Today at work while talking to a friend about finals, I mentioned that I have two papers due next week, both relatively about Judaism but for two different classes. He then asks me in a surprised tone, why I am so obsessed with Judaism. I guess as a Jewish person himself, with no religious ties at all, he would be curious as to why, I, whose religious beliefs lean toward Christianity, would take so many classes dedicated to this religion. But really, I couldn’t answer his question right away.  I guess in a way just coming to Dickinson fed my interest. Generally I had always been fascinated by religion. But in high school, when I officially decided that I could no longer call myself an atheist and began exploring Christianity (not Catholicism as I had been raised with) I realized that the pastors of the many churches I visited could not answer all questions. Many of which were inherently tied to Judaism through the Old Testament. But coming to Dickinson and becoming very good friends with Jewish people probably sparked my interest as well.  Now, I also feel that it is necessary to understand Judaism before understanding Christianity. Which leads me to this great quote by Stuart E. Rosenberg from the book  “The Christian Problem”, he writes ” I profoundly believe that Christians can meet Jews with a balanced spiritual attitude by first recognizing and analyzing how their majority faith should deal with so intimately-related a minority faith and culture as Judaism.” While he goes on to say many other things that I don’t necessarily agree with, I do think that Christians need to acknowledge that there are innate connections between Judaism and Christianity, that need attention if one is understand their Christianity, while at the same time emphasizing the fact that Judaism is its own distinct religion in faith and practice. I guess it’s a complicated relationship.

One of the most interesting aspects of Judaism for me is its fluid definition. Not only the idea that people who are Jewish integrate it into their lives in different ways but that they are also each forming their own individual definitions of being Jewish. I think how other Jewish people perceive Jews with different practices is important when attempting to understand Judaism as a people. From the interviews conducted by myself and other students, I found that community seemed to be a universal theme when discussing what Judaism meant to the interviewees. The Jewish community was defined as a type of haven where everyone was accepted and everyone understood and followed the same values. But what if a certain Jewish community did not consider another community to be legitimately Jewish? I was curious, so I asked those who I interviewed what they thought of those who practiced differently whether they leaned more toward the orthodox or liberal side of the spectrum. While most considered being Jewish as “self-defining”, they all seemed to still have their own criteria in order for Judaism to be  legitimate in their eyes. These criteria differed from having certain knowledge about Jewish text and culture to simply having a Jewish mother. I wondered then, if everyone had different “requirements”, is there really an entire Jewish community? Or perhaps they only exist at the local level.

Lowenstein’s distinction between the great tradition and the little tradition sheds much light on the idea of a possible united Jewish community. He says the great tradition was “written in books and enshrined in the laws of the Jewish religion, [and] was the uniting factor. The great tradition had an advantage that was particularly important for the Jews-it was portable” (Lowenstein 2). The little tradition is basically everything else and is obtained through culture and family, including things like, music, food, and language. This dichotomy between great tradition and little tradition did help to understand how the Jewish community can be united but there are still many complications in these distinctions. For example, Karaite Judaism cannot be fully included within the great tradition since it does not consider the Talmud or the Mishnah as binding or authoritative sources. This demonstrates that there are communities that are not defined by the standard of the great tradition but still consider themselves to be part of the Jewish community even though they main not be considered so among other Jewish societies. So then are they actually Jewish? Pseudo-Jewish? Or should they be categorized as a branch stemming away from the larger Jewish society? I don’t really know how to answer these questions or if answers even exist. I guess it would all come back to the fact that universals rarely exist in a world where people are moving from one place to another, adapting to their surroundings, borrowing and giving ideas to other communities. But since all religions, not only Judaism, change over time, how can one group really claim legitimacy over another?

