A JOFA JOURNEY

Along with my five siblings I grew up in a Conservative Jewish home but found myself increasingly drawn to Orthodoxy and in my late 20s finally declared myself Orthodox.

I was happy with my newfound Orthodoxy.  Happy, that is, until some years later when I felt stirrings of discontent which grew louder and which I was increasingly unable to quiet.

Along this journey I studied texts on my own, attended many classes and went to shul regularly.  And I loved all these opportunities to learn and to pray.

However, in my late 40s I began feeling very uncomfortable as I wondered, for example, why one of the daily prayers men recite thanks G-d for not making them a woman.

When the Sefer Torah was held aloft, and we say the words, “This is the Torah which Moses placed before the children of Israel,” I became distressed that, in some shuls, I could not see the Torah because the women’s section was too far back, or the balcony was too high up, or the mechitzah too opaque and tall.

I didn’t understand why scholars-in-residence were always men.

On tombstones, why was the name of the mother of the deceased not included?  Why were the names of the mothers of the bride and groom not written in the ketubah?

I even began to wonder why bentschers included images only of men, except for a few which had images of women lighting candles.

But most painful of all was my growing awareness of the terrible plight of agunot.

I began questioning so much of what I had believed in for 20 years.  But I still loved Orthodoxy with all its richness and depth of observance.

To whom could I turn for answers?  Was it possible for things to be different?  And if so, how?

And I felt lonely, for who else could possibly have these same questions and yearnings.

In February of 1997 I attended the First Conference on Feminism and Orthodoxy, a two day event that changed my life forever.

My confusion, searching and questions were addressed in the numerous seminars and workshops and in the conversations so many of us had throughout the two days.

Still ringing in my ears are the words of the closing plenary’s speaker, “Tear down those balconies! Judaism is not a spectator sport.”

Here I was among a like-minded group of women and men who believed halacha allowed for women to participate more fully in all spheres of religious life.

JOFA was created from this conference in 1997, and I had the great fortune and joy to be asked to join the founding board.

My yearning to empower Orthodox Jewish women grew and became an integral part of my life.  I came to believe in maximizing the potential of Orthodox women in all areas of life – in their families, shuls, schools, and in Jewish communal organizations—to the full extent possible within halacha.  And I believed that through this meaningful participation in Jewish life, the whole of the Jewish world would be enriched and elevated.

It was JOFA that shaped my formerly inchoate ideas and dreams into clear goals.

And then my funding began to flow from these values and this passion and this commitment to JOFA’s ideals.

At the same time JOFA was taking shape, my siblings and I were assuming a greater role in the stewardship of our family foundation.  And as I took courses in grantmaking and met with my mentor, Barbara Dobkin, and with others so important to the development of my thinking, I began to look closely at the way I did my funding.

I began formulating a tzedaka plan aligned with my values and passions.

When I was asked to donate $18 per letter for a new Sefer Torah, I asked the solicitor if women and girls were going to be allowed to read from this Torah.  When the answer was no, I responded that I could not give any money to this project, but that I would be happy to consider future donations for a Torah that would be read by women and girls.

When solicited by organizations that did not allow women officers, I responded that since I believed women should be allowed to serve in leadership positions I could not support their organizations.

I could not give to a girls’ Yeshiva which did not have the study of Talmud included in its curriculum.

And I came to love JOFA more and more, and fund it more and more.  It became the primary recipient of my tzedaka.

For JOFA embodied all that I believed in.

JOFA promotes women’s leadership, works to influence schools to be more gender sensitive with its personnel and its programming, teaches how to celebrate life cycle events in a more inclusive way, educates us in how to increase women’s participation in synagogue life, struggles to ameliorate the problem of agunot, shows us how to enrich our spiritual lives.  And it urges us to give tzedaka in a thoughtful way—a way that expresses clearly our most deeply held values and beliefs.

Change cannot happen by itself.  It requires our ideas, our voices, and our money.

JOFA imagines a different future, a changed future, one with limitless possibilities. JOFA educates people as to what this future looks like, inspires us to believe in this different future and advocates for this future. JOFA imagines, inspires, educates and advocates.

We all have the power to enrich, elevate, empower and actualize the potential of Jewish women. By so doing we create a just, fair and compassionate world.

