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Essays and Articles:
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Woman as a Relational Source
Translated from Hebrew by S. NAthan l'ilui nishmat Esther bat mordechai
Rashi: “‘And among these, there was no man of those counted by Moshe.’ But about women, the spies’ decree was never decreed, because they were always fond of the Land. The men were saying: ‘Let us give us a leader, and let us return to Egypt,’ while the women were saying: ‘Give us a landholding.’ This is why the section on Tslofhad’s daughters is juxtaposed here.” (26:64, Rashi quoting Sifri 16.)
This midrash is faithful testimony to woman’s central place and decisive role in the chronicles of the people of Israel. It behooves us to examine it, so as to attempt to define woman’s essential being through a Torah perspective.
“Women are a people unto itself,” Hazal state. “Unto itself” does not distance woman from man, but establishes her as an independent entity, and not something dragged in man’s wake.
What separates woman from man, since after all she too is called human being, as Hazal determine: “The two of them are called Ahdahm.”
For some reason, we are witnessing women’s movements fighting for women’s rights throughout the entire world, yet not necessarily in countries of the Third World. Even, or perhaps specifically in the civilized, progressive world, the movement arises that fights for women’s rights, and that claims as an undisputed given that women’s status is deprived and requires improvement.
Parenthetically it might be mentioned that in an ultra-civilized country such as Switzerland, women do not necessarily have the vote in every province. This is not against their wishes, but rather they have refused to take part in the political game, just as soccer does not generally interest them.
The movement for women’s rights maintains that deprivation of women is a continuing historical given, and in need of redress. After all, progress in popular perceptions of equality and democracy constitutes a prime indicator of the development and evolution of the human race.
Yet it seems we cannot relate to this claim as being self-evident or given. More precise would be the statement that “women are a people unto itself”. Woman sees her duties as being other than man’s duties, her role as being complementary, not different and not inferior.
Nietzsche has already commented that if woman were to leave her role in the kitchen (as the “liberated” woman aspires to do, to take upon herself masculine roles and to give the man the woman’s role as child-nurturer and dealer in household tasks, cooking especially) and man were to take over the territory of the kitchen, we would be nourished by medicines and pills, rather than by natural food preparations. Formulas from the regions of the pharmacy would find their way to our tables, and not only for the hypochondriacs, who do this already as everyone knows.
What are the causes behind this mystifying state of affairs? After all, women are not less than men in intelligence, or in wisdom, and perhaps superior to them in astuteness.
To understand woman’s place, one must first understand the concept of a relational system.
In previous parshiot, mainly Parashot Korah, we discussed the human tendency to relate to a systemized framework. This can be for convenience, or out of laziness, or due to lack of interest in confronting the environment, preferring to bypass it as it were, to evade its stimulants and temptations. As a general rule, people are drawn after external stimulants, and do not initiate on their own.
Initiative is expressed by inner aspirations, by destinations and goals that one sets for oneself, according to one’s inner quality and one’s values. If these do not exist, as with the weak of character and mind, then they are drawn after stimulants that society sets, and after nature’s temptations, that come by way of the fight for existence.
“The children of the sublime,” however, the “bnei aliyah, and they are few indeed,” according to Hazal’s definition, succeed in rising above stimulants and temptations, and are drawn, out of the initiative of their own free choice, toward the Goal of all goals: Dvaikut, attaching to their Creator. “To do Your will, my Lord, I have longed, etc.”
Desire for this dvaikut fills every component of their life, whether domestic, social, or financial. Value-based content and meaning are measured whenever possible by how they can be used to draw nearer to God. “For the sake of mitsva.” Such people have no dealings with fixed and permanent and rigid structures and frameworks.
For such people, all things are flexible, all things are fluid, and all things are measured only by the yardstick of Godly values. Such a yardstick eludes systemization. Opportunities for fulfilling mitsvot may present themselves any way at all, one day one way, and another day, another way signals a new path, perhaps previously blocked and then opened up, by them, through their own initiative.
Routine is the most dangerous temptation, leading to a systematic petrifying of the character, as the Ramban indicates in his cutting-edge depiction: “A degenerate with the Torah’s permission.” (Kedoshim)
Strange as it seems, there is a real parallel in the real world that parallels the goal, and it stands above and even sometimes outside of all of existence’s goals, and it has a values-based power that purifies as the red heifer does – purifying the impure and impurifying the pure – and it is found in dangerous proximity, and this is woman.
“All that Sarah tells you, obey her,” is God’s verdict to Avraham as he stands before a grave moral dilemma. “Evict this maid and her son,” Avraham’s wife Sarah demands of him. As we know, the son of this maid has come forth from Avraham. Where would he go? Avraham hesitates until there is a Godly intervention, which sides with Sarah’s opinion.
Indeed, this is the verdict of the Gemara, to obey the wife in all worldly affairs and in all human affairs. Meaning one must concede to the wife’s opinion in anything of a practical or people-related nature.
