r.

3.,




-- A. me.

A Question of Boundaries: Toward a Jewish
Feminist Theology of Self and Others

 

Rachel Adler

K?nai l?kha chaver: This teaches that a person should set
himself a companion, to eat with him, rink with him, study
Bible with him, study Misbrza wit/9 him, sleep with him,
and reveal to him all his secrets, secrets of Tara/3 and se-
crets of tbz?izgsnAvot d?Rabbi atan 8.

kind of intimacy: the study-companion relation-

ship. The c/aaverim do not simply study Bible and
Mishna; the very structure of their relationship and the
nature of its boundaries present a Jewish model for the
relation between the self and the other. In this relation-
ship, people experience each other as whole, rather than
as fragmented, beings. Companionship is simultaneously
physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.

Self and other are not sharply separate here. To be
c/Javerim is to be neither fused nor counterposed, but to
be juxtaposed. The root CH-B-R means to join together
at the boundaries. The curtains of the tabernacle, for in?
stance, are chemo! is/Ja e1 acbotab, ?joined one to another?
(Exod. 26: 3).

Boundaries define the shape and extent of an entity,
and distinguish between what is inside and what is out.
They maintain the integrity of the entity and keep it from
dribbling out into everything else. Setting the boundaries
of entities and formulating categories for them is the way
we make sense of a vast and diverse world.

Some boundaries are barricadeswchainlink fences
guarded by Dobermans. Others are not primarily barri-
ers but loci of interaction. A cell membrane, for example,
is part of the living substance of the cell. It is the perime-
ter at which the cell conducts its interchanges with other
cells??the contacts, the flowings in and out, which main-
tain its life within its environment. The boundary between
self and other in our passage from Avot d?Rabbi Nataiz re-
sembles this living, permeable boundary.

The boundary of c/Javerim requires two entities suffi-
ciently alike to be capable of bonding; it presupposes an
other who is experienced as akin to the self. In From A
Broken We: Separation, Sexism, and Sal}: feminist philo-
sopher Catherine Keller contends that the notion of an
other experienced as analogous and contiguous to the self

This rabbinic text describes a distinctively Jewish

 

 

RatheIAa?ler lives in LosAngeles and has written extensively
about women andjudaism.

is alien to Western philosophy. She asserts that since the
time of Hegel, \X?cstern thinkers have understood bound-
aries as barriers that entities erect to protect their integrity
in an invasive war of all against all. According to this for-
mulation, opposition and subjugation are the means by
which we make the world make sense. In other words, I
can only be an 1?3 subject?by objectifying you and
making you less significant than myself.

Keller and other feminist theorists argue that opposi-
tion and subjugation particularly characrerize patriarchal
modes of making boundaries and making sense. Conse-
quently, in patriarchal societies the structure of thought
itself predisposes us to Split and separate rather than to
perceive interconnections and interdependencies. Susan
Griffin describes how patriarchal category-making carves
the universe into dualisms. At the heart of this dichoto-
mous system is a definition of normative humanity as
maleness and irreducible otherness as femaleness. And
that is how woman comes to be the first stranger.

By exclusively claiming normative humanity, patriar-
chal man denies that there exists among all the members
of his species a human similarity in whose context human
difference takes on meaning. He splits himself off, alien-
ating himself from the females of his kind, and an infinite
series of dualisms proceeds from this splitting. In each
dualism, the superior term is associated with patriarchal
man while the inferior and dependent term is identified
with woman. Heaven and earth, light and darkness, clean-
liness and filth, good and evil, freedom and slavery, suf-
ficiency and lack, all are made to mirror the estrangement
of patriarchal man from the woman he has cast out. These
dichotomies are then used to justify the subordination
and exclusion of all who are consigned to the feminizecl
category of the other.

