1 Drives Jewish Law on Women
women from a give role will generally not suffice. We will instead need to confront the custom head-on, evaluating it in terms of its role in our community now.
[hat will not be easy. In 1984, I wrote an article for the University of Judaism's University Papers series in that I suggested that the proper stance was“equal but distinct.”*° That is, I would want to recognize that men and women as classes are equal in their legal status, and in their theological status as creatures of God are created in the divine image, but I would also want to have our rituals express the fact that men and women differ from one another in important ways linked to their respective genders. Some of these differences, of course, are socially engendered(if not determined), and then one must ask whether such differentiations are justifiable or desirable. Increasingly over the last fifteen years, though, we have discovered that a number of the factors that differentiate men and women are biologically based, Including most recently, the study based on functional magnetic fesonance imaging(MRI) of the brains of men and women as they 'espond to the same questions; this study demonstrated that men and women do think with different parts of their brains?! In any Case, whether the result of nature or nurture or both, men and Women are now demonstrably different from each other in the Way they think, talk, reason morally, and respond to life in general, as indicated by studies carried out largely by women such as Caro] Gilligan, Deborah Tannen , and Nel Noddings. *? Moreover, ia it has become politically acceptable to acknowledge these distinctions, men and women have dared to explore in women’s and
men’s groups the meaning of their engendered states of being, as
ell as, and in denigration of, their common humanity and, in
Our case, their common Jewish identity.
I, for one, then, would like to repeat the suggestion that I ade in 1984, but now with much more evidence. Specifically, I "Ink that Jewish ritual life should incorporate many leadership Oles are open to people of both genders. On the other hand, Ough, there should be, in my view, some elements of worship - rituals that specifically are performed by women, and others a restricted to men. That would acknowledge in graphic, ._alterms that we are at once equal and different. If the slogan
*parate but equal” had not had such bad press in American
th r