‘Judaism demands compliance: I can barely follow a recipe’

JOANNE FEDLER: Stung by Judaism’s exclusions, I sought my faith elsewhere. Feminism beckoned

I WAS 12 when I staged my first feminist protest by refusing to recite the morning prayers at school. Why did boys get to say, “Thank God I was not born a woman”, and the girls had to supplicate with, “Thank you for making me just as I am”?

And why couldn’t I be counted for a minyan? Why did girls have to sit in the gallery in synagogue? Why couldn’t we read from the Torah?

The head of Jewish studies said women were naturally closer to godliness because we could have babies. Men were burdened with spiritual tasks. In fact, being excluded was to be exempted – and this, he claimed was “an honour”. 

I knew gaslighting long before there was a name for it. Until then, I’d been a devout prayer reciter and mitzvah-chaser, on track to Eshet Chayil-dom (from the poem in Proverbs that describes the qualities of an ideal Jewish woman), with a price beyond rubies.

But something soured when I crossed the line from girl to woman. Judaism suddenly forked into a “his” and “hers”, underscored with a liturgy of rituals, fearful of menstruation, replete with a lexicon of shame-inducing hygiene. I slammed up against its gendered inhospitalities like a bird against a pane of glass.

Judaism demanded modesty and compliance. I can barely follow a recipe, let alone 613 mitzvot. Never, I swore, would I acquiesce to fashion advice from bearded men, erotophobic projections to curb male fervour for the female body.

As my feminism quickened, I recoiled from anaesthetising explanations of gender inequality and became loosened like a wobbly tooth in the jaw of my religion. It was another branch of the patriarchy, under a yarmulka.

But the fate of uppity women is well documented. The price of disobedience is expulsion, a myth deeply veined in our collective archetypal subconscious. Stung by what I perceived as Judaism’s exclusions, I sought my faith elsewhere. Feminism beckoned.