Shabbat Shalom.
Shabbat Shalom. I would like to dedicate this d’var Torah to my parents of blessed memory, Ralph and Dorothy Pearlman. I would like to thank Susan Leider and Avi Havivi for sharing some insights with me, and my family for inspiring me to speak about this today.
I want to speak about women and mitzvot, and what that means to us as a community… by means of a little personal history. My parents met and married in Boyle Heights in 1948. They joined Valley Beth Shalom in Encino in 1959 or so, and they lived down the street from the shul until they passed away. Ours was the family that was called when they needed another person for the minyan.
My father was on the Education committee when Rabbi Bergman was the rabbi, and Dov Peleg was the school principal. Together they modernized Jewish education at VBS, and the community. My dad developed a diagnostic test in Hebrew so kids with learning disabilities could be taught Hebrew. My dad also taught confirmation, and professionally was a social worker, and had a school for kids with learning disabilities, before they were called disabilities. (And today for the first time we have an amazing service called, "Koleinu" for kids with special needs.)
My mother, an immigrant from Poland came to the US in September 1939, on the last ship that left Poland. She was an active member of Sisterhood, cooking for shul functions, volunteering for every charitable function and event (we would call the Sisterhood kitchen when we got home from school to find out when our mom was coming home). She collected household goods for Soviet Jewry that immigrated to Los Angeles and was in charge of selling script for the shul at the time of her passing. She raised 6 children, and encouraged her four daughters to go to school and learn a profession, at least until we married, which was our family joke.
My parents cherished education, especially my mother, since it was not available to her as a child or a young woman. She provided all her children with a Jewish education. (Dr. Singer always reminds me when he sees me that my mother gave up her dining room one school year for a weekly Hebrew High class when VBS was remodeling, and there wasn’t a place for the class.)
As a young girl growing up in Poland, her brother/my Uncle Tia was send to Cheder, but as a girl, she was only taught to read the prayers. Here in the US, when my grandparents settled in Boyle Heights, she wasn’t offered a formal Jewish education, though she was raised in an Orthodox home.
My mother embraced Conservative Judaism for it’s tradition and modernity, and my father who had been teaching at the Reform synagogue, Temple Beth Hillel, embraced liberal Judaism, maybe for the absence of dietary restrictions. (No one laughed here, so I added, "That was a joke, since we had a kosher home.") As a fighter pilot in WWII I think he valued the emphasis on social justice that Reform Judaism embodied. But pragmatism won out: my mother did not want to carpool with six kids, so they bought the house right up the street from VBS. We could walk to Hebrew School, and my mom could walk to shul, especially on Yontov, and there was a Passover pantry that made life easier. Judaism at that time was defined by doing—kosher home, attending Junior congregation, observing holidays, supporting Israel. For my mother and her peers, women’s roles were defined by preparing meals, caring for the family, supporting your spouse.
So many years ago on a Shabbat morning similar to this one, Parashat Noah—Rosh Hodesh, I became a Bat Mitzvah at Valley Beth Shalom.
As a Bat Mitzvah during the 60’s, we went to temple on Friday night, and I did something during the service, which I don’t recall. (I do remember what I wore though.) On Saturday morning, I was called to the Torah, and had an aliyah, read my Haftarah, and helped Cantor Fordis lead musaf, which was different due to Rosh Hodesh.
Though my two older sisters had had a Bat Mitzvah before me, the Rabbi at that time would not allow them to have an aliyah, though my older brother could be called to the Torah. I remember being upset that my sisters couldn’t be called to the Torah for an aliyah, though just the year before and the year before that they had read from the Torah for their Bat Mitvah.
My brother was given a tallit, though neither I, nor my sisters had a tallit.
It never occurred to me that I could wear a tallit. Girls did not wear one, and t’fillin was unfathomable, not even on the radar screen, though my father taught my brother, and they laid t’fillin together in the hallway every morning. I never once asked to try it or have my dad or brother show me how.
I went to Israel with LA Hebrew High School Ulpan in 1970, and the boys brought tallit and tefillin with them, and not one girl had a tallit on our trip. And this past summer, for USY Pilgrimage, tallit and tefillin were mandatory for boys, and tallit optional for girls. It was not until I began coming to the Library Minyan about 15 years ago that I first saw women regularly wearing a tallit… and it started a deep yearning in me to wear a tallit. It had never occurred to me that I could, or should wear one.
