Subscribe to Print Edition | Tue., July 08, 2008 Tamuz 5, 5768 | | Israel Time: 16:37 (EST+7) web haaretz.com   Back to Homepage Rosner's Domain Diplomacy Defense Jewish World Opinion National Print Edition Car Rental Books Peres Conference Business Real Estate Easy Start Travel Week's End Anglo File

Young women studying at Jerusalem's Midreshet Lindenbaum, the seminary that Ilana Blumberg attended in the late 1980s (Lior Mizrachi, BauBau) Last update - 14:50 19/06/2008 Memoir A pilgrim's progress By Esther Solomon Tags: Jewish World, Ilana Blumberg  'Houses of Study' is about the coming-of-age not only of a single individual, but also of a generation of women brought up in a not-yet self-confident stream of Orthodoxy Houses of Study A Jewish Woman Among Books, by Ilana M. Blumberg, University of Nebraska Press, 1 Advertisement 77 pages, $24.95 Ilana Blumberg must have felt a moment of bittersweet satisfaction when her autobiographical "Houses of Study" was shortlisted for the prestigious Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature earlier this year. Bittersweet, because although the nomination is a sign of success and recognition, her book is based on a lifetime of hard and agonizing conflicts. That the themes of her book have now reached the Jewish cultural mainstream is hardly to be taken for granted, considering that it explores life out of the mainstream -- the frustrations, marginalization and alienation of a specific generation of Orthodox Jewish women. "Houses of Study" is the bildungsroman not only of a single individual, but also of a generation of women brought up in a not-yet self-confident stream of Orthodoxy, a school of thought in the making. Each of its four long essays covers a "chapter" in Blumberg's life: growing up in Chicago in the '70s and '80s, when she prayed at an egalitarian Conservative synagogue but studied at an Orthodox day school; a post-high school year at a women's seminary in Jerusalem; university education in the United States; and, most recently, being appointed to an assistant professorship at Michigan State University, finding her soulmate and giving birth to a first child. The text's tone reflects its subject's complexity, as it moves back and forth between the discursive and instructive and the poetic and intimate. The book's form embraces extreme variety, from snippets of poems, written by the author and others, to extended discourses on Hebrew and Talmudic phrases and concepts, streams of consciousness, and mini-stories that sound like extended metaphors. Blumberg's perception of conflict between her gender and her religious aspirations began early. As a child, she was taught Hebrew by her father and grandfather (the latter a scholar of modern Hebrew), as well as how to leyn (chant from the Torah) and to love the study of the Jewish tradition. But as she began identifying as Orthodox, Blumberg started feeling trapped by the role prescribed for women within that tradition. Her "knowledge became unusable." There was a cognitive gap between Blumberg's dedication to Jewish learning and ritual participation, on the one hand, and the surrounding culture's lack of acceptance, or interest, in her religious knowledge and actions, simply due to her gender. This dissonance has followed Blumberg throughout her life. Blumberg chose to study at Mikhlelet Bruria (now Midreshet Lindenbaum), one of the first Orthodox women's seminaries in the world to encourage women to explore central texts such as the Mishna and Talmud. However, her portrait of the "year off" experience in Israel is unflattering in the extreme. Socially, she felt alien to Israeli life, ignored, mocked because of her accent, stuck in a seminary offering basic conditions and with a total lack of privacy. Spiritually, although Blumberg encountered highly intelligent, learned and religious women teachers, she felt that her learning conditions were second-rate in comparison to those enjoyed by her male friends from home who were also studying in Israel. Blumberg yearned to learn all hours of the day and night, to grow thin because food is a distraction, to escape the homemaking and dressing-to-impress that the seminary atmosphere fostered, to live solely within the pages of the holy books: "Even as our passion breathed and died, the boys' was being born - The boys were pushing their minds, straining their bodies, until they dropped in exhaustion." Whereas the boys were taught and judged according to the intellectual knowledge and understanding they accumulated (hokhmah, a "male" attribute), the girls were expected to express their understanding through binah, the apparently inherent, "natural" and unschooled form of insight traditionally ascribed to women. Only hokhmah has a true home in the house of study of Jewish texts. Ironically, having chosen the path of study, Blumberg felt that she was "a Jewish woman with no Beit Midrash to welcome her." Back in the U.S. for college, she developed a deep love for English literature. Instead of seeing a dichotomy between secular and sacred texts, Blumberg found time for each, and her bookshelves held both George Eliot, Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters, and the books that open "from right to left." Today, she teaches both English literature and Judaic studies. She has also found a partner who speaks both her languages: Ori is a student of English literature and a seeker of traditional Jewish scholarship and the life of learning he did not find in his Reform upbringing. No personal gratification A decade ago, however, life was fraught with other encounters, for instance between Jewish and non-Jewish social circles. To her mother's