Dear Ashley,
Your recent piece responded strongly to media speculation about the “puffiness of your face” and broadened that to include the “assault on our [women’s and girls’] body image, the hypersexualization of girls and women and subsequent degradation of our sexuality as we walk through the decades, and the general incessant objectification.” Further, you conclude that this is the very antithesis of feminism, and is most disturbingly a patriarchy that includes women as well – as the aggressors.
My heart broke when I read your article. Not because you’re wrong, and not because your piece wasn’t intelligent and articulate, but because there is so much work to do in enlightening the world about the truths you mention.
See, Ashley, in a funny way you and I are in the same business. I’ll sidestep the entertainment industry because, well, I’m not in it, though I did dream of being a famous actress long ago. And also because it so complicates your message. You yourself allude to this:
“I am also aware that inevitably some will comment that because I am a
creative person, I have abdicated my right to a distinction between my
public and private selves, an additional, albeit related, track of
highly distorted thinking that will have to be addressed at another
time.”
Distorted, yes. But the entertainment industry is distorted to begin with – it deliberately presents a distorted image of life to entertain and, sometimes, educate.
The business we share is education. You seek to educate the public about body image, misogyny, and feminism. Allow me to share your mission by shedding some Jewish wisdom on the conversation, as you invite us to join it at the end of your moving and passionate piece.
1. The Hebrew word for face (panim) is etymologically linked to the word for internality (p’nim)? That’s because our faces reveal that which is on the insides of our souls. Not our skin tone or flaw scale, but our eyes, our smiles; the body language that speaks so loudly from our faces should others but care to hear the message.
2. Did you know that Jewish Bible tradition teaches that our patriarch (the irony of that title is not lost on me) Abraham was married to our matriarch Sarah for decades before it dawned on him that he was married to a physically beautiful woman? And even then, he only noticed because he was trying to determine if it was safe for them to travel openly through Egypt, a notoriously immoral country, and therefore attempted to see her through the eyes of the natives.
Do you know why, Ashley? Because, the tradition continues: Physical appearance meant nothing to him. Beauty was not just in the eye of the beholder, but for some of those beholders, purely spiritual in nature. This is MY hero. This is MY patriarch.
3. There are laws in Judaism about dissing other people? They’re called the laws of lashon hara – literally, evil speech. In fact, there are volumes, texts, and libraries about this. You can get a law a day via text or phone or email. My kids’ Jewish day schools have ongoing programs and learning sessions about it. There are entire video presentations and educational days about it.
Would you believe it’s one of the worst sins in Judaism ever? Did you know it includes dissing of public figures as well as unknown nobodies; dissing in print, in speech, with body language, or via text? To one person or a whole group? And online dissing is the worst because of the exponential damage. In fact, the Jewish Talmud goes so far as to state that the victim of the dissing earns the merits of all the good deeds that the perpetrator has achieved throughout his life to date.
I don’t know if you’re a religious person, Ashley, but you’ve gotta admit these are really powerful ideas. I’ll end with just one more.
4. Judaism teaches that we are both body and soul. We choose if we’d like to identify more with our bodies or more with our souls. The problem is that the world, as you’ve so articulately observed, chooses body so much more loudly and so much more often than soul. This is sad and unfortunate, but Ashley, I’m here to tell you that we can fight the fight. We can choose soul. The misogyny and the pettiness will never go away, because humans are flawed, but you and I can continue to be souls more than bodies. There’s a fine line between fighting the good fight and getting sucked into the drama.
Me? I’m not playing the game. I try to live and dress according to the Jewish codes of modesty, as do many other co-religious men and women. I limit the media exposure in my life. I strive to learn the Torah regularly to fortify myself with these truths. I seek out spiritual people who are choosing soul over body. I’m definitely far from perfect but that’s the fight worth fighting.
I hope you think so too.
Your fellow female non-misogynist soul,
RK
I love this. Keep fighting, my friend. I hope Ashley sees this.
Beautiful!
Another thoughtful column, beautifully expressed. Thank you for making our religion so clear. You help me appreciate the great responsibility and privilege of being a Jew and encourage me to keep improving myself. Chag Kasher V'Sameach
Excellent response! Lovely!
I have lots of questions about the Abraham example and its uses–which are connected to many big and sensitive questions about how to use Torah to respond to contemporary life and what it means to interpret the Torah. This is tricky to ask, because I know that part of Orthodox belief is also that the truths of the Torah are unchanging and we shouldn't add or modify them, except of course there is a tradition of Biblical interpretation as well.
So let me try to offer some ideas with a spirit of great respect for the Jewish tradition of Biblical interpretation and appreciation of Ruchi's reflections: We can cite certain moments of Torah as exemplary for our times, as lessons, but of course there are other moments that are not necessarily good lessons, at least not if we take them as directly applicable. (Like soon after he realizes she's beautiful, Abraham lets Sarah get taken into Pharaoh's house–ambiguously described, but still, could include a sexual arrangement. Ruchi has reflected on these kinds of Biblical moments before–e.g. she reminded one reader that contemporary Judaism does not take plural marriage as a model although the patriarchs practiced it.)