But Parashat Noah…there must be a connection. Susan Leider told me about a teaching she learned a class taught by Reb Mimi Fegelson who taught a midrash about T’shuva. (If I get this wrong, it’s my fault, not Susan’s—we talked about during Sukkot and I couldn’t write it down.) So Noah built compartments for all the animals, like little cubbies. And that our relationships are like the contents of those cubbies, that is we can take them out and examine them; decide which to repair, to whom to do T’shuva since we can’t realistically take care of all of our relationships, we can’t repair them all. And the same is true for mitzvot. If we take the mitzvot out of the cubbies, do we decide which ones we do, which ones are holy, which ones will bring us closer to G-d, which ones will bring us closer to people who are created in the image of G-d? Do we pick and choose our mitzvot based on what we know, what we’re familiar with, what won’t challenge us?
So I come back to the tallit… this community, and we see women wearing tallit. They are rabbis, rabbinical students, or for the most part older women, myself included, who were not raised with them, and voluntarily acquired them…who worked hard to acquire them. I spoke with Rachel Adler about a few weeks ago, and she reports that she was ridiculed for wearing a tallit. (I have been thinking about this d’var Torah for awhile.) And it saddens me that our amazing post-Bat Mitzvah girls don’t regularly wear their beautiful tallitot that were lovingly selected or created for them. And yet, I couldn’t get up the courage to get my own tallit, and I talked about it so often that my husband must have tired of me talking about it, and he bought me this one for me…from the gift shop at my old shul, Valley Beth Shalom. And my mother loved that I wore a tallit.
I am a lawyer, and while I practice disability law now, I used to do sex discrimination cases, and Title IX work. Sociologists who study male groups, such as Professor Michael Messner at USC, find that there are positive outcomes for boys and men when they see women acting powerfully, such as by participating in sports. I would add to Professor Messner’s thesis that there are positive outcomes when they see women and girls doing traditional male practices such as wearing tallit and t’fillin. It changes the social dynamics and erodes gender stereotyping. It allows both men and women, boys and girls, to engage in more egalitarian relationships.
As a community we want to encourage our young women and young men not to regress, not to act in stereotypical ways, including in our religious practices. And I’m concerned about a return to stereotypical role modeling, and a return to outmoded notions of what it is to be a girl or boy, man or woman, Jewish woman, Jewish man. And so I challenge our comfort zones this morning.
I want us to examine something as essential as the mitzva of tallit/tzizit. Personally, I need every tool I can get to make prayer meaningful for me, including wearing a tallit. I am paraphrasing from Abraham Joshua Heschel essay from Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity:
Prayer must not be dissonant with the rest of living. The mercifulness, gentleness, which pervades us in moments of prayer is but a ruse or a bluff if it is inconsistent with the way we live at other moments. …Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.
I challenge us to maintain an egalitarian community here, by acting as equals among ourselves, without stereotyping, supporting each other through change, without doing what is familiar, because sometimes what is familiar may be detrimental to the whole. This is subversive. Encouraging each other to be subversive.
I want to share with you part of a poem by Yehuda Amichai:
Whoever put on a tallis when he was young Will never forget; taking it out of the soft velvet bag, Opening the folded shawl, spreading it out, kissing the length of the neckband (embroidered or trimmed in gold).
Then swinging it in a great swoop overhead like a sky, A wedding canopy, a parachute.
And then winding it around his head As in hide-and-seek, Wrapping his whole body in it, Close and slow, Snuggling into it like the cocoon of a butterfly, Then opening would-be wings to fly.
….
And as a girl, I never had that experience. And men need to share that experience with women and girls. And we need to have that experience. For me, it means approaching t’fillin, which I still have not tried or touched. It means being supportive while at the same time encouraging change.
The Kabbalists considered the tallit as a special garment for the service of God, intended, in connection with the tefillin, to inspire awe and reverence for God at prayer (Zohar, Exodus Toledot, p. 141a).
So, inspired by last week’s drash by Susan Laemmle, I leave you with Psalm 104, which is recited on Rosh Hodesh, and the first few lines, which are in Birkhot Hashahar, and are said as a meditation before putting on the tallit…words which I have come to know and love:
Barchi Nafshi et Adonai. Adonai elohai gadaltah m’od, hode v’hadar lahvahshtah. Ohteh or kasalma, noteh shamayim kayireeah.
Let all my being praise Adonai who is clothed in splendor and majesty, wrapped in light as in a garment, unfolding the heavens like a curtain. Psalms 104:1-2
Shabbat Shalom.