לקריאה בעברית | Read in Hebrew
How does a woman, who views herself as a religious feminist, read the following poem?
Eve | Orit Klopstock
Fluttering wings of an ovary
A sack of compassion
As the moon wanes
Shedding
Tears of blood
I am devoid of AdamHe shall enter me
A membrane torn asunder
A butterfly of rapture
Enraptured
I will blossom into fruit
Bearing the world withinAnd within me, the chaos of awe
The throes of sorrow and joy intertwined
Tears of blood
I am brimming with Adam.
“This is the law of the woman giving birth,” states the parsha (Vayikra 12:7). It is referring to the ‘days of purification’ that a woman must count between giving birth and when “she shall be purified from the source of her blood“.
The repetition of the Hebrew word ‘dam’ (blood) in Orit Klopstock’s poem Eve mirrors a similar repetition in the opening verses of this week’s parsha, Tazria. The parsha discusses a woman who has given birth and other phenomena such as skin lesions and leprosy, as part of a broader central theme in the Book of Vayikra which comprises ‘Torat Kohanim’ (the Laws of the Priests). In fact, structuring reality around the status of ‘impurity’ and ‘purity’ is a recurring key theme in the Torah’s general description of a life of holiness, not just here.
How does Klopstock’s poem strike us? Does it trigger resistance, a rejection of its infuriating essentialism? Or, on the contrary, a sense of identification? The range of reactions – from identification with the poem’s descriptions to refutation of this mythical narrative about Eve, and everything in between – finds its parallel in various streams of feminism, including religious feminism.
The contents of this week’s parsha raise questions about how women who identify with religious feminism read descriptions of impurity and purity in their immediate biblical context, and how they engage more broadly with parshat Tazria’s influence on halakhic life when it comes to a woman’s impure status after birth, miscarriage, or niddah in general.
These questions will resurface next week in our encounter with the metzora (leper), and they are, in fact, part of the ongoing discourse at the intersection between feminism and halakha, even if we do not always pause to recognize this fact.
The halakhic Q&A website ‘Din’ features a scholarly response from one of its team of anonymous rabbinic responders to a female inquirer’s questions on niddah. The woman describes various physical occurrences in her gynecological system and asks whether these hold any practical significance for her status as pure or impure. The rabbi answers her as follows [abbreviated, owing to the detailed descriptions and the potential for triggering; the full response can be found on the Hebrew website]:1
Halakhic authorities have already stated in their writings that our women today do not ‘feel’ […] Nowadays, women arrive at the point of childbirth without even knowing that they are significantly dilated […] There is no woman who feels this today. What you feel is meaningless…
The words of the anonymous responding rabbi are certainly intended to help; his goal is to facilitate halakhic leniency and ease women’s lives. The problem is that his rhetoric completely dismisses the woman’s detailed description (“what you feel is meaningless”), and, even more troubling, is tied to a broader generalization about women (…”there is no woman who feels this today”). Furthermore, his reliance on real-life examples that he considers definitive – drawn from the delivery room – serves to place the posek on a footing equal to the medical authority responsible for the woman giving birth, as the decisive figure across the board. The woman’s own reports are insufficient, as exemplified in the case described here.
In recent years, as more women become morot halakha and meshivot (halakhic instructors and responders) in various areas, the question arises as to women’s halakhic responses on the specific topic of niddah. In enabling women to decide halakha, is the goal to create a talmid hakham (Torah scholar) who just happens to be female? Or is it rather to bring into the world a new paradigm of a talmidat hakhamim, a female Torah scholar who synthesizes between her world of scholarly knowledge and her life experience as a woman, both in general and vis- à-vis mitzvot in particular? This question is predicated on a large number of basic assumptions and hence results in different answers that do not necessarily coexist harmoniously.
At the same time, various methods of fertility awareness have been adopted in recent years by women who pay close attention to what is happening in their bodies, either from a desire to conceive or to avoid pregnancy. So, one of the fascinating challenges in the religious feminist domain is the intersection between the woman who practices and is highly proficient in fertility awareness method(s), and the woman knowledgeable in fertility/infertility and other niddah-related laws, to whom halakhic questions are addressed. Can there indeed be a genuine dialogue between the two, respecting the knowledge each of type of woman brings, and from there leading to a halakhic answer? Or will the meshiva perhaps feel that her primary responsibility is to reply in a way that disregards the woman’s report about her own body, echoing the sentiment: “No woman feels this today… what you feel is meaningless”?
Will religious feminism succeed in incorporating the different paths rather than merely parroting the statement “What you feel is meaningless” and its ilk? Will we (inspired by the garment theme in our parsha’s concluding verse) succeed in ‘weaving’ different voices into a single garment, without canceling other voices? Questions about the disregard for women’s reports – and the high cost paid for deeming them unreliable – have increasingly occupied me recently and will likely continue to do so during this shabbat’s Torah reading.
Translated by Jeremy Kuttner