The topic of a woman’s place in Judaism has always been of great interest to me. As a woman, it is a way to search for my own place within Judaism.  I have experienced many different customs as well as had many different evolutions of my own beliefs about women in Judaism.
When I was growing up I went to a Reform shul.  My mother is Jewish but my father is not.  Because of these things I never really noticed any difference between men and women in religious circumstances.  Boys and girls became b’nai mitzvah at the same time.  Families prayed as a unit.  My mother was in charge of all religion in the household.  Women wore kippot and tallitot with as much frequency as men.  The cantor was a woman and the rabbi a man.  We invoked the G-d of our fathers and of our mothers.  I never thought twice about being a Jewish woman.  I was just a Jew, no different than the boys.
It wasn’t until probably around middle school that I began to learn that in more traditional circles there were large differences between the genders.  I began to notice that Orthodox women were always covered up and wearing skirts (which my mother explained to me was because they didn’t want to let men see the shapes of their bodies).  My mother began to put an orange on our seder plate as a form of protest against the rabbi who had once remarked, “a woman belongs on the bimah like an orange belongs on the seder plate.”  I also saw women have a bat mitzvah ceremony as adults because their communities did not have the ceremonies for girls when they were young.  But despite all of this, in my daily religious experience girls were still no different than boys.
It was when I started attending a Jewish high school that this idea was shattered.  Yes, I attended an egalitarian minyan but the girls almost seemed only to participate in protest of non-egalitarianism.  Down the hall there was a minyan in which a woman’s place was completely different.  There were two separate sections divided by a removable wall (a mechitza).  The women were not even allowed to walk through the men’s section to get to their own.  They did not wear tallitot or kippot.  They were not allowed to lead services or be called to the Torah.  I was shocked.  I didn’t understand.  I had always thought that Judaism was a tolerant religion, yet here were these girls who could do almost nothing.  And the worst part was that they had chosen to be there! I was furious and I could not understand.
I have come a long way from this initial reaction 6 years ago.  I currently wear only skirts in the presence of men and always cover my shoulders.  I am uncomfortable sitting next to men while praying though I do not feel the need for a physical barrier and am okay without completely separate sections.  I will not put on tefillin, though I would put on a tallit but find it completely unnecessary and usually do not do so.  I do however, still maintain that women should be counted in a minyan and allowed to participate fully in the service (leading prayers, being called to the Torah, etc), but I do not feel that women have obligations to fulfill the time-based mitzvot.  But, I do believe that they are welcome to perform most of them if they wish.
Obviously this change in opinion did not occur overnight.  Throughout my high school career I struggled with friends “putting themselves down,” as I saw it, but as I became more familiar with the customs some of the ideas started to click with me.  I had a wonderful rabbi who was Orthodox and taught from a completely Orthodox point of view but in a way that was completely open and understanding.  He explained the idea that women don’t do the mitzvot because they are already closer to G-d.  He also explained that modesty (tznius) and the separation of the sexes was due to men’s weakness and is not at all a commentary on women.  When I first heard these things I dismissed them as excuses for completely sexist ideas.
I went to Israel for second semester of my senior year with my high school class and I wanted to pray but the only options were often Orthodox services.  As I spent more time in these places where I originally felt so uncomfortable and that used to outrage me, I began to get more and more comfortable. When I had the opportunity to go to an egalitarian service, I felt uncomfortable sitting next to a boy.  This was the first time in my life that I had felt more connected to women than boys (I was the girl whose best friends were always boys growing up), and it felt really good.  And getting comfortable with the customs made me look at the ideology differently and I my ideas started to change.
It’s still hard for me because my mixture of beliefs is shared by very few people and I have yet to encounter a place to pray where I can be completely comfortable, but it is still very interesting to see how much my views have changed.  I see people who were in the place I was 6 years ago, and I understand them completely, but I also hope that they will really come to understand that the more traditional views are not all restrictive, that a lot of them give women more freedom and opportunity.

Welcome to Ethnography of Jewish Experience, the blog for the Dickinson College course of the same name.  Students will be posting a variety of reflective and analytical essays to this site as they explore ethnographic perspectives on Jewish experience.