Keller charges that monotheism is a product of this pa-
triarchal splitting. Pained by the fragmentation of self and
world that he has engineered, patriarchal man longs for
unity. But he conceives of it not as the reunion of all he
has driven apart, but as the conquest and incorporation
of the realms of the other. The god of the patriarchal
philosophers, omnipotent, passionless, and utterly alone,
is simply a projection of the patriarch?s own desire for ab-
solute self?sufficiency and self-control. This god serves
both as a model and as a justification for all patriarchy?s
tyrannies and exclusions. The charges in Keller?s critique

43

 

.

 

 I



- I

 

 

 

 

can be substantiated, to varying degrees, by texts and
events within all three monotheistic faiths. However, Ju-
daism cannot be reduced to the misconceived monothe-
ism Keller describes. Instead, I would like to argue that
as Jews we have available to us a different way to de?ne
the relation between self and other: to reconstitute the
objectified other as a subject; and to understand a sub-
ject as a self with permeable boundaries contiguous with
the boundaries of neighbor-selves. This Torah of self and
other, which we saw re?ected in our text about the study-
companions, grounds not only our capacity to be chauerz'nz
but our capacity to create tzedeh, justice-as-righteousness.
Tzedeh is a justice far richer and more particularized than
the abstracted, objective fairness of Western liberalism.
Its goal is to embody the Torah of self and other in a so-
cial matrix that allows all human beings to ?ourish.

 

The central narrative of
fua?az'srn enzhodzes an 
challenge to the polarized
thought structures
ofpatrz'archz'es.

 

However, the one relationship thatJewish tradition has
consistently refused to incorporate into this Torah of self
and other is the relationship between women and men.
Instead, Jewish tradition permits men to define them-
selves by objectifying women. In Halacha, in narrative,
and in liturgical praxis, tradition has sought to construct
impermeable boundaries to wall women out. Our text
about the study-companions is a case in point. For the
man who wrote the text and for the generations of men
who learned it and transmitted it, such a relationship be-
tween women and men was inconceivable. This refusal to
acknowledge the Jewish woman as subject has perpetu-
ated a brokenness, an institutionalized estrangement of
women from men inIudaism. We confront this estrange-
ment as soon as we reach out to one another to be
chauerz'm.

and critique the social and linguistic structures that have
objectified and marginalized them, they have recovered
the vantage point of the subject. To be aware of oneself
as objectified subject is to be conscious of oppression. Be-
cause there is a Torah of self and other, Judaism possesses
within itself the means of relieving the oppression of
women. To refuse to integrate this Torah into our man-
woman relationships is to claim that there is one kind of

44 TIKKUN VOL. 6, No.3

 

. . 5.9135
- .i - 

   

 

human relationship which need not be just, and one kind
of human being who cannot be a subject or a chaver:

here did we learn this Torah of self and other,

and what do we know? We learned it from be-
ing the people other peoples knew as the z'vrz'm,

the ones from the other side of the river, the boundary-
crossers. As boundary-crossers, z'vrz'm are bridgers of
worlds, makers of transition. The name t'vrz' is not reso-
nant of self-perception. It re?ects the perspective of those
native to this side of the river, those who are at home.
Those who do not cross the boundaries may view the re-
locations of the z'vrz' as transgressions against a ?xed cos-
mic order, trespasses into the anomalous and the chaotic.

In our narratives, however, it is God who demands that
Abraham and Sarah become z'vrz'nz. A people rooted in
one place experience a God rooted in a particular place.
A people that has known transience can experience the
translocal nature of God. It is the revelation of a God who
is present in every place that makes possible the moral
universe of the covenant, where relatedness rather than
location becomes the ground of ethics.