dismay, she moved in with a non-Jewish boy she fell in love with over John Donne's metaphysical poems, although the two separated when Blumberg discovered that her solo dedication to a Jewish way of life was a source of complete aloneness. A further source of unremitting friction was Blumberg's experience as a graduate student in setting up an Orthodox women's prayer group at the University of Pennsylvania's Hillel House in the mid-90s. She describes the humiliation that the women in the group, who had studied in depth the halakhic issues relating to women's prayer, felt when the far younger -- and mostly male -- students of the college's Orthodox minyan declared that they too would study the issues to ensure that the women were really acting solely "leshem shamayim," for the sake of Heaven, and not, God forbid, for personal gratification of any kind. Declares Blumberg: "It has never been the masses of women who do not pray that the rabbis find worthy of fearful rebuke; it is women who want to pray publicly, who want to pray, that cause trouble. Male zealousness can be troubling to authority, yes, but female zealousness for anything is always seen as zealousness for being female." Indeed the depth of hostility to women's ritual activity that Blumberg experienced almost jolted her into leaving Orthodoxy altogether. Down the street she could easily find more progressive Jewish options. The U.S. is known as a veritable free-market paradise of religious movements. According to a recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 44 percent of Americans change religious faith or denomination at least once in their lives. It is a painful question for anyone who feels at the margins of their religious denomination: Could one's spiritual life be more comfortable, fulfilling, focused, in the midst of a neighboring denomination? What would be lost and what found? And there is another question: Am I being honest with myself? Is it nostalgia or real belief or the fear of a loss of face that prevents a more radical move? Is it in fact more courageous to step into the next denomination? Many of these questions surround famous "conversions," such as the move of Alice Shalvi, a leader and flagbearer of liberal Orthodoxy and women's empowerment in Israel, from Orthodoxy to Conservative (Masorti) Judaism in the late 1990s. Shalvi cited the irreconcilable differences between how she believed women should be active within religious life and the shackles that Orthodoxy put on women's participation, a result of an "androcentric and patriarchal" tradition. Indeed, Blumberg's critique of Orthodoxy, especially vis-a-vis women, is so comprehensive that the option of moving leftward in terms of formal affiliation would seem to be a natural one. We even hear that many of her seminary peers are now involved in liberal Orthodox groups and a significant number that have voted with their prayer books and chosen egalitarian communities. Blumberg herself decided to remain within Orthodoxy, but although she talks articulately about what that means to her - accepting obligations, learning, consistency, ritual - she doesn't explain how she made her peace with a denomination about whose flaws she is so articulate. It's as if the bildungsroman has met a spiritual treasure hunt where the author's clues to her reader peter out toward the journey's end. All we hear about the spiritual flavor of her current place of worship, in Ann Arbor, is that it is "not a formal congregation but a small university minyan." What about the exclusion Blumberg felt from gender-divided formal Jewish prayer? Does this environment offer her the "use" of those Torah-reading skills her family carefully nurtured in her? How will this synagogue nurture her own little girl's religious learning? Perhaps one explanation for this silence can be found toward the end of the book, when, in the late 1990s, Blumberg revisits Penn Hillel for a women's prayer group, a decade after she was involved in the struggle to establish the group. Blumberg is shocked but also deeply moved by the easy familiarity of the women with the service, with the lack of obsessing about appearances, with the sense of entitlement they feel that Blumberg's generation - nervously squatting waiting for the religious bailiffs to move them out - never felt. Indeed, to a new generation of modern Orthodox women, the constant struggles to participate in Jewish life that Blumberg describes in "Houses of Study" may already read like a history book, such have been the changes in Orthodox Jewish life since then. Perhaps Blumberg feels that the tide is on her side, that modern Orthodoxy recognizes the issues facing Jewish women and is committed to redress them, or that Orthodox women themselves have taken up the challenge in a far more scholarly yet vocal manner than any previous generation. Perhaps, having found in Orthodoxy "the movement to work against," and having battled with religious institutions and mindsets over several decades, she has decided, for the time being, to prioritize her family and professional -- rather than spiritual -- homes. Esther Solomon is the Jewish World editor at Haaretz.com Bookmark to del.icio.us   Prisoner exchange Israel signs swap deal, begins exhuming bodies of Hezbollah guerillas. Provocative questions Gaydamak tells TAU student to 'shut up and go to hell' over Angola question.   1.   intellectual pride 03:28  |  sarah`s child 20/06/08   2.   Reb Moshe Feinstein 20:15  |  Joseph 20/06/08   3.   Rashi`s daughter/s 20:18  |  Joe 20/06/08   4.   Pilgrim`s Progress - strange title 12:56  |  Aussie 22/06/08   5.   Pioneers - at least 10 years too late 16:07  |  Steph 08/07/08

