Reaction paper for class #4
JWST 237
Binkovitz
The two issues that most caught my attention in the first chapter of Women and Jewish Law were the issue of men’s honor being infringed upon by women’s assumption of the commandment to read the Torah, and the question of “how much” a woman’s mitzvah was “worth”.
The issue of honor, when traced back to the root, seems to have no halakhic basis prior to the rulings regarding k’vod ha-tzibbur. I was surprised that Biale let this issue go so easily; after carefully following a convoluted thread of logic back to its non-existent source, she moves onto the next topic without any further speculation as to where this notion of women’s inferiority may have actually come from. Perhaps she didn’t have space or perhaps that question is beyond the scope of her book (being a largely multi-religious problem) but I was dismayed with her failure to at least acknowledge that closer scrutiny of this issue is in order because it seems to represent a disappointingly omnipresent tendency to view men’s subjugation of women throughout history as somehow natural, if not entirely acceptable, due to its thorough permeation of so many cultures.
The issue of the “worth” of a mitzvah on the other hand, is a reaction to the material as well as to its presentation. It seems to me that a lot could be discovered by an examination of exactly why these scholars consider it important to “quantify” mitzvot, insofar as they say that a woman’s fulfillment of a commandment from which she is exempt gains her “less of a reward” than when a man does it. Even if this were true, and there is some kind of quantized spiritual reward system, where on earth do these men get the audacity to act as though they understood and were capable of administering it? As far as I know there is no reference to quantified divine rewards for specific acts in the Torah. Ultimately I would hypothesize that this, too, is a construct devised to support the circular system of gender-based oppression throughout history.