If our story about our beginnings as God?s ivrim were
not enough to give value to the project of boundary-cross-
ing, our master-narrative about crossing the boundary
from slavery into freedom, and about bridging the bound-
ary between creature and creature in the transaction of
covenant has done so. We have valorized these boundary-
crossings in our tradition; they shape not only our mem-
ories of the past but also our actions in the present and
our visions for the future. We are obligated to regard our
liberation and our covenant not simply as legacies from
our unique history as crossers-over, strangers and slaves,
but as events that radically transform the meaning of
boundaries in the world; they demonstrate the potential
for all objectified others to be reconstituted as subjects
similar to ourselves. There is nothing inevitable about this
moral understanding of our communal identity. Our spe-
cial liberation and covenant make equally powerful justi-
?cations for subjugation of the other. The admonition in
Exodus 23: 9 warns us not to adopt this second interpre-
tation. ?You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know
the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been
strangers in the land of Egypt.? By itself, this command-
ment could be read as a directive to merge with strangers
and to idolize in them the image of our own history as
stranger. Instead, Torah demands that we extrapolate
from our bond with the stranger to include familiar de-
viants within our own communities, with whom we may
be more reluctant to identify:

You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the
fatherless; you shall not take a widow?s garment in
pawn. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and

 

       
 

 

mm uLoarw-b??

 

 

 

that the Lord your God redeemed you from there;
therefore do I enjoin you to observe this
commandment.

(Deut. 24: 17-18)

I mean to argue that the central narrative of Judaism
thus embodies an implicit challenge to the polarized
thought structures of patriarchies?even though patriar-
chal thinking is embedded in Judaism as it is in the rest
of Western culture. This is not to claim that either ancient
Israelites or rabbinic Jews had modern sensibilities for
dealing with those defined as other. Such a contention
would be both anachronistic and demonstrably false. I do
claim, however, that the unfolding of the ivrz' identity and
its experience of covenant locates at the core of Judaism
an implicit challenge to an ethics of alienation and dual-
ism that perceives the world outside its borders as threat-
ening and chaotic. The Torah of self and other that we
first encountered as ivrz'm, and later internalized through
liberation, covenant, and prOphetic admonition erodes
and must eventually obliterate the fixed, impermeable
boundaries that define the world of patriarchal dualism.
By recognizing a self in all others with a potential like our
own for transformation, this Torah transforms the bound-
aries between self and other and deconstructs the justifi-
cation for patriarchal boundaries. Contrast, for example,
Aristotle?s notion that slaves and barbarians had fixed na-
tures suitable to their condition, and that these natures
made them qualitatively different from Athenian gentle-
men. The subjugation of these inferior beings is justified
by their nature as objects?a moral dissimilarity from hu~
man beings with value that could not be changed or mit-
igated by more fortunate circumstances.

ut having ourselves crossed the boundaries from
slavery to freedom, from dependency to respon-
sibility, from homelessness to home, from power-
lessness to power, we know that people have a capacity
for transformation. We cannot justify either our privi-
lege or our virtue, such as it is, by arguing that some
people are, by nature, ?awed in character and intended
for subjugation. Having crossed the boundaries Aristotle
thought impassable, we are no longer adept at maintain-
ing the irnpermeability required to keep the alien alien.
Biblical narratives illustrate how, even when estrange-
ment is most to our advantage, we are propelled across
the boundary where the other lifts to us a human face.
That is why, with our legitimacy as inheritors hanging

in the balance, the narrative compels us to follow Hagar
and Ishmael through their painful wanderings in the
wilderness and then requires us to witness their redemp-
tion. We are not spared Esau?s anguished cry, ?Have you
but one blessing, Father? Bless me too, Father!? (Gen.
27: 38). At Nineveh, with the reluctant Jonah, we are

forced to watch the moral renewal of an enemy nation
and to understand that it too is precious in God?s sight.
We cannot even kill the archenemy Agag, King of Amalek,
without hearing in his last utterance, not the demonic de-
fiance that makes executions easy, but a human cry of fear
and regret, ?Ah, bitter death is at hand? (1 Sam. 15: 32).

It is not that the meanings liberation and covenant hold
for Jews have rendered us incapable of injustices or atroc-
ities. Rather, because liberation and covenant entail such
flexible boundaries between self and other, it is more dif-
ficult for us to separate from the other suf?ciently to in-
?ict hurt without feeling reciprocal pain. Inability to wall
out the other explains why the intifada has distressed Jews
across the political and religious spectrum. It accounts for
a common motif in both Israeli and diaspora novels: the
depiction of Palestinians as mirrors or doubles of Jews.