Read & React Bradley Burston: Fear of calling a terrorist a terrorist Responses: 70 Editorial: Hamas has kept its truce commitments thus far Responses: 34 Former water chief: Faucets could run dry this summer Responses: 34 U.S. exports to Iran shot up despite Bush sanction talk Responses: 23 Assad: Direct talks with Israel only after Bush leaves office Responses: 20 Rosner's Domain Iran's bomb-building potential more than doubled (WTR) New Poll: What should Obama do about Iraq? How good/bad is Obama's faith based initiative (WTR) On Israel-Diaspora relations, Israelis are quite clueless More Headlines 12:32 Olmert to be questioned by police for third time 16:36 Gaza militants fire mortar shell in truce violation, says IDF 15:15 IDF shuts down Nablus mall in campaign against Hamas 13:59 Knesset panel admonishes Netanyahu for London spending spree 16:17 IDF rebukes Egyptian soldiers over fatal cross-border manhunt 15:20 Report: Iran begins war game with warning to U.S. and Israel 14:43 Elie Wiesel testifies against man who allegedly accosted him 11:06 Former water chief: Faucets could run dry this summer 15:22 Gag order lifted: IDF troops arrested Hamas militants in May 16:10 Education Minister, former ministry DG exchange heated words 14:35 Arab MK: Indict police who beat Bedouin to death 11:26 Israel signs swap deal, exhumes bodies of Hezbollah guerillas 08:57 U.S. exports to Iran shot up even as Bush talked tough on sanctions 11:21 Two Hamas men killed in blast at Gaza training camp Previous Editions Select Day 07 jul 06 jul 04 jul 03 jul 02 jul 01 jul 30 jun 29 jun 27 jun 26 jun 25 jun 24 jun

Special Offers Advertisement Dan Hotels Israel Live the Legend & experience an Unforgettable Summer Vacation Yossi Avrahami Presents: New Luxurious Projects in North Tel Aviv & Eilat Jerusalem of Gold Luxury apartments in Jerusalem's finest location Holyland Park Jerusalem Apartment Tower World Class Luxury In the heart of Tel-Aviv The Meier on Rothschild tower Your vacation starts here Israel Travel Center Guaranteed Lowest Rates Hebrew Summer courses From $39.95 Pardes Institute Summer Sessions http://www.pardes.org.il/ Fattal Hotel Chain Perfectly located hotels on best resorts of Israel. ISRAEL BONDS Build Israel Israel bonds - a multi-purpose way to celebrate Israel's 60th Eldan Rent a Car Israel's leading car rental company offers you a 20% discount on all online reservations Junkyard Junk a car - get free towing nationwide and a tax-deductible receipt

Home | TV | Print Edition | Diplomacy | Opinion | Arts & Leisure | Sports | Jewish World | Underground | Site rules |

Real Estate in Israel | Travel to Israel with Haaretz | Hotels Israel | Restaurants Israel | Tourist attractions Israel | Shops Israel

birthright Israel | Search engine marketing

Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.

© Copyright  Haaretz. All rights reserved