Book The Men’s Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an Egalitarian World By Elana Maryles Sztokman
Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press 269 pages; hardcover $85, paperback $29.95, ebook $27.99
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n 1996, shortly after my mother died, I searched for a local minyan where I could say kaddish. At the time, the only afternoon minyan I could find was in an Orthodox shul. The men there were so jarred by my presence, they brought in movable partitions to surround me and after they had penned me off, one said: “Make sure we can’t hear you.” I left before the davening began. That was the last time I went to an Orthodox shul until 2004, when I attended an erev Shabbat service at Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem, one of the first “Ortho-egalitarian” or “partnership minyanim” (a term coined by JOFA, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance). Here, I was told, women could lead the congregation in prayers (the ones that don’t require a quorum) and layn (chant Torah) in front of men. The goal was to include women in ritual leadership roles to the greatest extent possible within the bounds of halacha (Jewish law). I was impressed by the hundreds of people who came to this service and by their youth and enthusiasm. But at the same time, it felt old to me, perhaps because I remembered the beginnings of Jewish feminism in the 1970s and ’80s in America and its struggle for acknowledgment in the Reform and Conservative movements. As I watched this Orthodox congregation endeavoring to make room for women, my only question was: Why did it take so long? I found part of the answer in Elana Sztokman’s fascinating study of Orthodox men and feminism in partnership congregations. If partnership minyanim represent a new frontier for modern Orthodoxy (there are 22 partnership congrega22
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tions now in Israel, North America and Australia), then perhaps the men who joined them could tell us something about how the feminist challenge has affected them as religious Jewish men. With that assumption, Elana Sztokman, a Hebrew University-trained sociologist and a founding member of a partnership synagogue in Modi’in, Israel, interviewed 54 men about their reasons for joining partnership congregations, their backgrounds and experiences, and what it is like for them to share formerly gender-specific roles in the service. Their responses take us inside the world of Orthodox Jewish manhood, its ideal types and the nonconformists who are resisting its stereotypes. Some men gave answers she anticipated: One respondent said he joined his shul because “living in a world that does not take into account feminist insights is a moral injustice and a halachic injustice.” A father talked about his pride at how beautifully his daughter layns. But most men did not cite the participation of women as the reason for their choice. One mentioned a desire for greater halachic flexibility in general: “I can’t bear sitting in shul with loads of Pope Piuses running around, getting worried about whether you opened the ark with your left hand or your right.” Others simply said they liked the atmosphere, the communal singing, the more spiritual experience of davening, or the welcoming community they found for their families there. “When I embarked on this research project, I assumed the partnership synagogue to be the most feminist place in which Orthodox Jewish men could belong,” Sztokman writes. “It was not very long after I began that I realized this population of men is hardly what one could call a predominantly feminist or even profeminist group.… Men come to the partnership synagogue for a whole
host of reasons, the overwhelming majority of which have nothing to do with feminism.” Sztokman hits on an important truth, however, when she discusses the powerful connection between the synagogue and masculine gender identity for Orthodox men. Synagogue rituals, in fact, define masculinity in the minds of many Orthodox men — and sharing them in this shared space is a powerful challenge to their sense of self. “Overall, layning and hazzanut are central components of Orthodox masculinity that include an entire array of expected behaviors, such as meticulous performance, perfectionism, emotionlessness, and verbal-cerebral spirituality,” she writes, referring to the cultural baggage men bring apart from halacha. As a participant in her congregation as well as an observer, Sztokman reacts to attempts by some men to control the service and their tendency to criticize women by the standards in which they were raised. “Although women are allowed to lead certain parts of the service, many men still assume that women are less capable,” she writes. One respondent told her that certain men “roll their eyes when women get up to read, or take out a book to read until a man steps up.” Other men complain that women aren’t serious enough about the obligations they take on; they are not punctual, they are not perfectionists, they are not committed, they are hafifniks (slackers). Most of all, the men seem to fear being judged “not Orthodox” by other congregations, or even worse, “Reform,” which they see as an American import and associate with wimpy men who have given in on all gender issues. Sztokman is shocked when one member asks the women not to participate in the service on the weekend of his son’s bar mitzvah so that
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