It is important not to mistake this discomfort for an
ethical response. It is a of ethical dysfunction
just as pain is a of disease. Anguished hand-
wringing over the terrible things we are doing is nothing
more than a self-indulgent display of The ?ex-
ible boundary that enables us to sense our commonality
with the other is the ground of justice in Judaism, but it
is not justice. Justice is the reshaping of our actions and
institutions to express this sense of commonality in our
everyday life.

I have been saying that the obligation to do ju5tice
is derived relationally, and rests upon a prerequisite obli-
gation to perceive a likeness to self in the other. Taken
together, these obligations comprise a fundamental nor-
mative principle in Judaism. If this is so, however, why
has Judaism consistently estranged and excluded its most
intimate others?Jewish women? How shall we under-
stand sacred texts that polarize and subordinate? How
shall we determine what authority any text may claim to
form our attitudes and to inform our actions?

What perpetuates this intimate injustice in Judaism is
that in its deconstruction of dualistic, other-rejecting, pa-
triarchal thought-structures, Judaism stops short and
leaves in place the foundational construction?the other-
ness of woman. This constructed rift is embedded so
deeply in our language, in our and in some of
our texts that we reinforce the objectification and es-
trangement of women without even being conscious of it.

Man names himself za/ebar in Hebrew, the creature
with the male member. And it is perhaps more than co-
incidence or homophony that the za/ebar is also the zo/eber
and the za/ebm; the rememberer and the remembered. In
a patriarchy, the only memory is the male memory, be-
cause the only members are male members. They are the
rememberers and the remembered, the recipients and
transmitters of tradition, law, ritual, story, and experience.
They are the righteous whose memory will be for a bless-
ing and the teachers whose lips will move in the grave.

A QUESTION or BOUNDARIES 45

   

 

 

 

 



 

 

 

 

 

Zakbar names as his antithesis negeaa, the pierced one,
the one whose boundaries are penetrated by the invading
male. Even her name is held hostage to male memory.
How she described herself to herself has been forgotten.
Negeva represents not only an objectification but a pro-
jection. In this naming, patriarchal man points at the other
as the permeable one. He portrays himself as sealed and
impenetrable.

We cannot be too surprised to discover that our texts
have been marked by male memory and by the alienated,
hierarchical relations of the patriarchal self with the other.
The rabbis? dictum, dz'bra Tom/J beiesbon bimz'aa?am, The
Torah speaks in human language," implicitly acknowl-
edges the limitations of context?dependent human lan-
guage and human texts for conveying transcendent truths.
There is, however, a very special kind of truth that is cap-
tured only in texts.

A text is a mirror. Once you have told a story about
your experience, you have an image of it external to your-
self into which you and others can look. This makes pos-
sible the process of critical reflection. I would like to
reflect upon two texts about the origins of women and
men that mirror two kinds of self?other relations and
teach two different lessons.

The first is the Genesis 1 account commonly ascribed
to the (Priestly) author. In it God speaks in the plural
as if out of a diverse and many faceted wholeness: my
yomer Elohim na?are/J adam [yam/2177282221 ?Let
us make the human in our image, after our likeness.? The
gendered humanity thus created represent two varieties
of a single species, collectively called adam: ?vara er lua-
adam betzalmo, hetzelem 5am 0130, zakfyar u?negeva
6am cram. ?And God created the human in His image, in
the image of God, He created it, male and female He cre-
ated them.?

This creation proceeds not by polarization but by dif-
ferentiation within wholeness. A modern analogy would
be the biological process of human development in which
a zygote, a diverse wholeness which a sperm and an ovum
have merged to create, differentiates into the various cells
of a particular human being. Emphasis is placed upon
similarities and kinships. The tzeleirz, the image, is a
source of connection and continuity between creator and
creation. The two varieties of add?: embody diversity
within similarity. Equally human, they share equally in the
responsibilities and benefits of the natural world.

