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It was a hectic week. And then Thursday morning I was asked to do some laynen, and I said yes, and then agreed (because I like being useful and am not good at saying no to these sort of ritual requests) to read 2 aliyot and the rosh chodesh maftir (which I knew already and just had to look over quickly)- but that was still 31 psukim to learn from scratch. And the way Friday went, I ended up learning 19 of them Friday night after dinner. So- I was kind of nervous. Really, I was more nervous about that layning than I have been in a while. And it turned out alright. Not wonderfully, but certainly decently enough. Just not good enough for me to really be proud of, besides that I learned and retained them in a pretty darn short period of time. And I lead p'sukei d'zimra, because the only other people there on time were the gabbay and two folks who didn't want to lead.
Meals were interesting too- dinner I had with a hallmate and a friend of a friend. Lunch was a Brush potluck, and both a lot of fun and with good food. And it was fun and still ended in time for me to get a nap- although I woke up only minutes before mincha. And then the room was both sweltering and sans lights for mincha. But oh well.
And then there was tsuris with ma'ariv, because there were some people in the room singing, and they just kept on singing. And eventually they asked if they could daven with us and we of course said sure, but they kept singing. And then we started davening, and they were ticked off because they weren't given time to get siddurim. So- there was drama. There will probably be More drama. Ugh.
And this evening the women of my class had a Rosh Chodesh gathering, and it was a lot of fun- just very casual and very comfortable. Learned a lot about my classmates. And found out some rather surprising things of a variety of natures.
Meals were interesting too- dinner I had with a hallmate and a friend of a friend. Lunch was a Brush potluck, and both a lot of fun and with good food. And it was fun and still ended in time for me to get a nap- although I woke up only minutes before mincha. And then the room was both sweltering and sans lights for mincha. But oh well.
And then there was tsuris with ma'ariv, because there were some people in the room singing, and they just kept on singing. And eventually they asked if they could daven with us and we of course said sure, but they kept singing. And then we started davening, and they were ticked off because they weren't given time to get siddurim. So- there was drama. There will probably be More drama. Ugh.
And this evening the women of my class had a Rosh Chodesh gathering, and it was a lot of fun- just very casual and very comfortable. Learned a lot about my classmates. And found out some rather surprising things of a variety of natures.
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I've always wondered how a supposedly egalitarian group can condone this sort of gendered get-together. Any thoughts?
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Sounds suspiciously like "reverse" gender discrimination to me. In principle, I'm not totally opposed to carefully considered discrimination/affirmative action to balance previously unbalanced scales*, but (a) one needs to be extremely conscious of doing it and (b) there ought to be a goal in mind such that once said goal is achieved one will stop doing it. I've yet to hear either of these points articulated, not to mention an acknowledgement of the sociological consequences of depriving men of gendered space while preserving it for women. (As opposed to consistently obliterating all gendered spaces and forcing men and women to deal with it, which tends to be my inclination.)
"Sometimes I feel like there's a category of folks who are gender-egal for public ritual but not for private ritual- I mean, pretty much every egal family I've visited, the wife/mother is still the one lighting the Shabbos candles..."
And it's not just ritual -- it's shot through their entire sociological and psychological experience of gender. (My mother, who goes to an ostensibly "egal" shul, recently put out a flier advertising something for women to do on Superbowl Sunday. *puke*) I feel like egalitarianism (at least as articulated and practiced by the C movement), just like political correctness, is a matter of waving one's arms and distracting people from their very real, deeply entrenched, and difficult-to-change biases (which come out of a particular set of experiences and needs that need to be addressed for real change to occur).
In our house, we take turns lighting the Shabbat candles, and since I'm the cook, half the time I daven minha be-yehidut while my spouse takes our guests to shul, where I join them after Shabbat begins.
*This was brought home to me in a wickedly funny Purim skit at Shira Hadasha (a Jerusalem minyan in which, among other things, women only may lead kabbalat shabbat and, theoretically, pesukei dezimra and hotza'at/hakhnasat sefer Torah) imagining "100 years from now" in which they're debating whether men may lead kabbalat Shabbat, and conclude that maybe they may do so for "nahat ruah" purposes. (This is a riff on the gemara that says that women may violate certain issurim in order to voluntary perform korbanot because it gives them spiritual satisfaction.)
