Women as ritual experts: the religious lives of elderly Jewish women in Jerusalem 9780195111460

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
Introduction (page 3)
1 Old Women as the Link Between the Generations (page 18)
2 The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality (page 34)
3 Between Woman and God (page 49)
4 From the Female Perspective (page 65)
5 Sacralizing the Feminine: Food Preparation as a Religious Activity (page 87)
6 The Liberation of Widowhood: From the Private to the Public (page 103)
7 Ritual Expertise in the Modern World (page 121)
Conclusion: The Making of a Ritual Expert (page 138)
Glossary of Hebrew Terms (page 142)
Notes (page 145)
Bibliography (page 161)
Index (page 171)

Citation preview

Women as Ritual Experts

Publications of the American Folklore Society New Series General Editor, Patrick B. Mullen

WOMEN AS RITUAL EXPERTS The Religious Lives of Elderly

Jewish Women in Jerusalem

SUSAN STARR SERED

New York Oxford OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press Oxford New York

Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogota Bombay Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Dar es Salaam Dehli Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madras Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi Paris Singapore

: Taipei Tokyo Toronto

and associated companies in Berlin Ibadan

Copyright © 1992 by Susan Starr Sered First published in 1992 by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016

First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback, 1996. | Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sered, Susan Starr. Women as ritual experts : the religious lives of elderly Jewish women in Jerusalem / Susan Starr Sered.

p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-19-511146-0

1. Women, Jewish—Jerusalem—Religious life. 2. Aged women— Jerusalem—Religious life. 3. Jews, Kurdish—Jerusalem. 4. Women in Judaism. 5. Orthodox Judaism—Jerusalem—Customs and practices.

I. Title. BM726.S47 1992 296'.082—dc20 91-8514

798 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

This book is dedicated to my mother, Bernice C. Starr, who was writing her doctoral dissertation on women and aging at the time of her death.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to express my thanks to Harvey Goldberg and R. J. Z. Werblowsky, my dissertation advisors at the Hebrew University of

Jerusalem. The members of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bar-Ilan University have provided me with the warm academic environment in which my dissertation was nurtured

into a book. In particular, Dafna Izraeli’s advice and encouragement have been helpful and unstinting. This book would never have been written without the emotional, intellectual, technological, and financial support of my husband, Yishai Sered.

Portions of some of the chapters in this book have appeared elsewhere in different form: Chapter 1 appeared in Man N.S., Volume 23 (1988); Chapter 2 in Israel Social Sciences Research, Volume 5 (1987); Chapter 5 in Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 61 (1988);

Chapter 6 in Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology, Volume 2 (1987); Chapter 7 in American Anthropologist, Volume 92 (1990).

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Contents

Introduction, 3 The Women, 4 Women and Religion, 6 Note on Methodology, 10 Middle Eastern Jewry—An Overview, 12 Setting the Stage, 15

1 Old Women as the Link Between the Generations, 18 Supplicants and Guardians of the Dead, 18 Spiritual Guardians of Their Descendants, 22 Guardians of the Unborn, 24 The Domestication of Religion, 26

2 The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality, 34 The Women, 34 \ The Men, 36

: Charity—The Greatest Women’s Mitzvah, 39 An Exceptional Woman, 41 An Exceptional Man, 43 Women, Men, and Moral Development, 46

X Contents 3 Between Woman and God, 49 Belief, 50

Everything Is in God’s Hands, 51 The Wheel of Fate, 54 Between Women and God, 54 Evil Eye, 56 The Chosen People in the Holy Land, 58 Gestures, 61

4 From the Female Perspective, 65 Women and [Il]literacy, 66 Women and Modesty, 71 Reinterpreting Stories, 74 Women, God, and Halacha, 77

The Holidays, 79 | 5 Sacralizing the Feminine: Food Preparation as a Religious Activity, 87 Kashrut, 88 Domestic Religion, 90 Cooking as Caring, 92 Food and Festivals, 93 Cooking as a Female Sacred Act, 101

| 6 The Liberation of Widowhood: From the Private to the Public, 103 Childhood, 103 Wives, 104 Widows, 106

Day Center, 110 | Synagogue, 112 Pilgrimage, 114

7 Ritual Expertise in the Modern World, 121 New Opportunities, 121 Ritual Specialists in the Old Country, 127

Contents x1 Vulnerability of Women’s Religion, 132 Innovation and Tenacity, 134

Conclusion: The Making of a Ritual Expert, 138 Glossary of Hebrew Terms, 142 Notes, 145

Bibliography, 161 Index, 171

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Women as | Ritual Experts

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Introduction A bent old woman, wearing two colorful kerchiefs, indiscrimi-

nately kisses books in the back of the House of Study, and then kisses the shelf on which the books rest. Her friend, making an eloquent gesture with her arm, blesses all of the young men who are engaged in studying sacred texts. These same women will return home, spend hours preparing traditional Jewish foods, and then in the evening go to synagogue to attend a prayer service of which they understand no more than a few words. At several times during the service they will

hold their hands palms upward, kiss their fingers, and beseech God to grant their children, grandchildren, and all of the Israeli Defense Forces, health and happiness. Following the service, they will distribute perfume to the other women in the ladies’ gallery of the synagogue, and all will anoint themselves with the perfume, proudly declaring the Hebrew blessing said for sweet smells. Despite their own poverty, on their way home

from synagogue they will be careful to give small sums of - money to every beggar that they pass.

Such are the religious events and activities on a typical day among the elderly Jewish women of Jerusalem’s Kurdish neighorhood. The women described here are pious Jews; indeed, religion is the focus of their lives. Yet their religious lives seem to have little in common

with what most of us mean when we talk about Judaism. In this book, through an exploration of the religion of the illiterate, uneducated, but spiritually attuned elderly Jewish women of the East, I hope to challenge preconceptions about the very nature of such concepts as the sacred, the holy, and human spirituality. 3

4 Women as Ritual Experts Traditional Middle Eastern Jewish women believe that women and men have very different spiritual concerns because they have very different lifestyles, priorities, and inclinations. Within what the women themselves consider to be the female domain, women have a great deal of power and autonomy. I have chosen to focus upon two important implications of the sexual division of the religious world.

First, it is clear that even within male-dominated Jewish culture, women can be ritual experts. And second, despite the fact that normative, literate Judaism is male-oriented, women have developed ways for religion to sacralize female experience. In these respects, the women of this study are not atypical of the generations upon generations of Jewish (and non-Jewish) women who have lived their lives in traditional, sexually segregated societies.

The Women In 1984 and 1985, I conducted fieldwork among a group of women

who frequent a Senior Citizen’s Day Center in Jerusalem. The women are of several ethnic groups: the majority are Kurdish (from various parts of Kurdistan), there is a sizable minority from Turkey,

and several are Yemenite, Iranian, Iraqi, or Moroccan. Because they have lived in the same part of Jerusalem for fifty years, their beliefs and religious practices are more or less homogeneous. !

The choice of elderly women for this study was made because they have already experienced most or all of the religious events

that are connected to the life cycle. [literate and functionally illiterate women were chosen in the hope of learning what women really believe and do, not what rabbinic authorities and books have

told them that they are supposed to tell strangers. Realizing the technical impossibility of learning anything about “women’s essential nature” in a culture in which women are socialized from birth into masculine world views, belief systems, and cultural norms,? I

selected a population in which there is a great deal of sexual segregation in order to maximize my contact with what can accurately be labeled women’s religion. My initial goal was to come to an understanding of the meaning of religion and religiosity for a group of women whose religious life is conducted for the most part in the female domain, among other women. As I quickly learned,

Introduction 5 the women I studied have rich religious lives that they themselves are not able to articulate, but are revealed to the interested observer through nonverbal gestures, rituals, daily experiences, and life stories.

From the start, I envisioned this project as a contribution not only to the discipline of anthropology, but also to the discipline of religious studies. Rather than try to explain the women’s religion within the framework of some more encompassing social process or

structure, I wanted to approach the women’s religious world with the same agenda of questions that the historian of religion would normally ask. While I have not ignored the cultural milieu in which

the women conduct their religious lives, I have tried to avoid reducing their spiritual path to some constellation of purely social or psychological factors.3 Conversely, I suggest that their religiosity may be an appropriate starting point for attempting to understand such issues as food preparation or aging. The Day Center serves as a primary focus for the religious lives of the women. Almost all of the Day Center activities are religious in nature: there are weekly Judaica lessons conducted by a rabbi and by a rabbanit (learned woman and rabbi’s wife), communal celebrations of certain holidays, and occasional organized trips to

holy tombs. The women clearly view the Day Center as sacred space—the Day Center is the meeting place for women who define

their reason for existence as a group, their common bonds, and their shared goals in religious terms. While the Day Center is run by

the Municipality and formally open to anyone, in reality only women attend the various activities and utilize the services provided by the Day Center. The few men who enter feel most conspicuous

and quickly leave. Thus, the Day Center must also be viewed as women's space. Approximately thirty women are very involved in the Day Center,

forty or so come occasionally, and another thirty are officially members but rarely come. The women who attend the Center resem-

ble, both in their appearance and in their concerns, thousands of other elderly Middle Eastern women living in cities, development towns, and agricultural settlements throughout Israel. The Jerusalem Day Center was selected for several reasons. First, the women who attend live in fairly closed ethnic neighborhoods, and their lives are rich in traditional customs. Second, the women are extremely religious, and even seemingly prosaic conversations were rich in spiritual

6 Women as Ritual Experts perceptions. Lastly, none of the women at the Day Center are senile;

they all maintain their own homes and continue to prepare for holidays in the traditional way. However, most have quite a bit of free time and were willing to spend some of it talking to me. The Center women range in age from 58 to 90; most had worked

as housewives and were married to laborers or vendors. Most are now widows. They are for the most part poor, living on a small old age pension from the National Insurance Institute. Although most of the women live alone, they are in close contact with their children. They are very attached to the Day Center, consider it their own, and proudly claim that they would not leave even if another day center were to offer better services. Very few of these women have ever worked outside of the home. Therefore, they have been economically dependent upon men for almost their entire lives. The women describe themselves primarily

(and sometimes solely) in terms of the family: they are daughters, | mothers, wives, grandmothers, widows. It is within the family that

they find meaning in their lives, it is within the family that their social status is defined, it is within the family that they maneuver and jockey for position. Regular involvement with a nonfamilial organization (such as the Day Center) represents a significant change in the focus of their time and energy.

Women and Religion The feminist scholarship of the last two decades has offered critiques of almost every aspect of society; countless books and articles describing women’s oppression in economic, political, medical,

social, familial, legal, religious, and academic institutions have carefully and convincingly analyzed the ways in which patriarchal culture circumscribes women’s lives. Less is known about the strate-

gies that women have used to circumvent patriarchal institutions, the techniques women have created for making their own lives meaningful within androcentric culture, the ways in which women have developed their own “little tradition” within and/or parallel to the “great tradition.”4 In this book we will not be looking at the status of women within Judaism, because that status is something that has been defined largely by literate, male authorities. What we

Introduction 7 will be looking at is women’s religious culture, the rituals and beliefs that women have chosen or created for themselves within the

constraints of the great tradition.

The study of women and religion encompasses at least three distinct enterprises: the study of female symbols; official (which is usually synonymous with elite, male) definitions of the religious role and status of women; and the study of religious lives of real

women. In the first two types of studies women are necessarily treated as objects—psychological, theological, legal, mythological, or biological—but undeniably as objects. In contrast, the third type of study looks at women as subjects, as actors in their own right. Too frequently, works on women and religion have confused these inherently distinct types of studies. In books on women and Juda-

ism one typically encounters a hodgepodge of inheritance laws, feminine images from medieval mystical texts, aphorisms about marital love, and romantic descriptions of pious mothers lighting

Sabbath candles. ,

The reasons for the continuing confusion between women and female symbols are significant. First of all, as the earliest feminist critiques of anthropology have shown, anthropologists in the field have too often spoken primarily to men; they have received male explanations and interpretations of cultural items. And when the anthropologist is a man, his view of the culture is masculinized twice over: by his own Western male perspective and through the male perspectives of his principal informants.5 Male-oriented data collection contributes to what has been labeled the androcentric bias in the social sciences. Within an androcentric perspective the male norm and the human norm are collapsed and become identical: to study males is to study humanity. And finally, and this is the relevant point here, when women are considered, they are discussed as an object exterior to mankind, “having the same ontological and epistemological status as trees,

unicorns, or deities.” I do not mean to discredit the study of symbols or legal texts; rather, I am insisting upon the necessity of distinguishing between the study of symbols and the study of real people, a distinction that is taken for granted in the study of men, but that is often glossed over in the study of women. The study of the religious lives of real women is a fairly new pursuit, both for anthropologists and for historians of religion, and

8 Women as Ritual Experts while most of the information available is purely descriptive, there are several themes or trends that have begun to emerge from within this growing literature. The religious world described in this book elaborates and builds upon a number of these themes.

First, it is clear that although women are frequently excluded from certain types of leadership roles (for example, as priests and theologians within the Roman Catholic tradition), there are other leadership roles that have been open to women. In particular, exceptional women can often be found functioning as shamans, charismatic preachers, soothsayers, witches, and leaders within new religious movements.” Can we conclude that certain institutional forms foster or impede women’s access to power within religious movements? Among the factors that seem to encourage women’s

authority are: emphasis on personality rather than the training of cult/church leaders (women are often denied access to formal training), healing as a major theme in liturgy (cross-culturally, women seem especially concerned with health issues), and spiritual identity predominating over social categories. Chapter 2 takes a close look at one woman who has attained a leadership position, and Chapter 7 reconstructs some of the other leadership roles that may have been available to Middle Eastern Jewish women in the past. Even within those religious frameworks that exclude women from positions of institutionalized power, women may be active participants. For example, studies of women in American religion have found that women attend church more frequently than men.? It seems that certain ritual forms (especially pilgrimage) and certain issues (especially sickness and healing) particularly attract women in many cultures. These activities will be discussed in depth in Chapters | and 6. The effects of modernization on women’s religious lives has generated only peripheral interest in academic literature, but in light of the rapid social and cultural change that touches every corner of today’s world, this issue is worthy of closer attention. In the religious domain, modernization often results in an increase of choices for women. On the other hand, in the face of modernization, women’s traditional religious wisdom is often reevaluated. Certain aspects (for example, fertility wisdom) may be rejected, while others (for example, knowledge of the ways of the ancestors)

Introduction 9 may be elevated to a new and higher status. The religious world of the Middle Eastern women has been deeply affected by the rapid social change resulting from their move from the mountains and villages of Kurdistan and Yemen to the cities of westernized Israel (see Chapter 7).

A number of studies have discovered that in old age many women find new religious meaning.!° Middle Eastern women see old age (and more specifically widowhood) as a time for deepening and expanding their religious lives. No longer busy with the de-

mands of husbands and small children, they are able to devote increased time and energy to religious pursuits. The most dramatic change in their religious lives is a shift in locus from the private to the public sphere (see Chapter 6). The women in this study show us that women’s religion has the power to sacralize women’s lives in different ways at different points in the female life cycle. It is clear

that a static model of women’s religiosity 1s neither useful nor appropriate. In many cultures food is one of the few resources controlled by women. Not surprisingly, women manipulate food for various purposes, including religious ones. This may take the form of feeding the poor, choosing to give better or more food to certain categories of people, observing traditional food taboos, abstaining from food, and preparing holiday foods.!! The rituals of food preparation imbue with holiness the everyday domestic work of the Middle Eastern women (Chapter 5). When we talk about women within sexually segregated cultures, we may think about a women’s model of religion that is unlike yet parallel to the male one.!2 Because Middle Eastern Jewish culture (like most Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu cultures) is not only sexually

segregated but also male-dominated, women necessarily know more about, and participate more actively in, the male model of religion than men do in the female model. The women’s counterpart

model does not usually challenge or oppose the male model, but rather elaborates or modulates certain elements of that model. In this book we shall see that the women interpret literacy and mod-

esty (Chapter 4), the relationship between human and divine (Chapter 3), and official holidays (Chapters 4 and 5) from a radically gynocentric perspective. They use the forms of “male” Judaism to sacralize female experience (Chapter 4).

10 Women as Ritual Experts Although the actual content of women’s religious worlds has received little systematic attention, one theme that emerges from many ethnographic descriptions is the link between women’s religious lives and women’s domestic or interpersonal concerns.!3 As Carol Gilligan has found in her impressive work on gender and moral development, the identification of morality and relationship is crucial for many women. The particular network of relationships that seems most relevant to the understanding of women’s religios-

ity is the familial. Historical and ethnographic accounts describe women’s religious activity as embedded within, complementary to, enriching of, and/or growing out of women’s familial concerns.!4 This theme will be explored on many levels in the following chapters.

Perhaps the most significant idea to grow out of this study is what I call the domestication of religion. An intense concern with the well-being of their extended families characterizes the religious lives of these Jewish women (see Chapter 1). In numerous rituals— spontaneous, formal, private, and communal—they guard over the living, dead, and unborn people with whom they have close rela-

tionships. Inspired by Fustel de Coulanges’s notion of domestic religion,'5 I define domestication as a process in which people who profess their allegiance to a wider religious tradition personalize the rituals, institutions, symbols, and theology of that wider system in order to safeguard the health, happiness, and security of particular

people with whom they are linked in relationships of caring and interdependence. Individuals (like the Middle Eastern women) who have a great deal invested in interpersonal relationships, and who are excluded from formal power within an institutionalized religious framework, tend to be associated with this type of personally oriented religious mode.

Note on Methodology In the course of my fieldwork I have utilized a mixture of informal small groups interview, in-depth interviews, and participant-observation. Most of the women were born abroad and came to Israel as adolescents. Unfortunately, most never learned any language thoroughly, and their conversations typically vacillate from Hebrew to

Introduction 11 Kurdish to Arabic, and often end midthought and midsentence with the words “you know” or “I don’t know.” Since many of the women of this study had difficulties expressing themselves verbally, much of the data was collected by observing their religious behavior

and joining with them in various religious activities. The events observed included lessons and lectures by rabbis, trips to holy tombs, synagogue worship, Sabbath and holiday preparation and observance, life-cycle celebrations and mourning rituals. Very few of the women felt comfortable when they saw me holding a notepad or a tape recorder. As members of a literate and technologically oriented culture, the women are acutely aware of their own illiteracy. I experimented with various methods of recording data in the field and settled on endeavoring to remember as much as possible of the women’s words, together with frequent trips

outside or to the restroom to jot down notes. When I quote the women, I have taken the liberty of editing out content-less sounds, such as “uh” and “uhm” and the phrase “how do you say?,” which in fact are part of almost every sentence the women speak.

There are several key informants who appear throughout this work. The first, Simha B., is an exceptionally articulate woman who, unlike most of the other women of the Day Center, speaks Hebrew fluently. Since she was one of the few women who felt at ease with a tape recorder, she is often directly quoted here. Simha B. was born in Israel to parents who had recently arrived from Persia. Her husband, about whom we shall hear more, was born in the Old Country, and never learned either Hebrew or Arabic. Simha B. spent a good part of her adult life caring for her husband in various ways. Another particularly helpful informant, Batya, was

the one woman able to answer “why” and other more abstract questions. Unfortunately, she died during the time in which I conducted my fieldwork, so her fascinating perceptions and descriptions are not quoted as extensively as Simha B.’s. Batya, like many of the women of the Day Center, married a man who was a great deal older than herself and who already had children from a previous wife. Although Batya raised these children, when her husband

died his sons became increasingly hostile toward her. Another Kurdish woman, also named Simha, appears often in these pages. She is a bit younger than the other women and appointed herself my protector. She has been widowed for a number of years and

12 Women as Ritual Experts | earns money serving tea and cleaning at the Day Center. Lastly, the

presence of Rabbanit Zohara, a truly exceptional woman, is felt throughout my fieldwork. All names have, of course, been changed.

The director of the Day Center is a Kurdish woman. She has been with the Day Center for sixteen years (the Day Center has been in existence for twenty-five years). A few women have been coming to the center for close to fifteen years, but most have frequented the Day Center only during the last five years. Besides the director, the staff consists of a retired (Ashkenazi) handicrafts teacher who comes in twice a week and gives instructions on knitting and crocheting to those (few) women who are interested, an exercise teacher, a social worker who comes in once a week, a rabbi (Rabbi Benyamin), and Rabbanit Zohara. Except for the rabbanit, all receive salaries from the Municipality. The Center members pay a token sum in monthly dues. During most of the time in which this fieldwork was conducted I was pregnant. Therefore, it must be expected that there are both lacunae and advantages in my data collection. On several occasions the women stopped their conversations when I entered the room because they felt that the topic of conversation would be harmful to the fetus (I managed to catch a few words and so know that on one

occasion they were talking about worms). On the other hand, because of my pregnancy I was party to a great deal of intimate advice concerning conception, pregnancy, childbirth, and nursing that a nonpregnant field-worker would probably not have heard.

Middle Eastern Jewry—An Overview The religiosity of the women in this book must be understood within the context of Asian and African Jewry. Even before the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 c.£. and the scattering of the Jews from the land of Israel, Jews had lived in cities and towns of three continents. While there always were deep common bonds

of religious belief and practice, there were also important local variations and divergences. Some of these differences were the result of the influence of the surrounding peoples, and some were simply the natural consequence of changing times and circumstances. Today, in Israel, despite the homogenizing influences of

Introduction 13 both modernity and the rabbinical establishment, many of these variations persist. Jewish life in their countries of origin plays a major role in the women’s experience of, and interpretation of, religion. Because the

majority of the Day Center women are Kurdish, I shall limit my comments here to a brief description of Jewish life in Kurdistan. The reader who is interested in learning more about the Jewish communities of Yemen and North Africa is referred to the bibliography at the end of this book. Kurdistan is a mountainous region that now covers parts of Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and the Soviet Union. There are a great variety of religious, ethnic, and national groups in Kurdistan, and in recent years there has been a strong independence movement. Most Kurds are Sunni Muslims, with a sprinkling of Nestorian Christians and Jews. Kurdish society is predominantly tribal. Kurdish women have traditionally been freer than Arab, Turkish, or Persian women. The veil is uncommon, and women work in the yards or fields outside of their houses. Jews in Kurdistan were scattered throughout the mountains, often with only several Jewish families living in a small village, although there were a few larger Jewish settlements. Jews living in Kurdistan spoke several different languages, depending upon the region, and particular Kurdish-Jewish communities were influenced by the larger Jewish communities of Turkey, Iraq, or Baghdad. The Jewish family was patriarchal and patrilocal, with extended families living together. Relations among women affines were nor-

mally warm. Jewish schools were rare in Kurdistan, and the wandering rabbi who would visit the small communities twice a year was the most important religious leader. Jews and Muslims consulted the same “wise men” and visited the same holy tombs. Most Jews were uneducated, and even the wise men usually knew only the Bible, not the Za/mud or later rabbinic literature. The Sabbath, laws of kashrut, and laws of ritual purity were strictly observed. Warding off evil spirits was an important religious concern for Jews and non-Jews alike. There were two waves of Kurdish immigration to Israel. The first was at the beginning of the twentieth century and consisted of Jews

who voluntarily left Kurdistan, primarily for religious reasons. Most of the women described in this book were among that group.

14 Women as Ritual Experts The second wave was in the 1950s following Israeli independence, when Jews were expelled from most Arab countries. Kurdish Jews did not become absorbed into Israeli society as quickly as Jews of other ethnic groups. First, in the eyes of many Israelis the Kurds are “primitive,” “coarse,” “uneducated,” and “superstitious.” A large number of Kurds settled in fairly insular Kurdish neighborhoods within larger cities, or in more isolated Kurdish agricultural settlements. Today, the younger generation is all but indistinguishable from other Israelis, although the old people preserve many of their traditional customs. Even among the young people there is often a strong sense of Kurdish identity, manifested primarily through a keen attachment to Kurdish cooking. The ethnic makeup of modern Israeli society is varied and complex. There are Jews living in Israel whose families at one time lived in Europe. These are called Ashkenazi (literally, from Germany) Jews. Ashkenazi Jews are mostly middle-class and are well represented in the government, universities, and professions. Non-Ashkenazi Jews, incorrectly grouped together and called Sephardi [literally, from Spain] or Mizrachi [Eastern], mostly came to Israel from Asia and Africa. Non-Ashkenazi Jews include true Sephardi

Jews whose families at one time lived in Sapin and then fled to Europe, North Africa, or certain cities in Asia at the time of the Spanish Inquisition. Jews from Kurdistan, Yemen, and Ethiopia clearly are not of Spanish descent. These Jewish communities were

founded far earlier, perhaps even as early as the time of the First Temple. While Israeli society is in a constant state of flux, most Kurdish Jews are at the lowish end of the socioeconomic ladder. I have chosen to use the term ‘Middle Eastern Jewry’ to describe the Kurdish, Yemenite, Turkish, Syrian, Persian, and Iraqi population of this study. Most Ashkenazi Jews in Israel are either ‘secular’ [hiloni], ‘Orthodox’ [dati], or ‘ultra-Orthodox’ [haredi]. Jews from Africa or Asia are more likely to describe themselves as ‘traditional’ [masorati], an amorphous category that can more accurately be described as Orthodox in theological outlook and secular in terms of religious practice. Traditional Jews may only turn to Jewish ritual at the important holidays and for major life-cycle events. Most of the children of the women described in this book are masorati, although the women themselves are dati.

Introduction 15 As I have already remarked, not all of the women of this study are Kurdish, although the neighborhood in which they live is popularly known as “the Kurdish neighborhood.” This neighborhood 1s really a section of a larger neighborhood in which a majority of the population is non-European, religious, and of a low socioeconomic level. Most of the residents immigrated to Israel before 1948 or were born in Israel. Despite some recent gentrification of the neighborhood, most of the families are large while most of the houses are quite small.!6 The majority of the women of this study live in old, low-rise apartment buildings. Typically, the apartments consist of a large living-bedroom, a small kitchen, and an outdoor patio. No previous studies of which I am aware have had the primary goal of investigating the religion of elderly Middle Eastern Jewish women.

Indeed, there is little research concerning Middle Eastern Jewish women at all. The classic book on Kurdish Jewry is A. Brauer’s Jews of Kurdistan (in Hebrew). Brauer, writing in the 1940s, attempted to reconstruct the life of Jews in Kurdistan before their aliya to Israel. Unlike many other ethnographers of his day, he included a great deal of information about women. Although he never directly addressed the religious lives of women, much fascinating data can be garnered from the sections on cooking and housework, childbirth and fertility,

observance of laws of menstrual purity, death and burial customs, holidays, and especially weddings.