In contrast, the Genesis 2 account, generally assigned
to theJ (Jahwist) narrator, depicts creation as a process
of opposition and partialization. Adam in this story is a
male individual, and bears a curious resemblance to the
mOtherless asocial resident of the state of nature posited
by liberal political theory. He is a competent male adult,
endowed with language and reason, engaged from the mo-
ment of his creation in the business of mastering nature.

46 TIKKUN VOL. 6, NO. 3

Human sociality is recognized as a necessity: [0 ton
beyor ba-adam (evade), ?It is not good for man to be alone,?
but the remedy for man?s isolation is the creation of an
oppositional other: e?ereb [0 czar Keenegdo, will make
him a helper who is his counter/part." {The word kenegdo
carries dual senses of likeness and opposition which Ihave
tried to convey with the translation counter/ part.)

\Woman in this story has no independent being. She is
neither created nor formed (y-tz-r) but constructed
waive}: Adonaz' [claim .9: ba rzela aber {meat}; m2}:
ba-adam vavavez' e! ba-adam. ?The Lord God built the rib
into a woman and brought her to the man.? A part of
the man is separated off, constructed into woman, and
handed back to him. He recognizes her neither as simi-
lar to himself nor as a different entity with its own bound-
ary. Instead he claims her as a part of himself that he can
reincorporate through fusion:

This time bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh . . .
Hence a man leaves his father and mother and clings to
his woman and they become one flesh. (Gen. 2: 23-24)

Adam, in this narrative, is both gendered male and generic
human. His maleness represents the original human con-
dition, rather than one variety of it. Hence, there is no
mention of the creation of maleness, as there is in Gene-
sis 1. The text only alludes to Adams gender identity as
My, man, in the wordplay that establishes it's/9a, woman, as
a derivative gender. Together they are Ha-adam ve?z?sbto,
the human and his woman, for the text never recognizes
her as adam. It designates her only as a creature de-
rived from adam, contrasted to him and possessed by him;
a construction designed to meet his specifications.

How are we to characterize these two accounts, and
what Torah may we learn from them? Genesis 1 may be
taken as a description of the creation of humanity. It
teaches about kinships, about the continuity of bound-
aries between God and humanity, and between the two
varieties of humankind. Genesis 2 is best understood as
an account of the creation of patriarchy. Its depiction of
the patriarchs? inner experience?loneliness, and a sense
of mutilation~?and its account of the attempt to recover
the banished other through fusion and incorporation are
as perfectly convincing as its disastrous aftermath. An
Eden founded upon a fantasy of obliterating the other is
bound to be unstable.

Yet nothing in this text speaks to us with normative au-
thority. There is no reason to conclude on the basis of the
narrative that relations between men and women in sub-
sequent Jewish societies must adhere to the patriarchal
model. In fact Genesis 2 has never been an independent
source of normative authority for Jews. The prescriptive
language of legal obligation (?be fruitful and multiply?)
occurs not in Genesis 2 but in Genesis 1. Jewish tradition

(Continued 0:2 p. 87)

mind. But I let it drop. I was tired, and I had so much to
do at home before Monday rolled around. I needed my
sleep.

I have learned something from all of this. Just let any
man rest his hand on my ass in public and I will let him
have it right between the eyes  or elsewhere, if you
understand my meaning. If people like my parents, or
Joan for that matter, want to behave like childish fools,
that?s their business. I, at least, am an adult. Cl

A QUESTION OF BOUNDARIES
(Continued from p. 46)

does not understand the curses that follow the eating of
the forbidden fruit as literal prescriptions, although some
antimodemist Christian sects read them this way. Hence,
it has never been claimed that because the text says ?by
the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat,? Jews
ought not to use modern farm machinery or labor-saving
devices. Similarly, while some Victorian clergymen cited
?in pain shall you bear children? as a reason to forbid
anesthesia in childbirth, no Jewish authority ever did so.
By analogy then, there can be no prescriptive force in the
admonition to Eve; ?Your desire shall be for your hus-
band and he shall rule over you.? Consistency requires us
to read the entire narrative as a description of how things
came to be the way they are?in other words, as an etiol-
ogy of the construction of patriarchy and its attendant
hardships.

