Rabbi David Ellenson analyzed three Jewish feminist thinkers and their understanding of Jewish Law during last Tuesday’s 52nd-annual Simon Rawidowicz Memorial Lecture.

Prof. Jonathan Decter (NEJS) began the lecture, explaining that Rawidowicz came to the University in the 1950s after fleeing from Nazi-ruled Europe and became the first department chair of the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies program. He helped create its graduate program as well. Prof. Eugene Sheppard (NEJS) then introduced Ellenson, the acting director of the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies and a visiting NEJS professor. Sheppard also noted his personal connection to Ellenson, who taught Sheppard while he was studying at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ellenson’s lecture, which was titled “To Reshape the World: Interpretation, Renewal and Feminist Approaches to Jewish Law,” focused on the work of three Jewish feminist thinkers — Rachel Adler, Tamar Ross and Dr. Ronit Irshai — but began by discussing Rawidowicz. Ellenson noted that Rawidowicz’s famous interpretation of the two houses of Judaism — the first, the Judaism of the Bible full of original interpretation, and the second, the Judaism of the Diaspora filled with the works of Rabbis — needs a new understanding. This new understanding of Rawidowicz is necessary, he claimed, because even in the second house, “all interpretation is, of course, creation and, inescapably, involves inventiveness and imagination. The moment we begin to conceptualize our sensory data while applying certain laws and forms to them, we are already involved in a process of what [Rawidowicz] labels interpretation.”

Ellenson then moved into a discussion of the three thinkers, noting that they all “have attempted to reshape the world of Halacha [Jewish Law] by exposing many of its assumptions and explaining its concerns. … They seek, through novel interpretations and discussions of arguments with one another, to reshape the contours and the substance of Jewish faith and practice in our time.”

Adler, Ellenson explained, provided the foundation for the other two thinkers, since she argued Judaism, specifically Orthodox Judaism, treats women more like religious objects than people. Ellenson noted Adler focused on Jewish marriage, presented as a metaphor of acquisition of the wife by the husband, which “fails to express love [and] the feelings of reciprocity and concern that more properly characterize the bonds that obtain between two people who wish to sanctify their devotion to one another as permanent partners.”

Ellenson then moved into a discussion of Ross’s three assumptions for divine revelation with human involvement. First, she assumes that Jewish law is a series of ongoing learnings; second, she assumes God’s word is heard through the study of Rabbinical texts and history; and third, she assumes the original message of Jewish law is not replicable. Ellenson observed the differences between Adler and Ross, remarking, “Ross’s charge is that Adler does not appreciate the divinity of what Ross still regards as a revealed tradition and that Adler does not therefore adequately situate herself on the bridge of Jewish legal tradition as Ross does.” Ellenson also discussed the backlash Ross received from Orthodox men, who accused her of being heretical, and noted that Ross paved the way with her counterarguments to those who rejected her.

Next, Ellenson focused on Irshai’s discussion of the Jewish views of birth control, which Irshai claims are more primarily centered on the woman’s role as a vehicle for giving birth rather than seeing the woman as a person. Ellenson noted that for Irshai, “the question of birth control would leave the domain of pure Halacha and become a matter of political control in which the personhood of a woman is diminished, and the power she, as opposed to male [decision-makers], can exercise is nonexistent.” Ellenson noted that rejections of Irshai’s work focused more on exceptions to the rule and “[miss] the point that Irshai and her colleagues are making. Even if the attitudes of some [decision-makers] are seemingly consistent with modern feminist statement regarding setting priorities in this highly-charged debate, [they dismiss] the overarching and powerful thrust that Irshai and her colleagues have been making over and over again about the nature of traditional Halachik discourse.”

Ellenson closed his lecture with a personal story of his connection to Adler, for whose book “Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics,” he wrote the forward, and remarked, “What these women have done is to indicate that human beings are not … even within the Orthodox world only Ha’Medabrim, men who speak … but the women who speak [as well].” The lecture and event were sponsored by the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry, the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute and the Valya and Robert Shapiro Endowment.