can use the telephone for my work?
But they all sounded a little meek before rabbinic authority, as if the rabbi owned Jewish Law. I felt that way, too. He owned us as well, for the time being, even if that was voluntary. Only one question sounded incredulous. “We can’t tear anything, but surely,” the woman said, “you can tear toilet paper?”
We couldn’t. We had to prepare that in advance.
“We’re Jews,” I whispered to Ana. “But I didn’t know any of this stuff.”
I was both leery of rules and attracted to them. My mother was incredibly inconsistent, would suddenly decide she had rules we should have known, even if she’d never revealed them to us. Her anger for not following them would come like a shot out of nowhere, a demand, we knew, to make her happy. There was love at stake for us bound up with those unknowable rules. I was always uncertain around my mother, trying to please, never getting it right. In high school as well, there seemed to be unwritten rules among the girls that made being one of them my endless social failure. There I was in my overalls, longing for my girlfriend and dreaming at night that I was a boy, watching mystified as the other girls pretended to be women, girls I’d known a long time who didn’t seem themselves anymore as they touched up their makeup in the bathroom mirrors and swished around boys. I couldn’t figure out their rules either, and I wanted to.
“Here’s our schedule for the evening,” the rabbi said. “In a few minutes, the women are going to light the Sabbath candles. When they say the candle blessing, that’s when Shabbos begins. It is our women who inaugurate the holy Sabbath.”
Our women. The phrase swept me solidly into the group, into a reassuring and rare sense of belonging. But it also sounded as if these strangers owned us. But then again, by “our,” didn’t he just mean “Jewish”? So wasn’t I already in? I was confused, conflicted. Both attracted and repelled. Our women.
“Oh, and one more thing,” the rabbi said, like an afterthought. Then he glanced sideways and swallowed. “Throughout the Sabbath, the women and men will participate separately.”
I looked up.
“This is the modest way,” he said. “Separate is Godly.” For the rest of this timeless Sabbath, the women were to sit separatedfrom the men at meals and behind a partition at prayers. We would gather in designated areas; pray apart, with low voices; eat apart.
So much was coming at me so fast. Out in the world, there was a budding feminist movement: Bella Abzug in Congress in her hats, the Equal Rights Amendment making its slow movement state to state, women burning bras on television. But at this event we had stepped into a different society apart from all that. I supposed this gender divide was no more strange than all the other new rules. Maybe, I thought, this was just like summer camp orientation, reasonable enough that we would be subdivided into groups with different activities. In any case, I liked that I had just been deemed a woman and thus an adult.
The rabbi talked on about Jewish women lighting Sabbath candles all over the world, about how Jewish women have been doing the candle ritual on Friday evenings for thousands of years. He called those women noble and important. Images of this simple simultaneous act of lighting candles played in my mind, the little flames lit by women around the world, always at sundown, flickering shadows on dining room walls, covered heads bowed over centuries. That was solidarity, global, historical—a true sense of belonging. The rabbi said that we women brought light to the world.
He paused and gave us a long gaze, then raised his voice for dramatic effect. “It is time,” he said, “for the women to inaugurate the holy Sabbath.” He gestured toward a long table at the other end of the hall set with unlit candles. He turned and stretched out one arm as if we women were honored guests he was ushering through
But they all sounded a little meek before rabbinic authority, as if the rabbi owned Jewish Law. I felt that way, too. He owned us as well, for the time being, even if that was voluntary. Only one question sounded incredulous. “We can’t tear anything, but surely,” the woman said, “you can tear toilet paper?”
We couldn’t. We had to prepare that in advance.
“We’re Jews,” I whispered to Ana. “But I didn’t know any of this stuff.”
I was both leery of rules and attracted to them. My mother was incredibly inconsistent, would suddenly decide she had rules we should have known, even if she’d never revealed them to us. Her anger for not following them would come like a shot out of nowhere, a demand, we knew, to make her happy. There was love at stake for us bound up with those unknowable rules. I was always uncertain around my mother, trying to please, never getting it right. In high school as well, there seemed to be unwritten rules among the girls that made being one of them my endless social failure. There I was in my overalls, longing for my girlfriend and dreaming at night that I was a boy, watching mystified as the other girls pretended to be women, girls I’d known a long time who didn’t seem themselves anymore as they touched up their makeup in the bathroom mirrors and swished around boys. I couldn’t figure out their rules either, and I wanted to.
“Here’s our schedule for the evening,” the rabbi said. “In a few minutes, the women are going to light the Sabbath candles. When they say the candle blessing, that’s when Shabbos begins. It is our women who inaugurate the holy Sabbath.”
Our women. The phrase swept me solidly into the group, into a reassuring and rare sense of belonging. But it also sounded as if these strangers owned us. But then again, by “our,” didn’t he just mean “Jewish”? So wasn’t I already in? I was confused, conflicted. Both attracted and repelled. Our women.
“Oh, and one more thing,” the rabbi said, like an afterthought. Then he glanced sideways and swallowed. “Throughout the Sabbath, the women and men will participate separately.”
I looked up.
“This is the modest way,” he said. “Separate is Godly.” For the rest of this timeless Sabbath, the women were to sit separatedfrom the men at meals and behind a partition at prayers. We would gather in designated areas; pray apart, with low voices; eat apart.
So much was coming at me so fast. Out in the world, there was a budding feminist movement: Bella Abzug in Congress in her hats, the Equal Rights Amendment making its slow movement state to state, women burning bras on television. But at this event we had stepped into a different society apart from all that. I supposed this gender divide was no more strange than all the other new rules. Maybe, I thought, this was just like summer camp orientation, reasonable enough that we would be subdivided into groups with different activities. In any case, I liked that I had just been deemed a woman and thus an adult.
The rabbi talked on about Jewish women lighting Sabbath candles all over the world, about how Jewish women have been doing the candle ritual on Friday evenings for thousands of years. He called those women noble and important. Images of this simple simultaneous act of lighting candles played in my mind, the little flames lit by women around the world, always at sundown, flickering shadows on dining room walls, covered heads bowed over centuries. That was solidarity, global, historical—a true sense of belonging. The rabbi said that we women brought light to the world.
He paused and gave us a long gaze, then raised his voice for dramatic effect. “It is time,” he said, “for the women to inaugurate the holy Sabbath.” He gestured toward a long table at the other end of the hall set with unlit candles. He turned and stretched out one arm as if we women were honored guests he was ushering through
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