In Days to Come by Avraham Burg

Author:Avraham Burg [BURG, AVRAHAM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

IT TOOK ME MANY YEARS TO UNDERSTAND THAT THE place of women in society—any woman in society—is the litmus test for the degree of equality in that society. The boys-only schools in which I had studied, the male combat units in which I had served, and the long years in local political life in which there are few women—all these environments gave me plenty of opportunities to understand and express my commitment to the equality of women and their status, a commitment whose basis is so simple: a society in which women are discriminated against is a flawed society, and an egalitarian society—among all and for all, not only for women—is a proper society. That is how we raised our girls and boys together. We didn’t want our boys callous and insensitive, and we didn’t expect to have fragile and needy girls who have no active role in building the world.

During the nineties, in the years before my children’s bar mitzvah and bat mitzvah celebrations, we sat down every Sabbath and studied together. Every child chose his or her topic, and from the broad and deep study, the speech on the festive day emerged. Not an incomprehensible and inexplicable speech like mine, dictated by father to son, but their own words, expressed as they wished. To this day, ideas are still sprouting from those seeds. Equality, freedom, justice, sensitivity, environment, vegetarianism, and a great deal of brotherhood. Roni wanted to learn about “the status of women in Judaism.” At age eleven, when we started these studies, she was already a veteran of the feminist wars. In the religious public school where she studied, the principal wanted to forbid the girls from coming to school in pants. She confronted him, launched a school movement named “Modest in Pants,” studied Jewish sources, prepared a sharply worded petition, got male and female students to sign, and had the decree rescinded.

Before her bat mitzvah, Roni expressed a desire to read her weekly portion from the Torah in synagogue. Together we studied the traditional melody and the Torah trope. At first it was a bit strange for me because I had never heard the Torah read and sung with a woman’s voice. In my ancient, primitive consciousness, the Torah belonged to the male world, and its sounds were somewhere in the area of the bass and baritone. But with her help it became more natural. In alto or soprano, the Torah sounds so beautiful, new, fresh, and right. We studied every Sabbath, and each time I would witness her wonderful progress. As our studies progressed, the complexity of the topic deepened.

The bat mitzvah date drew near, and the question grew more urgent: how can we have a shared family prayer when my parents, especially my father, were never part of the religious egalitarian revolution? “I’ll talk to Grandpa,” the young revolutionary said with determination. After a week, she came back with an arrangement. On Independence Day of that year we celebrated with her—the whole family together—the day of her entrance into the circle of Jewish responsibility.

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