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חלום חלמתי ואינו יודע מה הוא: I’ve dreamt a dream, and I don’t know what it means. (Talmud Brakhot 55b)

This wasn’t my dream; it was Blu Greenberg’s I’m talking about. I like to say that I was there at the birth of JOFA—actually I was there at the conception. Blu had a dream, a conference of Orthodox women to talk about expanding their spiritual, ritual and intellectual roles within the framework of halakha. Her wonderful friend, Esther Farber a”h, brought my sister into the mix and my sister corralled me. The conference exceeded expectations. We ran out of chairs. People sat on the floor, hung from the rafters. The highlight: One woman saying to another—I thought I was the only one who felt this way.

חלום חלמתי ואינו יודע מה הוא …

The dream: Part Two. Blu brought a group of us together and said we should form an organization devoted to the goals of the conference. And, she said, let’s hope that in a few years we will have accomplished all our goals and be out of business.

And one evening, surrounded by a group of like-minded incredible women, our young lawyer, Laura Shaw Frank, read us the articles of incorporation and we voted unanimously to accept them. JOFA was born.

Those early years are a fond memory. Those of us on the executive committee met once a week in Riverdale around the table in Blu’s kitchen or dining room. There, I might add, our fabrenta feminist leader served us hot cereal as we debated our future. And what debates! We thought we could bring a systemic solution to the agunah travesty. We were told by some rabbis that the solutions are there, and we just needed rabbis who would study and use them. We thought, naively, that if we got a group of rabbis together and talked around my dining room table and charged them with the task they would make it happen. We were wrong. Not only were we powerless to make change, but we were unable to get the rabbis to come together to discuss change. We thought that we could promote women in leadership roles. That, too, has been difficult. Some rabbis called us pagans. Others used the argument of tseniut, modesty. They say it is immodest for women to take on leadership roles. Some of these same rabbis will not allow a yoetzet halakha in their synagogues. It is better to bring the intimate questions of niddah to a male authority.  The spokesperson for Agudas Yisrael says women rabbis demean women. I quote: “Whether ordaining Orthodox women violates a specific halakha is unimportant. It’s still wrong.”  Is there a halkahic issue with women and leadership? Agudas Yisrael argues that the Shulhan Arukh doesn’t say that you can’t put a cat in an aron kodesh, but we know it isn’t right. If you recall a number of years ago another rabbi was furious that a woman would read a ketubah at a wedding. Well, he said, it’s not that it’s a halakhic prohibition—even a monkey can read a ketubah.

חלום חלמתי ואינו יודע מה הוא…..We had a dream and we didn’t know what it would bring….

Sadly we are not yet out of business. But we have accomplished a lot. A simhat bat ceremony to welcome the birth of a girl is a given now in most communities. And the celebration of a bat mitzvah is catching on even in hareidi homes. JOFA publishes Shema beKolah, divrei Torah written and edited by women. The JOFA Journal, each issue covering a specific topic, is read by over 5,000 people and is being used by study groups and as part of school curricula. We have begun a series of halakhic source guides on topics relating to women, Ta Shma. The first three are “May Women Touch a Torah Scroll,” “Women’s Obligation in Kiddush of Shabbat,” and “A Daughter’s Recitation of Kaddish”—with others to follow. We published our first book: Women and Men in Communal Prayer: A Halakhic Perspective written by Rabbi Daniel Sperber and Rabbi Mendel Shapiro

עת ספוד ועת רקוד —A time to mourn and a time to dance…. (Kohelet 3:4)

Today is a celebration, a time to dance. Though many of our dreams have been trampled on and some have been deferred, many have also been realized. Seneca, a Roman philosopher, once said: It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare; it is because we do not dare that things are difficult.

I hope that we at JOFA will continue to dare—and to dream.

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Putting Women Back in the Picture: A Celebration

November 20, 2011

Scroll of Honor Essay by Blu Greenberg

I was blessed to grow up in a home that taught me that Judaism is much more than a collection of laws and customs to be practiced.  My father and mother, z”l, made clear that Torah and tradition are a way of serving God by living a life of honesty, uprightness and chessed. Everyone who knew my parents understood that their commitment to Torah and deep faith enabled them to be this way. When I grew older, I understood this Judaism as a covenant, a partnership between God and humanity, and between the generations, as my parents sought to pass on to their family the values and commitments they had inherited.