Setting the Stage This book is a study of women who live out their religious lives on the stage of patriarchal culture. Traditional Judaism addresses the

deity in the masculine gender, teaches that God’s message was conveyed primarily through men (Abraham, Moses), bestows the privilege of leadership (rabbinate and priesthood) upon men, has traditionally excluded women from such central areas of religious expression as study and vocal participation in the synagogue, places

prohibitions upon menstruating and postpartum women, and discriminates against women in matters of inheritance. Men write the prayers and make the laws. In modern Israel, marriage and divorce are within the sole province of religious authorities (there is no civil marriage), and women

16 Women as Ritual Experts continue to suffer from unfair treatment and unequal access to positions of authority. Only men can initiate or grant divorce, and there are currently hundreds (and possibly thousands) of women in Israel who have requested divorces, yet are tied to men who refuse to free them. In traditional Jewish society, power is a function of knowledge; respect is given to the one who demonstrates his grasp of Jewish texts (especially Talmud and Zohar). Women were systematically

barred from access to Jewish knowledge. In the Talmud, it is written that it is perferable to burn the Torah than to teach it to a woman.!7 And, in certain Jewish communities at various times women have actually been prohibited from studying Torah.!8 While there have always been some exceptional women who have become

scholars, the women of this study regret and resent never having learned how to read. In Jewish law, the normative Jew is considered male. Women are treated either as exceptions to the male norm or as something to which men must relate. Perhaps the clearest statement of the androcentric perspective comes from the Bible, where in Exodus 19:15 Jews are instructed not to have contact with women for three days

prior to God’s presenting the Torah on Mount Sinai. Judaism sacralizes the male life cycle: boys are circumcized at eight days and have bar-mitzvah ceremonies and parties at age thirteen. Important female experiences such as menarche, pregnancy, and menopause are ignored by normative Judaism (except in the context of prohibi-

tions upon various activities). It is the male body that symbolizes the covenant between God and the Jewish people. Many of the rituals that define the Jewish day and year are men’s rituals. According to Orthodox Jewish belief, men are obligated to wear a tallit [fringed garment], put on tefillin [phylacteries], pray in synagogue, and study Torah. Jewish legal texts say very little about women’s rituals, many of which are optional, local, and superfluous from the standpoint of halacha [law]. The patriarchal world against which the religiosity of the Day Center women is presented is in fact multilayered. First, there are Kurdish men, most of whom are not very learned in Jewish texts themselves. Traditional Kurdish-Jewish culture must be understood in the context of tribal life in a mountainous region of the Muslim Middle East, irrespective of particular Jewish inputs. Second, there

Introduction 17 is the impact of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, a dynamic force in Israel today. Contemporary ultra-Orthodoxy, rooted in the experience of

Eastern European Jewry, has reacted to the Enlightenment and modern Zionism by sacralizing the good old days—days in which women were modest and men were scholars. Finally, the great tradition of rabbinic Judaism—recorded in sacred texts and interpreted by male religious leaders—serves as a constant background to women’s religious choices. These are some of the key factors that limit the religious lives of Middle Eastern Jewish women. In this book we will see women who

are extraordinarily religiously active, but we will not find women rabbis, priestesses, or scholars. The women recognize the lines over which they cannot and will not cross. On the other hand, two powerful factors serve to ameliorate the harshness of these limits: sexual segregation, which means that male authorities may be ignorant of many of the things that women

do and think, and communality, which means that groups of women meet together and construct a collective, shared alternative view of reality. Michelle Rosaldo has shown that women tend to have an intermediate status (not equal but not drastically subordinate) when groups of women can form autonomous associations. !9 While she was not looking primarily at religiosity, I believe that her schema holds true for the population described in this book. Sexual

segregation and communal religious activity do not cancel out women’s lack of access to formal positions of authority, their status

as “Other,” or their limited freedom within the family; women’s spiritual expertise rarely (if ever) leads to social power or economic rewards. Sexual segregation and communal religious activity do, however, allow some women some opportunities to sacralize their own concerns. This book is organized around the themes of domestication and interpretation. The first five chapters present religious beliefs and rituals from a female perspective, highlighting the diverse strategies that women use to make sense out of the universe and out of their life experiences. The final two chapters, addressing issues of lifecycle change and societal change, demonstrate the external flexibility and the internal coherence with which the women construct their religious universe.

Old Women as the Link Between the Generations

Listening to the Day Center women and observing their behavior it

becomes clear that they share certain motivations and functions that define their role within the religious domain. The old women who frequent the Day Center consider themselves to be the spiritual

guardians of their extended families. The women understand the concept of “family” in an extraordinarily broad sense, indicating descendants and ancestors, both biological and mythical. As young and middle-aged women they tended and cared for their families, and in old age this role has become spiritualized. Serving as spiritual guardians is function of both age and sex—men and younger women have much more limited contact with ancestors and have almost no responsibility (in the spiritual sphere) for the well-being of their children. Seeing themselves as the link between the generations, old women are responsible for soliciting the help of ancestors whenever their descendants are faced with problems such as illness, infertility, war, or economic troubles. The old women are widely respected for their expertise in guarding the family.

Supplicants and Guardians of the Dead Guarding over, petitioning, visiting, and negotiating with ancestors is an important part of the religious lives of the women of the Day 18

Old Women as the Link Between the Generations 19 Center. Ancestors can be either biological (parents, grandparents) or mythical (saints, Biblical figures).! In a variety of rituals the women “remember their ancestors.” These rituals range from lighting candles on the Festival of the New Moon to visiting cemeteries and holy tombs. The women primarily seek from their ancestors help in caring for both their living and their as yet unborn descendants.? For the women of the Day Center almost all dead relatives (with

the exception of perhaps a particularly hated husband or in-law) have something of the status of a saint. Those Jews who have

accumulated enough merit in their lifetimes go to Gan Eden [Heaven], where they dwell in the company of the Jewish saints.

“The saints, being part human, part divine, cross the boundary separating spheres. ...”3 The saint can intercede with God on behalf of individual Jews or the Jewish people as a whole, yet maintains his/her status as a Jew among Jews.4 Of the many possible channels of communication between the world of the dead and the world of the living, dreams, prayers, and candle lighting are the most common.

The women of the Day Center go to cemeteries and to holy tombs “to ask for mercy and to cry on the graves.” They try to visit the graves of family members on the day before the new moon and on the anniversaries of deaths, and they visit tombs of saints when the Day Center can arrange transportation. Although many of the

saints have special days [hillulot] on which thousands of people come to their tombs, the women of the Day Center, being too old to manage well in a crowd, try to avoid these popular days, preferring to visit a shrine like Meron two weeks after Lag b’Omer instead of on the holy day itself. The tomb is not only a cult object, but also a place for the living pilgrim to meet the dead saint and make a pact with him.

When the women visit the cemeteries in which their family members are buried, they describe the trip as going on “aliya el ha-

har” [going up to the mountain]. Aliya or going up, has several important connotations. First, aliya is the term used for a Jew coming from the diaspora to live in Israel. All of these women came

to Israel on aliya in their youth and still regard it as the most important event in their lives, talking about it far more than they talk about their weddings or first childbirths. Many tell stories of

20 Women as Ritual Experts miracles surrounding aliya to the holy land and imbue aliya with

both sociological and spiritual significance. Second, aliya to Heaven is what a saint does when she or he dies, as in these words

of Simha B.’s: “Elijah the Prophet went up in a storm. ... A big storm, even rocks jumped. At his tomb the roof is closed with rocks so that no one else can go up.” A third use of aliya is in the phrase aliya le-regel [pilgrimage], which in the Talmud means ascending to Jerusalem on certain festivals, but in later periods also carries the meaning of pilgrimage to any holy shrine. Finally, a/iya is the ritual honor, available only to men in Orthodox Judaism, of being called

up to bless the Torah at synagogue. When all of these additional uses of the word aliya are considered, it is clear that for the women of the Day Center aliya to a cemetery is a supremely significant religious act. Aliya means moving from the profane to the holy, and the use of the word aliya highlights the superior status of saints, vis-a-vis the living. But the women also describe trips to tombs as “going to visit

Elijah” (or Meir, etc.). The use of this personal and informal terminology highlights the earthly nature of the saints.

When the women are asked why they visit holy tombs, the answers include the expected “because it 1s a mitzvah,” but also such comments as “because we are homesick for our ancestors.” Their connection to biblical ancestors is a serious matter. When one woman was asked who is the female figure in the Torah to whom she feels the closest she answered, “Rachel—she is our true mother.

Eve is our first mother. If you don’t know the name of someone’s mother, you say, ‘So and so daughter of Eve.’” The relationship between the women and their dead is a reciprocal one. First of all, the women can communicate with the dead by standing close to the tomb and talking. The dead can communicate by appearing in dreams (possibly also by giving signs, but this was not adequately verified in the course of this fieldwork). Dreams may contain specific, personal advice, or they may be more general,

as in the case of a woman who wanted to know what happens to a person after death. When her recently deceased husband appeared to her in a dream, she grabbed his hand and asked him what the next world is like. He answered, “Friday, Sabbath, Festival of the New Moon, Friday, Sabbath, Festival of the New Moon,” and then disappeared. Biblical figures such as King David and especially

Old Women as the Link Between the Generations 21 Elijah also commonly appear in dreams. Lucy Garnett noted the custom of giving a dying friend or relative messages to bring to the patriarchs and matriarchs and mentioned that it was a women’s custom to place letters to departed friends in open coffins.5 It is not automatic that the dead saint will be interested in helping his or her living descendants. Gifts such as new curtains to cover a tomb, flowers, candles, and contributing money for .the upkeep of the tomb encourage the saint to intercede. The women believe that by touching or kissing the tomb one can have some type of physical contact with the person inside the tomb, and they trust that the dead saint comes out of his grave at night (and possibly at other times) to bless objects, such as oil, that are left near the tomb. In addition, because they believe that their various religious activities are pleasing to God, they expect to receive a divine reward for contributing to the care of a tomb. The relationship of the women of the Day Center to the dead is paradoxical—on the one hand they seek the assistance of the dead saints, but on the other hand they must guard over them, in much the same way that old women must guard over their children. The women help their ancestors by collecting (purchasing) blessings on the anniversaries of their deaths. On such days the women ask rabbis for a special blessing in memory of the deceased, and in return they contribute some money to a cause of the rabbi’s choice. The formal Jewish prayer [kaddish] that is recited by close family

members during the first year after a death, and then on each anniversary of the death, 1s recited only by men. For Jewish men the

reciting of kaddish naturally results in the formation of a male support network in that this prayer can only be recited together with a quorum of ten men. Purchasing of blessings by a woman should be understood as a way for the female bereaved to be comforted. On anniversaries of deaths, she elicits some special, personal attention from the rabbi. The women believe that by contributing money to a cause of the rabbi’s choice and by causing a blessing to be said in memory of the deceased they are helping the dead to reach or remain in Heaven. The purchasing of blessings has a twofold effect—both the woman and her ancestor benefit.

In the culture of Kurdish Jews, it is daughters (and to a lesser extent, daughters-in-law) who have responsibility for aging parents. While sons who drive cars may help their parents with transporta-

22 Women as Ritual Experts tion, and religiously observant sons may visit their widowed moth-

ers on the Sabbath in order to recite the appropriate prayers and blessings, it is the daughters who bear the burden of the diurnal and emotional support of aged and sick parents. Daughters may accompany sick parents to the health clinic or hospital in order to serve as

interpreters for the medical establishment. Daughters generally phone or visit their widowed mothers everyday, enquiring about medication, shopping, and other physical needs. In cases where the mother has died leaving an elderly father alone, daughters will bring him food and clean his house and do his laundry. The spiritual role

of caring for dead ancestors may be seen as an extension of the female day-to-day task of caring for aging parents. The preceding paragraphs have described the reciprocal relationship that the women have with their ancestors. On the one hand, the women guard the dead by lighting candles for them, by decorating their tombs, and by purchasing blessings. On the other hand, they expect the dead to help them by interceding with God on behalf of their families.

Spiritual Guardians of Their Descendants The central affective relationship in the lives of the women of the Day Center is with their children. As will be explained in detail in Chapter 6, most of the women describe their relationships with

their husbands as at best problematic. Regarding their children there is no such ambiguity—they love and admire their children and their grandchildren and are vitally concerned with their health and

happiness. Even children who are no longer religiously observant are considered “good” (at least in conversations with anthropologists and other outsiders) and such lapses as a child’s failure to keep

the Sabbath become simply one more reason for the women to guard over him or her. Most of the women are in close contact with their children. “My daughter and my son ask me every day to come and live with them. They are always talking about it, that they’ll give me my own room, that I shouldn’t be alone.” They believe that the greatest sorrow a woman can suffer is to be barren. For these women, who come from societies where malnourishment and poor medical care were the

Old Women as the Link Between the Generations 23 norm, having no surviving children was indeed an immediate threat.

Being able to raise children past infancy seems to them a great blessing from God. Although statistics are not available concerning infant mortality rates in Kurdistan at the beginning of this century,

most of the women at the Day Center remember neighbors like the one “who had ten children, nine of whom died.” The rabbi at the

Day Center teaches them “that a woman without children is the same as dead. The proof for this is that Sarah died when she heard about the sacrifice of Isaac.” Those women who do not have living, biological (as opposed to step) children feel that they are missing the most important relationship that a woman can have.

A favorite pastime is describing the difficult conditions under which they raised their children—the scarcity of food and the backbreaking work. Having cared for their children through almost continuous wars, famine, and financial insecurity, they are proud of their successes. Indeed, most of their children have received the help

and education needed to attain a higher socioeconomic level than their parents. They tell how when they were young they would rise before dawn to prepare food for their families and sew and launder until late at night. Most lived in one-room houses, in which they raised anywhere from two to ten children. Women who have many children are praised by friends and kin. According to one woman, “Women today feel that they can only take care of two children. When we were young everyone had ten. I had four who died in Iraq and five who survived in Israel. We didn’t have enough food or things, but we had happiness. We gave to our children from our hearts, from our hearts and from our breasts. I nursed my children for two years, not like women today.” Most of the women feel that their husbands did not help them through difficult pregnancies and childbirths, nor with the overwhelming task of raising their large families. Instead, “I gave birth and raised my children alone; me and God.” They also say that “it is

better to have daughters because daughters have more rachmanut [mercy or compassion] and care if we are sick or unhappy when we are old.” The husbands of the Day Center women spend(t) most of their time outside of the home. It is the woman who is intimately concerned with house and family, and it is above all the mother who is loved by the children.? The women attribute their success at raising

children not to the help of their husbands, but to the help of God.

24 Women as Ritual Experts Having worked hard for many years providing for their children, they do not relinquish their responsibility for their descendants now

they are no longer healthy and strong enough to wash floors and boil diapers. Instead, they transfer their role of loving caretaker to the spiritual realm, devoting time and effort to safeguarding children and grandchildren by way of prayers, blessings, and the soliciting of saints’ intervention.

Guardians of the Unborn The women of the Day Center consider both biological kin and all deceased members of the people of Israel (particularly dead saints) to be their ancestors. In the same way, descendants are believed to include both biological children and the more abstract category of

unborn children. |

“Traditionally the prospective parents depended on... . the spir-

its who represented the tribe, and linked present with past and future, and the natural with the supernatural world. Human beings, alive and dead, and supernatural beings were all ritually united in promoting fertility. Fertility was not just a personal, private matter, but involved the cosmos.”8 This account of the fertility beliefs of an African culture well describes the Day Center women’s attitude. The women of the Day Center are very concerned with the fertility of their offspring. A common reason for visiting holy tombs is to request the saint’s aid for a daughter, daughter-in-law, or grand-

daughter who is having trouble becoming pregnant. | One woman told about her daughter who had but one child and then was not able to conceive for six years. “The doctors said that her [fallopian] tubes were no good and she could not have any more children... . | asked a rabbi what to do and he told me to go to the tomb of Rabbi Yonatan ben Uziel and wrap a string seven times around the tomb and give it to my daughter to wear. I went to the tomb three times to pray for my daughter, it was hard to get there, and I brought everything to the saint even a new drape [to cover the tomb]. Then she had a baby girl.” In this story, the old woman appears in the role of intermediary between her ancestor and her descendant. When the women are asked why so many women visit holy tombs, a common answer is

Old Women as the Link Between the Generations 25 that women who cannot bear children make vows that if the saint will intercede, they will hold their unborn sons’ bar mitzvahs at the tomb. In other words, the dead Jew in the tomb is expected to be

interested in his as yet unborn descendants, and this interest is normally mediated by old women.? Pregnancy and childbirth are viewed as matters that have practical and supernatural aspects, both of which are rightfully the busi-

ness of old women. The women believe that everything is in the hands of God, whether or not a woman will become pregnant, whether the child will be a boy or a girl. But there certainly is room to persuade God to grant what one wants. This is where the old women fit in; their children and grandchildren feel that the old women are closer to God and so readily accept their help in matters of fertility.

Throughout my pregnancy, the women repeatedly told me, “It should be in a good hour.” At times of heightened spirituality, such as on pilgrimages, many of the women reiterated this same phrase every time they stood near me. “It should be in a good hour” was usually accompanied by a beseeching, upward glance. The meaning is, of course, that I should give birth at an auspicious time. The goodness of the hour was possibly at one time determined by astrology, but even today the women perceive childbirth as so dangerous and mysterious an experience that, although modern

hospitals and doctors are deemed important, a good hour is equally, if not more, valuable. Frequently after saying, “it should be in a good hour,” the women add “only God can give a good hour.” While they do not belittle Western medicine, they believe that the

most famous obstetrician in the world will not be able to help if God does not grant “a good hour.” One woman asked me if I was in my ninth month. When I answered yes, she of course rejoined, “It

should be in a good hour.” Forgetting myself, I replied, “Thank you.” All of the women listening to this interchange were horrified by my response and immediately called out, “Amen,” to cover up my faux pas. Wishing someone a good hour is not polite small talk; it is calling upon divine aid in a most crucial and difficult matter.

Profound belief in the singular ability of God to grant fertility and a good hour are combined with centuries of women’s folk knowledge about pregnancy and childbirth. The women tell how in the Old Country barren women (Jewish and non-Jewish) would

26 Women as Ritual Experts wear amulets to help them become pregnant. Amulets were also used during the birth and to protect the young children afterward. Shortly after I began my fieldwork (I was not yet pregnant), one woman told me that I would surely conceive because of the upcoming holiday (Rosh HaShana).!° She then went on to describe what positions during sexual intercourse are most efficacious for becoming pregnant. Another woman told me, “to have a fast birth, we cover our head, kiss the mezuza, ask God to help, do mitzvot, and have sexual relations with the husband up until the last day, even the last minute.” This combination of the practical and the spiritual is most typical of the Day Center women. The women are repositories of a multitude of folk traditions aimed at safeguarding the health of pregnant women and the health and souls of unborn children. This knowledge includes rules like: It is dangerous to travel in the eighth month, but safe to travel in the ninth. They believe that what the pregnant woman sees and hears effects the fetus. This can be for good or for bad—going on pilgrimage (that is, visiting saintly ancestors) has a positive effect; listening to a conversation about worms has a negative effect. It is expected

that elderly women will instruct daughters and granddaughters in such matters.

The Domestication of Religion The women of this study, like women in many other cultures, are specialists in spiritual guardianship. Virginia Kerns, writing about Black Carib women in Belize, has noted that old women protect their descendants by representing them in ritual. In daily life and in ritual, their actions serve to strengthen and sustain ties between lineal kin: male and female, young and old, living and dead.!! Mary Beech, studying Hindu women in Calcutta, has discovered certain rituals “performed primarily by women who are heavily invested in and dependent on the outcomes of activities performed by other

members of their families. ...”!2 Loring M. Danforth similarly observes that in rural Greece, death rituals and laments are performed almost solely by women. He interprets women’s involvement in this major ritual constellation as an outgrowth of women’s familial concerns; according to Danforth, women in rural Greece

Old Women as the Link Between the Generations 27 embody social and kin ties.!3 Religion is not isolated from the rest

of human experience, and women whose secular lives revolve around love and care for children and parents also develop kincentered religiosity. Individuals who invest a great deal in human relationships are likely to interpret religion as sacralizing those

relationships. , |

The Middle Eastern women’s familial concerns interact with and

indeed define their participation in the great tradition of literate, male-oriented Orthodox Judaism. Moshe Shokeid has convincingly shown that the “flexibility of meaning and interpretation of sym-

bols and norms seem to be an important feature of the ritual domain.”!4 The examples that follow show how the women of this study elaborate, de-emphasize, modify, circumvent, and domesticate elements and aspects of the male (official) model of religion.

Example 1— Raising the Torah The great tradition frequently provides the external form or language to a more personal religious content. Women are not re-

| quired by Jewish law to attend synagogue; observant Jewish men are expected to attend synagogue twice each day. In Yemen and Kurdistan, women did not attend synagogue at all (there were no womens’ sections in the synagogues), and in most Israeli synagogues today, the women’s section consists of a balcony that is closed off by a curtain. The elderly Middle Eastern women with whom I worked have begun, in old age, to regularly attend synagogue. These women generally cannot hear the men’s service— they are sitting too far away, they cannot understand most of the Hebrew, and their presence is considered superfluous in terms of a prayer quorum (ten men are needed to make up a quorum for prayer). The women play no part in the male synagogue service, nor do they conduct an autonomous female service. The male synagogue service is comprised of written prayers and readings from the Bible. On Mondays, Thursdays, and the Sabbath,

portions of the Torah (Pentateuch scroll) are read out loud at synagogue. At these times, to the accompaniment of song, the Torah is removed from behind a covered cabinet in the men’s section; at the beginning or end of the public reading, it is held up for the congregation to see. In many synagogues it is passed among

28 Women as Ritual Experts all of the male congregants so that they can touch or kiss the holy scroll. The men follow the Torah reading in their individual copies of the Pentateuch, and the content of the weekly reading is the most common topic for sermons. Many elderly Middle Eastern women attend synagogue faithfully, making a special effort to come on Mondays, Thursdays, and the Sabbath, because they believe that the time when the Torah is held up is particularly efficacious for making requests of God on behalf of their families. Women, who are not required by halacha to attend synagogue, who take no part in the official synagogue service, who can barely hear or understand the formal service from their seats in the ladies’ gallery, come to synagogue at times deter-

mined by Jewish law, but they come in order to make personal petitions. This is a case in which an official ritual—synagogue attendance—has given the external form to the personal religious content of guarding family members. The women use the male great

tradition ritual as forum for expressing their own religious concerns.

Example 2— Festival of the New Moon The women themselves distinguish between personal and nonpersonal religious rituals. The next ritual that I shall describe is partic-

ularly important because it 1s a developmental one: the same women, when younger, performed this as a nonpersonal ritual, but in old age reinterpreted it as personally oriented. The Festival of the New Moon is a women’s holiday. While the roots of this are probably to be found in ancient beliefs regarding the connection between women’s cycles and lunar cycles, Jewish written sources give credit for turning the Festival of the New Moon into a holiday that women celebrate more than men to the generation of righteous women who refused to give their jewelry to make the golden calf.!5 Many if not most modern Jews are unaware when there is a new moon in the sky. Observant male Jews celebrate the Festival of the New Moon only by reciting a few additional Psalms and prayers during the daily prayer service and by adding an extra paragraph to the Grace after Meals. The women of this study, who cannot even read a calendar, are extremely aware of the Festival of the New Moon, and on the day preceding the monthly festival make

Old Women as the Link Between the Generations 29 an effort to visit cemeteries, both those of their families and historical shrines such as Rachel’s Tomb in Bethlehem.

Unlike for the Sabbath and most holidays, there are few laws

| governing behavior on the Festival of the New Moon. The only special prohibitions observed by the women concern laundry and sewing (work that can be postponed). The one ritual enacted by all of the elderly women is that of lighting candles for the dead on the evening of the New Moon. Most of the women light numerous candles, aiming to light an individual candle for each dead relative. One informant explained that on the evening of the Festival of the New Moon, “we [women of her ethnic group, Iraqi] light candles for family members, wise men and scholars, and saints who have died. .. . No, we don’t say a real [formal Hebrew] blessing—yjust that the soul of the dead one should be in Gan Eden [Heaven]... . We light lots of candles, it doesn’t matter what kind, remembrance

candles, big candles, small candles, Sabbath candles, Chanuka candles, or whatever I have in the house.” What is relevant for this discussion is that according to my - informants they did not light the Festival of the New Moon candles when young. “When I was first married I didn’t light for relatives— there were no dead relatives to light for. I only lit one candle for the

Festival of the New Moon [my emphases].” Upon questioning it became clear that this same woman now lights candles for relatives who were already dead when she was newly married, for relatives of

a distance that she must have had when she was younger, and for Jewish saints who died 2000 years ago. If it had been the custom for

young women to light candles for the dead on the Festival of the New Moon, she would have had ancesters for whom to light. However, she did not light candles then: it is only as an old woman that she has begun to light a multitude of candles each month. The women, then, differentiate between lighting New Moon candles as a

calendrical ritual and lighting New Moon candles as a personal-

relationship ritual, and they shift from one to the other in the course of their lifetimes.

Example 3— Planting Trees When Jews from Europe began returning to Palestine at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, most of the

30 Women as Ritual Experts land was barren swamp or desert. Reforestation became an impor-

tant goal for the early Zionists. On Tu b’Shvat (the traditional Jewish holiday on which all trees are reckoned to become one year older) in 1985, the women of this study were taken by the Senior Citizen’s Day Center to plant trees in a new forest. As the women planted the saplings, they said, “in the merit [zechut] of my planting this tree, my family should have good health/happiness/ everything we need.” Planting trees on Tu b’Shvat is a modern, secular ritual, normally performed by scouts, other youth organizations, or tourist groups for the express ecological and political purpose of reforestation. When the elderly, Middle Eastern women were taken to

plant trees, they created their own ritual, utilizing a traditional verbal formula and conception of the relationship between God and

humans. Contributing to the state and land of Israel by planting trees in a new forest is assumed by the women to merit divine reward. The expected divine reward is expressed in personal terms—health for a child, fertility for a granddaughter. Worthy of comment is the fact that these illiterate, uneducated women feel competent to create a new ritual within a broader religious system that has been more or less frozen for a great many years. While rabbis continue to argue over the legality of reciting additional Psalms of praise [ Hallel] on Israeli Independence Day, these elderly women are firmly convinced that any contribution to the modern Jewish state is deserving of divine reward. These women did not ask a [male] rabbi before performing their new ritual. This

ritual, designed to enlist God’s protection for their families, lies within women’s sphere and so does not need rabbinical approval.

Example 4—Sabbath Candles Candle lighting can be seen as the paradigmatic Jewish women’s ritual. When the women of this study were asked questions such as “do you say blessings when you are menstruating?,” the answers usually pertained to candle lighting, even though the question did

not specify candle lighting. When asked to think about women’s | religious ritual, the women most often use candle lighting as the primary example.!6

Jewish sources (all written by men) specify that women are commanded to light candles on the Sabbath Eve because women

_ Old Women as the Link Between the Generations 3]

must make amends for Eve’s having “put out the light of the world,” because candle lighting is done at home and women are more connected to the home than are men, because there is no happiness without light and on the Sabbath Jews should be happy,!’ and because the Karaites (wrongly) do not use light on the Sabbath (Jews who accept rabbinic law must ritually light candles to show that they are not Karaites!’), Lighting Sabbath Eve candles is required by Jewish law, and legal texts spell out at what time and in what manner the candles should be lit. Jewish law demands that two candles are lit in each household and that the woman who lights the candles recite a formal Hebrew blessing. The women of the Day Center, like most traditional Jewish women, light candles on Friday night. However, many of these women do not know the formal blessing that one is supposed to recite at that time (“Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has commanded us to kindle the Sabbath lights”). Even those who do know the official blessing add their own supplementary blessings and gestures.

One woman told that she lights seven candles for the Sabbath and holidays because seven is a “good” number. More common is to light one candle (or one wick in a bowl of oil) for each child. For many of the women, each candle or wick represents the soul of a family member. All of the women use the lighting of the Sabbath candles as an opportunity to make requests of God, for example, “that the Messiah will come, that God will help all of Israel, that there should be good health,” or simply that God should do “wonders and miracles.” God is believed to be particularly receptive to requests made at this time, and the most common requests are on

behalf of family members.

If it is possible to summarize the meaning of as rich and versatile a symbol as lighting candles, I would suggest that for these women a lit candle is above all a signal to God that they have something to ask of Him. Because Jewish law requires that candles be kindled on official occasions such as the evening of the Sabbath, the women

believe that God likes, indeed requests, lit candles. In short, the women transform Sabbath candle lighting—a ritual whose great tradition meaning concerns time and historical identity, into a ritual that focuses on the welfare of particular, beloved individuals.