Apart from these specifics, I sometimes wonder about how an Orthodox person can pick some Biblical moments and verses as our direct exemplars and models, and yet others require a lot of interpretation or historical contextualization. To me, as someone who has studied literature–and, to be very honest, treats the Bible as the world's very best literature more than as the source of direct guidelines for my life–this makes total sense and is not at all inconsistent or problematic. But within Orthodox Judaism it seems to require more explaining–sometimes the Bible has a direct lesson or prescription, and yet many times it needs interpretation or contextualization so that it can be made to be relevant, insightful, important, and especially not problematic (like some of the more violent stuff). Again, from a Reform-literary perspective this is part of the absolute multidimensionality and genius of the Bible. But Orthodoxy would seem to require certain interventions and justifications for the various ways of using the Bible as a source of prescriptions.
Not sure if this is a question–it is part of my ongoing interest in how Orthodox Jews refer to the Bible as a source of direct knowledge, and yet require the interventions of different kinds of interpretation and different lenses of application in order to make every element 'true'. In a literary way I find every element important as well, and literarily 'true' (this would require a lot more explanation, it has to do with the composition of the Bible and how the poetic and literary patterns are so amazing) but I'm not so concerned about having every element of it be 'true' for my life.
So I see an interplay in Ruchi's use of the Abraham example between the Bible on its own and a particular USE of it that in my view is historically contextual. I wonder if for Orthodox people that kind of variation of reading technique does not ever evoke questions about how we decide the 'truth' of the Bible. There is a reliance on authority–what one's own strand of Judaism says about how to read it and how to understand certain passages–but that also intervenes in the direct process of just reading the Bible itself. As a literary-minded person I'm fine with all that interpretive work and the use of different techniques, but for Orthodox people it would seem to require a lot more effort to hold all those different techniques together AND maintain the direct truth of the Bible.
Again, I mean this as an explanation of my own way of reading the Bible and a respectful expression of interest in how Orthodoxy treats its own multifarious interpretive toolbox.
SBW, you bring up basic ideas about how the Torah is allowed to be interpreted "in Orthodoxy."
The first thought I have is with regards to the role the Talmud (the Oral Tradition) plays in understanding not only basic fact, but also generalized lessons about life as derived from the Torah stories and commandments. Basically, the Written Tradition (the 5 books of Moses, the books of the prophets, and the "writings" which includes Psalms and the Megillahs) simply cannot be understood without the Talmud. It's like reading the headlines without the article.
From the Talmud we see that some ideas are left alone with not much exegesis, which indicates they are to be taken at face value, and other ideas, as you mention, undergo considerable wrangling in the commentaries. Whether a concept is meant to be taken literally or figuratively is dependent on what the Oral Tradition has to say about it. But there are rules to which the commentators must comply – it's not the Wild West.
Here are a few:
1. The particular implied in the general and excepted from it on account of a new and reversed decision can be referred to the general only in case the passage under consideration makes an explicit reference to it.
2. Deduction from the context.
3. When two Biblical passages contradict each other the contradiction in question must be solved by reference to a third passage.
Here is a highly detailed description of the rules, with examples. As I am not an advanced Talmud scholar, some of it is over my head, but nevertheless it may be of interest.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/judaica/ejud_0002_0009_0_08805.html
In any event, my point is that there are very clear rules about how and when the Torah is to be analyzed and what, if any, lessons are to be extrapolated thereby.
As far as your question about whether Orthodox students of Torah will find that "that also intervenes in the direct process of just reading the Bible itself," that observation took me surprise. My only reason to read the Bible with a more aerial view is simply to get a better understanding of my history and of life's eternal truths.
Honestly, I would never even *want* to read Torah as literature. *That* would intervene with other things, such as the almost incomparable reverence with which I hold it, the respect I have for all its commentators (and I'm a rather skeptical person), and the vast love I harbor for its wisdom.
Thanks for the link, I appreciate the pretty straightforward summary of Talmudic hermeneutic rules.
You know, I hope, that by talking about reading the Bible in a literary way I did not mean at all to denigrate the Bible nor anyone's reverence for it. Probably this is not going to be understandable, but what I mean by
'literary' is not at all far removed from what the webpage describes as R. Akiva's concern for how every word has significance, although the significance for me is not in terms of prescriptions for my life. This might go back to what the limits are as to what "Jewish" means, as in "what do you have to believe regarding precisely how Torah is true to count as Jewish". I imagine that my range of acceptable "Jewish" answers to this question is wider than some other people's.
I understood what you meant 🙂 Since for me, every word is significant both in terms of generalized spirituality and also in terms of practical application (this is called in Hebrew "Torat chaim" – a Torah for living), it (the Torah) will always be in a league of its own. I actually even dislike calling it a "book" or even a "text." To me there is simply no literary work that would have any resemblance to even be categorized together.
When a Torah text falls on the floor, I pick it up and kiss it. When piling books, it always goes on top. If it's upside-down, I kiss it. If someone drops a Torah scroll, they are supposed to fast to atone for it.
Re: what "Jewish" means…the answer to "what do you have to believe regarding precisely how Torah is true to count as Jewish" is: nothing. And now you've really encouraged me to dedicate a future post to just that…ruffled feathers and all.
This discussion reminds me of something I once heard (I wish I'd remember the source). It is more difficult to picture the face of a loved one in our minds' eye than that of an acquaintance. This is true because we look at our loved ones through their eyes to their souls rather than at their facade. I find this concept to be so deep and meaningful in that what's inside is what matters so much more than the outside. Chag Kasher V'Sameach.
I have never heard that. How amazing. Just discussing with some friends how everyone tries to figure out who a baby looks like, and often each side attributes the features to the "other" side of the family (even with a good-looking baby 🙂 – it's hard to be objective about the features of your nearest and dearest.