I’ve also had the good fortune to be married to a man for whom covenant is a core of Judaism. Tzelem elokim – that every human image of God be treated as equal, unique, and of infinite value – infuses and informs all of his teachings and relationships.

So to me, JOFA has never been just about “expanding [women’s] spiritual, ritual, intellectual and political opportunities …within halakha”, never just about freeing agunot or ordaining women.  The purpose of JOFA was nothing less than to join society in moving closer to a just and equitable world; JOFA’s focus would be on a very small segment of the world—our own universe of Orthodox women.  We understood that in this increasingly egalitarian society, Orthodox Judaism must reach for the biblical paradigm of men and women, created as equals, in the image of God.

How does a covenant between God and humanity work?  Covenant involves compromise and forward motion, a process begun at Sinai.  The Torah mediated between the ideal of gender equality and realities of society.  In 1250BCE, women could be bought and sold as chattels. The Torah’s correction was that henceforth, a man could sell his daughter only to someone who would marry her and treat her as a free wife.  [Ex. 21:6].  Another correction was to require a written gett which protected wives against the impulsive oral divorce that surely terrorized all Mesopotamian women. [Deut. 24]

The process continued — with God counting on human partners in history to keep moving closer to the ideal. That is what Torah sheh b’al peh is about, and the function of Rabbis in every generation.   Centuries after Sinai, the Rabbis added a ketubah with its financial protections. Centuries later, they forbad forcible divorce.  In every generation, as women’s status improved and conditions in society changed, the Rabbis sought to bring tradition closer to the Torah’s ideals.

Each generation under the covenant takes the Torah as far as it can go until someday the messianic world of full equality will be attained. In this sense, we Jewish feminists are part of the mesorah, not outside of it, as some would have others believe.  We are links in the unbroken and unbreakable chain on the way to redemption. We are transmitters of the mesorah to future generations, carrying forward covenant goals and ideals.  It is those who hold back progress, hold women in personal limbo or diminish their humanity, who turn the precious chain of tradition into chains of injustice.  But the task will not be put down until the covenant dream is realized, until our community is liberated from oppression of agunot, from denial of opportunity and leadership, religious experience and expression of its women.

One last word about covenant:  We tend to think of ‘covenant’ in terms of Torah, the generations, Shabbat, marriage…   But there is another dimension to covenant that I did not understand until I stepped down as president: that JOFA itself is a profoundly covenantal institution.  Yes, gratefully, we’ve witnessed progress in women’s learning, in leadership, tefillah, and life cycle ceremonies.  Still, given Orthodoxy’s naturally slow pace of change, given the resistance of some rabbinic authorities who equate Orthodoxy with no change, the goals carried by JOFA could never be reached in discrete presidential terms.  But in true covenantal fashion, the organizational structure enables others to step forward and carry on this sacred work.

I am deeply grateful to my co-honorees, to Carol who moved the organization to greater heights, greatly professionalizing it during her tenure, and to Judy, who took the reins after Carol. I know that both have taken JOFA along with them on vacations and deep into the nights.  I am grateful to Zelda, generous Zelda, who has mentored for so many the model of principled giving, which she credits to her mentor, Barbara Dobkin.  I feel grateful to the JOFA board– who give time, energy and soul to bring justice and betterment to the lives of others. And I want to remember those who were there from the beginning but are no longer –Esther Farber, Honey Rackman, and Natalie Friedman, z”l. I greatly appreciate the work of Robin and our dedicated staff who are a joy to work with, and I wish Robin well on her next challenge.  I feel gratitude to the members of JOFA who walk this history together as a real force, and gratitude to friends present and not present, whose generosity enables our work to go forward.  My special thanks to Giti and Jacky, Belda and Marcel, and Barbara and the dinner committee, for producing this wonderful event. And I thank my family, for always, always being the source of unadulterated happiness.  I thank God for all these blessings, and for creating me a Jewish woman at this moment in history.

Plenty of work for JOFA remains. Tonight, we declare that we will neither tire nor cease. As Isaiah promised (40:31): “Those who trust in Hashem shall renew their strength; they shall run and not grow weary: they shall march and not grow faint.”

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Putting Women Back in the Picture:

A Wonderful Celebration

Thank You!

A fantastic evening… The room was packed and full of energy…

The art exhibit resonated…

Over 420 people joined the celebration!

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