32 Women as Ritual Experts Domestic Religion The term “domestic religion” has been used by anthropologists and

historians of religion to indicate a relatively minor subset of religious observances.!9

The notion of domestic religion is an important one, yet few writers have attempted to define either the parameters or the characteristics of the domestic religious sphere. Domestic religion cer-

tainly shares symbols, beliefs, a ritual framework, and a sacred history with the nondomestic religion of the same wider tradition—

a Christian theologian writes a theology of the crucifixion and a Christian woman whose child is ill kisses the cross hanging in her living room. Simultaneously, if there is meaning to the crosscultural category of domestic religion, the domestic religions of Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, and so forth, should share certain other symbols, beliefs, moods, motivations, and rituals that are not part of the particular wider traditions, but that in some way characterize the domestic. The difference between the theologian’s writing and the woman’s kissing of the crucifix seems to me above all a matter of intent: the crucifix-kisser is concerned with the lives and deaths of particular people, not merely with life and death as abstract problems. I find it useful to characterize the domestic religious realm very broadly as

the arena in which the ultimate concerns of life, suffering, and death are personalized—domestic religion has to do with the lives, sufferings, and deaths of particular, usually well-loved, individuals. This conception of domestic religion is useful in that it allows for

the possibility that the same symbol or ritual may, on different occasions, or on one occasion but for different people, be both domestic and nondomestic. A New Moon candle may be lit “for the

holiday” or “for the dead.” Domesticity, then, is not an inherent characteristic of any particular ritual, place, or event—it is a human

interpretation of that ritual, place, or event. | Rituals and symbols become transformed when they enter or leave the domestic realm. When a literate Jewish man listens to the

Torah reading in synagogue, he is obeying a divine law, learning about the history of the Jewish people, and participating in the life

of the community. When an illiterate Middle Eastern Jewish woman listens to the Torah reading in synagogue, she is seeking the

Old Women as the Link Between the Generations 33 most efficacious moment, the moment when the channel of commu-

nication. between human and God is most open, to ask God a personal favor for a particular, loved person. A pervasive problem in much of the academic study of religion is the tendency to treat

the first set of motivations as more noble, beautiful, important,

eternal, or true than the second set. This sort of treatment is ethnocentrism at its worst: there is no reason to assume that the experience of the holy is any more immediate to a rabbi in a yeshiva

than to a woman lighting candles to protect her family. I suspect that the high visibility of women in domestic religion has contributed to its secondary status in the academic literature. Throughout this chapter I have pointed out ways in which domestic religion differs from yet interacts with the great tradition—I have described a process that I identify as domestication. Because human beings live in communities in which larger groups of people share common histories and interests, I see continuity rather than fracture between domestic and non- or less-domestic religion. The women of this study always maintain their identity as part of the Jewish people.

The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality

This chapter continues to investigate the ways in which women maneuver upon the stage of patriarchal religion. Examining how the women of the Day Center perceive male and female religiosity and how they describe the perfectly religious woman and the perfectly religious man, we shall see that they interpret the essence of religious activity [ymitzvah'] in light of their domestic religious concerns. In discussions with the women, they consistently spoke of

religion for women as equating religion for humans, while men’s religion stood in contrast to both.

The Women The women of this study define female religiosity in terms far different from those in which they define male religiosity. From their point of view, standards and meanings of religion are quite different for the two sexes. The women were asked a variety of questions aimed at eliciting from them a description of the essence

of religion (for them). All of the answers are summed up quite | nicely in these words of the son of one woman. “For her [my mother] religion is moral behavior. She would be embarrassed for anyone to see her upper arms. One shouldn’t live with someone [of the opposite sex] before marriage.” Or, as Batya put it, “A good 34

The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality 35

religious woman gives to charity, helps a couple get married, and spends time with and helps old people.” This same informant, when asked to describe a good religious man, answered, “Good religious men—there are many. For example, a hacham [rabbi/ wise man]. Many men pray but do bad things.” Here her daughter interjected, “See in the newspapers how many [ultra-Orthodox] men from Mea Shearim rape!” In other words, according to Batya and her daugh-

ter, a man may be religious but behave in an immoral manner, whereas for women the very definition of religiosity is moral behavior. For men, religion is correct observance of certain rituals.

“The most important mitzvah [for women] is not to speak ill of others and to be honest.” Several women stressed having a “clean

heart.” Not to slander or gossip were frequent answers. Simha described her late mother as a very righteous woman, a perfect saint. “She never slandered or gossiped and would not even talk unless someone asked her a question. She went straight to Heaven.” Almost all of the women included giving to charity in their definitions of religiosity. The worst sins are stealing and murder.

That for women religious behavior is seen as interpersonal or contextual was highlighted in a lecture given by Rabbanit Zohara. Her lessons, in which she teaches the women biblical passages, frequently center around miraculous stories of Jewish saints and folktales that emphasize certain moral principles. During one lesson she told the story of a man who fell in love with a married woman. “But the woman was very righteous and so instead of having an affair with

him, she told him words of wisdom and he conquered his lust.” Rabbanit Zohara went on to say that the definition of a good woman is that “she does everything so that her husband can learn in a yeshiva and be a talmudic scholar. She does nothing for herself.” In short, a good woman does not commit adultery, she encourages others not to sin, and she helps her husband. This same idea appears in Shula’s description of her mother-in-

law. Shula’s father-in-law had recently died, and according to Shula, he was a saint. His story will be told later on. But what is interesting at this point is Shula’s description of the wife, a particularly righteous woman. “My husband’s father had been paralyzed for six years before’ he died. She [his wife] took care of him at home,

nursed him, did everything for him. ... And even when the old man was sick and couldn’t really walk, he didn’t always, you know,

36 Women as Ritual Experts make it to the toilet in time. She, the memory of saints is a blessing, would spray air freshener in the house so that nobody would smell

that he had dirtied his pants.” Interestingly, Sabbath observance is the one form of ritual (as opposed to moral) behavior that was frequently mentioned in this context. However, as one might expect from the interpersonal emphasis of other women’s mitzvot, even Sabbath law can be subsumed to relationship. In an interview with Batya and her daughter, we discussed whether Batya’s children are religious. They

said that the daughter is religious (for example, she does not light fires on the Sabbath) but she drives to visit her widowed mother so that she will not be left alone on the Sabbath (driving is prohibited by Jewish law on the Sabbath). Interestingly, those widows who had sons living nearby would boast that their sons are so good, they

come by on Friday night in order to say the blessing over wine [kiddush] for their widowed mothers. The sons are expected to cater to their mothers’ halachic/ ritualistic needs, the daughters to their mothers’ emotional needs. One day when the rabbi had not yet arrived, a woman used the opportunity to give a lesson of her own. “Listen, you want to hear a

lesson. Ill tell you a real lesson. This 1s a true story. In my synagogue there is one Moshe Cohen. He did not come to the synagogue for three weeks, and no one even took the time to find out

what had happened to him. It turned out that he was in the hospital. This is terrible. Taking care of your friends and neighbors and people in your community is the most important mitzvah. It is more important than helping a bride [financially] or giving small amounts of money to charity.”

The Men Perfectly religious men, seen through the eyes of the women of the Day Center, have little in common with perfectly religious women.

The first male saint we will meet is the husband of the saintly woman who sprayed air freshener so that her paralyzed husband would not be humiliated. Shula’s father-in-law had been the beadle

at his synagogue for thirty-two years, and everyone loved him.

: When asked what he did that made him a saint, Shula had three

The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality 37

ready examples. The first, he would pick up bread from the ground and put it on fences or roofs “because it is forbidden to throw bread

on the ground.” The second, “he would visit sick people in the hospital and bless them and bring them his book.” (Shula, who is illiterate, did not know what book it was.) The third, “he would pay

for children, even my children, to have aliyot [ritual honor] at synagogue.” What is interesting here is how superficially similar these acts are to women’s mitzvot, but how in reality they are so different, lacking the moral emphasis of true women’s mitzvot.

Women also are concerned with food. Feeding the poor 1s the greatest deed a woman can do. But this man did not feed the poor. His handling of bread was purely ritualistic—his concern was not that a hungry person would eat the bread, but that the bread would

not be left on the ground. Visiting and caring for the sick is something that all good women are expected to do. His own wife cared for him for six years when he was paralyzed. He also would visit the sick, but not to nurse them. His visits were to bless them. This same subtle but critical distinction is also true for her third

example. Helping poor children is seen by women as a great mitzvah. But this saint did not clothe or feed them; he paid for them

to have a ritual honor. Although Shula’s father-in-law was a righteous man when alive, his status as saint was really sealed after his death. Apparently, when he died, his wife became depressed, and she began to spend most of her time lying idly in bed. “He [her husband] came to her in

a dream and told her to get out of bed and open the door to the house [have an open house that people can visit], and then to go to the kitchen. She went, she did what he said. He told her to prepare food for the children. All the time she was in the kitchen she felt that he was with her, helping her. He came to her other times, too. He would tell her that it is nice where he is now, that there are a lot

of trees, and that she should come sit with him. That he was learning Torah in the next world.” A man, to be a saint, does not need to be involved in what the women would label as moral behavior. Learning, prayer, mysticism, is the stuff of male religiosity. But because in this case the recipient of the dream is a woman, the religious instruction she receives is geared to a female—to stop neglecting her neighbors and her children.

38 Women as Ritual Experts Yona Sabar, in an entirely different context, also noted the emphasis that Kurdish men place on prayer. For example, in the Kurdish Neo-Aramaic epic version of the story of Adam and Eve, the main theme is man’s salvation following his repentance and prayers. “This motif of salvation through repentance, which consists mainly of repeated prayers, seems to reflect the preoccupation of the [male] Kurdish Jews with the daily routine prayers above all other types of religiosity.” In the neighborhood of the Day Center lives a zaddik nistar [a hidden holy one]. One of the women offered to take me to receive a blessing from this great zaddik. We entered his one-room house and sat down and waited for his wife. She brought us tea and introduced us to a young woman who lives with them. This young woman told us that she had just become engaged, and this happy event occurred because of the zaddik (that is, his merit [zechut] or intercession had

somehow brought about the engagement.) She and my informant from the Day Center told me how holy he is: he says Psalms all day and night until 3:00 in the morning. The zaddik then entered the room. He had just finished ritually washing his hands before eating and was looking for a towel. My informant gave him one, but was told by the young woman not to give things directly into his hand (because he is a man and she is a woman). He blessed the bread and ate some and gave each of the women (the informant, the young

woman, his wife, and me) a piece from his portion as a segula [charm]. We ate without ritual hand washing. The zaddik then sat down to eat, and we watched him and waited. Throughout his meal he conversed with the Angel of Death. He talked/ prayed /mumbled constantly, but most of what he said was incomprehensible. When he finished, he gave his leftover food to the young woman to eat as a segula. His wife told him that I had to leave soon and that he should

bless me. He recited the Grace After Meals and then muttered a mixture of scriptural verses and Psalms, all the time continuing his conversations with angels. He put on his prayer shawl and phylacteries and began to bless me and my informant. I was expected to leave

money on the sofa next to him, but all I had with me was 100 shekels, at that time worth about 50 cents. His wife told me that was

enough, I put the money down on the table, and left. The women with whom he lives clearly think that he is a great saint and have much respect for his blessings and mystical powers.

The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality 39

His wife addresses him as Hacham [literally, wise man] and the young woman tells of miracles he has brought about. They both see it as proof of his righteousness that he does not touch women on the head when he blesses them. However, they are equally aware of the

fact that he is either a bit senile or a bit crazy. Ignoring much of what he says, they yell at him, push him around, tell him what to do, and talk while he is talking. Batya remembers that her late husband was very pious: he would yell at their daughters not to transgress the Sabbath laws. This then, sums up male religiosity. The religious man prays, studies, observes many laws concerning ritual behavior, but is not particularly concerned with morality and kindness in interpersonal relationships or with real, everyday needs.? Relationship manifested through charitable behavior, on the other hand, is the essence of female religion.‘

Charity—The Greatest Women’s Mitzvah “Charity saves [you] from death!” This well-known Jewish saying has taken on the importance of a creed for the Day Center women. Giving money to charity, or “contributing,” as they put it, is done daily in a variety of contexts. Following is Simha B.’s definition of a righteous woman. “She gives alms, does mitzvot, helps people— maybe to carry a heavy basket. She cooks for a sick woman, gives

money to a bride and groom who are orphans. But it is a bigger mitzvah to give cooked food, because a poor person can die before buying and preparing food from money. . . . [Here she related at length the story of a man who was punished by God for not giving cooked food to a poor person.] If someone comes to your house, you don’t know if he is poor or not, you must give him food. Maybe

he came from far away and is hungry or thirsty; you must give to him, even a king who begs must be given food. This is a mitzvah, this is a righteous woman. If you have mercy, that is a righteous woman. Charity saves [you] from death. A man was in a cemetery and heard from the dead (who always tell the truth) that his wife would die the next day while doing laundry. He went home and told her not to do laundry and she did not listen to him. While she was

hanging the laundry on the roof, two beggars came and asked her

for food, and she gave them all the food she had. When her

40 Women as Ritual Experts husband came home that day, he saw that she had not died. He went back to the cemetery and said that he thought that the dead never lie, but that was not the case—his wife had not died. The dead

told him that they had indeed spoken the truth but that ‘charity saves [you] from death.’” The significance of the women’s contributing is complex. First of all, because they give very small sums, this is a religious act that

almost anybody can do; one does not have to be rich in order to help the poor. Second, contributing is often done as an accompani-~ ment to receiving blessings for the health of their families, which as we have discussed in Chapter 1, is connected to the role of elderly women as the spiritual guardians of their families’ well-being. When men contribute or raise money they usually do so for ritual purposes, not for feeding the poor. The two examples of men and charity that occurred during the fieldwork were Shula’s father-inlaw, who bought ritual honors in the synagogue for his poor male relatives, and the rabbi who collected money for the building fund of his yeshiva. The rabbanit, on the other hand, constantly collected money for poor families and for soldiers. The female director of the Day Center also collected money on one occasion, and the money she solicited was to help a poor orphaned girl get married.

| On numerous occasions the women and the rabbi stressed that the sum of money that one gives to charity is not important. What matters is the frequency. One should constantly contribute small

amounts. In order to gain a clearer understanding of what they mean by small amounts, a contribution can range from the equiva-

lent of a few pennies to a dollar and can be given either to an institution or to an individual. Indeed, it is not even important to know to which organization the money goes. The women give to

whomever asks; it would be unheard of for them to ask if an Organization has a tax-exempt status. While the women do exhibit certain preferences in the matter, being most eager to give money to the Israeli army and soldiers, it is a matter of conviction and pride to give money to anyone who comes asking.

The most common form of contributing, in the context of the Day Center, is giving money to the rabbi for his yeshiva’s book or building fund. On the surface, this would seem to contradict what was said earlier concerning the interpersonal nature of women’s mitzvot. However, a closer look proves that this is not the case. The

The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality 41

women extract a price from the rabbi in return for their money— they request his blessing. And the blessing is usually for a relative who needs divine help. The ritual proceeds as follows: Either before

the rabbi enters the room, or as he is finishing his lesson, several women will prepare small sums of money in their hands. They appear to be anxious or excited while doing this. When the rabbi is free, they approach the table at which he sits to give his lesson and hand him the money, which he puts into a plastic bag inside his briefcase.5 They then, in a low voice, request a blessing for a particular family member who is ill, in memory of someone who died, or on behalf of a relative who has some other kind of problem.

The rabbi then, also in a low voice, says a personalized blessing (modified Mi She-Berach).6 Women requesting a personal blessing from a rabbi with higher status, for example the yeshiva director, are expected to give larger sums of money. Many of the women give the Day Center rabbi money in this manner each week. Particularly on the days preceding holidays, the women seek his blessing. The

women domesticate their contribution to a male institution—the yeshiva—turning it into a way of enlisting God’s help on behalf of their loved ones.

An Exceptional Woman There are two religious leaders who interact with the women of the Day Center on a daily basis. The first of these is Rabbanit Zohara,

the wife of a neighborhood rabbi. The second is Hacham Benyamin, a Kurdish rabbi who has extensive contact with members of his ethnic group who live in the area. Both give weekly lessons at the Day Center. Examining these two figures provides important insights concerning culturally accepted male and female religious modes.

The women of the Day Center have ambivalent feelings toward

the rabbanit. Some call her by her first name, others call her Ha Rabbanit (a title of respect), and those who are angry at her refer to her merely as Zohara. Women who like her and women who do

not will sometimes rise when she enters the room and even reach out to touch her. But sometimes, they will not even take their feet down from the chairs in front of them when she begins her lesson. The women are less attentive to her than they are to the rabbi, but

42 Women as Ritual Experts rather than drawing any conclusion concerning the respect they have for male versus female teachers, I must interject here my subjective evaluation that her speaking style is rather dry. She claims that she can teach because she has a good memory, and her lessons usually consist of her slowly reading and then explaining several verses from the Bible. Although she herself cannot read very fluently, compared to the illiterate women at the Day Center, she 1s a great scholar. When she speaks about more practical subjects, particularly Jewish law, the women are interested in what she says and enthusiastically listen and ask questions. Yet on one occasion when the women

had been served sandwiches and Rabbanit Zohara told them that they must ritually wash their hands before eating the bread, none rose to leave the room to wash. Rabbanit Zohara knows each woman by name and knows to inquire about the appropriate relatives, health problems, neighbors,

and so forth. She gives the impression that she sees herself as something of a protector or guardian of the neighborhood. She tells how she “takes care of 1200 families.” Certainly almost everyone she passes on the street seems to know her. Once, as we were walking together in the neighborhood, she stopped to talk to a woman who was wearing a sleeveless dress with an opened neckline. Rabbanit

Zohara reached out to pull together the neckline of her dress and then helped the woman to put a jacket on. Both Rabbanit Zohara and the other woman clearly saw it as appropriate for the rabbanit to ensure that women of “her neighborhood” dress modestly. Her status as teacher derives both from her role as rabbi’s wife and her role as philanthropist. As the wife of a rabbi, she has a certain amount of automatic status. However, it is more as a result of her own very strong personality and commitment to mainstreamor halachic-style Judaism that she has become a teacher. She has had no formal education; she reminisces, “In. . . [the Old Country] no one taught the women, but they learned a lot by memory.” She says that her husband does not help her prepare her lessons, but neither does he object to her spending so much time out of the house. The women sometimes argue or bicker with the rabbanit concerning points of Jewish law or Jewish history; they see her as belonging to the same category of being as they themselves belong, and so do not feel that it is inappropriate to publicly disagree with

The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality 43

her. However, when the rabbanit appeals to her husband’s authority as a rabbi, the women accept what she says.

One of her favorite ways of describing herself is as a shlichat mitzvah [a mitzvah agent—one who carries out good deeds for others], something, she stresses, that anyone can aspire to be. During one lesson at the Day Center, she digressed and related to the women that “they’ve asked me a few times, many times, to sit on the City Council and in the government, but I said no. I don’t want

to get involved with them. I want to help my people.” Rabbanit Zohara 1s well-known and respected throughout the country for her

charitable activities. She even raises money abroad to help “her families,” and the amounts she raises are quite large (I could not get any kind of more precise estimate from her). With a few exceptions, the women at the Day Center do not like

the rabbanit.’” (Note that this is in dramatic contrast to the high esteem in which she is held by most of Israeli society. She is considered by the government, philanthropic agencies, and by most

of the general public to be an exceptionally righteous woman.) According to Simha, Rabbanit Zohara is not really a good person. Her lessons are not very good, “she doesn’t really know anything; she is not like those who really went to school and learned. She just

learned a little from her husband, who is a real rabbi, and that is what she teaches.” Also, “Rabbanit Zohara collects large amounts of money for charity but hardly gives any out. She gives almost nothing to the women at the Day Center, just matzah, sugar, and oil for Passover.” Simha complains that Rabbanit Zohara even sells the clothes that she collects. “She collects so much money from so many places, and what does she do with it? She has a beautiful house!” (I have seen no evidence that these accusations are true.) On another occasion, when several women were discussing the rabbanit, Rosa announced knowingly, “She has risen, risen, risen,” and Simha continued, “and now she wiill fall.”

An Exceptional Man In contrast to the rabbanit, the rabbi—Hacham Benyamin, is very popular among the women. The women frequently ask the rabbi for blessings. (Rabbanit Zohara, at least in the time that I observed her,

44 Women as Ritual Experts never gave anyone a personal blessing.) His title, hacham (wise man), is a title that is reserved for men. In Kurdistan, the hacham fulfilled all of the important religious functions: mohel [circumciser], ritual slaughterer, teacher, amulet writer, miracle worker. While some of the women half-rise when the rabbanit enters the room, almost all of the women stand when the rabbi enters. If any women are sitting with their feet up, they immediately put their feet

down on the floor when he comes into the room. His style of speaking is very different from hers. Her lessons contain a mixture of Jewish law and homely advice; his lessons contain biblical and miracle stories. This is how the rabbi explains his aim in giving lessons at the day center: “These women are very downtrodden, most are widows and poor. I try to make them feel better by giving them belief,? security, and joy. I try to give them a good feeling that they can carry with them all day. Of course, it is only temporary, so I repeat each time the things that make them feel good.” When asked if it disturbs him to see that the women are frequently careless in their observance of Jewish law, he answered that he would not expect the women to know Jewish law because they do not know how to learn [read], and so, they only know what they hear. And even the things that he tells them are not absorbed very well, so that he must frequently.

repeat himself. |

Unlike the rabbanit, the rabbi is not involved in helping the

women with their material needs. They do come to him for advice in

both religious and secular matters (for example, financial and health problems), but not for assistance. They also come to him to

“solve” their dreams. According to the rabbi, he always tries to interpret the dreams in a positive way, because “the dream follows the mouth.” When the women approach the rabbi to ask for his blessing, they usually request blessings for their own and their family’s health. The rabbi says that the woman value his blessing because they believe that a rabbi has a broader horizon or outlook than they do and because he knows more. The women always agree

with the rabbi. Whereas the rabbanit is sometimes forced to fall back on her husband’s authority in order to convince the women that she is correct, the rabbi is always perceived as being right. The thrust of Rabbi Benyamin’s teaching is not ethics or history, but Jewish philosophy and faith. Typical lessons concern predesti-

The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality 45

nation, God’s omniscience and omnipotence, the role of the Jewish people in the cosmic scheme of the world, the nature of Satan and of the evil inclination, the difference between Jews and non-Jews. Many of his lessons focus on the coming of the Messiah and on the power of great rabbis. During a typical lesson he told the story of a rabbi who was so great that when he died he held onto the sword of

the Angel of Death for seven years and no one in the world died during that time. Another of his stories concerned a young rabbi who had the gift of prophecy and was made advisor to the king, which resulted in the Jews being treated well for many years. “Such is the power of hachamim,” he ended his lesson. He frequently stresses the importance of belief in God, Jewish wise men, and Torah scholars. Even when his lesson superficially seems about other subjects, he manipulates the theme to emphasize the importance of belief and the power of great rabbis. The rabbi likes and respects the women of the Day Center. He allows them to interrupt him while he is speaking and politely waits and says Amen when they bless their tea outloud during his lesson. He respects their herb-smelling ceremony!® enough to participate in

it, although on at least one occasion told the women that it is superfluous. As was pointed out above, he is aware that the women do not always heed what he says, but does not seem overly bothered by it. Perhaps even more than the rabbanit does, the rabbi respects the women’s expertise in the female religious domain.

The women believe that the rabbi has mystical and spiritual powers that are more potent than those of other humans. This is manifested through the blessings he gives them, through his role of

interpreter of dreams, and in incidents like the following: Two weeks before Passover several women and the rabbi were sitting in the Day Center director’s office discussing the trips to cemeteries

that they had made the day before. He suddenly turned to one of the women sitting in the room and told her that her request (that she had made at the tomb) had already been answered, “because you have a clean heart.” The rabbanit would never claim to know whether God had accepted someone’s prayer. The rabbi reinforces the belief in traditional and sexually differentiated roles in such comments as “all women should get married young and have as many children as possible for Israel, without thought to having enough money to support them.”

46 Women as Ritual Experts In these descriptions of the two religious leaders with whom the

women at the Day Center have frequent contact, many of the themes that arose in the discussion of the nature of religion for men and for women again emerge. The rabbanit has a personal relation-

ship with each woman—she knows their families and their problems. The rabbi has a ceremonial relationship with the women—he blesses them and assists them in the performing of ritual obligations. She is not seen as having any special spiritual powers, while he is perceived as being in touch with spiritual realms that are not accessible to the women. She gives the women food; he blesses them. She collects money for poor families; he collects money for his yeshiva. Her lessons frequently focus on things that she believes the women need to know (this includes Jewish law, common sense,

good.

and health advice.) His lessons are designed to make the women feel

Rabbi Benyamin behaves in the way that good religious men are

expected to behave: he studies, prays, and performs the proper | rituals. Rabbanit Zohara, on the other hand, has added to her religious repertoire certain types of behavior that the Day Center women do not see as appropriate for a good religious woman. First of all, she studies and teaches from texts, a type of religious behavior that traditionally was associated with men. Furthermore, instead of giving cooked meals and small amounts of money to beggars (which is what women traditionally do), she organizes large charitable enterprises—an activity for which there is no precedent

in the religious world of the elderly Middle Eastern women. Rabbanit Zohara wins a certain grudging respect for her literacy and charitable activities, but this respect is always tinged with suspicion and anger.

Women, Men, and Moral Development The dichotomized religious world of the Middle Eastern Jews is particularly interesting in light of Carol Gilligan’s recent work on psychological theory and women’s moral development.!! Carol] Gilligan responds to the fact that in studies using the classic Kohlberg scale of moral development, females are consistently found to be at

a lower stage of moral development than males. Women’s moral

The Dual Meaning of Religiosity: Women, Men, and Morality 417

judgments are seen as exemplifying the third stage of moral development—the stage at which morality is equated with helping and pleasing others, while men’s moral judgments exemplify the fifth and sixth stages, in which morality consists of an understanding of fairness that depends upon universal principles of justice, equality, and reciprocity. “Yet herein lies a paradox, for the very traits that traditionally have defined the ‘goodness’ of women, their care for and sensitivity

to the needs of others, are those that mark them as deficient in moral development. In this version of moral development... the conception of maturity is derived from the study of men’s lives... . When one begins with the study of women and derives developmental constructs from their lives, the outline of a moral conception different from that described by Freud, Piaget, or Kohlberg begins to emerge and informs a different description of development... . This conception of morality as concerned with the activity of care centers moral development around the understanding of responsibility and relationships, just as the conception of morality as fair-

ness ties moral development to the understanding of rights and rules.”!2 Carol Gilligan highlights the difference between male and

female moral modes with an illustration from the Bible. While Abraham as proof of the integrity of his faith was willing to sacrifice his son, the mother who comes before King Solomon relinquishes the truth in order to save her child’s life.!° Carol Gilligan’s critique of Kohlberg’s model lies in the greater legitimacy, the higher score, that is given to the male moral mode. On the other hand, according to the Day Center women, Judaism legitimizes and encourages both male and female religious modes. I suggest that the scenario drawn by the Day Center women may be typical of religious systems that legislate sexual segregation and different behavioral and attitudinal norms for women and for men. Such a legitimizing of two distinct modes of religiosity/moral de-

velopment would probably not occur, or occur to a much lesser extent, in a more egalitarian or sexually integrated system. Barbara

Welter, in a provocative article entitled “The Feminization of American Religion, 1800-1860,” finds that women’s predilictions helped to alter the form and content of Christian worship [for both men and women]. She points to the emphasis on humility, brotherly love, charity, meekness, forgiveness, and the reinterpretation of

48 Women as Ritual Experts Christ as the embodiment of these sex-related virtues. But what went hand in hand with this development was the identifying of religion as a female sphere.!4 Ann Douglas, in her book The Femin-

ization of American Culture, points to the concurrent decline in ministerial prestige and state support for American Protestantism.!5 It seems probable that in more sexually integrated religious cultures, there exists an “either/or” situation: either religion legitimizes and involves men and male modes of religiosity, or it legitimizes and involves women and female modes of religiosity. This chapter has drawn what appears to be a rather neat dichotomy: men and ritual versus women and morality. It is crucial to bear in mind, however, that individuals do cross over into the religious territory of the other gender. And all of the women, through the domestication of religion, blur the distinction between rite and morality.

