Death of a Holy Land by Levinson Rose L.;

Author:Levinson, Rose L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Amalia comes to accept that by having sex with this rabbi, she who lives in the detritus of sin may be saved. And not only she will be saved; those she has lost will also be redeemed. The rabbi’s distorted, manipulative and degrading imagery is terrible in and of itself. Equally sad is that his words sum up Amalia’s internalized sense of self. Her inexorable progress towards self-destruction is hastened by this exemplar of the religious world encouraging the belief that her very existence is a source of the unholy. The rabbi’s words are instruments of destruction for this pious, grieving young woman as he unerringly inflames all of her wounds. She is seduced both by the man himself and by what he as a rabbi represents: a socially sanctioned conduit for God.

This evocation of rabbinic power is a stark reminder of the influence that can come from perverted religious authority. It’s also a comment on “The association of women with sexuality and female sexuality with God, connect[ing] God to an ethic of sexual intemperance, potentially wreaking havoc with an ethic of control” (Plaskow 1990, 188). Any changes in the ethic of control threaten to disturb the whole system of religiosity held together by a complex web of symbolic associations. It is the rabbi whose sexual practices bespeak sexual intemperance, but it is the woman Amalia who will be condemned for setting them off.

Traditional conceptions of God preclude the presence of sexuality of any kind—and most particularly any form of a feminine sexuality. Chaos will follow when sexuality is introduced into notions of what is holy, disturbing not only that which is sacred but upsetting the whole social order. If feminine sexuality is taken seriously, it undermines not only the traditional view of God but may inflict serious damage to the way normative cultural behavior is defined. Therefore, the potential for a profound change in religious metaphor—and ultimately reality—comes from the likes of Amalia who revels in such a highly sexual interaction with the divine. Reframing traditional reli

gion to make a genuine place for women’s perspective is to risk losing the certainty of a world constructed by men.

Amalia’s sexuality is also a powerful exemplar of other aspects of feminism in conflict with the male world where women are not entitled to be included within the world of defining religious narratives. Describing the roles assigned to women by those who choose a masculinist, traditional reading of text, theologian Rachel Adler (1998) writes of the purported opposition between women and sacred text in traditional temptation narratives where “Women are the source of the life of the body—and hence of death. Holy text is a source of eternal life. A good woman, one who accepts her proper role . . . assigns her claim to visibility in deference to the superior claim of holy text. . . . A bad woman is one who makes herself a rival of the text” (11).

Adler’s distinctions help in understanding how profoundly Amalia has internalized the worldview in which the way she lives her God-seeking life defines her in countless ways as a “bad woman.

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