chauvinistic directive, in many cases reality is stronger than they are. It is certainly possible that in a society operating within different cultural and value norms, halakhic behavior in practice will be different. There are countless examples of this in the history of halakha and of course also in our day.[2]

A third distinction we must make, which I have discussed in the past, is between halakha in its purely religious sense and social and cultural norms that have been embedded within it. I gave the example of “honor killings” in the Muslim world. As far as I have understood from Muslim religious scholars, there is no basis for this in the sources of Islamic law. It is an Arab custom (from the deserts of Arabia) that has been culturally embedded within Arab society and, at least in some places, has become part of their Islam. In Jewish halakha, too, some attitude toward women is embedded that is not all, if at all, founded on halakhic sources. Some of these are cultural practices, and some entered the Talmud and post-Talmudic sources, and therefore are perceived by many as part of Sinai-given halakha. Not so. They certainly have no sanctity. Take for example Maimonides’ well-known statement that a woman’s going out to work is grounds for divorce, or various laws concerning relations between husband and wife and between father and daughter. I argue that even things that the Sages saw as halakha are not necessarily such. It is easier to think about this in a hypothetical experiment: if there were today a Sanhedrin that could interpret the Torah and change existing halakhot, is there any necessity that all these halakhot would remain as they are? I have no doubt that not. As the Sages did in their time, so too the Sanhedrin would be supposed to do in ours. True, we do not have a Sanhedrin today, but in the third book of my trilogy (the sixth part deals with the theory of halakhic change) I discussed structured methodological possibilities for substantial changes in halakha even without a Sanhedrin (such as the “freezing mechanism,” etc.).

In general, it is important to understand that what we call today “halakha” is not the word of God from Sinai in its purity. It is an entire corpus, the vast majority of which is interpretation given to those halakhot (or verses) given to us at Sinai, and I assume that a significant part of it is not very connected to what the Holy One intended at the outset. This does not mean there is no obligation to keep it (I have written more than once that the obligation to halakha does not depend on its authenticity), but the sanctity and the impossibility of touching and changing is nevertheless different between the word of God and the determinations of the Sages, even if they have formal authority. The interpretations of scholars over the generations are certainly not free of cultural influences of the environment in which they operated, just as we can see in our own generation (compare the status of women in a Lithuanian Haredi society, Hasidic, Religious-Zionist, Conservative, and even by countries of origin: Caucasian, American, Moroccan, Hungarian, etc.). The sense that such statements are “Reform” stems from imprecision in defining the concepts. Here I only point to the directions, and whoever wishes to delve deeper is invited to read the sixth part of the third book in the trilogy, where I defined the concepts and explained this well.

B. Practical conduct, or: how to solve problems

Now I wish to comment on drawing conclusions and practical conduct. In the previous section I noted the possibilities to effect change and to act and change. The conclusion is that the current situation is not a decree of fate, and it is not true that whoever deviates from it is not Orthodox (more precisely: is not committed to halakha. The word “Orthodox” belongs to the world of sociology. There is no sanctity in it). In general, I think my trilogy—and especially the third book, which deals with halakha—is not a bad platform for carrying out significant changes within full commitment to halakha.

But to bring about this change, the women who want it must invest the necessary effort, enter the halakhic world, learn and deepen, and then propose well-founded and reasoned suggestions for change. It is not enough to complain about the situation and express distress without offering concrete solutions. The way of the world is that when a person or group is in distress and wants and needs help, they must invest effort themselves and only then can they expect assistance. The Palestinians, Mizrahim, black people in the US, and other groups in problematic situations (weak or weakened) cannot make do with complaints about the situation. They need to invest effort and work and lead the effort to improve it. Only when they initiate and lead will there be a chance that others will join them.

A woman who does not want her husband or rabbi to tell her unreasoned things to which she will have to answer “amen” and obey cannot simply refuse to obey or make do with complaints that the situation is unbearable. She must get into the thick of it, examine the situation, see whether there are avenues of solution, then propose something reasoned and only thereafter expect support. As long as you expect others to do the work for you, it will not happen, and to some degree justly so. Those who suffer have the greatest motivation to seek and propose solutions. Others will not do the work for them, especially when the core feminist complaints are about dependence on men.

In this sense, abandonment and despair are the easy solutions. If indeed it is a believing woman, and if she truly thinks that Torah was given at Sinai and that there is an obligation to keep it and obey God, then abandonment is not an option for her. If you do nothing, will that be in accordance with God’s will? She can argue that it is implausible to her that the existing conceptions are an expression of His will, but a serious approach obligates her to seek an alternative. She must think how she can and should fulfill His will. Abandonment points to a lack of commitment and suggests that even the observance up to now stemmed from it seeming to suit her needs rather than from substantive commitment to God’s will. If in your view certain people do not do God’s will, that does not exempt you from doing so. On the contrary—if they do not keep it, arise and you keep it.

True, this is a difficult project, and not every woman can meet it. Especially since even today the tools and knowledge are not given to her as they are to men. But I expect that among a group of intelligent women at least a small part will nonetheless advance toward solutions and strive to carry out this project. For now, the number of learned women at a good level is tiny, and even among them I usually have not heard overly revolutionary proposals. They operate entirely within the existing framework (within which there is certainly much to do), but I am not familiar with foundational work, like in the trilogy, that is done by women. It is very likely that this stems from lack of proficiency and from a desire to gain legitimacy in the (male) halakhic world, and that is natural. But that path cannot truly lead to change.

In the meantime I have not heard of women who have gone through the trilogy; at least I have not received comments or questions about it. As I showed there, our tradition requires a thorough house-cleaning and there are ways to do this. Distress is an excellent motivation to move in such a direction. Many speak of a “women’s Torah” that differs in its character from the Torah developed by men. I do not know if there is such a thing, but in any event the burden of proof is on the women. By all means—pick up the gauntlet and create it. Truth has power, and when such proposals exist there will be those who take them up. And if there will be a core of those who excommunicate—no one needs to be alarmed. There are always fanatical sects and there are always opponents of any innovation (cf. Maimonides, Shulchan Aruch, and more). The dogs bark and the caravan moves on.

The sincere distress so beautifully expressed in Devorah’s post sometimes serves as a basis for despair and giving up, or abandonment, but it can and should be a lever for renewal and revitalization that we all need like air to breathe.

[1] Many have claimed to me that this is also the reason it is very hard to elicit a Torah article, let alone a scholarly one, from a woman. They explained to me that a woman is usually shy and uncomfortable speaking in public, certainly on a Torah platform that is by its nature male in character. I always thought that in academic venues this problem does not exist, certainly not to the same extent; but again, I am a Martian and do not understand.

[2] There is the well-known joke that no religious person is a thief, since one who steals is not religious. But we all know there are certainly religious thieves, because practice sometimes trumps halakha. Admittedly here it is a negative trumping, but there are also positive ones (which I noted in the previous column).