Between Woman and God

“It is not necessary to be theologically self-conscious to be religiously sophisticated ... the disquieting sense that one’s moral insight is inadequate to one’s moral experience is as alive on the level of so called ‘primitive’ religion as it is on that of the so-called ‘civilized,’” worte. Clifford Geertz in an essay entitled “Religion as a

Cultural System.”! In the same essay, Geertz defined religious action as “the imbuing of a certain specific complex of symbols with a persuasive authority.”2 This chapter examines some of the sym-

bols that are most important for the women of the Day Center. Issues of belief, of ultimate concerns, will be addressed from the perspective of a group that cannot present us with their own sacred writings (the women are illiterate) or with complex explanations of their personal theology (women are not expected to have the language to talk about such things). Much of what the women believe must be deduced from comments they make about seemingly mun-

dane subjects, from their diurnal and their ritual behavior, from their hand gestures, and from the symbols that seem to them to have a “persuasive authority.” The examples, illustrations, parables, explanations, and anecdotes through which the women express their beliefs are often drawn from the female domain. When the women discuss complex

concepts such as faith, the nature of God, and the relationship between God and humans they use the language of female experience. However, neither I nor the women claim that their beliefs 49

50 Women as Ritual Experts are uniquely feminine. The women’s religion is not independent of normative Judaism; the little tradition does not exist in a vacuum; and the women’s beliefs do not radically differ from those of their fathers, husbands, and brothers. Rather, the Day Center women, seeing themselvs as good and pious Jews, subtly alter, elaborate,

reinterpret, reshape, and domesticate selected aspects of Jewish belief and law into a form that is meaningful to and consistent with

their perceptions, roles, identities, needs, and experience as old, Middle Eastern women.

Belief The women of the Day Center are aware of the concept “to believe.”3 This is demonstrated by comments like, “If you believe, God will help you.” On several occasions the women explained that belief is not limited to Jews—not all Jews believe and non-Jews can also believe. For example, Batya remembers, “This Arab woman in Iraq who couldn’t have children, and she asked one of us, the Jews, for an amulet. The hacham scribbled something on a paper, folded

the paper, and gave it to her. She got pregnant because she believed. Belief is the biggest thing. People here today don’t believe like they did in Iraq. There even the Arabs believed... . In Iraq we

would cure eye problems by using dust from the ground. Just regular dust, like I can pick up here. It wasn’t anything special. We would put it on at night and in the morning the eye would be better, because we believed.”

Belief means belief in God, in saints, in Elijah the Prophet, in the Messiah, in Satan, in the sacredness of the land of Israel, and in the special relationship between God and the Jewish people. If the women had a formal creed, it would probably be: God sees and cares about everything we do. Everything is in God’s hands. It is possible to negotiate with God. An individual can and should be in daily contact with God. There are realms of existence besides our material world. God has a special relationship with the Jewish people and the land of Israel.

Between Woman and God 51 The titles that the women use when referring to or addressing God are good indicators of the way in which they picture and relate to the divine. The most frequently used name for God is “God who does miracles and wonders.” Particularly when the women want to thank God for good health, children, or the existence of the state of Israel, they will use expressions like, “thank God who does wonders

and miracles that we are all here in Israel.” For these women the universe is a mysterious place, which while functioning according to certain laws of nature, is also the arena for God’s miracles. Most of the women believe that they have witnessed miracles in

their lifetimes and the greater number of these miracles concern coming to and the survival of the state of Israel. Indeed, one of the more unique names that the women use for God 1s Elokei Eretz Yisrael—“God of the Land of Israel.”4 Begging God to perform miracles for Israel is an important part of the women’s religious experience. The other common sphere for God’s miracles is the home or family. Many of the women talk about God’s miraculously curing a sick child or allowing a barren woman to conceive.

A title for God that is used frequently by the women is Mishtabach [“He 1s blessed”. Since the written word unfortunately

cannot convey the fervor with which the women say this name, suffice it to point out that they accompany the pronouncing of this name with a meaningful look upward. The women of the Day Center firmly believe that God is in his heaven, that his heaven is located somewhere above the earth, and that when speaking to or about God it is most efficacious to either look or move the hands in an upward direction.

Everything Is in God’s Hands The women of the Day Center believe in an omniscient God. This is shown through comments such as, “we must cover our hair all the

time because God can see it.” God’s omniscience is in contrast to the human inability to know, in such remarks as, “How can we know if the Ethiopians are really Jewish? Who knows? Only God knows!” The women frequently state that God sees and knows everything everyone does. Again, this is in contrast to humans who have no knowledge of matters like life after death. Although the

52 Women as Ritual Experts women enjoy speculating as to the sex of an unborn child, almost every conversation about this subject ends by one or more women saying, “Who are we to know? It is forbidden to speculate! Only God knows! Everything is in His hands!” One of the most important implications of God’s omniscience is that He knows what 1s in

the heart of each person. An illiterate, deaf woman can go to synagogue and sit through a prayer service that she neither hears nor understands, but because God knows everything, “He knows that I have a good intention.” Having a “clean heart” is greatly valued by the women—and God is the final arbiter of what constitutes a clean heart. The most important corollary of God’s omniscience is His omnipotence. For this reason, just as it is discouraged to speculate about the sex of an unborn child, it is also taboo to talk about the weather, that most neutral of all topics for Westerners. The women typically respond to comments about the weather with an upward tilt of the head, bringing the palms of the hands up, while shrugging _ the shoulders and saying, “What can we do? Whatever God gives, there is nothing one can do about it. Everything is in God’s hands.” Similarly, politics elicit little interest from the women. Even though most of them do understand the hourly news reports broadcast on the radio, they rarely express any opinions beyond “tsk, tsk, tsk” when there has been a terrorist attack or other tragedy. As Simha B. said, “Someone can do many mitzvot [commandments] and one sin and it covers them all and they take him to Hell. Man can’t know anything. He thinks he does what is good, but God thinks it is bad. Everything is in God’s hands. He writes down everything.” From this pervasive awareness of God’s omnipotence grows a fatalistic attitude toward all of life. An example of this type of belief

came from a very old woman who told how all of her life she had abstained from food and drink on every ritual fast day. This partic-

ular woman is known to be very ill, and when one of the other women expressed concern about the effect that fasting would have on her health, she said “If I die, I die.” This was of course accompanied by the familiar looking at the ceiling and raising the hands. One woman spoke at length about the problem she was having with her landlord, how he was trying to cheat her out of a great deal

of money. I suggested that she consult a lawyer, telling her that

Between Woman and God 53 based upon my knowledge of tenants’ rights, it seemed likely that the landlord would have to capitulate. Her answer, one that can be

heard frequently at the Day Center, “There is a God.” In other words: I don’t have to do anything. God will either help or He won’t

help, but either way, it is out of my hands. It seems that the poor, weak, old women of the Day Center project their own position of powerlessness in society onto the theological level. Instead of react-

ing with anger to a bureaucratic, arrogant, sexist society, they console themselves with the knowledge that the divine realms are equally inscrutable. Health and sickness play a key role in the women’s philosophy because these matters epitomize the belief that everything comes from God. Most of the women know all too well that one can be “healthy today and sick tomorrow.” Many have seen their healthy-

looking babies suddenly take sick and die. They know that a woman can be blessed with five beautiful children, none of whom survive infancy. While this can lead to what seems (to a Western observer) a shocking passivity in regard to one’s body (for example, many of the women have high blood pressure but continue to eat salty foods, saying that if it is their time to die, not eating salt will not help), it can simultaneously result in a most arduous search for cures in the spiritual sphere. The women’s approach to healing is

religious—if someone is ill it is advisable to ask a rabbi for a blessing, give money to charity in his or her name, perform certain

rituals (such as lighting candles), and go on pilgrimage to holy tombs. Indeed, the most common request made while at holy tombs is for healing of a family member or simply good health for all of the Jewish people. This is not to say that the women are blind to the efficacy of either modern or folk medicine. Rather, they believe that for any kind of medicine to work God must will it. They are eclectic in their search for healing; for example, they advocate going to the

warm springs at Ein Gedi rather than to the holy tombs at Meron for certain illnesses, and they can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the Health Service versus traditional medicine in Kurdistan. They can even debate such theoretical points as whether faith is necessary for a folk cure to work. But the underlying belief remains that neither antibiotics nor traditional suction cups will help if it is one’s fate to die.

54 Women as Ritual Experts The Wheel of Fate A crucial element in the belief system of these women is the notion that the world spins: here today, gone tomorrow, nothing is permanent, the wheel of fate turns eternally. One day as the women were waiting for the rabbi to arrive, one of the more articulate among them began speaking in a loud voice (conversations in the Day Center are

usually conducted in low voices among women sitting near each other.) This woman announced that the world turns [ha-olam mitgal-

gel|, nothing stays the same. The other women all murmured and nodded their agreement, and then the woman continued, “God gives and God takes. Especially wealth, strength, and wisdom. God hates people who are proud that they have these things. Someone can go to

bed at night knowing everything and wake up in the morning not knowing even one word. . . . There was this Yehezkel, he had a shop here in Jerusalem, and one day he traveled to Tel Aviv to get things for his shop worth a lot of money. The next morning while he was

sitting in synagogue someone came to tell him that his shop had burned down during the night. So Yehezkel lost all of his money. He was probably too proud of his shop or his wealth.” The other women

were very impressed with this story and related similar incidents proving the tenet that ha-olam mitgalgel. The ladies of the Day Center are women in a sexist culture, illiterate in a religious system that honors learning above all else, so-called primitive in a modern culture, Jews in an anti-Semitic world, old and sick in a world that worships youth and health, and poor in a country where wealth is seen as the ultimate proof of success. It is not surprising that they choose to emphasize those stories and traditions that teach that health, beauty, wealth, and even knowledge are impermanent. The women hold as central to their belief in God that He can do anything, that he can “raise up” anyone, that even a sick, uneducated, poor, old Kurdish Jewish woman can hope that tomorrow will be better.

Between Women and God A tenet of faith for these women is that an individual can and should be in frequent contact with God. From the point of view of

Between Woman and God 55 humans, this contact includes prayers, blessings, and petitions. In return, the women expect that God will send them signs and wonders.

Following is an incident related by Simha B. “A long time ago, during World War I, I went with my mother and sister to Yesod

HaMale, near Rosh Pina, to work during the harvest. We left in Safed the daughter of my other sister, who had died. We just couldn’t take her with us. We were working and working, and then one night I dreamed that my sister came wearing a white dress and tearing her hair out, and said, ‘How could you leave my daughter?’

The next morning, I decided to return to Safed, even though we needed the money, and see how she [the niece] was. I got up early and walked to the road. Someone stopped and gave me a ride. I didn’t know but he was a very bad person. I had to get out of the car, and he left me on the side of the road. There was no one there. It was really empty. I was afraid. I had been fasting the entire day and carrying big bags of grain on my head. All of a sudden, three Arabs came and said to me, ‘Stand still!’ They were getting ready to hurt me, and then all of a sudden a platoon of Shiite soldiers came into view. The Arabs were frightened and ran away. You see, they were AWOL from the [Turkish] Army. All the time I cried and cried

and said over and over the names of saints, of Rabbi Meir, and saints from my family. Then, out of nowhere, there appeared a man with a white beard. He was riding a donkey and holding a lamb on his lap. He asked me where I was going. I told him ‘home.’ He asked me who was with me, and I said the names of people in my family. He said I was lying and disappeared without any trace. There was no one there. Right away friends of my father found me there, and they took me and gave me food and then drove me to Safed. When I got there you know what I found? He [the brother-in-law] hadn’t

taken care of my niece. She was dirty and had lice and had been wearing the same dress and was just sitting in the house.” When Simha B. tells this story, she hints that the man she saw on the donkey was Elijah the Prophet. Many of the women have seen Elyah the Prophet in visions and most exhibit a more or less intimate relationship with him. When they were preparing for a trip to Haifa, the main attraction was “going to visit Elijah.” Elijah appears in dreams, and the women know many miraculous stories in which he figures prominently.

56 Women as Ritual Experts Typically, when they hear a story involving Elijah they bend forward, kiss their hands, and touch their foreheads, so that, in Shula’s words “he will come to us, because he rose up to heaven, because in God’s and Elyah’s merit [zechut] we are alive.” On Saturday night

after the ceremony marking the end of the Sabbath, they light a candle for Elijah while saying prayers that he should come to them,

“that everything should be good, and that the soldiers and army should be safe.” This prayer is not formalized and varies from woman to woman, from week to week. Eliah is important because he is the precursor of the Messiah. Simha B. believes that the Messiah will come soon; that we have seen all of the signs. For example, we do not know how long days are anymore. “We used to be able to finish all kinds of work before sunset, and now we turn around and the day is over. Also, there is

much more death now. It used to be that every month or so someone would die. Now, thousands die everyday.” Simha B. saw messianic significance in the crash of an Air Japan plane that had occurred recently.

The women believe that God sends signs so that humans can know that He has performed a miracle for them. One woman relates that when her formerly barren daughter conceived as a result of the

intervention of a saint, she asked God for a sign so that when her daughter had the baby she would know it was from God and thus come to have perfect faith [emunah shlema] in God. The baby was born with a black birthmark on her chest, a sure sign from God. Dreams are an important part of life for the women of the Day Center. In fact, one of the most important functions of the rabbi is to interpret dreams. Dreams can bring warnings, for example, that one’s child is sick. Or dreams can bring comfort, giving a glimpse of something good that is to happen. Many of the women tell of things

that they saw in dreams, and then saw afterward in “real life.” A dead relative can appear in a dream, often to scold and advise, sometimes to comfort.

Evil Eye Belief in—and rituals to avert—the evil eye were among the most prominent features of traditional Middle Eastern culture. In com-

Between Woman and God 57 mon with non-Jews throughout Indo-European and Islamic societies, Middle Eastern Jews perceived the amount of good fortune in the world as finite and limited; one person’s gain is at another’s

expense. As Alan Dundes has argued, this world view is often connected to the belief that certain individuals, through gazing, can either consciously or unconsciously harm others.5 Evil eye beliefs have dramatically declined among the women of

the Day Center. Most, when they are asked, profess not to have even heard of the evil eye. One informant explained the evil eye in the following manner: “Do I believe in the evil eye? Yes! I have experienced it myself! It is caused by jealousy, someone will look at

you and you will get sick and a temperature. My son had the evil eye put on him when he was a baby. I took him to the Western Wall when he was two and a half years old and someone put the evil eye

on him and he suddenly developed a temperature. He was so beautiful, he looked Ashkenazi. He recovered. But my first child,

my daughter, died from the evil eye. ... The rabbi came to our house to give her a name in the sukka. She was beautiful and healthy when she went out and came back into the house very sick.

I had dressed her in beautiful clothes and jewelry, and everyone looked at her. That was why she got sick. I took her to the hospital and she died. The nurses at the hospital could not believe that this was the same child who had been released a few days before.” [Here

she described the weird noises and gestures the child made.] According to this informant, there are measures to take to guard against the evil eye. For example, if one finds out immediately afterward that someone has given them the evil eye, it is effective to wash one’s face, arms, and legs three times with salt water and then

throw the water in a place where three roads meet. “God is also frightened of the evil eye. That is why He moved up to the seventh heaven, to get away from the evil eye. Of every hundred people who die, ninety-nine die from the evil eye and only one from God. There

are things that can be done for protection, but one must believe in them. They only work if one believes. That is true for everything.” The meaning of the evil eye is that the world is not always good

and that unforseen disasters often occur. A pious mother does everything she should to take care of her child, and she or he still may die. I would surmise that despite claims to the contrary most of the women do continue to believe in the evil eye, but have received

58 Women as Ritual Experts enough modern Jewish education to know that it is no longer socially or intellectually “acceptable” to profess belief in such things. I would venture to guess that the strong taboo on talking about their hopes and preferences, the weather, and the sex of an unborn child are to some extent expressions of evil eye beliefs, of a sense that it is dangerous to publicize good things. When asked why it is forbidden to talk about these things, the women answer enigmatically, “Because it is so.” While manifestations may change, I suspect it is rare for a belief as deeply ingrained and pervasive as the belief in the evil eye to disappear in one generation.

The Chosen People in the Holy Land The women of the Day Center believe that God has a special interest in the Jewish people and that He has chosen the Jewish people to play a uniquely important role in the history and future redemption of the world. This is proven by his having given them the land of Israel. Old women have a special role in this scheme through their spiritual responsibility for the safety of the Israeli Army. For the women of the Day Center, religion is intimately connected to the state of Israel. The rabbanit repeatedly tells them that “this country is our home and we have no other place, so we must be very good.” Walter Zenner, in writing about the aliya of Syrian Jews, pointed out that for those who emigrated to Israel, identification as Jews had distinguished them from other Arabic-speaking inhabitants in Syria. It had formed a basis for their world outlook, ritual behav-

lor, and economic activities. Most of the Syrian Jews were not ideologically Zionist, but considered themselves part of a Jewish religio-national entity. “Israel is the Zion whose restoration was prayed for.” Many of the stories of miracles related by the women concern either their personal a/iyot to Israel or the victory of Israeli soldiers in war. Batya told of King David appearing to soldiers and telling

them not to be afraid in Israel’s War of Independence. Several women related how in the Six Day War, a small unit of Israeli soldiers was being shot at by thousands of enemy soldiers. All of a sudden the enemy turned and fled. The Israelis captured a few of

Between Woman and God 59 the enemy and asked why they had suddenly run away. They answered that they had seen the three old men throwing a strange fire at them. The men were, of course, the patriarchs Abraham,

Isaac, and Jacob. |

One woman told how her brother’s son was called out of syn-

agogue to go fight in the Yom Kippur War. On Yom Kippur Jews are

obligated to fast, and he was taken to his army base and told to eat before going into his tank. He refused, saying that if he dies, he will die fasting, like his grandfather and father before him. His tank was attacked by the enemy and the other three soldiers in the tank were killed. “Only he survived, and this was because he was fasting.”? Yom HaZicaron [Memorial Day] is an important day at the Day Center. In 1985 the rabbi devoted his entire lesson to the theme of fallen soldiers. To begin with, he requested that the women stand for a minute while he chanted one of the traditional prayers said during a memorial prayer service. In the typical Day Center mixture of spirituality, Jewish tradition, and secular Zionism, he read excerpts from a pamphlet published by the Israeli organization of parents whose children had fallen in war. Then he told of several miracles that had happened to Israeli soldiers. For example, during the Lebanese War, one tank of Israeli soliders was cut off from all

of the others and surrounded by terrorists. The terrorists shot at them and the tank caught fire. The soldiers did not know what to do and finally decided to leave the tank. One of the soldiers was, by chance, wearing tzitzit and tefillin [ritual fringed garment and phy-

lacteries worn by observant Jewish men]. As they got out of the tank, the shooting stopped and none of them were hurt. “This shows that God’s miracles are not always clear to the eye, but they are there just the same.” The women are all proud of having made aliya and enjoy telling of the hardships that they suffered in order to come to Israel and of the difficult conditions in the early years before Independence. The women are anxious that all Jews make aliya and view coming to the

modern state of Israel as part of the ultimate redemption of the Jewish people. Although the rabbi sometimes makes reference to political issues, the Zionism of the women is basically apolitical: Israel is the land given by God to the Jewish people, and it is a great

merit [zechut] or reward to be able to live here. One woman told how she came from Turkey to Israel on foot

60 Women as Ritual Experts with her three young children: “I had my baby, another little one, and my seven-year-old girl with me. Right after crossing the border [into Palestine], the girl separated from the group. I just didn’t see

at first. When she was found three days later, she told how she didn’t even know she was lost and then she realized she was and she looked up and saw a light in the distance. She headed toward it and found that it was an Arab village. The Arabs suspected that she was

Jewish. But the Blessed God opened her mouth, and she did not know any Arabic, but she spoke in Arabic. [Here my informant said something in Arabic about Allah.] They believed her and took her in. While she was there she didn’t eat or drink anything, because it was not kosher. The next day she began walking toward a Jewish settlement, and an Arab with a gun almost shot her. But again God

put words in her mouth and she tricked the Arab and was saved. She got to the [Jewish] settlement on the Sabbath, and they drove her to me. This was a big miracle.” Aliya was the first major rite de passage in the lives of most of the

women. Aliya has overshadowed even weddings and first childbirths as the greatest event in their lives, as the event that changed their lives, that moved them from the old life to the new. Indeed, aliya includes most of the classic attributes of initiation: a new language, a new name, new knowledge, a period of separation (the actual trip), dying to the old life, and being reborn to the new. The women feel that in many ways life was better in the Old Country: they were wealthier, healthier, enjoyed celebrations more, lived longer, had better relations with their Arab neighbors, were happier, families were closer, and everyone “believed.” However, they feel that by coming to Israel they have changed their religious status for the better; they have literally “moved up.” This upward movement should be understood in two senses. First, it is a great merit [zechut] to live in Israel. “Israel is the navel of the world. See, everyone is fighting over it, everyone wants it. God has performed countless miracles so that we can live in Israel. This is the land that God chose for us. Jerusalem is the holy city.” When one woman was asked if it is more efficacious to pray at holy tombs that can only be reached by a difficult journey by foot, she

answered that “every footstep in the land of Israel is a great merit [zechut].” Planting trees in Israel and helping the soldiers are religious acts that will be rewarded by God.

Between Woman and God 61 The second aspect of this spiritual aliya is far more specific to women such as those who come to the Day Center. These women describe with pain how in the Old Country only boys went to school, girls were not educated. In Israel, however, not only their daughters have gone to school, but they themselves have been fortunate enough to learn at the Day Center and synagogue and so become fuller Jews. One eloquent Moroccan woman told how “in Morocco, Jewish women were more modest and more careful about laws of menstrual purity. We all wore sleeves down to here [the wrist]. Girls didn’t walk around [with bare legs] like they do here... . But, in Morocco women didn’t even go to synagogue and didn’t know how to read or write. .. . I don’t know. Maybe it is better here.” Falhibe came to Israel at the age of 13 or 14. She tells the story of her a/iya with relish—it was clearly the most memora-

ble event in her life. In Turkey, the girls did not go to school because the only schools that were available were run by Arabs. Boys, however, learned Torah. “I didn’t have time to go to school anyway. I had to help my stepmother all day. I had to work hard doing the laundry.”

Gestures The illiterate, often verbally inarticulate women of the Day Center have an eloquent language of hand gestures that they use to replace

and/or augment those ideas and rituals that depend upon a rich and literate vocabulary. While the men of their families are certainly acquainted with most of the gestures and even use them on occasion, it is accurate to describe these gestures as primarily women’s gestures. Hand gestures and facial expressions are often used to help communicate more precise shades of meaning. Particularly in

the religious sphere, gestures are used as abbreviations for, or in place of, the many philosophical concepts that they do not know how to express. When someone refers to something good that has happened— that a family member recovered from an illness, that a grandchild graduated high school, that an old woman is still able to do her own shopping at the market, that a war has ended—the women look up toward heaven and kiss their fingers. When asked why they do this

62 Women as Ritual Experts the answer is “to bless the blessed God.” This gesture indicates a clear belief regarding where God is located. Discussions of political

issues often end with, “Who knows? Only God knows,” as the woman looks up at the ceiling.

One woman asked me how many years [| had lived in Israel. When I answered six years, she kissed her hand and looked upward, saying, “The land of Israel is beautiful.” This gesture seems to both

praise God and bring down His blessing. For example, when the rabbi told one woman that her petition to God had already been answered, she remained silent but kissed her hand and looked up. Another variation on this gesture is to kiss one’s hands, look up, and then hold the hands opened on one’s lap and look at them. This seems to be a gesture designed to “catch” a blessing. A related example would be the woman who complained that her leg hurt her, said “Baruch HaShem” {Praise God] twice, kissed her hand, then touched her forehead, saying, “Thank the Lord every day that we can still walk.” One woman described the Rabbanit Leah, who had been Rabbanit Zohara’s predecessor at the Day Center by saying, “Such stories, such lessons!,” and raising her hand upward as if to imply

that the stories that Rabbanit Leah told raised them up out of themselves to another, higher level. When Elijah the Prophet is mentioned, the women will usually

bend forward, kiss their hands, and then touch their foreheads. According to Shula, they do this “so that he will come to us, because he rose up to heaven.” When the rabbi told the story of Shimon bar Yochai and his son Elazar,’ the women looked upward while holding their palms up and murmured “their merit [zechut]

should guard us.” When the rabbi came to the point in the story where Elijah saved Shimon and Elazar, the women once again looked up while holding their palms upward and murmured. When Simha B. was asked why they touch their foreheads and kiss their fingers at the mention of saints, she answered that “it is a custom, honor, we honor the saints, respect them. Even if you don’t see them but only hear their name, you must do this. Like the Christians do for the cross.” Hand gestures also have the power to bring about negative results. For example, the women reprimanded me for sitting with my hands clasped together and my fingers intertwined. They told me

Between Woman and God 63 that this is forbidden, although none knew why. According to Issachar Ben-Ami, among Moroccan Jews such hand positions may mean that one 1s trying to “tie-up” someone’s fertility.9 Alternatively, hand gestures can be used for protection, as by the woman who responded to my worrying about my ability to take care of two small children by saying, “God will help, God will guard.” At the same time, she kissed her fingers and looked upward. She then said something 1n Arabic, and when I told her that I do not understand, she translated what she had said as meaning “something like God is big and will help.” The week before the pilgrimage to Meron, one

semi-invalid woman said that she hoped to be able to go on the pilgrimage, “bli neder,”!° looking first at the sky and then covering

her eyes. This gesture seemed designed to ward off the evil eye. According to Simha, when we hear something bad we should pull on the lapel of our shirt, so that “we shouldn’t know it, so that it should stay far away from us.” Similar gestures are used to express the belief that everything is in God’s hands. On one stormy day when I commented that I enjoy thunder and lightening, Tova looked upward, saying, “Whatever God gives, there is nothing one can do about it.” When another woman told me that all of her children and grandchildren would be coming to her house for the Passover meal and I commented that the preparation must entail a lot of work, she looked up and said, “The Blessed One will help.” Fate or luck also seem to reside in the heavens, as indicated by Rosa when she said that she wanted to go on the pilgrimage but had come to the Day Center too late to sign up. The Day Center director told her that the bus was already full, and Rosa’s response was, “Everything depends upon luck, if I go or not.” At the word “luck” she looked up to the ceiling. At particularly sacred occasions the amount of gesturing proliferates. For example, when the women visited the rabbi’s yeshiva, they bowed upon entering the office of the yeshiva director. During the short speech that he addressed to them, the women frequently said

“Amen” and kissed their hands and looked at the sky. They did much more of this than they do during a regular lesson by the Day Center rabbi. When visiting holy tombs the women also dramatically increase the amount of gesturing and kissing. Beginning several weeks before Rosh HaShana and Passover, many of the women solemnly shake hands with each woman in the

64 Women as Ritual Experts Day Center, wishing a good year or happy holiday. When the rabbi or rabbanit enters the room women stand up to show respect. Some

women also reach out to touch the rabbanit or to shake her hand. Occasionally a woman greets a friend by kissing her hand. The examples cited above are all instances in which the gestures were accompanied by verbal comments. However, more frequently the women simply move their hands and their eyes, without words. For these women, nonverbal gestures are more useful than words for expressing complex philosophical notions. Lacking the oral vocabulary for talking about God and their relationship with God, they use an eloquent language of gestures for expressing their ideas,

hopes, and fears. |

From the Female Perspective

Both the rabbi and the rabbanit who teach Judaica lessons to the audience at the Day Center present the normative Jew as male. In her lessons the rabbanit frequently says things like, “We should not have sexual contact too frequently with women.” Now, her audience is entirely female, and it is unlikely that Rabbanit Zohara intends to preach against homosexuality. Rather, she chooses to identify herself with the brand of Judaism that defines maleness as normative and femaleness as “Other.” On one occasion she told the women that “everyone should learn Torah everyday.” Her audience,

being illiterate and female, could not possibly be expected to become Torah scholars. Rather, she has described the “Jewish” norm of Torah study, which in reality is a male norm. | The rabbi’s lessons also exhibit a perspective that sees male behavior and concerns as normative. The subject of one of his lessons was the holiday of Tu b’Shvat [New Year for the Trees], when he told the women that at the festive meal for this holiday, “You should be careful to see only one type of fruit at a time so that it will be permissible to repeat the blessing over fruit. The way to do this is to have your wife keep the fruit in the kitchen and only bring

you one type of fruit at a time [my emphases].”! The women of this study consider themselves part of the larger great tradition of male-oriented, literate Judaism. They consider themselves obligated by Jewish law—a legal framework that in many ways limits women’s religious opportunities and places constraints upon women’s social behavior. However, these elderly 65

66 Women as Ritual Experts women subtly reinterpret aspects of the great tradition in ways that they, as women, find fulfilling and perhaps even empowering. This chapter looks at several areas that the women consistently reinterpret: literacy, modesty, miracle stories, halacha, and Jewish holidays.