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It isn't just the Conservative movement. When I started researching my senior thesis, which was on women who made Shabbat dinner without communal support, I was really interested talking to people of both genders- but I found a series of women who did so, and one man who Sometimes did so, but whose wife was usually the one doing the preparations... These folks ranged the total religious spectrum (or pretty darn close), and were without a lot of communal influence, and still, it was very gendered.
Egalitarianism can feel very superficial. And that often really irks me. But I don't know what to do about it. So I try to make it more than surface deep for myself, and to try and figure out where I feel resistance to it, and whether or not that's a good thing... I haven't gotten too far yet, but I keep trying.
Cool. I spent a while in my last relationship totally confused as to why my ex was much happier with me or his mother lighting with him in mind. And I just didn't understand why he didn't Want to do so for himself. To each their own, but- it seemed a bit confusing.
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I'm not either, but as I pointed out, I think we need to be extraordinarily careful about defining why we're maintaining such spaces, and whether we think we're doing that for the short-term or the long-term.
"It might serve the useful function of teaching folks who know only egal settings what some of the benefits of the way another part of the Jewish community lives..."
On the one hand, as tovah623 points out below, people in egal settings already have deeply-ingrained notions of gender separation/division. What I think needs to happen is that they be forced to confront those separations and question them at least as deeply as they've questioned (and rejected) the separations codified in halakha. On the other hand, I don't think that one can really empathize/understand the way another part of the Jewish community lives without really absorbing the narrative of that community, because it is only through that narrative that the practices of that community will make sense.
"When I started researching my senior thesis, which was on women who made Shabbat dinner without communal support"
Fascinating. What do you mean "without communal support"?
"Egalitarianism can feel very superficial. And that often really irks me. But I don't know what to do about it."
In addition to what you said, I'd suggest figuring out what implications the practice you're examining has both in terms of gender and not in terms of gender, and try to imagine what the consequences of changing that practice would be. (I like the Kantianesque thought experiment of "what would the world be like if the relevent everyone acted this way.") Ultimately, I think what's important is to place egalitarianism side by side with many other values and weigh it against them when making decisions. (This presumes that egalitarianism itself is a worthwhile value -- I think it is, but I also think it has to be more carefully defined.)
"To each their own, but- it seemed a bit confusing."
I think it's actually vital for a person to dredge as deep as they can in order to figure out why they are or are not comfortable with things, particularly when the implications are potentially quite broad.
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I think a lot of people in gender-egal settings haven't so much confronted the gender-differentientation in halakha and rejected it so much as they have either grown up with this system or adopted this and can't see halakha without it. I was in that position for quite a while- maybe I still am, it's hard to tell in some ways. I try though, at least.
That was one of the tricky parts. "Without communal support" ended up meaning Both "without any significant number of other Jews around" and "without any significant number of other Jews who make Shabbos meals around".
It's very hard to weigh out the component aspects of a practice that has almost no defined practice besides general timing and I guess the gender of the participants...
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You're probably right; David Fine argues that this reality has halakhic significance for those who hold by the Roth teshuva on egalitarianism. At best, I think this is a case of following a bet din she-ta'u (hashkafically, not necessarily halakhically).
Did your study correlate with more general trends of men vs. women who made meals for themselves and/or others during the week?
"It's very hard to weigh out the component aspects of a practice that has almost no defined practice besides general timing and I guess the gender of the participants..."
I can think of at least two: Perpetuating gendering in social/ritual matters and ad hoc creation of ritual. I'm sure there are more.
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1) Whence "different social needs"? Are they foundational or mutable?
2) Ritual seems to me to be a type of social event that addresses a plethora of human needs (individual and communal). If human needs are gendered as you suggest, is it possible that the ritual of (communal?) tefillah should also be gendered to best fulfil those needs?
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Why does it smell like halokho doesn't have primacy in a community that holds thus?
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In the parlance of modernity, social convention gains its strength from claiming scientific (often biological, sometimes sociological) foundationalism, which is basically the same thing as claiming to be from God (which is just another foundationalist language, although it needn't be).
And there are at least two serious errors in this paragraph. The first is your divorce of halokho from social convention. (One of the reasons that people find halokho's delineations of gender roles "not OK" is because the social conventions codified in halokho no longer accord with the way those codified activities are experienced -- the social coventions have shifted.) The second error is your assumption that halokho has overarching theory of gender roles. (A third error is to use the word "halokho" to imply univocality as opposed to multivocality, and potentially a fourth is using "halokho" as a synechdochy at all.)