Here we find an opening to an understanding of the essential nature of woman. It is woman who initiates, woman who attracts, woman who tempts. It is woman who determines man’s relationship to the surround, to existence itself. From her the source of all relationships comes; with her the source of all relationships is found. One who remains without a wife “is as though passed on and cancelled from this world” for better or for worse. “Cherche la femme.” “Look for the woman behind events.” “Behind every great man stands a great woman.”
Woman constitutes a source of energy, whether positive or negative. From her, all relational systems derive, not only relations between “he and she”. A relationship to a woman never becomes rigidified within a framework. “Onn, son of Pelet, his wife saved him from the dispute of Korah and his mob.” With her anti-framework flexibility and astuteness, she persuaded her husband to refrain from joining any framework other than the domestic framework.
Woman represents life’s essence. “Additional abundance of bina, insight was given to the woman, as it says, ‘vayiven, and He built the rib.’” This is an insight into life; it is neither rigid, nor fixed into frameworks, nor petrified. Woman’s entirety belongs to the very roots of life, to its human and practical aspect, to its aspect of values – to what not? She has the ability to sense the root of matters in every situation.
The man is influenced by frameworks. He is drawn to them. He attributes to them the weight of a pure value. He is unconscious of their rigidifying and petrifying effect. The woman relates flexibly to frameworks, seeking the human or practical value in them. She remains unimpressed by their structuralist and framework value per se`.
A man builds frameworks for his own sake, in order to attribute to them his own heart’s murmurings, as well as their own intrinsic temptations. Novels, sports, games of chance, chess, and politics. The entire value of these frameworks lies in their fixed permanence, in their detachment from reality, in their being virtual.
Therefore the women are few who deal in theory for its own sake, such as mathematics and the other frameworks mentioned above – because these do not represent life itself. They exist only in the hearts and minds of male theoreticians playing “make-believe”. To women, they have no real substance.
Woman sets purposeful goals for herself, and her place is in the eye of the storm of life – though she herself is usually the cause of the storm.
A positive woman represents the positive human being in full glory. She expresses the embodiment of positive motivation. The negative woman represents as well the source of negative motivation. She is the source of temptation. She incarnates the power of temptation. Woe to the man, and be he the strongest of men, who falls into her trap. In a moment of weakness, this woman waits for him, a temptation that is unequalled in power.
For this reason, man is commanded to surround himself with protective barriers and prohibitions in relation to her: “About his own wife, they said it. All the more, about his friend’s wife.” The danger is not in the woman, but in the man who is weak, and has a natural tendency to stumble through her.
Toward the man who is compatible with her, she is a source of blessing and positive stimulation, energizing him to march on the path of life and blessing. That same woman, in relation to a man who is not compatible with her, constitutes a source of failure and curse.
Therefore, “it is from God, a man’s woman.” Her relations with the man who is compatible – the relations are what is good, more than the woman herself. It is the relating to her that has the effect – and this is something that she determines – rather than her essential substance and values of the person herself.
Therefore, there is no woman without man, and there is no man without woman. “The two of them are called ahdahm.” Man without woman, or woman without man, is only half the vessel.
Woman has a creative approach to life per se`. She is a part of life per se`, flowing with life’s flow, her finger always on its pulse. The spiritual dimension in its pure form, in its theoretical form, is the man’s lot. Therefore woman does not address the “doing, time-bound mitsvot”. She is busy with the permanent, with the aspect of tangible substance, she does not deal in the ephemeral. She is involved with raising and educating the family. Her investment in values focuses on expressions of the tangible and actual, on her investment in the essential substance of human behavior, with her children, with tangibly actualizing values within the intimate space of the family.
“ ‘Thus will you say to the house of Ya’akov,’ refers to the women.” Therefore the man, who tends to detach from life per se`, and to invest in theories, is obligated to fulfill the “doing, time-bound” mitsvot, in order to be protected from his tendency to detach himself, to “space out.” The woman does not deal in the ephemeral; her business is with what is permanent.
However, it can happen that woman’s tendency to emphasize life per se` could come at the expense of values. Here lies the paradox, in woman’s greater impressionability: She can be impressed by the form while ignoring the meaningful content, yet any actualization of this meaningful content is influenced by the dynamic process of life per se`.
This is “the thing and its opposite”, and this is why woman resembles the red heifer. Her feet are solidly planted in matters of real substance, yet her eyes are drawn to impressions, even when these impressions are empty of values. For this reason, the woman does not stand on her own feet, but is dependent on the man, but only on the man who is deserving of her. Similarly the man, drawn after theories per se`, as mere theoretical principles. He needs them to be actualized in the real world by his own real wife.
The segulah, the specific capability of the Land of Israel is that it can actualize values in the real world with no separation between content and form. Therefore woman’s segulah is attracted to this dimension of values-based realness typical of the values and uniqueness of the Holy Land.
The man has difficulty relating to the sanctified values that the Land holds as being a tangible realness that actively transfers to a values-based doing. His tendency is to relate to the dimension of values as being detached from tangible realness. Therefore, he fears the Holy Land.
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