Women and [Il ]literacy According to Jewish belief there are certain deeds for which one is rewarded both in this world and in the next. These deeds are enumerated in the Mishna (“Peah” 1,1) and recited daily during the weekday morning prayer service: honoring one’s father and mother, the practice of loving kindness, the making of peace between a man and his neighbor, “but the study of Torah surpasses them all.” Jewish women

throughout the ages have been denied access to learning Torah; in many Jewish cultures illiteracy was an integral part of women’s role.?

Where, then, does an illiterate group fit into the “People of the Book”? What strategies do women use to find religious meaning in ceremonies that revolve around literacy? In short, how do women relate to literacy? What tools can be used to study the religion of a

: group that is by definition illiterate, but that exists parallel to or in conjunction with a group that is literate? Clearly, from the perspective of women, literate Judaism cannot be defined as normative, with illiterate women relegated to the status of a minor subset of Jews who do not quite fulfill all of the obligations of the religious system. From a female perspective, their nonliterate Judaism is also normative, mainstream, and legitimate. Women are not a fringe group; women are fifty percent of the population. One way in which women relate to a religious system that commands Torah learning for half of the population while forbidding it to the other half is through the ritualization of literacy. This term is explained by Shlomo Deshen, an Israeli anthropologist, as mean-

ing that the written material has ritual rather than literary value. Deshen describes how many Tunisian [male] Jews in Israel purchase religious books, which they do not read, for a blessing or for shmira [protection from harm].3 The ritualization of literacy may be seen as functioning on different levels for men and for women. Many Middle Eastern men sit in

From the Female Perspective 67 synagogue and study the Zohar, reading it very quickly and understanding almost nothing of what they read. However, they are still

directly and personally carrying out the important divine commandment of study. The women, while believing that learning is holy, can barely recognize the Hebrew alphabet. For these women,

any type of religious literature or object with religious writing is sacred, yet their connection to that sacredness is necessarily one step further removed. In describing the lives of these women, it may be more accurate to speak about the “mystification” of literacy than

about its “ritualization.”

Simha B. told the story of how one time many years ago a chicken to which she was especially attached disappeared from her

yard. She searched for it everywhere, but it was nowhere to be found. As a last resort, she opened a prayer book at random and asked her husband to read what was written on that page. He told her that the words “walk in the path and you will find it” appeared there. The next morning, after dreaming that she found the chicken, she went to the market. On the way home, as she was walking along the path, she saw the chicken at the house of an acquaintance (who had apparently stolen it). For Simha, this is proof of the power of the written word. Tova, when questioned about special prayers said on Tu b’Shvat described that “they [not us] would read from a book, because it is written [to do so].” She of course does not know the name of the book. Shula remembers that her saintly father-in-law would visit sick people in the hospital and bless them and bring “the book.” When asked what book, she answered “big like this” and made a rectangular shape with her hands. From her tone it was clear that even the shape and size of this book were significant for her. After he died, this same holy man appeared to his wife in a dream, telling

her that he had taken all of his books and made one big book, which he showed to her. The women frequently donate money to their rabbi’s yeshiva for the purchase of books. This is an act that the women view as a great

mitzvah. When they visited the yeshiva, they entered the room where the young [male] students sit to study. Several women randomly picked up books from the bookshelf in the back of the room

and kissed them. One woman also kissed the bookshelf itself. During the same visit, the women were given pieces of paper with

68 Women as Ritual Experts writing on it. Many went home and hung the paper up in their houses, not knowing what the writing meant. The next day, when

Blessing printed on it. |

one woman asked, the rabbi told them that it had the Priestly At the holy tombs at Meron (to which I accompanied the women

on a pilgrimage), a man was selling photocopied papers covered with printing. Several women bought the papers, only afterward asking me what was written on them (they were amulets). Batya tells how rabbis in Iraq often wrote amulets, just “scribbling something” on a piece of paper. But these papers were effective, both for Jews and for Arabs, because “we believed.” Even God is often described as writing down individual’s fates. Something that is written takes on an increased value. During a discussion of the differences between Jews and non-Jews, I asked one woman why she says the formal Hebrew blessing thanking God for not making her a non-Jew. Her answer: We must say it because it is written. Simha B., one of the most eloquent informants, says “‘it

is written” to describe something that is absolutely true, and “so people say” to describe something that she is not sure is true. All of the women describe any important belief or custom as “written in the Torah.” For example, according to one woman there is a certain weed that cleans the blood and so 1s healthy to eat twice a year. “It is written in the Torah, in the Sefer [the Book], my father said.” Or, “God is everywhere. It says so in the prayer book.” The mezuza is a small box containing Biblical verses that observant Jews hang on the doorways of their houses. Batya does not know what is written inside the mezuza, but would not let her daughter move into her new house until she put one up. While Jewish law requires that these boxes be placed on each doorframe in a Jewish house, there are no laws relating to the kissing and making of petitions that the women do at the mezuzot. Kissing mezuzot is a ritual activity that allows a great deal of individual variation. Some women kiss all mezuzot all of the time, some kiss some mezuzot some of the time, some kiss only certain ones all of the time, and some kiss all mezuzot occasionally. The mezuza may be Kissed one time or three times in a row. Some women merely kiss the tips of their fingers and touch the mezuza, while others then kiss their hands and touch their foreheads. Kissing the mezuza is usually done silently, although sometimes the

From the Female Perspective 69 women may take this opportunity to whisper a blessing or petition. One woman blesses her children each Friday night by placing one

hand on the kitchen mezuza and making a personal petition for each child. At times of heightened spirituality the amount of mezuza kissing increases, with many women kissing the mezuzot of rooms that they

do not even enter. For example, leaving the Day Center after a religious lesson, the women may kiss the ‘mezuzot’ on the doorways of the offices that open into the corridor leading out of the building.

I once saw a woman knock on the door of the building to the Day Center on a day that the Day Center was closed and locked. Before leaving, she kissed the mezuza. After she took a few steps, she turned back and began to knock again, and once more she kissed the mezuza of the locked building. “My mother always kisses the mezuza. The best mezuza is in the

kitchen. For her, the mezuza in the kitchen is the holy ark.” Mezuzot located in holy places are kissed more than mezuzot located in profane places. When the women visited the Rabbi’s yeshiva, they all repeatedly kissed the mezuza outside of the office of the yeshiva director. The women also pay special attention to the mezuzot on the buildings that house the holy tombs. One woman tells why she always is careful to kiss the mezuza: “It

is the Ten Commandments, written in the Torah. If one letter is damaged, it is forbidden for the mezuza to be in the house. Harmful spirits can come in if no mezuza is up. We say the “Shma” everyday and that says to put up mezuzot. It guards you and your children.”4 She went on to relate that one time many years ago there was great

illness among the people living in her courtyard (here she used female pronouns, so it is not clear if only the women were affected or if her grammar was faulty.) One person/woman would recover

and another would get sick. “It turned out that the mezuza was damaged [pasul].” The women of the Day Center are illiterate; they do not know what is written in the mezuza. But they do know that mezuzot are what guards the home. For women whose self-image is as the spiritual guardians of their families, kissing the mezuza is a particularly potent ritual. The women are well aware that literacy bestows social and spiri-

tual status, and they are eager to receive the blessings of great scholars. On the other hand, when they visited the rabbi’s yeshiva,

70 Women as Ritual Experts they blessed the young men who were studying there. In the usual social hierarchy, a man who studies Talmud is far more respected

than an illiterate, old lady. The women, however, represent two different religious world views—that of the official tradition and that of the domestic tradition. In the female-oriented, domestic religious sphere, there is nothing incongruous about old women blessing men young enough to be their grandchildren. The widows of this study are, for the most part, eager to expand and enlarge their religious world. There are, however, a number of rituals that their late husbands had performed and that they, as widows, are extraordinarily reluctant to take over, even though they know that according to Jewish law they must. Not surprisingly, these rituals all involve literacy. During the week before Passover, the rabbi brought contracts to the Day Center for the women who wanted to sell the food in their possession that was not specially permitted for Passover [kosher lePesach]. Because it is forbidden for any Jew to possess food that is not kosher for Passover, Judaism has developed a system of semific-

titious sale of non-Passover food to non-Jews. Selling hametz is usually done by men on behalf of their households, although a woman may do it and if she lives alone must do it. Watching the women decide whether or not to sell the food through the rabbi, and then watching them sign the contract, I received the impression that this was the first time any of them had performed this ritual. They hesitated, procrastinated, giggled, and looked scared. In fact, most of the women of the Day Center have been widows for a long time and have sold the food by themselves in previous years. This is a ritual that the women have known about all of their lives; it took place in the Day Center, a physical location in which they feel comfortable; they were assisted by the rabbi, with whom they are well acquainted and who was very helpful to them in dealing with the logistics of signing (remember that most of the women are illiterate). However, this remained a ritual that the women did not adopt as their own. They sold the food because the rabbi said that they must, but they continued to relate as strangers to the ritual sale. Berger-Sofer quotes an ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi woman telling

the story of a great rabbi who said that his very righteous mother did not know how to pray, learn, or read Hebrew. The only prayer that she knew was the Grace After Meals. The rabbi felt that if she

From the Female Perspective 71 had not known the Grace After Meals she would have been even more holy.» The Day Center women would heartily disagree with this rabbi. “I didn’t say the [formal Hebrew] blessings on food when

I was young. Actually, even now I don’t really say them. I can’t read... . In Iraq there weren’t any schools for girls, only for boys. ... Yes, it bothered me a lot that my brothers went to school and I just stayed home, and not just me, it bothered all the girls.” Vimala Jayanti has observed that “{ultra-Orthodox] women are expected to be both staunch believers, and ignorant ones, a seeming paradox.” According to Jayanti, the simple faith of uneducated women can be a conservative force, but ignorance can also give women room for making their own interpretations.® Both of these possibilities are actualized in the religious lives of the women of the

Day Center. |

Women and Modesty Pious Jewish women cover their hair with a hat, wig, or kerchief. Hair covering is a mitzvah that may seem to symbolize the oppression of women: women must cover themselves up so that men will not be distracted from their holy male tasks of prayer and Torah study. The women of the Day Center, ignorant of written Jewish legal sources, interpret women’s obligation to cover their hair in an entirely different manner; for these women hair covering acknowledges God’s omnipresence and omnipotence. According to Jewish law, married women must cover their hair only in the presence of men. The well-known sentence from the halachic literature is “Women of Israel shall not go with their hair loose in the marketplace.”’? Rhonda Berger-Sofer, studying the

ultra-Orthodox women of Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood, noted that it is commonly believed that although men think “forbidden” thoughts more easily than women, women are the catalysts who can cause men to lose control over their animal instincts. Because of this, women must be controlled through the laws of modesty.’ Similarly, according to Jayanti, women in a male model of culture are perceived as dangerous and polluting objects of sexuality and therefore must be controlled. “7znius [modesty] is the measure of the pious woman.”?

72 Women as Ritual Experts However, the evidence that comes directly from the women of the

Day Center makes it clear that for them modesty is a matter concerning women and God, not women and men. This idea first emerged during one of the earliest small group interviews that I conducted. The initial purpose of the interview was to collect information about synagogue behavior. The women always wear an extra shawl or sweater in synagogue, and it seemed interesting to ask whether this extra garment was the female equivalent of the men’s tallit.'°

| According to the informants, women must wear shawls or sweaters in synagogue because of modesty—in synagogue a woman must cover her arms to her wrists. “We must cover our hair all of the time because God can see it [our hair].” Although many of the women

wear kerchiefs from which long, thin braids visibly hang out, in synagogue “we must cover all our hair, especially in front all the way to the forehead. God gives everything, food and everything, so we must wear a kerchief.” A few days later one woman came to the lesson at the Day Center

without a kerchief. Another woman told her that she should go home and get one, because “it is written in the Torah that the ceiling is witness to a woman’s head.” All married women, and especially older ones, must cover their head. Men too must wear head coverings. “It is forbidden to even kiss the mezuza without a kerchief on

your head.” Another woman explained that it is forbidden to be without a head covering because one might say a blessing, and it is strictly

forbidden to say a blessing with uncovered hair. Some of the women at the Day Center cover their hair only for religious activities. These women bring with them a kerchief to wear during the rabbi or rabbanit’s Judaica lesson. It is relevant that the kerchief is equally important for a lesson by the female rabbanit—it is not the

teacher’s gender but the content of the lesson that determines whether or not one should cover her hair. Several women habitually cover their hair upon entering the room in which the lesson is

given, indicating that for them the room is a holy space. The middle-age daughter of one of the women from the Day Center put on a kerchief as part of her mourning ritual upon the death of her husband.

From the Female Perspective 73 According to Falhibe, “Modesty is very important. I have covered my hair since shortly after my wedding, ever since my brotherin-law told me to. I also cover my hair at home and in bed.” “Why?” “For religious reasons [bishvil ha-dat]. . . .One must be covered up because what would happen if one went into a synagogue [uncovered]?” According to Henny Harald Hansen, non-Jewish women in Kurdistan fastened their veils around their heads and necks, leaving

only their faces uncovered, when they prayed. They would also loosen the knots with which their long sleeves were tied so that the material would fall down and cover their hands, and step on their gowns so as to cover their feet.!! As related earlier, one woman included covering the hair on her short list of acts to facilitate childbirth. A last bit of evidence that

for these women modesty is between women and God concerns their behavior when on pilgrimage to holy tombs. Several women who do not usually cover their hair do wear hair coverings in honor of the pilgrimage, quickly placing any sort of cloth on their heads, in much the same way as nonreligious Israeli men cover their heads with handkerchiefs or napkins at weddings or bar-mitzvahs. Decisions regarding modesty, and particularly hair covering, are in the female realm. Simha stated that she has never covered her hair, as she finds wearing a kerchief uncomfortable. This is despite her husband’s expressed preference that she wear a hair covering. In

a private discussion, the rabbi told me that his own wife does not

cover her hair, although they both well know that according to Jewish law she must. Both husbands, then, wanted their wives to cover their hair, but when the women objected, both spouses recog-

nized that the final decision lies with the woman. Most of the women also covered their hair before they married. Batya proudly

said that in Iraq women and girls always covered their hair and wore long dresses and sleeves. She herself has covered her hair every day of her life, even before marrying. For them, hair covering is neither connected to marital status nor to male preference. Ironically, it is not the young, beautiful woman with long, seductive locks who is most expected to wear a kerchief. According to

several informants, it is particularly important for old women to cover their hair. One woman explained that while she used to wear a hat, now that she is older she only wears kerchiefs. Another

74 Women as Ritual Experts woman said that since she had become widowed she has begun going to synagogue and covering her hair. Another woman stressed

that especially old women must cover themselves up, to not is humiliating. !2

Most of the women at the Day Center wear dresses, although the few who wear pants, unlike those who have uncovered hair, are not frowned upon. (This is possibly connected to the fact that women in Yemen traditionally wore trousers covered with a tunic.) All wear either long or short sleeves, never sleeveless dresses or shirts. How-

ever, a woman who is wearing a short sleeved shirt or dress will bring a long-sleeved sweater with her to synagogue or Judaica lessons at the Center. Many of the women also wear an extra kerchief for religious purposes. Most do not wear stockings in the summer, and almost all wear open-toed shoes. The very fact that women are illiterate and so situated outside of “sreat tradition” Judaism allows them the flexibility to interpret and explain Jewish law and ritual in a manner sympathetic to their gynocentric concerns. Although according to Jewish texts a married woman must cover her hair in the presence of a man other than her husband in order to preserve the man’s spiritual equilibrium, according to the women of this study, the necessity for all women (and especially old women) to cover their hair in the presence of God is purely a matter between woman and God.

Reinterpreting Stories At the end of each lesson at the Day Center, the women are treated

to a story or maaseh [literally, “something that happened”]. The rabbi and rabbanit both claim that many of the women sit through the entire lesson just to be able to hear the maaseh. The women perk up when the rabbi or rabbanit announces that she or he will now tell a maaseh, and they are disappointed if the lesson has to be cut short. The maasiot seem to embody most of the elements of the belief system of the women. In almost every maaseh there is some type of divine intervention in the affairs of man. The God of the maasiot knows everything, even seeing into the lives and souls of poor Jews. The hero or heroine is often a downtrodden man or a

From the Female Perspective 75 poor widow who trusts in God and is “raised” at the end because God sees that she or he has a clean heart. Miracles abound in these stories and reinforce for the women the idea that while life might be

difficult for them now, the omniscient and omnipotent God can miraculously turn everything upside down and raise even a poor, old Jewish widow. By strengthening their faith in God, the maasiot give these women hope for a better future.

The women frequently miss the point of the maaseh either because the rabbi or rabbanit tells the story in a convoluted manner or because the women do not really listen to or understand all of the words. No matter what the story seems to be about, the women interpret almost all of the maasiot to be a story of the wheel of fate. Many of the stories do not have a real moral—they are simply miracle stories of great rabbis. But the women read into the stories meanings that are more relevant to their own lives. The maasiot strengthen the bond that the women feel to the Jewish people as a whole and prove to the women that God really does take a special interest in His people. The stories are sometimes taken from the Talmud, sometimes from other early midrashic literature. Sometimes they are traditional Kurdish folkstories, and frequently they are Eastern European Hassidic stories. The rabbi can barely pronounce the Eastern European locations and names in those stories, but the women listen to the Hassidic tales as avidly as they listen to other maasiot. When Batya was asked why the women like maasiot, she answered, “I like to hear about things that really happened in our past.” Whenever the rabbi or rabbanit tells of something painful that happened to a Jew or to the Jewish people the women excitedly

say “tsk, tsk, tsk ... oy vavoy. ... It shouldn’t happen to us.” Whenever someone in a story is saved (particularly by Elyah the Prophet), the women kiss their fingers and look up at the ceiling, murmuring praise to God. The women identify with the characters in the maasiot, understanding them to be part of their own [very] extended families. The women, including the rabbanit, interpret almost every story to mean that the world spins and no one’s fate is secure. One day the rabbanit told the story of a very pious man who gave generously to charity, but was maligned by the people in his town. He asked the

76 Women as Ritual Experts local rabbi why this was, and the rabbi prayed and found out that the man was being purified through his suffering. Rabbanit Zohara interpreted this story as meaning that the wheel of life spins, one can be rich today and poor tomorrow. “A man can be rich and also be so sick that he cannot eat sugar or salt, so that he does not even enjoy his food or his money. Or, someone can be rich but have no children, or his children do not get married. This can even happen to children of rabbis.”

The rabbi told the women a complicated story about a great rabbi who publicly humiliated a student by accusing him of steal-

ing. The student became Christian because of this humiliation. Many years later the rabbi and student met again and student helped rabbi to purify himself of the sin of humiliating someone. Afterward, the woman next to me said, “Everyday we must thank God for making us Jews and not Christians or Arabs.” Later that morning, I interviewed Batya and she retold the story, explaining that the point of the story is that “even holy men sometimes do bad things.” One of the most common methods of interpretation used by the women is to retell a story in which the rabbi had said, “This

story shows the power of holy men,” with no mention of the greatness of saints. Instead, the women emphasize the uncertain nature of the universe, the merit of small acts of charity, the piety of old women.

On another occasion the rabbanit told a story about Rabbi Akiva. The intended point of the story was that what you give in charity you will get back in the end. The women thought that the moral of the story is that you should not be embarrassed to give even tiny sums of money to charity. Since they themselves are unable to spare more than very small sums, their interpretation of the story empowered one of their primary religious rituals. In many ways the maasiot are symbolic of the religion of the women of the Day Center. They emphasize God’s power, the uncer-

tain nature of the world, miracles, and ties among the Jewish people. Above all, they give the women the will to keep struggling in a world that must seem almost insurmountably difficult to a sick, poor, uneducated, old widow. The women love the stories and wait expectantly for the happy or miraculous ending that is an essential

part of each one. |

From the Female Perspective 77 Women, God, and Halacha Since God Knows everything and controls everything, if one has any kind of problem, the best possible helper is God. However, it is not usually enough to merely ask God for His help; one must convince, bribe, or negotiate with God in order to be awarded His assistance. One of the most effective ways to convince God to help is through following Jewish law. The women believe that while one is learning Torah (or doing other mitzvot) one is safe from harm; God will not allow something bad to happen to someone who is at that moment doing something that pleases God. Other ways of soliciting God’s

help include visiting holy tombs, giving money to charity, paying

the rabbi for a blessing, and making a personal petition at synagogue when the Torah is raised up. The religion of these women is above all apotropaic. Religious acts are ones that ward off evils that perhaps were supposed to have happened, but because one said or

did certain things that are pleasing to God, the disaster did not happen.

“Do mitzvot, that means give money to poor people and to the synagogue. Doing a mitzvah saves one from bad things that can happen. Maybe you were supposed to have slipped and fallen and maybe even died, but because you gave money to charity or just finished doing a mitzvah, you won't slip.” Against this background the attitude of the women of the Day Center toward Jewish law takes on significance. Let us bear in mind

that these women consider themselves good, pious, law-abiding Jews. They believe in the absolute sanctity of Jewish law and frequently state that all of the disasters that happen to Israel could be averted if all Jews would obey the Law. While believing in halacha {Jewish law], they have what might be labeled a nonhalachic attitude toward halacha. This is manifested in a number of ways. They do not see all Jewish law as binding upon all Jews all of the time. For example, when the women were served bread and cheese for their snack at the Day Center, and Rabbanit Zohara reminded them that it is forbidden by halacha to eat bread without first performing the ritual hand washing, the women asked many questions about exactly how and when to Say the blessing. Yet none

78 Women as Ritual Experts of the women actually rose to wash their hands. They continued to

| sit, eating their bread, all the time listening attentively to the rabbanit. The women are fascinated by details of correct [halachic| behavior. Before each holiday, they ask a myriad of questions concerning proper legal observance. These range from questions about preparing for the holiday to ones about transferring flames on the holiday. All the time, however, it is clear that the women intend to continue observing the holidays in the way in. which they always have. The questions about halacha seem to stem from an intellectual fascination with a system from which they are more or less excluded. The

most successful lessons at the Day Center are ones in which the teacher talks about a halachic issue, even one that is not so relevent to the women’s lives. On one occasion the rabbi mentioned something about the laws of tithing. The women became very animated, plying him with questions about the legal details of this basically

useless subject. (The women do their shopping at the open-air market where almost all of the produce is already tithed.) Many of the women treat the recitation of formal, Hebrew blessings as a social ritual. Since tea is served daily at the Center, I had numerous opportunities to see the women say the blessing for tea. Often, the woman who is about to drink her tea picks up her glass

and looks around the room until she makes eye contact with someone else. Then, she lifts her glass (in the same way that a person making a toast would) and says the blessing, waiting for the

response “Amen” before drinking. During one of the rabbanit’s lessons a discussion of blessings began. Several of the women asked the rabbanit if it is permitted to say a blessing on food when one is

alone in the house. The rabbanit did not understand the question, and the women explained: Is it permitted to say a blessing on food

when there is no one to hear and say “Amen”? The normative Jewish view is that one is equally obligated to say blessings when one is alone or in a crowd; the women’s question seemed nonsensical to someone teaching the great tradition.

The women seek out extra opportunities for saying blessings, often creating situations in which one must bless. Passing around sweet-smelling herbs so that others can say the blessing for a pleasant scent is acommon women’s custom. When the women visit holy tombs, many bring herbs, candy, or cookies for other women

From the Female Perspective 79 to bless. Similarly, on Rosh HaShana the women provide their families with various symbolic foods over which they can say blessings. They say the formal blessings both to demonstrate their new-found familiarity with great tradition Judaism and to please God and so encourage Him to rescind any bad decree he had made concerning the woman or her family. While the women enjoy hearing the rabbi talk about halacha in his lessons at the Day Center, they rarely come to him individually to ask halachic questions. The rabbi explained to me that he does

not really expect the women to know halacha, because they are illiterate. When the women themselves are asked to whom they go for answers when they have a question concerning halacha, they answer, “No one. We know everything that we need to know. We learned at our father’s house.” For these women, unlike for observant, educated Jewish men, being religious is not defined in exclusively halachic terms. When the women are asked what constitutes a good religious woman, the answer never includes keeping the laws of kashrut or going to the ritual bath [mikvah]. Although the women certainly do keep kosher and certainly did go to the ritual bath when they were younger, they view religion more as a matter of belief in God, of having a “clean heart.” On the other hand, when they are asked in what way Arabs are different from Jews, they typically answer that “the Arabs do

not have mitzvot,” that is Sabbath and kashrut observance. Halacha functions to highlight their cultural identity as Jews, and it is one of the best means of bargaining with God. It is not surprising that halacha is prime raw material for the process of domestication.

The Holidays Jewish sacred texts primarily describe male modes of sacralizing time and space, male spiritual concerns, and male religious rituals. According to the Zalmud (Kiddushin 29a), only men are obligated in the active observance of rituals that are connected to specific times. Official Judaism makes holy the male day, the male week, the male year. When we think about the acts that make each holiday special, we tend to think in terms of rituals that are performed by and for men.

80 Women as Ritual Experts Men come to synagogue on Rosh HaShana to listen to a man blowing the shofar, the ram’s horn. Men eat and sleep in the outdoor booth for the week of Sukkot. Men light the Chanuka candles. Men read the Scroll of Esther at synagogue on Purim. Men

conduct the Passover seder, celebrating the Exodus from Egypt. Men stay awake all night studying sacred texts on Shavuot, the holiday commemorating the giving of the Torah to Moses at Mount Sinai. Although according to Jewish law women must participate in some (not all) of these rituals, female participation is passive, secondary, often from a distance. The women of this study do not share that androcentric perspective. They are part of a highly sexually segregated culture in which women have traditionally had the autonomy to develop their own, usually complementary, sometimes parallel, occasionally conflicting religious world. While the women are aware of the official reasons, laws, and customs for the various holidays, they stress aspects that are not considered important when thinking about the holidays from a male perspective.

