Shelley Lindauer
Response to Doug Barden

It is not surprising that our synagogue- based women’s and men’s groups so closely parallel each other in mission and feeling.  Though the stated mission of Women of Reform Judaism is broader and more global than that expressed in Doug’s piece for b rotherhood, both groups embrace the ideology of service to our local congregations and communities. Both groups are clearly committed to working collaboratively within our congregations while still retaining our single-gender identity.

What is surprising to me is that all of our congregations do not encourage, and in some cases even forbid, the formation of these groups in the interest of upholding the doctrine of equality. Sisterhoods offer the women of our congregations the opportunity to come together as women in an environment filled with spirituality and camaraderie.  This group dynamic nurtures and fortifies the connection our women feel to their congregations and to our Movement. Sisterhood was the stepping stone for many of our female congregational leaders, who were empowered by the training and skills learned in their wom en’s group.

Several years ago, I met with clergy at a congregation that was disbanding its sisterhood at the directive of the senior rabbi. Though the women wanted to continue to meet, even on a social basis, the rabbi had determined that no single-gender groups were to meet in the congregation. In addition, his associate rabbi, a woman in her thirties, felt that women’s groups were no longer necessary. A s she said to me: “We appreciate how hard our mother s worked to achieve equality for women, but now the job is done.”

I greatly admire and respect these rabbis, but in this matter I feel both were short-sighted.  What could possibly be the down side of having a women’s group meet within congregational walls ?  Does it not make a statement of the women’s commitment to the congregation to choose to meet there and not in someone’s home? Is it not a benefit for the women to hear and observe what’s going on and to feel actively engaged with their congregational community? Is not the vibrancy and vitality of congregational life enhanced by the connection of these women to their temple? How can a woman’s commitment to a congregational affiliate ever be construed as a negative?

As for the “job being done,” though women have made incredible strides in working toward gender advancement in the twentieth century, we are still far from enjoying gender equality.  

According to the National Organization for Women, nearly seventy-five percent of the nation’s elderly poor are women, and the income of older women is approximately half the income of older men. Women still earn less than men for comparable work. In 2006, though nearly half of all workers in management, professional, and related occupations were women, they earned 81 cents for each dollar their male counterpart earned.

Insurance companies regularly charge women a higher premium then men for the same benefits, or provide them with less protection or benefits then men for the same premium.  Women who are lucky enough to receive a pension receive only half as much as men and they are only half as likely as men to receive a pension at all. Women are seriously underrepresented in political office. Seventeen percent of the House of Representatives and sixteen percent of the Senate are women, yet women represent more than fifty percent of the total population. 

Sexual harassment didn’t disappear with legislation. T he US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports that from 1992 to 1996, the number of sexual harassment lawsuits has increased by fourteen percent, with Generation X women most affected. And reproductive choice, the freedom that Baby Boomer women worked so hard to gain, is once again threatened.

In our long history, Sisterhood has traditionally taken the lead in advocating on behalf of these issues. Our mothers and grandmothers planned, organized, marched, wrote and lobbied to ensure that we would have the right to vote, that we would be protected under employment laws, that we would have every opportunity available to men, that we would have the right to control our bodies, that we could be rabbis and cantors in our congregations. We need to continue that work, to ensure the hard gains won by the women who came before us are gains that will be enhanced and enjoyed by future generations of women.

No two sisterhoods are alike, just as no two congregations are alike.  The demographics and the role assumed within the congregation vary from sisterhood to sisterhood.  What does not vary, however, is the devotion and concern of our sisterhood women to their congregations, Reform Judaism, and to equality and justice for all.

Doug Barden
Response to Shelley Lindauer

As Shelley reminded us last week, a truly historic event happened last December, when the URJ Press publishing WRJ’s The Torah: A Women’s Commentary. It is an extraordinary and long overdue achievement. On behalf of Men of Reform Judaism (MRJ), I offer my sincere congratulations on a job well done, and at the same time, thank you for presenting MRJ and our brotherhoods with an interesting dilemma.

Next Saturday morning, many brotherhood presidents will be doing what they have done for the better part of eighty-five years: presenting gifts on the bimahto a b ar or b at m itzvah candidate. Until last month, there really wasn’t much to consider in terms of the gift from the brotherhood. Aside from a personally engraved Kiddush cup, brotherhoods have traditionally given the bar or bat mitzvah a copy of Gunther Plaut’s Torah Commentary. This book has been the standard, a best seller for years. Now there is a new alternative…

First question: “Is WRJ (or anyone else) recommending that MRJ affiliated brotherhoods now present this book as a gift at all bat m itzvahs?” I am going out on a limb on your answer: “Absolutely.”

But now the second question: “Is WRJ (or anyone else) recommending that MRJ affiliated brotherhoods now present this book as a gift at all bar m itzvahs?”  

This is not being asked rhetorically, for I can safely assume that, unlike a number of women’s-only promoted/marketed events (e.g. Rosh Chodesh, Women’s Seder, Women’s Shabbaton, etc.), the publication of a Women’s Torah Commentary was not designed to be read or experienced by only one gender. If that was so, then it will, in my opinion, have ultimately failed to advance us as a truly gender egalitarian Movement. Rather, if a goal of this book is for all of us, women and men, to hear the voices of our sisters, voices that have been unfairly silenced for so long, shouldn’t it be read by a young man first grappling with being a contemporary Reform Jewish male? If not now, when?  

On behalf of MRJ, I am prepared and look forward to working with WRJ and other interested parties in trying to figure out how best to ensure that this book gets into the hands of your brothers!  But what about some reciprocity?

The reality is that congregational support for serious men’s-only activities is too often seriously lacking. There has to be more to a brotherhood in the future than giving out books, funding scholarships for URJ summer camps or NFTY trips. Brotherhood has to be a place where the unfinished business of the ‘women’s movement’ can occur: where men can, at times only in the company of other men, explore and celebrate what it means to be a contemporary Reform Jewish male. Our goals within our Movement must be to honor and to make a space for both the feminine and masculine spirits in the religious life of our people. Just as Jewish women must search out ways to access and celebrate their spiritual energy, so Jewish men must search out ways to access and celebrate their own spiritual energy. And while every temple, and in a broader sense, the entire Reform Movement, is best served only when both men and women engage fully in congregational life, sometimes, not always, but sometimes, that means creating women’s-only space and men’s- only space. It is time for the rabbinic and lay leadership of our M ovement, men and women, to let men and their brotherhoods do some serious work! 

So I ask a favor of WRJ and our readers. A t around the same time WRJ published the “WTC,” MRJ worked with URJ Press on the publication of two books. T he first, The Still Small Voice, Reflections on Being a Jewish Man,is filled with nearly fifty contemporary Reform Jewish men’s personal stories. The second publication, The Gender Gap: Beginning the Conversation about Men’s Involvement in our Synagogues, encourages our congregations to overcome their concerns and doubts and begin to engage in long overdue gender- related discussions.

If only men read these books, we will have failed to advance as a truly gender egalitarian Movement. I sincerely hope and believe that our sisters will find the time and interest to hear what their husbands, fathers, partners, sons, brothers and grandsons are thinking! I invite WRJ and other interested parties to work with MRJ in helping to figure out how we can get these books into the hands of our sisters!

(No, at this time I am not proposing [ as some on a number of URJ list serves have] , that it is time for MRJ to produce a new The Torah: A Contemporary Man’s Commentary! Though that is a very interesting proposition…)