Conference turris::womannotes-v1

658.0. "Jewish Feminism?" by YODA::BARANSKI (Riding the Avalanche of Life) Wed Jan 20 1988 09:08

Path: decwrl!decvax!ucbvax!pasteur!ames!ptsfa!pbphb!pbhyf!rsp
Subject: Betty Friedan and the Goddess
Posted: 18 Jan 88 06:07:07 GMT
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
 
In the hope of stirring up some conversation about religion on this news group I
thought I would quote some excerpts from an interview with Betty Friedan found
in the current (Jan./Feb. 1988) issue of TIKKUN magazine.  TIKKUN bills itself
as "A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture & Society". Though not
Jewish myself, I find the magazine provocative. 
 
As a well known Feminist leader, Betty Friedan has been controversial over the
last couple decades; I'm sure her comments quoted here will be of some interest.
I'm quoting only a small part of the interview. (about 70 lines) 
 
++++++ BEGIN QUOTATION ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
TIKKUN:	What do you say to women who argue that, since historically Judaism was
patriarchal, it's a mistake to give any legimation to the Jewish tradition
because you only legitimate a tradition that had been fundamentally shaped by a
patriarchal consciousness. 
 
FRIEDAN: Well, everything was patriarchal.  But, you don't throw away the baby
with the bath water.  You can't really find in Jewish history or in the Bible
the images to justify the full personhood of woman that we're dealing with now.
In those centuries, there wasn't a feminine mystique.  Woman's main role was as
childbearer and child rearer, and that defined her life.  To see woman as a full
person was not possible then, and now it is.  This is a part of human evolution,
and Judaism has got to evolve and allow room for Jewish women who want to retain
the values of their spiritual tradition and integrate them with the equally
strong values of their feminism.  There's got to be some changes. And some have
been made.  You take the very best values of your spiritual tradition and you
apply them to women as if they were souls, too.  The next step is that the very
values themselves will change as values of nuturing life that have been
specialized to women become articulated as part of the religious tradition.  So
we will move beyond the male dominant, angry, patriarchal god, which articulated
something that was from the male experience. You add to that some dimension of
nurture, of not either or, win lose, but a dimension which embraces the
complexity that comes from female experience. This is an interesting theological
enrichment of the whole tradition that is coming from women's voice.  There will
be a transformation of Judaism when women's voice begins to define the religion
also. 
 
TIKKUN:	Have you heard the claim that Judaism played a major role in creating
patriarchy? 
 
FRIEDAN: Yes, and I don't like it.  I don't like feminism to be used in any way
to justify antiSemitism.  I understand that in some left circles it is now chic
to say that.  AntiSemitism of the left appalls and outrages me even more than
antiSemitism of the right.  It makes the left beyond the pale for me. Suddenly
we have the Jews blamed not only for killing Christ, but for supposedly killing
the Goddess.  I'm very quizzical about this Goddess stuff; I don't believe that
there was this wonderful world where women were worshipped and that the Jews
killed them off.  Monotheism is what the Jews did.  If God is seen as a male
God, then that is a limitation.  But you do not replace it by a female God.
There is one God.  And I, as a Jew, have no use for this Goddess stuff.  I have
great use for how women theologians and rabbbis are enriching the Jewish
tradition by bringing rubrics that come from female experience, but the
Goddess..."The Lord is One" is the basic truth here. 
 
TIKKUN:	One of the arguments that is made is that part of what makes the Jewish
God a male God is that the Jewish God, as One, is seen as transcendent from
nature, whereas women are more in touch with nature.  So the Goddess, or the
goddesses, were connected with nature. 
 
FRIEDAN: Watch it.  I just hate all that polarization, all that either or stuff.
If female experience is to inform in a new way and enrich our values generally
in any discipline, it should move us away from the either or, polarized, win
lose zero sum definitions that, to me at least, come from more linear male
experience, and embrace the complexity of not either or, but both. So, to say,
"you had your God, that was a male God.  Now we're going to have our Goddess"
that's ridiculous.  That's not liberation.  If there was too much of a masculine
definition, then you enlarge it by encluding the complexities of women's
experience.  You don't simply repeat the masculine polarization in the other
direction.  It seems to me such a weird perversion of feminism.  And watch this
business of designating women to handle nature, freeing men so they can dominate
and make war.  The games of the men are bringing the United States to ruin:
Wall Street is divorce from the realities of life. The nuclear weapons that the
men have developed can destroy the whole planet. It is not safe to try to define
in ways that bar them from the abstractions of mastery and specialize them to
focus on the concreteness of daily life, and let men have the dominance of the
realm of abstractions and politics. 

RE: -.1

I am worried about .0 being seen as an attack.  Please believe that it is not
meant to be an attack.  I merely seen several ideas here which I agree with.  I
hope that some good discussion results.

Jim.