Passover The Day Center women are part of the Jewish people, and as such know about and identify with the official, male-oriented meanings

and customs of each holiday.!3 However, when they are asked, “What do you do on Passover/ Purim/and so forth?,” or “What is done by you (or by your ethnic group) on Chanuka/Tu b’Shvat/ and so forth?” the answer almost always pertains to food and food preparation. I am not arguing that the women reduce the complex observances, meanings, and symbolism of each holiday to food. They certainly participate in other aspects of holiday observance. Yet, it does seem that for the women of the Day Center food is the central symbol of each holiday, and food preparation is the most important ritual activity that they as women perform. Passover commemorates the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt. During Passover it is forbidden, according to the Pentateuch, to eat leavened bread (Exodus 12:15). In later Jewish sources, this 1s interpreted to include use of any of the five recognized types of grain, except the use of wheat to bake matzah [unleavened bread]. Ashkenazi Jews also do not eat legumes or any other grains (such

From the Female Perspective 81 as corn or rice). Food products containing any of those substances

that are not specially permitted on Passover are also forbidden. Observant Jews use special cooking and eating utensils during Passover and scrupulously clean their kitchens before the holiday in

order to ensure that not one crumb of forbidden grain remains in the house. The Day Center women view Passover as the most important, as indeed, the ultimate holiday. The women begin their Passover preparations months in advance. Despite the hard work involved in Passover cleaning, most women claim to like doing it—they like seeing everything clean and shiny. For several weeks before Passover, normal life comes to a halt. Female time and energy are directed toward but one goal—getting the house ready in time for Passover. For the month or so preceding Passover many of the women stop coming to the Day Center, and few women have the

leisure time to talk to visiting anthropologists. | Jewish women have made a cult of Passover cleaning. Investing weeks creating an immaculate house is one of the most important measures of a pious woman. Not only do they sweep and wash away any crumbs of forbidden grain, but they also do a thorough spring cleaning. Many women white wash their kitchens before Passover; most clean their carpets, their curtains, the closets, and windows; all clean the floors, sinks, counters, kitchen cabinets, stove, and oven. Two weeks before Passover a woman walked into the Day Center saying that she had been doing Passover cleaning and “the work

will kill us.” When I asked the rabbi why he does not teach the women which work is really necessary (according to Jewish law it is only necessary to remove the forbidden grains, not to scrub toilets

and polish windows) and which is not, he answered that even his own wife ignores what he says and performs superfluous cleaning. The women claim that they never need to ask a rabbi’s advice about Passover cleaning; they already know how to do everything.!4 Even when the women moan and groan about the work, there is a strong element of pride in their ability and willingness to carry out a divine

command in what they perceive to be the correct, female manner. Simha -B. tells about Passover preparations as a young girl: “I was used to it. I grew up like that. Why shouldn’t I like the work? We cleaned the pots from morning to night. Everything was copper, not like today. Each family did its own cleaning. Single girls would

82 Women as Ritual Experts help pregnant women and women with many small children. When you were done, everything was clean and shiny and white. When you walked into the house, your eyes would pop open.” One of the most difficult ritual tasks that the women perform is

cleaning rice for Passover. Although many Middle Eastern Jews (unlike Ashkenazi Jews) do eat rice during Passover, it must first be thoroughly checked to ensure that no forbidden grains were accidentally mixed in during harvesting or storage. To this end, the women sort the rice grain by grain, going through it seven times or more in order to clean it properly. Many of these women cook for large extended families and so sort through ten or fifteen or even more kilograms of rice in this painstaking manner. Those women whose vision is weak call on daughters and granddaughters to help them sort, but the sorting has always been and remains today a women’s job. As an outsider observing this task, I found it difficult to understand why the women felt it necessary to examine each individual grain of

rice seven separate times. Did they have so little trust in their own ability to recognize different species of grains? Had some sadistic male rabbi told them that they are obligated to do this exacting and dizzying task? Further discussion with the women proved to me how difficult the shift 1n consciousness from an androcentric to an androg-

ynous understanding of religion really is.!5 These women sorted through the rice seven times because they believe that this is a form of worship. They believe that sorting the rice pleases God in much the

same way that it pleases God to hear prayers and Psalms of praise. Why seven times? This 1s simpler. Seven is a “good” (magical, ausp1-

cious) number and the women all want “that everything should be good, for our families and for all of Israel.” The food that is eaten at the Passover seder takes days to prepare. In the Old Country the women baked their own matzah, an arduous and time-consuming task. In Israel today, most buy matzah, but continue to prepare other such traditional dishes as the head of a cow. Before all holidays, the women prepare several kinds of meat and vegetables and numerous salads. Passover cooking makes great use of nuts, which must be cracked and chopped (by hand). Some

aspects of the preparation are very social; several women may gather to make a huge quantity of haroset [a fruit and nut dish

From the Female Perspective 83 traditionally eaten at the Passover seder or festive meal], which 1s then given out to their relatives.

Many of the women report that in the Old Country they were stricter concerning Passover food laws. For example, according to Simha, in Persia her parents did not eat coffee, oil, any milk products, or rice on Passover. If they wanted to fry they used some of the fat from the meat. She herself does not know why they did not eat these things, and when she married began eating rice because her husband’s family did. Simha B. relates that when she was young, her family did not eat rice or oil during Passover. (She began eating rice in Israel during the severe food shortages of World War I. At that time, the rabbi of her husband’s synagogue gave permission to use rice.) Her family

would make grease from the fat of the sheep, which was then prepared in a kosher manner and salted and suspended from a string into a hole and resalted every two weeks. This is how they

made their own matzah: After Passover the wheat harvest was brought in and threshed by the men. They put it in a bin and covered it with a rag. One month before the next Passover, the women cleaned it (sorted it grain by grain) one time. Then they sorted it another seven times to make sure that it was clean. They would take turns doing this in order to help each other. Then, carefully, they took the grain to the mill to grind it. Afterward, the

women sifted it three times through cloth. On the day before Passover they would roll it out by hand and bake the matzah. The women sense God’s presence helping them as they carry out their Passover preparations. One very old woman had invited all of her many children and grandchildren to her house for the Passover seder. When I commented that this must entail a great deal of work for her, she answered, while looking up at the ceiling, “Blessed God

will help.” Later, this same informant noticed that it was raining

outside and declared, “This is how God cleans the streets for Passover. We can clean the insides of our houses but all the hametz {forbidden food] stays outside.!6 So, God cleans the outside for us with rain.”

The women do not work during Hol HaMoed (the six days of Passover following the seder). In this instance, work means laundry, sewing, and household repairs. However, they do clean and

84 Women as Ritual Experts cook. Some of the women reminisce about the old days when they would go on trips during Passover, to springs and on picnics, but especially to holy tombs. “Every day of Hol HaMoed we went off on atrip. The girl cousins would go off alone and play and sing and dance. Life was better then.” The women tell that when they were younger, they would go on picnics on the day after the last day of Passover. To the picnic they would bring meat and salads, but no baked goods. Arab friends would bring them pitot (flat bread), oil, olives, and other foods that Jews would not have time to prepare immediately after Passover. Several days after Passover most women still do not come to the Day Center, and those who do come continue wishing each other

“Happy Holiday.” One woman even wished her friends “Shana Tova ve Hatima Tova” [“A Good Year and a Good Fate”]—the traditional blessing or greeting given at Rosh HaShana (the New Year), and no one looked surprised. On the folk level there seems to be an elaboration of the Talmudic parallel between Rosh HaShana and Passover; customs and beliefs are relatively easily moved from

one to the other.!’

Renewal is a major theme of Passover. Passover is a spring holiday, it comes at the end of the winter and brings with it budding trees and blossoming flowers. While at Rosh HaShana Jews meta-

phorically begin anew, at Passover the new beginning is more tangible. The kitchen (or entire house) is repainted; leftover bits of food that have been lying in the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets are discarded; new utensils are purchased. Just as the Jewish people started over again as a nation after the Exodus from Egypt, so does the Jewish house renew itself each Passover. It seems that for the women of the Day Center, Passover, more than any other holiday,

represents the possibility of another chance, of wiping the slate clean, of a fresh start. Passover is seen by the women of the Day Center as the holy season par excellence. The first and most obvious explanation for this is the sheer amount of work involved in Passover preparation—

preparations that, because they involve food and housework, fall into the female domain. And although women are in charge of the cooking and cleaning, men are obligated to live in a house that is kosher for Passover and eat food that is kosher for Passover. The men, then, are dependent upon the women for the fulfillment of the

From the Female Perspective 85 most important aspects of Passover observance. As mentioned ear-

lier, the women of the Day Center do not go to rabbis with questions about Passover preparation—they already know what they must do. At Passover, as at no other time in the ritual year, women are ritual experts in a field that affects both men and women. In other words, men are dependent upon women’s expertise for their correct observance of an important Jewish law. Passover laws of cleaning and food preparation give spiritual meaning and legitimization to their everyday, female activities. !8 Passover means that cooking and cleaning—time-consuming, repetitive, unrenumerated, generally unappreciated, physically demanding activities that women do all year—become, at least temporarily, religious activities par excellence. By cooking and cleaning

correctly (and let us point out that correctly means “correctly as their mothers taught them”), they enable their entire families to do what God has demanded that Jews must do.!? Preparing for Passover is essentially purifying the home—removing all hametz or impurities—allowing in only matzah, the quintes-

sentially pure food. And women are in charge of this purifying. I would suggest that the women see in Passover cleaning the translat-

ing of the most profane of activities—cleaning—into the most sacred—purification, and in Passover food the translating of the most mundane of substances—bread—into the most holy—the matzah that God commanded the Jews to eat. In other words, Passover makes sacred women’s entire profane domain: the domain

of sinks, buckets, mops, and rags. , Yom Kippur

In contrast to Passover, the women have little to say about Yom Kippur (Day of Repentance on which Jews abstain from food)

other than that it is difficult for them to fast. They remember fasting when they were pregnant, and that they often felt sick from it. Now that the women are old they do spend most of Yom Kippur in synagogue (as the men do). But when they were younger and had small children to care for, they were not able to leave the children in order to sit in synagogue. From the perspective of women, Yom Kippur looks very different than it does from a male perspective. While men spend the whole

86 Women as Ritual Experts day in prayer, repentance, and contemplation, much of women’s work continues on even this holiest of days: babies still need to be cared for, changed, and fed, messes still need to be straightened up (even if only minimally), small children still need to be looked after.

Whereas for men the sacred tends to be fully distinct from the profane, women, and particularly younger women, do not seem to designate certain days or times as fully or solely sacred. This may be why Yom Kippur—a holiday that is celebrated only in synagogue— is relatively unimportant for the women.

Purim The women of the Day Center see as the essence of the story of the Scroll of Esther [Purim] that Mordechai the Jew was raised up and evil Haman brought down. In one traditional story that they partic-

ularly like, Haman tried to persuade King Ahashueros to let him give Mordechai money instead of public honors, as the king had originally decreed. The king answered Haman, “Give him both money and honor!” Then Haman needed a haircut and a bath, but Jewish Queen Esther had ordered all the barber shops and bath-

houses to shut down for the day, so that Haman had to lower himself to bathe and cut his own hair. Finally, Haman’s daughter, by mistake, poured human excrement all over him, and then killed herself. While these are stories that appear in traditional Jewish sources, they would certainly be viewed as secondary to the central messages of Purim—human piety and the hidden divine machinations in the world. For the Day Center women, these “rich today,

poor tomorrow” anecdotes are Purim. Rosa explains that one cannot depend upon anything; everything is from God. The rich person should not count on always having his wealth, nor the mighty his might. “As they say, the world turns. All one can do is

have a clean heart.” |

The preceding paragraphs have looked at how the women perceive Passover, Yom Kippur, and Purim. The following chapter will

continue the discussion of holidays, focusing on what is for the women the single most important element of the Jewish holiday cycle: food and food preparation.

Sacralizing the Feminine: Food Preparation as a Religious Activity

Within a system that defines male as normative, women frequently deviate from the norm. Within a system that is sexually segregated

and in which the male world is defined as the official world, the content of the women’s world needs to be examined by a different set of tools. The question that seems interesting to me as an anthropologist studying Jewish women is not whether a women’s brand of Judaism exists (because I think that in this book I have demonstrated that it does), but how the two religious systems (the male and female, the great and little, the halachic and extra-halachic) interact. Male culture can sometimes out and out suppress women’s rituals

simply because men have more institutionalized power. Yet although the official religion may be able to decree laws that restrict women’s freedom, halacha cannot force women to internalize an androcentric interpretation of such laws. The great tradition sometimes gives the outside form to a more female content. Through the process of domestication, women convert male-oriented symbols and rituals to a female-oriented belief system. Within the context of male-oriented religion, women clearly find strategies for constructing a meaningful religious life. Women reinterpret, ignore, borrow, circumvent, and shift emphases. But per-

haps the most effective strategy available to women is to use the 87

88 Women as Ritual Experts forms of the great tradition to sacralize their own, female life experiences. The religion of the Middle Eastern women sacralizes elements of their profane lives that are important to them: relationships with loved ones, nurturing dependents, feeding hungry chil-

dren, taking care of their houses, responsibility for the poor and orphaned. In this chapter, it is argued that the women’s religious outlook naturally leads us to reconsider androcentric notions of what comprises religious behavior. This argument is made through demonstrating that the food preparation done by the Day Center

| women is a religious activity. The argument will be made along several lines: (1) that because of Jewish dietary laws, food preparation can be understood as religious ritual; (2) that food preparation, as the quintessential form of domestic religion, plays a key role in preserving Jewish tradition and in defining Jewish identity; (3) that

food preparation epitomizes women’s interpersonal and familial approach to religion; (4) that food preparation is intrinsically connected both to the Jewish liturgical calendar, the Jewish symbol system, and to the more general framework of women’s mitzvot; (5) that the women themselves treat food preparation as a sacred task.

Kashrut The laws of kashrut are first spelled out in the Pentateuch (e.g., Leviticus 11), but the actual instructions for implementing these laws appear in later Jewish sources. An entire tractate of the Talmud is dedicated to the subject of kashrut, and in the sixteenthcentury Shulhan Aruch, for example, there are 138 separate chapters detailing these laws. Talmudic scholars dedicate lifetimes to studying kashrut. Kashrut raises food preparation from a task that every woman in the world unthinkingly does in order to put food on her family’s table to a religious ritual par excellence.! The extra tasks that must be done in a kosher kitchen are numerous. When the women cook with eggs they examine each egg individually to make sure that it has no blood in it. When the women prepare meat, they salt the meat and allow it to sit until the blood drains away. When they cook greens, they carefully sort through the leaves searching for bugs. Since they do very little dairy cooking, separating meat and

Sacralizing the Feminine 89 dairy is not the important concern that it is in Jewish kitchens of other ethnic groups, but still, they empty out the sink between washing the dishes of the meat dinner and washing the spoons and cups from the morning coffee and yogurt. The most overwhelmingly time-consuming tasks are those connected to Passover, for example, sorting the rice in order to remove all forbidden grains that may have become mixed in during harvest or storage. All of this “extra” work is what for these women (and for many other Jewish women) turns the profane into the sacred. While the women of course cook in order to eat, they keep kosher and preserve tradition because this is what God wants them to do. In other words, kashrut sacralizes women’s everyday life. | Mircea Eliade, in The Sacred and the Profane, describes the sacred and the profane not as two separate worlds or sets of objects, but rather two different human interpretations. The difference between these two interpretations lies in the human perception of “holy” standing out against the everyday world of experience.’ Going one step further, I would suggest that the perception of “holy” may not always necessarily stand out against the everyday world of experience—the holy may be totally embedded in the everyday world. The women described in this paper inhabit a hallowed universe; their understanding of the nature of God’s relationship with humans sacralizes almost every aspect of their daily lives. The basic building blocks of their religious world include shopping,

sorting, cooking, serving, and cleaning—tasks that are simultaneously and inseparably essential to both physical survival and spiritual fulfillment.

When I describe kashrut as sacralizing women’s work in the kitchen, it is in the sense of that which relates the women’s lives meaningfully to God. The women do not doubt that God wants them to observe the laws of kashrut. Nor do they doubt that it is their responsibility as women to ensure that their families eat kosher food—it is women who are in charge of food preparation. On numerous occasions the women explained that they never need

to ask a rabbi questions involving kashrut; they already know everything that they need to know. Simultaneously, the women explain that kashrut is what differentiates Jews from non-Jews. As we saw earlier, the women claim that

Arabs can be religious—that they can “believe” and that Arab

90 Women as Ritual Experts belief is a legitimate religious expression. However, the women stress that they do not eat “Arab food.” In one woman’s story of her _

daughter’s miraculous aliya to Israel, the woman repeatedly stressed that her daughter did not eat or drink while she was in an Arab village. Other women describe good relations with Arabs in

the Old Country—that they visited each other and were very friendly, “Only we wouldn’t eat their food. It’s not kosher—only their milk and leben [yogurt].” When the women purchase prepared foods (such as ice cream), they are concerned to only buy “Jewish” (kosher) foods. Kashrut must be understood as contributing to the definition of the Jewish community, the extended network of kin,

the multigenerational web of human beings with whom one is connected with bonds of reciprocal care and responsibility.

Domestic Religion Other scholars have recognized the sociological implications and

the emotive power of food and food preparation. In particular, Mary Douglas has written about the “pre-coded messages” carried by food and meals. Douglas sees in food a pattern of social relations being expressed. “The message is about different degrees of

hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transaction across the boundaries.”3 Douglas’s thrust is that “whenever a people are aware of encroachment and danger, dietary rules controlling

what goes into the body would serve as a vivid analogy of the corpus of their cultural categories at risk.”4 The boundaries between kosher and nonkosher exclude the inedible, but also bound the area of structured relations. “Within that area rules apply. Outside it, anything goes.”5

Not only kashrut but also traditional recipes preserve Jewish identity. Relating Douglas’s framework to a Jewish context, Joelle Bahloul has suggested that among Algerian Jews living in France, food preparation and eating customs play an essential role in the maintaining of tradition and that the women play an essential role in the transmission of that tradition.® The concept of domestic religion can be of use to us here. It is also one of the few aspects of Jewish women’s religiosity for which we have evidence concerning a number of ethnic groups. According

Sacralizing the Feminine 91 to Barbara Myerhoff, in Eastern Europe it was the women who made Jewish the family, holidays, and tragic moments. Men’s religious expression was in the crowd, the synagogue. Judaism, according to the old people of her study, is what happens in the family. In

the words of one of her male informants, “They [the women] had domestic religion—it comes to you through rituals. Not the meanings, just the rituals. And they are beautiful and very connected to

the person who taught them to you.”’ This person is usually a mother or a grandmother. Myerhoff defines the little tradition, or domestic religion, as the local, folk expression of a group’s belief. It is an unsystematized, not elaborately idealized oral tradition practiced constantly and often unconsciously by ordinary people with-

out external enforcement or interference. “Its potential for being sacred comes from its being thoroughly embedded in a culture. Its authority comes from its being totally internalized in peoples’

psyches. ””® ,

Vimala Jayanti, in her study of women in the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi neighborhood of Mea Shearim, defined domestic religion as the family rituals connected to Jewish law, and other household customs sanctified by previous generations of Jewish women having done them. Many of these practices are tangential to or not even correct according to Jewish law. But, following one’s mother’s custom is an “alternative source of legitimacy that is hard for men to confront.”? According to Jayanti, domestic religion is

mainly autonomous for women. Although even in the home the father is the final authority in all matters of ritual, the mother is the one who passes on the values and motivation of religion.!® In a modern American community, Maurie Sacks has found that “Orthodox Jewish women can be influential in shaping community self-definition, setting values, and creating the social networks of

which community is constructed. ... In the ritual food exchange called shalach mones, which takes place in late winter at the holiday

of Purim, women’s handling of foodstuffs is a way of managing conflicting cultural demands on behalf of the entire community, and is symbolic of more practical exchanges that constitute the social relations that define the collectivity of Orthodox Jews.” !! Many Middle Eastern women have children who are no longer religiously observant and for whom eating traditional foods is a primary link with the culture and religion of their ancestors. When

92 Women as Ritual Experts the Day Center women prepare traditional foods for their married children and grandchildren, they are conscious of using food to

strengthen their descendants’ bonds to Judaism. Frequently a daughter or daughter-in-law prepares the entree and deserts for holiday meals, while the grandmother brings with her certain traditional foods, in order to “really make the holiday.” Domestic religion, then, preserves Judaism by binding the new generation with bonds of love and relationship, it maintains boundaries between Jew and non-Jew, transmits traditional values, makes the individual really feel Jewish, and is passed on informally from

mother to daughter. For all of these reasons, the Day Center women understand food preparation to be the ultimate domestic religious act.

Cooking as Caring When one informant was asked why she spends so much time and effort in preparing holiday food, her answer was twofold: for her children and lichvod ha-hag [to honor the holiday]. We will look now at the first half of her response.

A major aspect of the role of spiritual guardianship of one’s family is to preserve the Jewish identity of children and grandchildren. They use traditional dishes (which their children love) to that end. But food is also necessary for physical survival. The women know that when they cook for their families they are, in the most basic sense of the word, nurturing, allowing their families to live. Giving prepared food to the poor is the greatest religious act that a

woman can perform. While all charitable contributions are respected, supplying a hungry beggar with cooked food is the most | highly esteemed form of charity. This is the quintessential women’s mitzvah.

Our discussion here begins with a story told by the rabbanit and repeated on a variety of occasions by several of the women. Once upon a time there was a rabbi and his wife. They were both very righteous and gave to a poor, homeless family every day. He gave money and she gave cooked food. “The moral of the story is that she is more righteous than he, because she brought prepared food

to the poor and hungry people while he only brought money, so

Sacralizing the Feminine 93 that the poor, homeless people would have to go to the market and shop and cook for themselves.” Another woman added, “And they didn’t even have a kitchen! How could they cook?” In other ver-

sions of this story the man gives money to a poor and starving traveler, but the hungry beggar dies of starvation before he manages to go to the market and buy and cook a meal. Most of the Day Center women came from societies that were not based on money. Barter and exchange were the chief means of

obtaining the few articles that they did not grow or make themselves. In the Old Country when a beggar came to the door, he was

given food, not money. But more important, preferring cooked food to money places charity squarely in women’s sphere. While men could perhaps excel at giving large quantities of money, women are in charge of food preparation. Women, as the feeders of the hungry and the link between the generations, tie together the Jewish people, connecting the future with the past, the stranger with the friend, the rich with the poor, the biological kin with kin of a more mythical nature. These two tasks, that of giving charity and that of linking the generations are supremely religious tasks. The women are not particularly concerned with the identity of the recipient of their charitable contributions. The women most definitely do not feed the poor because of some intellectual humanistic or socialistic commitment to ending

world hunger. On the contrary, they “contribute” because God wants them to.!2 For the women, the giving itself is a sacred act, one that makes them holy, puts them into closer contact with divinity.

Food and Festivals From a female perspective cooking is the essence of the Sabbath and holidays. For the Day Center women, food preparation defines the various holidays and life-cycle events. However, the special holiday foods, they tell me, cannot be made by just anyone; “you have to know how.” It is the women, then, who are responsible both

for the knowledge of kosher cooking and for the traditions of holiday food. Joelle Bahloul found that Algerian Jewish men may perform the public food rituals (saying the blessing, distributing the

blessed bread, sitting at the head of the table) but women are

94 Women as Ritual Experts the experts and the guardians of the customs. In other words, the mother orchestrates and directs; the father is but an actor.!3 The women of the Day Center are very attuned to the Jewish liturgical calendar. Most neither know their own birthdays nor are aware of the current date on the Gregorian calendar. The passing of time is described by them in relation to the Jewish holidays: ‘the Hagim’ [the High Holidays] stretch from the beginning of the month of Elul to a week or so after Sukkot (approximately September and October); ‘after the Hagim’ continues until almost Chanuka; ‘before Passover’ begins (at the latest) right after Purim (one month before Passover). Thus, they might plan a trip to the holy tombs ‘after the Hagim’ or talk about a husband who died ‘at Chanuka’ (any time in the few weeks preceding or following Chanuka).

Sabbath The weekly cycle is equally important to women. When the women were asked to enumerate the most important mitzvot [divine commandments], observing the laws of the Sabbath was the only cere-

monial or noninterpersonal mitzvah mentioned. Some of the women claim that the Sabbath was observed more fully in the Old

Country. Other women sadly relate how when they were young mothers in Jerusalem they sometimes had to do laundry or other forbidden work on the Sabbath because life was so hard. All of the women say that they keep the Sabbath laws more strictly now that they are old. The Jewish Sabbath [Shabbat] is a day of rest, prayer, and religious study. Observant Jewish men (such as the husbands and brothers of the women of this study) welcome the Sabbath on Friday evening by singing special Psalms in synagogue and coming home afterward to a clean house and a large meal. In the morning they attend a lengthy synagogue service, again come home to eat

and rest, and then return to synagogue for a religious lesson and another prayer service. The women of this study cook for the Sabbath. The women’s gallery in the synagogue is empty on Friday nights except for a handful of young, unmarried girls and a few old widows, and on Saturday mornings most women stay at home and

Sacralizing the Feminine 95 set the table and prepare salads for the large meal that they will serve when their husbands return from synagogue. Food is central to the women’s understanding of sacred time. How much food they prepare for Sabbath depends upon whether or not children will come and eat the Sabbath meals with them. For a typical Sabbath with children one woman prepares two cakes (one with cheese and one with no milk products), cookies [bagelah] for visiting grandchildren, nuts and seeds that she cleaned, salted, and

baked herself, soup, chicken stuffed with fried potatoes, string beans, rice and tomato sauce, burekas, Sabbath stew (a bean, vegetable, and meat stew that sits in the oven from Friday afternoon until it is eaten for lunch on Saturday), two different eggplant salads, and several vegetable salads, at least one of which consists of tomatoes and cucumbers cut up into miniscule pieces. Burekas are made by mixing a stiff dough of flour, margarine, oil, water, and vinegar. The dough is rolled out and margarine is spread over the entire surface. The dough is then folded into thirds and thirds again and put into the refrigerator. On the following two days, the dough is again rolled out, more margarine is spread on top, and the dough is refolded into thirds. Finally, the dough is rolled out quite thin, cut into squares, and filled with a mixture of cheeses, egg, and seasoning. Other possible fillings are spinach or meat. The same dough can be spread out in a pan and covered with chopped nuts and cinnamon and sugar to make a type of baklava. The amount of work involved is staggering—both time-consuming and physically demanding.

The Day Center is closed on Thursdays and Fridays, and the women would not attend even if it were opened. They need two days

to organize and prepare for Sabbath—cleaning, shopping, and cooking are time-consuming tasks for women in their seventies and eighties. Most of the women have connections with vendors in the

shuk or open market in Jerusalem, and spread their shopping out over a few days because they have trouble carrying home heavy bags. Batya tells that she enjoys preparing for the Sabbath, and that it is said to be a mitzvah to begin preparing for the Sabbath by buying Sabbath food on Sunday (six days in advance). The women prefer to prepare Sabbath foods in complicated and time-consuming manners. For one favorite—chicken stuffed with potatoes—potatoes are first cut up into small pieces and deep fried,

96 Women as Ritual Experts the chicken is boiled, the potatoes are stuffed inside the chicken, and then the chicken is baked. This one dish involves frying, boiling, and baking—all of which are done in the same tiny kitchen. For Jewish women, as for Jewish men, the Sabbath is a day of increased holiness, yet this holiness is manifested in different ways

for the two sexes. For men, prayer, rest, and study make the Sabbath special. For women, being with family, serving elaborate

meals, and petitioning God while lighting the Sabbath candles sacralize the Sabbath.

Rosh HaShana Rosh HaShana, the Jewish New Year, is an extremely important holiday for the women of the Day Center. Beginning several weeks before the actual new year, they spend a few minutes each day saying “A good year,” “A blessed year,” “A year of health” to their friends as they leave the Day Center. They will see the same friends many more times before the actual holiday, but the handshaking

and blessing begin early. |

Each year their rabbi teaches the women that to prepare for Rosh HaShana they should go to the ritual bath to purify themselves and

then go to a river to symbolically discard their sins. They should remember to go to synagogue on the morning before Rosh HaShana and should give money to charity. Certainly, for Jewish men Synagogue attendance is the essence of Rosh HaShana. On this day there are special prayers and readings from Scripture, and the shofar [ram’s horn] is sounded. The women of this study do not understand the Hebrew prayers, sit too far away in the women’s gallery to hear properly, and until recently were too busy caring for children to attend synagogue at all. When the women themselves are asked how they prepare for Rosh HaShana, the answers reflect their gynocentric subculture. One informant described cleaning her house before Rosh HaShana. Reminiscing, she explained that in Kurdistan they would white wash the walls and scrub the floors and tables with stones. They would spend hours baking a special kind of flat bread. In Israel she still makes kube (a farina-based dumpling stuffed with meat and vegetables), stuffed chicken, and stuffed grape leaves. All of these

Sacralizing the Feminine 97 involve an enormous amount of work. To make kube, for instance, she must first mix the batter for the dumplings and then shape them into little balls. The batter is very sticky and this process involves

great skill. Then she makes the filling, chopping up parsley and other greens, and chopping the (usually inexpensive and tough) meat by hand. She fills each dough ball with the meat and spices, a very slow process. In the meantime, she has prepared either a sauce or a soup in which the kube are carefully placed in order to cook. When we realize that she does all of this in a tiny, primitive kitchen that most likely has no counters and at most a two burner stove (or

possibly only one kerosene burner), the amount of work seems

overwhelming. : One woman, originally from Turkey, explained that on Rosh HaShana they eat many symbolic foods. First, the men say the blessings over the different foods, and then, the women. Another woman tells that on Rosh HaShana they eat roast beef and liver. On the evening before Yom Kippur (the Day of Repentence is a fast day) they eat fish and rice, and especially the fish heads “so that you will be the head.” (Rosh means “first” and “head.”) Women, of course, prepare all of these symbolic victuals. They also serve many sweet things on Rosh HaShana, particularly dried fruit (which many of the women dry themselves), so that they will have a sweet year.

