Published: 18 May 2020
Last updated: 5 March 2024
I AM A MEMBER of two book groups, both composed of middle-aged professional women. In one group, most of the members are Jewish, in the other they are not. Lately, of course, both have been meeting via video link, which has made the experience much more similar than usual.
Usually the non-Jewish group meets at a wine bar. Nibbles are available but no one orders them. We have eaten dinner and, apparently, that precludes the need for nosh.
Members of the Jewish book group know better than to eat a solid dinner before our meetings. We sit around large dining tables in private homes, enjoying homemade cake, lavish cheese platters and plates of fruit.
The hostess who has prepared this spread has completed a solid day’s work but in Jewish circles that does not curtail the instinct – or sense of obligation – to present as an accomplished balabusta, a mistress of household arts.
It’s a stark cultural difference which places a much greater burden on Jewish women than on our non-Jewish peers. There is extensive literature about how women in the workforce struggle with the second shift – doing the bulk of household and parenting duties even when their paid workforce obligations are as demanding as men’s.
For Jewish women that second shift is much longer. When I listen to non-Jewish friends talking about the burden of putting on a three-course meal for a dozen people at Christmas, I always smile inwardly. Many Jewish women – and few Jewish men – do that every Friday night.
The competitive balabusta culture demands that we live simultaneously in the 21st century and the shtetl, judged in the workforce by our professional achievements and at home on the height of a kugelhopf or the weight of a kneidl.
When I listen to non-Jewish friends talking about the burden of putting on a three-course meal for a dozen people at Christmas, I always smile inwardly. Many Jewish women – and few Jewish men – do that every Friday night.
But keeping up with the Cohens is not the whole story. Store-bought cakes or dips served in their plastic containers would not irredeemably lower our social status, as they would have a generation or two ago.
My mother tells the story of overhearing a discussion as her guests tucked into challah and dips while she served up the soup in the adjacent kitchen. “That’s a delicious dip,” her cousin commented, “I wonder if she bought it or made it?”
My grandmother responded, “Why would she buy it if she can make it?” The cousin, a generation younger, answered, “Why would she make it if she can buy it?”
An analysis of this very Jewish conversation – in which all questions are answered with questions – betrays a world of expectations, generational differences and the ever-present guilt production capacities of our culture.
But for all the changes, the pressure to be a balabusta remains. We have absorbed a cultural value system that values domesticity without counting its cost.
There is pleasure in producing a delicious meal and watching one’s family or guests enjoy it. There is satisfaction in nesting and nurturing, in the smell of home-cooking and the visual peace of an orderly house. Shabbat dinners, simchas, and certainly Seders would be very different without skilled balabustas able and willing to make them happen.
Under coronavirus lockdown, a surprising number of people have discovered domestic arts. Social media feeds are filled with homemade bread and edible crafts. I’m not knocking it. Twice during lockdown my doorbell rang to reveal a freshly baked loaf – one from a son, the other a brother – and they were delicious.
The human desire to create a warm and comfortable home – which is not confined to women – is a deep and complex instinct, as isolation has demonstrated. Leading Orthodox feminist Blu Greenberg in the afterword to her excellent book On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition- which is mostly about women doing everything normally eclipsed by their domestic obligations – pauses in her argument to reflect on a moment of uncanny satisfaction of cooking and even doing laundry for her nephew while he was in the Israeli army. “There was a powerful primal emotion associated with these mundane tasks, almost a sacredness about them,” she writes.
These words have stayed with me and I still struggle with them. Domestic arts can be as engaging and fulfilling as other forms of creative endeavour. But the daily grind of housework is rarely so gratifying. More often it saps energy for creativity inside or outside the home.
A heavy load of domestic obligation is still used to exclude women from public roles in the synagogue and those of us who buck this convention find ourselves with the mother of all second shifts. Sometimes, as a I am simultaneously making the chicken soup for Rosh Hashanah dinner and writing the drash for Kol Nidre, I wonder how I came to be carrying the obligations of both my mother and my father in the name of liberation.
It helps when the baal habayit, the so-called Master of the House, learns the arts of the balabusta.
But Jewish women also need to ease up on the expectations. Somewhere in the back of her mind, the contemporary Jewish woman still feels inadequate if she is not also a domestic goddess. Perhaps her price will not be above rubies. But perhaps the price for that Biblical valuation is too high.
Photo: Jewishmom.com