The two creation stories with their divergent accounts
of object relations return us to the general question: How
shall we determine what authority any text may have to
form our attitudes and to inform our actions? Halacha,
classical Jewish law, addresses this question by making
certain texts repositories for generalized obligations,
mitzvot leollelot. These are not meta-halachic principles;
that is, they are not discourse about the project of Jewish
law. They are, rather, intra-halachic discourse. We might
call them orienting mitzvot, because they point out the
direction in which our normative perceptions and deci-
sionsought to know. Orienting mitzvot are the most gen-
erally phrased, and hence the most dependent upon the
particularities of context, of any Jewish obligations. What
then orients the orienting mitvot? To determine what is
right action or holy behavior for a Jew, we are obligated
to begin by recollecting the story that tells us who we are:
?Remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the Lord
your God redeemed you from there? (Deut. 24:18).
Deuteronomy appends this admonition to all its com-
mandments about the welfare of vulnerable others, and
to general exhortations to observe the laws of the
covenant. A particular ethical orientation must charac-
terize the behavior of a liberated and transformed peo-

 

 

 

ple. This orientation forbids the oppression of others and
urges us to recognize in them a capacity for liberation and
transformation akin to our own. This is the principle that
orients the content of the generalized mitzvot, and in the
context of its ?exible boundary with the other we must
assess the ethical claims that other texts make upon us.

What implications follow for the boundary with the
?rst Jewish other? Dorothy Sayers once asked, ?If women
are the opposite sex, then what is the neighboring sex??
By defining woman oppositionally as derivative isba or in-
vaded negeva, patriarchal texts refuse to acknowledge a
shared reality. We could call this the reality of mutual in-
terpenetration. Interpenetration, interconnectedness,
and interdependency attest that not only do we inhabit a
single context, but within that context we live deeply
within one another?s boundaries. The only way to
in/habit, one must conclude, is to co/habit. The patriar-
chal fantasy of the impermeable self is a snare and a delu-
sion. Human beings are profoundly interdependent. We
begin life tiny and helpless, utterly dependent on others.
We come to perceive ourselves as distinct and particular
beings only through experiencing our impact upon oth-
ers and their impact upon us. Intimacy is a survival need
for our species. Babies who lack a caring other to bond
with, even if they are fed and cleaned, die in alarming
numbers from a known simply as ?failure to
thrive.? From birth to death we coexist in a great network
of others, bound to them by speech, by touch, by labors,
quests, exchanges, and stories.

We are in truth no more separate from God than we
are from one another. What makes us Jews is not that we
subscribe to a dogma which holds that the world is con-
trolled by a deity without needs or desires, upon whom
no one and nothing has impact, or that this deity has re-
vealed to us a ?xed and objective law. What makes usJews
is that we frame our identities and our commitments by
telling and retelling how we came to be ivrz'm, how God
freed us from slavery and made a covenant with us. What
makes us Jews is that we center our selfhood, both indi-
vidual and collective, both male and female, around these
memories, that we learn from them the living, permeable
boundaries that make the other a neighbor and a partner
rather than an opposite. When we apply this orientation
to our man?woman relationships, then all Israel will in-
deed be cbaverz'm. Cl

FOREIGN AID
(Continued ?om p. 38)

USAID with over $500 million, was to ?breed capitalists

like rabbits,? one USAID official said. USAID itself ex-
perienced a virtual rebellion within its ranks when nu-
merous leaders of the peasants and farm workers were

TIKKUN VOL111:3 41$]