Shavuot Shavuot is the spring harvest holiday that also celebrates the giving

of the Torah at Sinai. Dairy products are traditionally eaten on Shavuot. The women make noodles by mixing up dough, rolling it out as thin as possible, cutting it into strips, and then hanging the long, thin strips out to dry on every available surface in the house. One eighty-three-year-old woman tells that she made three kilo-

grams of noodles this year. Another woman describes how she makes special noodles which are filled with cheese, eggs, mint, and pepper, and then closed up and fried. She also makes little individual bowls of rice and milk with cinnamon and rose water.'4 Men go to synagogue on the night of Shavuot and stay up all night studying. Very few women go to synagogue, and almost none stay up all night.

98 Women as Ritual Experts Chanuka Chanuka, which commemorates the victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks in second century B.C.E., also elicited very little comment from the women. According to Jewish tradition, during the siege of Jerusalem there only remained enough oil in the Temple to burn for

one more day. However, God granted a miracle and the light burned for eight days. To commemorate that miracle, Jews light the Chanuka menora (eight-branched candelabra) for eight days each winter. Lighting the Chanuka candles is a men’s ritual, and many of the women are not even clear about the story of Chanuka. Because

the miracle of Chanuka involved oil, Jewish women serve fried foods on this holiday. Several informants described the z/ubia, or sweet dough, that they fry for Chanuka. In their small kitchens, any kind of dough that needs to be rolled out is a major production to

prepare. It should be noted that Chanuka was not an especially important holiday in the Old Country. Tu b’Shvat Tu b’Shvat, the day on which all trees are reckoned to be one year

older, is much more interesting for the women to talk about, perhaps because of its modern Zionist significance as a day for planting trees in reforestation projects. Once again the women clearly describe different ritual activities for men and for women. The men say blessings and read from a book (the women do not even know from which book); the women prepare a great variety of foods. According to Tova, they spread a big table with all kinds of dried fruits and nuts. While there are a few traditional foods that are eaten particularly on Tu b’Shvat, there are no foods that are eaten only on that day. For kanape, Tova makes a dough out of special thin noodles that are boiled. “The Arabs make the dough on a machine but we cannot use their machine because they use bad [forbidden] oil.” Making these thin noodles by hand involves a

great deal of work. On top of the noodles they place a layer of chopped almonds and nuts. This is covered with another layer of homemade noodles. Chopping the nuts is also time consuming without any modern appliances. Tova makes it clear—this is all

Sacralizing the Feminine 99 very hard work. They also make baklava, which consists of a layer of dough spread with oil, more dough, more oil, more dough, more oil, chopped nuts and sesame seeds, dough, oil, dough, oil, nuts and seeds, dough, oil, dough, oil, dough, oil. This is done for as many layers as are needed to fill the pan. Melted sugar is poured over the top after the baklava is baked. Tova emphasizes that the nuts must

not be ground (which would go fairly quickly), but must be chopped into very small pieces with a knife. She also makes a dough and nut recipe that uses farina and flour. However, says Tova “not everyone can make these things. You have to know how.”

One informant from Aleppo in Syria tells how to make the traditional wheat dish that is eaten by her ethnic group on Tu b’Shvat. The night before she soaks kernels of wheat and in the morning cooks them. The cooked, whole wheat is then mixed with sugar, cinnamon, “and all sorts of good things, nuts and raisins.” It is served in individual cups, and is a great favorite of her children.

In Kurdistan, there were other nonculinary women’s customs connected to Tu b’Shvat, but these have disappeared in modern Israel. According to Brauer’s informants, women would take their physically mature daughters and marry each one to a tree. And, after blessing the fruits, women would pour water over each other’s hair so that their hair would grow nicely. These customs tie into the fertility theme of Tu b’Shvat as the new year for the trees and the beginning of spring.!5

Purim At Purim, the spring holiday that celebrates Esther and Mordechai’s victory over the evil Haman, the women reach truly great culinary heights. According to Jewish law and custom, each household must prepare two servings of food (usually cakes) to give to neighbors or friends. In modern Israel, women more typically prepare twenty or more plates containing five, ten, or more different home-baked treats.

One informant fondly remembers how in the Old Country all the women gathered together and cooked for Purim. They would all buy meat and chicken, one would bring the rice, one the oil. They would sing and have a good time. Another woman describes how even today she begins cooking a full week before Purim.

100 Women as Ritual Experts

Death and Mourning | I asked the Day Center women the open-ended question: “When someone dies, do you [does your ethnic group] have special women’s customs?” They consistently answered that when someone dies the women bring food to the mourners. The female relatives divide

up the meals between them and bring everything—sugar, eggs, coffee, bread. Mourners cannot eat anything from their own house for seven days. On the first day (after the funeral) food is brought from the synagogue—eggs, olives, bread, cucumbers, tomatoes—a light meal. Later, coffee and tea are served. Each morning and evening a light meal is served, and each midday a large lunch is brought by a female relative. On the first day it is traditional to eat rice and whole lentils, “like when Abraham died, Esau saw the lentils.” (According to Jewish tradition, Jacob cooked lentils because Abraham had died and lentils were to be eaten by mourners.) The rest of the week various vegetables, beans, and soups are eaten. Much rice is prepared.!6 Friends, neighbors, distant relatives all visit the house of mourning during the week following the funeral. It is the job of the female relatives to serve coffee, cake, and snacks to all of the visitors. The women take turns being on duty at the house of mourning and serve up vast quantities of food all day and evening. When the son of a

friend of one of my informant’s died, we visited the home of his widow. Men and women sat in separate rooms, and the central mourning rituals in the women’s room concerned food: visitors coming to comfort the bereaved are offered coffee, a cold drink, nuts or seeds, and homemade cakes. Confronting death, the women respond by strengthening interpersonal ties through preparing and serving food to friends and kin.

Independence Day Conversely, holidays for which the women do not prepare food do not elicit much excitement on their part. Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence Day) receives far less attention than one may have guessed based on the women’s deep commitment to Zionism. This is probably because the typical Independence Day activity—going on a picnic—necessitates access to a car. There are no special foods

Sacralizing the Feminine 101 that the women prepare on this day; instead, their sons and sons-in- | laws grill and barbecue meats at the picnic sites. Despite their firm commitment to Zionism, it seems that the women do not see Independence Day as conducive to being adapted to their spiritual needs—there is no especially efficacious moment for making personal petitions to God, the favorite foods are those prepared by men, there are no ancient women’s traditions linked to the day. Although Independence Day is one of the few holidays on which it is permitted to travel in a car (thus it should be somewhat easier for the women to see their children and grandchildren), the women do not seem to feel that traveling to a picnic is “for us”—it is more of a young people’s activity.

Symbolic Foods | In holiday cooking, foods are symbols that can be manipulated by the women. They cook sweet dishes for Rosh HaShana so that “you

[specific family members] will have a sweet year.” At the meal preceding Yom Kippur they serve the head of a fish “so that you will

be the head.” For Chanuka they fry pancakes and donuts in oil in memory of the miracle that God did for the Jewish people during the Maccabean revolt. At Tu b’Shvat, foods symbolic of spring and renewal are served. For mourners there are lentils and eggs, round foods that symbolize death and rebirth, renewal. At weddings there are special foods that symbolize fertility. For the Sabbath extra dishes are prepared in advance in memory of God’s giving the Jews two days’ worth of manna each Friday in the desert. And above all, for Passover they have matzah, the “bread of affliction,” in memory of the Exodus from Egypt. Proper cooking, then, is not merely a matter of balancing vitamins and minerals, but a way of connecting

with some of the richest, some of the most eternal symbols in human history.

Cooking as a Female Sacred Act When the Jewish woman picks through pounds of spinach search-

ing for miniscule bugs, when she sorts through piles of rice for Passover use, when she chops huge quantities of nuts, or boils, fries,

102 Women as Ritual Experts and then bakes her stuffed chicken, she is involved in avodat hashem [worshipping God]. Kashrut, coupled with the exceedingly time-consuming and elaborate festival and Sabbath preparation is what the women mean when they say that they cook “in honor of the holiday.” All of this “extra” work is what, for these women (and for many other Jewish women) turns the profane into the sacred. These women opt to do this work because, for them, it is a sacred activity.

The women also use food to thank God for granting personal petitions. Women distribute cookies or cakes at holy tombs when a prayer has been answered after pilgrimage to that tomb. This is usually as part of a vow to make a happy celebration for all of the pilgrims at the tomb.!7 Men do not usually make these vows; it is a women’s custom to use food to thank God for granting a request.

The most common requests concern the well-being of their extended families. The women share food with strangers because God has helped their kin.

Although this is not an absolute distinction, it does seem that while men celebrate or observe the Sabbath and holidays, women make or prepare the holy days. From one perspective, it could perhaps be claimed that this points to women’s auxiliary role in a male-oriented religious system. The holidays actually belong to the men; women merely help them with the necessary work. While there

certainly is an element of truth in this, such an approach reduces women’s religious expression to drudgery and spectatorship. From the perspective of the women, the fact that women prepare for holidays means that it is the women who are the ritual experts, the guardians of law and tradition, the ones with the power to make or create, not simply to participate. For these women food preparation is sacred because it embodies, concretizes, dramatizes, and ritualizes the central elements of Judaism, as understood by the women themselves. The basic ritual building blocks of their religious world include sorting, cooking, serving, and cleaning—tasks that are simultaneously and inseparably essential to both physical survival and spiritual fulfillment. The women both domesticate religion and sacralize the profane. As Laal Jamzadeh and Margaret Mills have shown concerning Muslim women’s votive feasts in Iran, through food rituals, “women achieve ... a measure of devotional autonomy for themselves.” !8

The Liberation of Widowhood: From the Private to the Public

In the previous chapters the religious world of the Middle Eastern women has been presented as if it were static; I have argued that

“they” reinterpret, that “they” domesticate, that “they” describe religion in interpersonal terms. It is axiomatic to the social scientific study of religion, however, that religious beliefs develop and are expressed within very specific social contexts. In the last two chapters, we will look at the religious lives of these women within two different contexts of change: change in the life cycle and modernization.

Childhood The women have very few specific memories of religious practices as children. They remember that “everyone was pious, especially

my father.” They reminisce about happy celebrations, in which everyone participated with “all their heart, not like today.” They remember helping their mothers clean for Passover, and they remember walking to local tombs of saints. Brauer has recorded, for example, that on the second day of Shavuot, women would visit local graves. (The men went on the first day of Shavuot.) Before setting out they would dip in the ritual bath and put on new clothes.

This was a joyous occasion with much dancing and singing. The 103

104 Women as Ritual Experts women would go up to the grave, kiss it, make requests, and give money that they had saved all year for this purpose.! I was unable to elicit many of these detailed memories, most likely because of the

great number of years that had elapsed since their girlhoods and because of the total embeddedness of religion in daily life in the Old Country.

Wives

In Kurdistan the position of the wife in the patriarchal extended family was an insecure one. Love was not assumed to be a part of married life,2 and a woman’s husband could easily divorce her by saying so in the presence of a rabbi and giving her the money specified in the marriage contract. There was no alimony and the husband kept the children. A woman could not usually get her husband to agree to a divorce if only she wanted it. A woman wanting to divorce her husband had two options: she could return to her parents and never remarry, or she could convert to Islam so that her former marriage would be annulled. Women typically married at the age of fourteen and the marriage was often consummated before the woman was physically mature. Lisa Gilad found that elderly Yemenite women in Israel vividly recalled their wedding

nights: they were uninformed about sex, terrified, and hurt. In short, a girl was passed from father to husband before being old enough to make decisions on her own.? Many of my informants remember their mothers and neighbors constantly pregnant, until dying at young ages.

| Walter Zenner notes that among the women of Syria the attitude toward marriage was above all fatalistic—one’s husband is called one’s fate.4 Other writers have described wedding songs in which the theme is of the bride crying and hiding to escape marriage. You will cry enough, sleep more tonight Tomorrow you are going Say good-bye to your sister-in-law And your three brothers And much as you cry, it won’t help you You are going Why are you running to the mountains?

The Liberation of Widowhood 105 The bridegroom’s parents are taking you Don’t hide yourself in the mountains, it won’t help you. . .°

Many of the women of the Day Center married men whom they had never met, often a man who had children from a previous wife

who had died. The new wife was expected to raise the previous wife’s children, and this was a task that most of the women perceived as a great burden. Nadya, for instance, told with a sad voice

that she never had children and now she is all alone. Upon being questioned, however, she revealed that she raised from infancy several children of her husband’s first wife. With these children she no longer has any contact. During the course of my fieldwork, one of the women of the Day Center, Batya, was murdered in her apartment. Several days later other women discussed the murder. They speculated about who had killed her, and the consensus was that her husband’s children from his first marriage wanted to get her (a widow) to sign over to them the property that her husband had left her. “They didn’t intend to kill her, just to frighten her a little.” The women did not see this incident as so extraordinary; rather, what one could expect in relations between a woman and the children of her husband. In-laws also receive a great deal of criticism. One woman told how when she was newly married in Iraq, they were very poor and had no food. She was an orphan and the brother and sister who had raised her lived far away from her husband. Her husband would go to his mother’s house to eat, but her mother-in-law would not give her any food. She almost died of starvation. “My husband, she yilech le-azazel [he should rot in hell], didn’t care that I was hungry. His belly was full.”

Although the women are aware of the fact that Jewish law enjoins the woman to abide by her husband’s family’s customs when she marries, and most of them indeed did this, when they talked about “our customs” or “how it is done by us,” they meant by their parents, not their husbands. Many of the women described their parents as saintly, deeply religious, observant Jews. None described their living or late husbands in such terms. One widow recalled that her husband was always very sickly, and

when her six children were small she was “like both a man and a woman.” Another woman put it this way: “It was hard then. I raised

106 Women as Ritual Experts my children alone, me and God.” Another widow described her husband as the type of man who if he was sitting with a glass of water on the table next to him, would tell her to bring it to him. As almost a matter of principle, none of the husbands would even consider preparing coffee for themselves. The women devoted enor-

mous amounts of time to serving their husbands and to being available in case their husbands would request food or drink. Simha

B. related that her husband had been sick for eighteen years with asthma, high blood pressure, diabetes, and heart disease. She took care of him until he died, taking him to the hospital twice each day. Until quite recently, the religious world of the women was centered in the home. One woman told how she once went away to a holy tomb without her children. While there she dreamed that her son was taken to the hospital, so she rushed home to make sure that he was not ill. All of the women listening to this story agreed that when they had small children they did not go to the tombs, or even to synagogue. Aside from the observances required by Jewish law (such as lighting Sabbath candles and attending the ritual bath at the end of each menstrual period), the women when younger performed a large number of personal, idiosyncratic, or spontaneous rituals. These included lighting candles whenever a child was in danger, placing salt in the bed of an infant, hanging pictures of saints throughout the house, and murmuring petitions on behalf of family members. A great deal of time was devoted to cooking and cleaning for Shabbat and holidays. The women express a rather negative attitude toward the Jewish laws of menstrual purity. One woman told how in the Old Country the women had to dip in a freezing cold river at the end of the period of menstrual impurity.6 Others remember that even here in Israel they would sleep on the floor while menstruating (so as not to touch their husbands).

Widows This is contrasted with a positive attitude toward menopause. One woman expressed her feelings about being too old to have any more children in this way: “Thank God Who has released me!” However

The Liberation of Widowhood 107 it is more typically social factors that predominate when the women talk about the transition to old age, and very few women mention physiological changes.’

This is how another woman describes her changing maternal role: “When I was younger I didn’t go to synagogue because I was busy with the children. There was a mess in the house... . . Now] go

to all the tombs—Meir, Yohanan ben Zakkai, Hebron... . [At the

tombs I] light candles, give charity, say a... blessing for my family.”

Nancy Datan, Aaron Antononsky, and Benjamin Maoz, three Israeli social scientists, have compared aging patterns of Israeli women of five different ethnic backgrounds. In certain respects the

women of my study resemble the Persian Jewish women of that study. Both groups of women believe that (unlike their own experience) a girl should choose her own husband. Both groups of women delivered many babies: 53 percent of the Persian women had seven or more live births, almost half had a child die. Like the women of my study, the Persian women claim that their husbands need them but they do not need their husbands.’ There are, however, a number of significant differences between the two groups. According to Datan, Antononsky, and Maoz, the Persian women tend to wish that they had borne fewer children. Most of the women

of my study wish they had more children, and those who are childless or mothers of small families describe themselves as miserable and pathetic [miskena].

They believe that old women should be more careful about religious observance than young women. In many of the tales they

know, the heroine is an old woman and frequently a widow. A favorite story concerns a very poor old widow who would bake four loaves of bread each day and give three away to poor people, saving only one for herself. One day there was a shipwreck near her house and four very cold, hungry, sick men came to her door. She fed and cared for all of them. Then, when she went to bake some bread for herself a gust of wind came and blew away all the flour that she had

left, some utensils from her kitchen, and part of her house. She went to the Rabbinical Court and said that she wanted to take the wind to trial. As the judges argued with her, telling her that this is not possible, two men came into the court carrying big sacks of gold

for pidyon ha-nefesh [ransom or redemption of a soul]. It turned

108 Women as Ritual Experts out that these men had been in a boat, the boat sprang a leak and they almost drowned, when suddenly a gust of wind blew into the hole in the boat some object which stopped up the leak and saved them. What saved them was part of the widow’s kitchen, and the men rewarded her by telling her that for the rest of her life she could

come live in the king’s palace and have whatever she wanted for herself and whatever she wanted to give away to the poor, Research conducted in the United States indicates that old age and religiosity are indeed linked. Constance Brennan and Leo Missinne summarize some of the current research. Quoting a number of studies, they argue the following: (1) The highest proportion of those who had unusual or intense religious experiences were in the seventy-plus age group. Also, old people more often felt “very religious.” (2) Old people believe more (in God, Christ, mira-

cles, the devil, etc.) (3) The elderly participate more in church organizations than in all other social activities combined, and women participate more than men. (4) Religious knowledge increases with age. (5) Religion helps old people overcome grief, depression, and fear of dying.?

| The women of the Day Center experience widowhood positively because it frees them from the demands of husbands whom they may not have liked very much, and enables them to develop their religious lives in ways not possible when they were tied to the home.

Old age means, to some extent, increased status. Lisa Gilad notes that in Yemen as a woman aged her sexuality was considered less dangerous (by men) and, if she had sons, she enjoyed increasing freedom from restraints as the “mother of sons.” !9 Another effect of widowhood is to force the women out of the

domestic sphere into the public sphere for the performance of certain religious rituals. One woman from Turkey tells that now that she is a widow she goes to synagogue on the Sabbath to hear kiddush {the traditional blessing over wine]. On a typical Sabbath she will go to synagogue four times. This same woman, while her husband was alive, would rarely go to synagogue. He would make kiddush at home, and she would prepare his meals while he was at synagogue. The Day Center women are not silent martyrs, and they certainly

complain about the many illnesses from which they suffer as a result of old age. Many of them are diabetic, have high blood

The Liberation of Widowhood 109 pressure, no longer walk very well, have no teeth and poor hearing

and eyesight, plus many other minor and major ailments. They suffer from loneliness when their children move far away, and most

of them, living entirely on the small old-age pension of National Insurance, struggle to make ends meet. Yet they are keenly aware of

their religious prerogatives as older women and/or widows, and they enjoy the privileges that go with that role.

Psychologist David Gutmann, in an examination of ethnographic data from Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and Amerindian

societies, hypothesizes that “the post parental period of life, in a variety of very disparate cultures, regions, and races, is a time of enlargement for women: They move into goverance roles particularly in the household, but also in the areas of community politics and religion . . . that were hitherto closed against them.”!! The new roles that open up for the older women include that of ritual leader, family matriarch (often in alliance with her oldest son), and witch. According to Gutmann, men age along an activity—passivity con-

tinuum. Young men are expected to wrest resources and power from physical nature and enemies. Older men are expected to coax power—whether for good or bad purposes—from the supernaturals. Older men move toward values, interests, and activities that are no longer stereotypically masculine. Women, on the other hand,

reverse the order of male aging, going from passive mastery to active mastery. Cross-culturally, older women are more domineering and less willing to trade submission for security.!2 For women,

sexual stratification often disappears with age; old women can sometimes occupy hitherto exclusively patriarchal slots.

For many of the Day Center women, aging means increased independence, greater role options, continued kinship ties, and newfound freedom of movement. This does not necessarily mean that the women become more powerful in either political or religious matters. They simply acquire a geographical mobility and a control over their own bodies and time that they did not have when they were younger. Because women’s life expectancy in the Old Country was much shorter than it is in modern Israel, groups of elderly widows who have a complete religious life of their own must be understood as a

recent innovation.'3 While there are hints in the literature that in Kurdistan very old women could sit in the men’s section of the

110 Women as Ritual Experts synagogue,'4 bless the palm frond and citron on Sukkot,!5 and accompany the men to the river for tashlich,'® it seems that there simply were not large groups of old women. The religious life of the

women of the Day Center has been, to a great extent, constructed by themselves.

The women are aware that the men in their families also have intensified religious lives in old age. The elderly men attend synagogue regularly, and those who are retired may spend most of

their time at study sessions for old men held at the local synagogues. Increased religiosity is seen in general as one of the prerogatives or rewards of old age for both men and women. But it is the women who are specifically responsible for those tasks that involve

the health and happiness of their children, and in old age most of

these tasks fall into the spiritual realm. The Day Center widows feel that their religious role has changed for the better as a result of the deaths of their husbands. In particu-

lar, in old age their religious lives focus much more in the public sphere—the Day Center, synagogue, and holy tombs. A major impetus for this shift is the women’s belief that rituals of spiritual guardianship over kin are more efficaciously performed in public locations. Simultaneously, widowhood allows many women, for the first time in their lives, the control over resources, time, and mobility necessary for moving into the public sphere. It must be emphasized that while their religious arena has broadened, their religious goals and belief system have not changed. Religious activi-

ties now occur outside the home, but the motivation for those activities remains the protection of beloved family members. Widowhood, for these women, is the point at which motive (to safeguard the well-being of their families), method (spiritual guardianship and mediation), and opportunity (release from the demands of husbands) come together. In the following pages, we will look at the three most significant public holy places frequented by the women.

Day Center The weekly schedule of the Day Center is as follows: Sunday— rabbi’s lesson, Monday—(not every week) trip to holy tomb, Tuesday—rabbanit’s lesson, Wednesday—rabbi’s lesson. There are very

The Liberation of Widowhood 111 few secular activities at the Day Center. In the year and a half during which I did my fieldwork, there were twq organized trips to the baths at Ein Gedi and Tiberias, and one film strip dealing with old age shown by a nurse from the Health Service. In various conversations the women were asked why they come

to the Day Center. A frequent answer was that “they” (the other women, not including the respondent and her closest friends) come in order to be able to go on the trips to the holy tombs. Most of the women are either physically or financially incapable of making the long trip to Safed or Tiberias by themselves. The Day Center not only subsidizes and organizes the trip for them, but can bring the

bus right up next to the tomb so that the women will not have to walk from the parking lot to the tomb. When asked why they attend this rather than another day center, several women answered that other people go to other day centers because they are better funded and serve better snacks with unlimited biscuits and coffee. “Some people just follow their stomachs.” The women seemed proud of coming to this Day Center precisely because of its poverty. (In fact, all the day centers have similar funding.) The senior citizens day centers are run by the Municipality, and the directors and the women can choose the activities that they want (within the appropriate budget). At day centers in more middle-class neighborhoods, for example, the main programs are lectures on various intellectual subjects. That almost all of the activities at this Day Center are religious in nature must be understood as the result of the expressed interest of the particular women who attend; the old women themselves request religious activities. The Day Center is clearly treated by the women as a sacred space.

Great believers in the efficacy of mezuza-kissing (see Chapter 4), they are especially careful to kiss mezuzot leading into places that they define as holy, including the Day Center. Several of the women who do not cover their hair all of the time do wear kerchiefs when involved in holy activities—and at the Day Center. An important function of the Day Center is to make celebrations

for the women. Few of the women know their birthdays, so birthdays are not celebrated at the Day Center. However, every holiday, major or minor, receives a great deal of attention and is usually accompanied by a party or other special treat. For Purim they are given bags of cakes and candy; for Tu b’Shvat they are taken to

112 Women as Ritual Experts plant trees; for Jerusalem Day they are taken on a tour around Jerusalem. This adds to the women’s perception of the Day Center as sacred space. For Lag b’Omer as for several other holidays, the Day Center has become the primary location in which the women

celebrate, commemorate, mourn, or rejoice. This is a very new phenomenon. The decor of the Day Center is significant. Zionism is a major religious theme for these women, and the only pictures on the walls are a travel poster saying “Jerusalem—lIsrael,” a large, illustrated copy of the song “Jerusalem of Gold,” and a small print of Jerusalem (how it looked about a hundred years ago).

Synagogue These women visit the synagogue for both social and religious reasons. Unlike the Day Center, which is ethnically mixed, each woman attends only the synagogue of her own ethnic group.!’ There she will greet friends, relatives, and neighbors, although almost no active socializing goes on during the actual service. They are very aware that only old women go to synagogue regularly, with young women coming on such special occasions as Rosh HaShana

and Yom Kippur. In Donna Shai’s study of a Kurdish neighborhood in Israel, she found that the younger women never go to synagogue—they are embarrassed to go because it is seen as an old woman’s activity.!8 Indeed, according to Yael Katzir, in Yemen women were actually barred from the synagogue; it was considered a sin for a woman to learn to read or to enter a synagogue as women

were considered potentially defiling because of menstrual and childbirth blood.!9

The women realize that men control the better space in the synagogue and that men are in charge of all of the public rituals. They resent men who read too quickly when leading the prayers, because the women want to follow the service but can only do so if the leader reads slowly, clearly, and in a loud voice. Before Purim the women asked if the Scroll of Esther would be read at the Day Center. When Simha said that it would not since all of the women go to synagogue anyway, one woman answered, “But it’s better here

[at the Day Center] where we sit like this [in a circle near to the

The Liberation of Widowhood 113 rabbi].” At the synagogue the women sit far away, in a balcony, behind a curtain. According to Lisa Gilad, in the Yemenite community the synagogue provided regular study sessions for the men, and

it offered “an intimate atmosphere and a circle of friendship to its members.”2° For Yemenite men the synagogue is a social meeting place; it is basically a “men’s club.” Both the Day Center and holy tombs seem to fit the women’s religious mode better than the synagogue does. For example, sev-

eral women complained that at synagogue one has to pay for a permanent seat (whereas at the Day Center each woman can sit where she wants). At those holy tombs with a synagogue adjacent to the tomb, the women never enter the synagogue; they only congre-

gate around the tomb. At the synagogue women sit in the ladies’ gallery, which is entirely closed off from the men’s section. The women’s balcony is high above the men’s section and covered with a thick curtain. The women have a number of their own synagogue rituals of which the men are probably not even aware. On weekdays, for example, after the evening service, one woman passes around perfume to all of the other women. They then smell or anoint themselves with the per-

fume and say the blessing over pleasant smells. Other women distribute grapes or small candies so that the women will have more

opportunities to say blessings. The women usually have special shawls, sweaters, and kerchiefs for the synagogue. Lower arms and foreheads, parts of the body that do not need to be covered at other times, must be covered in synagogue. This has little to do with the men being distracted by the women’s sexuality—the men cannot

even see into the women’s section. Rather this is an important element in the relationship between the women and God.

A third series of women’s rituals at synagogue involves hand gestures, kissing, and bowing. Since very few of the women can read, most are hard of hearing, and only some understand Hebrew, it is clear that they do not attend synagogue in order to recite the formal, written prayer service in the same way in which the men do.2! On the other hand, the women do not conduct their own autonomous service. Instead, they participate in the formal service through a series of gestures. The most important of these involves standing up, bowing slightly, reaching forward and then motioning

with the hands back toward the body when the Torah is raised.

114 Women as Ritual Experts They will often pull back the curtain in front of the women’s section

at this time, so as to get a better view of the Torah. The women make a special effort to attend synagogue on Mondays and Thursdays when the Torah is read. During the recitation of certain parts of the prayer service (specifically the Amida and Kaddish), the women eagerly say “Amen” and roll their hands, kiss their fingers, and then touch their foreheads with their fingertips. Another common ritual is that of kissing the prayerbook as they leave the synagogue. They do not actually read the prayerbook during the service.

The women attend synagogue for a number of reasons: to get out

of the house and meet friends of their own ethnic groups, to participate in (albeit passively) kiddush and havdalah—trituals that their husbands used to perform for them at home, to make personal

petitions to God in a place that is holy and so increase the likelihood of the petition’s being granted, and to receive merit from performing a mitzvah. In the words of one woman, it does not bother her that she cannot hear the prayer service because “God knows if you have the desire to go to synagogue, so that even if you cannot hear, you get the zechut.”

Pilgrimage The third type of holy space frequented by the women is holy tombs and cemeteries. Other anthropologists (especially Victor Turner and Edith Turner) have extensively analyzed pilgrimage, and so I have

chosen to focus here on a description of an actual ziara [visit, in Arabic] on which I accompanied the women. Most of the women believe that pilgrimage is the preferred, that is, the most efficacious, religious ritual.

The planned route for this ziara includes visits to the tombs of Rabbi Meir baal HaNess (Rabbi Meir the Miracle Worker) and Maimonides (in Tiberias), the tomb of Rabbi Akiva (in Safed), and the tomb of Shimon bar Yochai (in Meron). These are all popular tombs and are visited by most pilgrims in the north of Israel. The women gather outside of the Day Center at 7:00 a.m. Despite the early hour, all arrive on time. They are excited, clutching large bags of food, and wish each other “ziara mavule,” that God should

The Liberation of Widowhood 115 | grant all that they ask. As they stand chatting quietly in small groups, several of the women pass around herbs for the other women to bless. When the bus comes, many board still clutching a few leaves. They wear nicer dresses than usual and all wear sweaters and kerchiefs, including those who normally wear short sleeves and

no hair covering. They crowd around the bus door, excited and anxious to make sure that there is enough room and to get comfort-

able seats. At this point, everyone seems a bit tense, angry, and uncomfortable, probably fairly common emotions when one is setting out on a long and difficult trip with the goal of asking God’s help for a variety of difficult and seemingly insoluble problems. The

bus soon stops to pick up a group of women from another day center in the neighborhood, and the two groups of women barely greet each other. The women are quiet, perhaps talking softly to their neighbors. When the tour leader, Abraham (the women describe his job as “to make us happy on the bus”) reads the prayer for safety on the road, those few women who are not wearing kerchiefs

cover their heads with handkerchiefs. All fervently say “Amen” when he is finished. Soon the bus stops for breakfast and for the first time I see the enormous quantities of food and beverage that the women brought with them for this one day trip. Each is carrying enough food for an entire family, and they proudly offer each other tastes of various homemade breads and cakes. After breakfast the atmosphere loosens up a bit, and Abraham encourages the women to sing a mixture of Biblical verses, patriotic-pioneer songs, and popular, modern songs. I ask one woman if she knows exactly where we are going today.

She answers that we are “going to Meir, Akiva, and Meron,” but she does not remember where else. She has been to all of the tombs

many times, as “it is a mitzvah to go.” Walter Zenner reported a similar conversation with a woman at the Tomb of Benjamin the Righteous. He had accompanied several busloads of Middle Eastern Jews on a pilgrimage to this tomb. Upon arriving, one woman asked him, “Who is buried here?” When he answered that he did not know, she said, “No matter; it’s a saint of Israel” and kissed the tomb and began to pray.22 The women of the Day Center do not usually know the biographies of the saints whom they visit. One informant told me that Rabbi Meir was a “wise man and that he did a lot.” This was the extent of her knowledge.

116 Women as Ritual Experts The tombs that the women will visit today are not specialized for

functions such as fertility. They are popular, general tombs, and one can request anything that one needs. The women go to the tombs to request “miracles and wonders,” and they take the whole ziara very seriously. But it is also fun, a break in the routine of their lives, and they thoroughly enjoy the outing. Most of the women can only visit tombs together with the Day Center because they are too old and sick to manage the trip alone. Some have been going with the Day Center for fifteen years, and all seem pleased with the arrangements. They clearly like going as a group. At each holy site the women go into the building housing the tomb, kiss any mezuzot along the way, kiss the tomb or the grating around the tomb, whisper a short prayer, put money in the collection boxes stationed around the tomb, and finally light candles that they have brought for this purpose. At Maimonides’s Tornb there are several basins for lighting candles, and the women light at each one. They also put money into each collection box. At the tomb of Rabbi Meir Baal HaNess one woman serves pieces of a cake that she had brought with her from Jerusalem. On the bus she had been very anxious not to crush the cake, and now at the tomb she is proud as she passes it out. Cake is often brought as part of a vow that was made during a previous trip—if one’s petition will be granted she will bring a simha [happy celebration] for everyone at the tomb. The fact that the women put money into each one of the boxes deserves comment. It is possible that since they cannot read, they do not realize that all of the boxes are for the same purpose—for

the upkeep of the tomb. But when the multiple donations are considered together with their lighting candles in each basin, it seems more likely that the women perceive giving money and lighting candles as such essential parts of the transaction between God, the saint, and themselves, that they are careful to cover all

bases. Giving money is both a mitzvah [charity] and a way of soliciting the saint’s aid. The reasoning seems to be that once they have given money to the saint, he has an obligation to help them and their families. Lighting candles is both a gift, like the money,

and a reminder left behind at the tomb in case God or the saint forgets who was there and what she requested.

The Liberation of Widowhood 117 Most of the rituals at the tombs are tactile. The women kiss and caress the tomb and everything surrounding the tombs. They are angered and offended by the metal fences erected by the Ministry of Religion around the tombstones. These pilgrims come to tombs in order to be in close physical contact with the saint, not to admire from a distance the curtain covering the tomb. Kissing is a form of devotion that is possible for all women, including those who are

illiterate and ignorant of formal prayers. Kissing should be regarded as both a way for women to express their feelings of nearness to the saint and as a way of causing the saint’s power to “rub

off” on the pilgrim. . Many of the women cry while leaning against the tombs. One could even say the crying is ritualistic—a woman who visits a holy tomb is supposed to cry. In a religious system that excludes women from more formal worship, crying may be the one form of prayer open to them. It is a popular Jewish saying that there are several gates leading to God and of these, “the gate of tears never locks.” 23 By crying, one is guaranteed to receive an answer to one’s prayers.”4

Furthermore, most of the women do have a lot to cry about, and having a socially approved place in which to sob can be a great

emotional release. :

Standing next to the tombs, the women are totally absorbed in their rituals of praying and lighting candles. Many wipe a tear as they move away from the tomb. But as soon as they leave the area immediately around the tomb, they chatter with each other, eat snacks, throw their garbage on the ground, and distance themselves from the sacred space. The tombs visited by the women of the Day Center are not as female-controlled as are sanctuaries in societies in which the religious establishment is less involved in women’s lives. At the Israeli shrines there is all-too-obvious evidence of the fact that ultimately the shrines are controlled by the [male] Ministry of Religion. Many of the shrines are closed at night, so that, unlike in the Old Country or even the old days in Israel, the women cannot choose to stay at the tomb for several days. At almost all of the tombs there are male guards and numerous signs telling the women where to stand, how to act, what is forbidden, when to leave. Furthermore, the traditional women’s custom of lighting candles is now prohibited at

118 Women as Ritual Experts certain shrines. At Meron and at Rachel’s Tomb, groups of men praying the formal prayer service frequently tell the women to stop making so much noise. And finally, these women usually do not share their problems with each other; the actual praying is an individual experience. Unlike, for example, Muslim women in Morocco, these Jewish women whisper their petitions. (When they are asked for what they prayed most say that they requested health, healing for all of Israel, peace, and safety for the soldiers.) While the tombs are undoubtedly female sacred space, there does not seem to be the strong sense of the “female collective endeavor” that writers have noticed at shrines in other countries.?5 Although men also visit holy tombs (especially Rabbi Meir baal HaNess), they usually do not stand next to the tomb itself. Only women make use of the benches and chairs that are placed very near the tombs. The men either stand at a distance, or, in the case of Rabbi Meir’s tomb, they congregate at a synagogue nearby. At

Meron the men stand together in front of an ark and pray the formal prayer service for the appropriate time of day, while the women press up as close to the tomb as they can get. The men effectively disassociate themselves from the women by saying “shhh” to the women who remain near the tomb socializing and blessing each other. Covering Meir’s tomb is a large, heavy curtain, and the women stand in line to be able to walk between the curtain and the tomb and so make their petitions and prayers directly against the tomb itself. When one of the men from our group stood by mistake on the women’s line a number of other men came over to reprimand him. The women bless each other as they leave each tomb, and as the day goes on the number of blessings and the enthusiasm with which

they are said increases. It is as if the women are becoming better and better conduits for God’s blessing, so it becomes more important to bless as many friends as possible with as many blessings as possible. At the tomb of Rabbi Shimon, several women leave bottles of oil

next to the grave and take with them small amounts of oil that had been placed near the grave by previous pilgrims. According to one informant, “You must believe for it [the oil] to work [as a charm]. Some just come and some come and believe.” Next to the bottles of oil and the unlit candles, one can see many yamulkes (especially

The Liberation of Widowhood 119 small child-sized ones) and kerchiefs. These were apparently thrown by women who had: come earlier requesting miracles for their children or themselves. They leave behind something of theirs

that will remain in contact with the holy tomb even after they themselves must leave. Some of the women tie little pieces of cloth

onto the grating that surrounds the tomb. Of the tombs that they visited, most of the women seem to prefer that of Rabbi Meir baal HaNess. One woman says that some tombs have more merit than others—these are the tombs of someone who performed wonders and miracles, someone like Rabbi Meir baal HaNess. She says that Rabbi Meir is buried standing up so that he can pray for us. The women tell me that my child will be born with a pure soul because he saw Rabbi Meir and Rabbi Shimon. Since few of the women remember the biographies of any of the saints, the reason for their preferences must be sought elsewhere. Hazarding a guess, I would suspect that Rabbi Meir’s title of Miracle Worker [baal HaNess] makes him particularly attractive.?6 At noon the bus takes the women to a lovely picnic ground for lunch. They spread out enormous quantities of food, which they share with each other and force on me. The most popular dish is stuffed grape leaves, and almost every woman has brought with her a plastic container filled with twenty or so leaves. At the picnic site, the women find a plaque commemorating soldiers who had died defending Safed. Several women light candles in front of the plaque.

When questioned about how often she comes to the tombs, one

woman thought that I wanted to know how often she goes on vacation and proceeded to tell me about trips she has made to Tiberias. On the bus, when Abraham leads them in song, there is no preference for religious songs. As they travel, he points out historical sites of interest just as any tour guide would, and the women see nothing incongruous in this.2”7 The conversation on the bus on the

way home is almost all profane. Few women talk about their experiences at the tombs. Instead, they sing, gossip, and generally have a good time. As the day goes on, more women begin talking to and sitting with other than their closest friends, although the two day centers continue to stay separate. As the bus pulls into Jerusalem at 8:00 in the evening, the women are tired but satisfied. They feel that they have successfully completed an important job; that they and their families will be safe until their next pilgrimage.

120 Women as Ritual Experts The women of the Day Center also visit shrines closer to Jerusalem; for example, the Western Wall, Rachel’s Tomb, and the Cave

of the Matriarchs and Patriarchs. While there are some minor variations, usually caused by the physical layout of the shrine, the

rituals are similar at all of the tombs. At the Western Wall, the women might put little notes into the crevices between the stones (these notes are written for them by family members), and at Rachel’s Tomb, they sometimes “measure” the tomb with red string that is then worn as acharm.28 What is obvious at all of the tombs is the profusion of inexpensive gifts and charms brought by pilgrims.

According to Victor Turner and Edith Turner, “one mark of a pilgrimage’s decline may be an increase in externally imposed ceremonial symbols, while a major symptom of normal growth may be

the proliferation of devotional symbols donated by ordinary pilgrims.”29

Going on ziara fills the pilgrims with holiness and with a heightened spirituality that is manifested by their blessing each other. But more important, visiting tombs gives the women the merit [zechut] or right to ask the saints to intercede on behalf of their families. The

ritual of ziara, like most other rituals performed by the elderly women, is directed toward helping their loved ones. The ritual expertise displayed by the elderly women has developed gradually throughout their lives; in old age it reaches fruition. In old age the locus of their religious world has changed to the public sphere, but the focus has remained the personal. The women carry the domestic, female world with them into the public arena. In a sense, they domesticate the public realm.

Ritual Expertise in the Modern World

A number of studies have noted the effects of modernization upon

the lives of women.! As the traditional extended family disintegrates and wage-labor replaces reciprocity, women often lose the power that derived from their traditional social and economic expertise and from their kin- and village-based support networks. In this chapter I ask how modernization affects women’s religious lives. This question has received little attention in studies of religious change, which have looked almost exclusively at men’s experiences.2 At the time of my fieldwork, the female-oriented religious traditions of the Day Center women were deeply threatened both

by modern secular culture and by the masculine, Ashkenazi religious establishment in Israel. Despite the rather vulnerable status of women’s religion, the Day Center women felt that modern Israel provided them with new and meaningful opportunities for religious expression. Their interest in novel religious activities, however, was tempered by their awareness of the decline of other of their rituals.

New Opportunities Modernization often results in an increase of religious choices for women. 121

122 Women as Ritual Experts The Traditional Male Religion In the wake of modernization, women sometimes find new opportu-

nities to participate in what were traditionally men’s rituals. The Middle Eastern women have recently begun attending synagogue and Judaica lessons—two activities that were formerly for men only. They feel that because of their new Jewish knowledge they are now better Jews, better able to carry out God’s will, and better able

to accumulate merit [zechut] on their own behalf and on behalf of their families. Their daughters have all attended school and learned how to read, and the women are proud that their daughters have access to literacy, which was once a male prerogative. In addition, there are now more and more women like Rabbanit Zohar, who have become involved in public teaching that centers around writ-

ten texts. This is an important innovation for Middle Eastern Jewish women; in the Old Country only men studied from books. The roles that were available in the Old Country for female religious leaders did not necessitate literacy, wide knowledge of Jewish law and history, or extensive intervillage connections (see below). These innovations in the religious lives of the Middle Eastern women take on greater significance when examined in light of the experiences of women of other, diverse cultures. Marla Powers has

found Oglala women on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota participating in rituals that had once been restricted to males: The Sun Dance, the Vision Quest, and the Sweat Lodge have opened to women.3 Among the Aowin people of southwest Ghana,

women now serve as head mediums, a role that traditionally belonged to men. And in modern India, Hindu women “who stay at home often perform the morning worship [puja] to the deity in the

home shrine, especially in the urban areas, for the hours of the | modern work day do not permit men time for traditional ritualism.” The Traditional Female Religion The traditional female religious sphere may sometimes acquire new significance or prestige as women come to be seen as guardians of the old ways, as experts in the traditional religion. In a number of interviews, children of the women I studied made comments such

Ritual Expertise in the Modern World 123 as, “My mother is closer to God than I am.” “The way my mother does it [religion] is better, but I myself am not strong enough to do it like she does.” Even the “modern” children and grandchildren who consider much of the old women’s religion to be “superstition” acknowledge the spiritual potency of their ancestresses and turn to them for information concerning the old ways (especially during life

crises). Many of the children and grandchildren do not know exactly how the old women perform the rituals. The women pray in Arabic, Kurdish, and other languages (which the younger generation does not know), and the youngsters generally do not accom-

pany the old women to the holy tombs. The old women’s sacred knowledge has come to be surrounded by an aura of mystery that was not connected to the rituals in the Old Country. Even the old women’s cooking has taken on a new mystique: they proudly describe their traditional foods as needing special knowledge to prepare, “not just anyone can do it.”6 In a variety of contexts and working on almost every continent, scholars have discovered the critical role of women in preserving the

old ways. Even more interesting are the studies describing situations, remarkably similar to that of the Middle Eastern women, in which women’s traditional rituals have increased in prestige. Immigrant Jewish women in England at the beginning of the century did not drastically modify their religious practices, yet “the significance of these activities ... changed. ... Formerly regarded as peripheral, they now developed as key components in the transmission of a sense of Jewish identity and attachment.”? And in modern Tur-

key, the traditional ritual celebrating the birth of the Prophet Muhammed has changed significantly for men, while “the women seem to have become the repositories of spiritual values to which

both women and men subscribe but which, paradoxically, only women can experience with performative immediacy because of their inferior status vis-a-vis past and present religious establishments.”

New Frameworks The women of this study, by moving to Israel, have come into contact with a cultural system that is in many ways alien to both the

traditional male and the traditional female religious ways. These

124 Women as Ritual Experts women sometimes adopt modern rituals, subtly transforming them

to make the new rituals consistent with the traditional female domain. For example, their Tu b’Shavat ritual combines new sym-

bols and old motivations (see Chapter 1). When the Day Center women planted trees, they created a new ritual, drawing upon a traditional conception of the relationship between God and humans and modern conceptions of forest management and civic duty.’

One of the most important new religious arenas in which the women act is that of the Israeli Defense Forces. The women of the Day Center expand their notion of family to include every soldier serving in the Israeli Army. The first step in this expanded notion of spiritual responsibility is the feeling that they must take extra care of children and grandchildren who are soldiers. For example, one

woman reprimanded her friend for wearing black and dark blue clothing. She warned her that black and dark blue are the colors of mourning, and since her friend has two grandsons in the army, she must not endanger them by wearing these colors. The most typical prayerful petitions that the women make are that “the Messiah should come and that everything should be good for the children and especially for the soldiers and the army,” or that “there should be health for all of Israel, there should be peace, all of the soldiers should return in peace, all Israel should return in tshuva [become religious].” During a conversation about Rabbanit Zohara in which she was

criticized for collecting money from the poor women at the Day Center, Simha said, “She [Rabbanit Zohara] just needs to say the word ‘soldiers’ and they all give money.” According to one woman, “Every soldier is like my eye, even the Druse soldiers.”!® Compar-

ing someone to one’s eye is a fairly common expression used to indicate a close relationship. However, most of these women are oblivious to the world of politics and few have ever even seen a Druse. What this woman meant is that her self-image is as spiritual mother or guardian of the Israeli Defense Forces, and that includes everyone, even the most biologically unrelated, who serves in the army. The Day Center rabbi is well aware of the women’s feeling on this

matter, and when he ends his lesson with a blessing he frequently includes a blessing for the soldiers. For example, he may ask for “salvation, rebuilding the Temple, and God’s protection for the

Ritual Expertise in the Modern World 125 soldiers who are defending us.” Falhibe tells how on Memorial Day “of course I light candles for the soldiers.” The women place living soldiers into the same category as their children, and dead soldiers into the category of saints.

Just as the women claim an interdependent relationship with their dead ancestors—they guard the ancestors and the ancestors help them—they see the relationship with the soldiers as being reciprocal. As the rabbi expressed this idea, observing holidays correctly according to Jewish law protects our soldiers on the borders, and the soldiers allow us to be good Jews. In other words, by behaving in accordance with Jewish law, we persuade God to protect our soldiers. And the soldiers, by ensuring the existence of the Jewish state, allow us to be practicing, observant Jews. The women believe that it is their duty to care for the army, and like their responsibility for fertility, this is carried out both on the practical and the spiritual plane. So, for example, when the rabbi

mentions that the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Hebron was not in Jewish hands until the army liberated it, all of the women murmured, “God should protect them, they should be safe”

and “Amen.” On the other hand, a “big mitzvah,” according to Shula, is to go to an army base and pack weapons for the soldiers. Most if not all of the women are involved in some type of charitable

activity on behalf of the soldiers. This may be buying numerous

lottery tickets from the Committee for the Aid of Soldiers or frequent days spent at army bases sorting uniforms or doing whatever other jobs the army asks of them. When the women volunteer to work at the army base, they genuinely want to contribute to the state of Israel, but their actual description of their activity is “helping the soldiers, all of whom are like my own children.” The women feel great satisfaction in ritually caring for the soldiers: this is a communal activity in which all can participate, and it is one that the women believe is of the utmost importance for the

survival of the Jewish people and state. If modern Zionism can tentatively be described as a “new religion,” the women have adopted it most wholeheartedly. In other societies, women have joined religions that are entirely foreign to their traditional cultures. Yung-Chung Kim, looking at the spread of both Catholic and Protestant Christianity in Korea, postulates that women especially were drawn to Christianity be-

126 Women as Ritual Experts cause it helped break down class and gender barriers, encouraged social innovations, allowed women to participate in religious ritual, provided women with opportunities for education, condemned the double standard of sexual morality, and provided a vision of an

afterlife that was meaningful to women.!! New local or native religious structures that offer women increased opportunities may be another result of modernization. In Northern Sudan, for example, the zaar [spirit] cult is an urban phenomenon, a mechanism for helping village women adjust to life in the city by offering them

opportunities to build social networks with other women, to be cured of a wide range of ailments, and to actively participate in an exciting religious ritual. !2

Female Solidarity Most studies that mention women’s religion in developing societies stress that when the social support networks of neighbors and kin

available to women in traditional rural societies break down, women may join cults or churches as a means of creating new relationships. Indeed, Erika Bourguignon suggest that the “appeal of novel religious groups may lie in the opportunity they offer for the creation of private networks of power, influence and authority in a nondomestic setting.” !3

My fieldwork among the Middle Eastern women in Jerusalem certainly bears out the connnection between religious involvement and social networks. These women come together in the context of a Senior Citizens’ Day Center. They are of diverse ethnic groups, and most had been housewives for many years with few opportunities to meet women other than relatives and nearby neighbors. In recent years many of their close friends have died, and their neighborhood has become partially gentrified. The Day Center provides them with an opportunity to widen their circle of female friends. Many of the women avow that they come to the Center in order to get out of the house, in order not to be alone, “because I have to do something and not sit at home alone all day.” On the other hand, the members of the Day Center can choose their own activities within a budget determined by the Municipality of Jerusalem, and almost all of the activities they select are religious

in nature: Judaica lessons, pilgrimage to holy tombs, and holiday

Ritual Expertise in the Modern World 127 celebrations. The women who attend this particular Day Center are

actively seeking communal religious involvement in a nontraditional but all-female context. Whatever intention they may verbalize, the actual function of their Day Center involvement is a dramatic expansion of their religious world. These elderly women have created a new type of female solidarity, but they have created it in order to pursue more active religious lives; other benefits that they receive as a result of their Center membership are byproducts. The new network that the women have created by joining the Center cannot be understood as a material mutual-aid society. It seems to me necessary reductionism to suppose that women become involved in religious organizations because of economic or social needs. My conversations with the Middle Eastern women indicate that they join the Day Center because they are interested in expanding their religious opportunities—they specifically want the Day Center to organize pilgrimages to holy tombs—they do not request outings to public swimming pools or museums. While not denying that there are social and sometimes economic benefits to new female religious networks, it is neither necessary nor productive to explain women’s religiosity as a fallout of economic, social, or psychological factors.

Ritual Specialists in the Old Country Scattered throughout a very varied literature are hints of the existence of religious leadership roles that were available to women in the Old Country. Few of these options continue to exist today. In the following paragraphs, I shall review some of these roles. This review will be brief both because the primary aim of this book is to study the religious lives of the women today (not to reconstruct life in the Old Country) and because of the shocking paucity of infor-

mation concerning the religious lives of Jewish women in past centuries. Most of the information concerns Kurdish Jews because

the majority of the women at the Day Center are Kurdish and because the ethnographic record of women’s religious lives in Kur-

distan is somewhat richer than for other parts of Asia. Having listened to the Day Center women reminiscing about Kurdistan, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and North Africa, I would surmise that

128 Women as Ritual Experts similar roles for exceptional women existed throughout much of the Jewish diaspora. One religious function that was available to women in the past was

to be an expert in henna (the red dye that is painted on the body for luck at a number of ritual occasions). For example, the bride in Kurdistan would attend a women’s henna party before the wedding,

and at this party the women would sing traditional songs and perform certain rituals. This ceremony has almost completely died out in modern Israel. While today there still may be a henna party, it will probably not be sexually segregated, secular songs will be sung, and modern clothes will be worn. In the past this ceremony included a woman who was a ritual specialist, an expert in henna and knowledgeable about the correct songs and dances for a henna party. That role no longer exists. According to Donna Shai, in Israel there are many fewer opportunities for storytelling than there had been in Kurdistan. In Kurdistan, folksingers were specialists who were invited to perform on

| family and ritual occasions (such as weddings and funerals).!4 Yona Sabar has discovered that women in Kurdistan had their own somewhat independent oral traditions. Their folklore contained only “echoes of the barest outlines of the Aggadic themes” [traditional Jewish stories].!5 The role of female expert storyteller of women’s stories is another role that is no longer a viable option for exceptional women. Rabbanit Zohara, who tells the women at least one story each week, is literate and repeats stories that she takes from sources written by men, not from the traditional female repertoire. Yona Sabar describes the women’s tradition of chanting dirges on the evening of the Ninth of Ab.!® After the evening meal, several

women would gather on a roof and sit in a circle around one woman who knew the dirge particularly well. She would recite it very movingly, and the women would cry and sigh. These dirges were passed down orally from mother to daughter and were never put in writing. One of the dirges entitled “Le/-Huz” is a mixture of Kurdish and ancient Jewish legends. Briefly, it is the history of the destruction of the Temple and the Exile personified into the stories

of a young man and two young women. One of the women, by drowning in the ritual bath, escapes being raped by seven infidel

Ritual Expertise in the Modern World 129 men. The other woman is killed by her father-in-law as a sacrifice

imposed by divine edict in order to end a drought and save the entire family. Today in Israel, while some old women may still know this dirge, on the Ninth of Ab the women of the Day Center attend synagogue and sit passively in the women’s section, listening

to the men’s prayers and rituals. The Day Center women have accepted the standards of contemporary society as a basis of selfevaluation for what they should be doing. Instead of listening to the traditional dirges, songs, and stories that they understand and that speak to their own, female experience, they sit in synagogue listen-

ing to what is for them an inaudible, incomprehensible, maleoriented service. Leading the women’s dirges on the Ninth of Ab is one more traditional female role that no longer exists. Similarly, as Nina Katz has ably demonstrated, men and women in Yemen had different musical traditions. Women, excluded from the synagogue, did not even hear men’s religious rituals and music. Instead, the women created their own “second world” of fantasy, storytelling, and singing. Men’s music was developmental, antiphonal, without instrumental accompaniment, without a definite rhythm,

based on fixed texts, religious, and sung in Hebrew or Aramaic. Women’s music was repetitious, never truly antiphonal, rhythmic, usually secular, and sung in Arabic with improvised texts.!7 We can but surmise that there were certain women who were more expert at creating and remembering women’s songs.

Another female religious role recorded by Brauer was that of mourner or lamenter. According to Brauer there were professional women mourners who were experts at crying and who had a reper-

toire of songs that made others cry.!8 The role of female professional mourner hardly exists today in modern Israel. In the Old Country, a particularly pious woman could wash female corpses in preparation for burial and sew the shrouds for either female or both male and female corpses.!9 While the task of washing female corpses of course still exists, there are now so many fewer folk rites surrounding death and burial that this job has declined both in prestige and in the amount of knowledge necessary for performing it correctly. Women in Kurdistan wore many amulets, especially during pregnancy and childbirth.2° Many of these amulets were written by

130 Women as Ritual Experts rabbis, but others were geometric shapes embroidered on clothing. Since women did the embroidery, it is reasonable to assume that there were some women who were especially knowledgeable about amulet embroidery and who aided and instructed other women in this ritual.2! Embroidering amulets no longer exists as a women’s

ritual activity among the Day Center women. The most popular amulets today are printed ones, and the only handwork that the women of the Day Center do is the knitting and crocheting that they have recently been taught by an Ashkenazi teacher at the Day Center.

In Debbi Friedhaber’s excellent book about dance customs of Kurdish Jews, she mentions several occasions at which the women would get together and dance. These included the Sabbath before a wedding, Passover, childbirth and first pregnancy, Shavuot, and the first Sabbath in the month of Adar.22 Again, it is reasonable to assume that there were certain women who were more proficient at dancing and playing the tambourine, women who knew more dances and could teach them to others. Women’s autonomous dancing no longer exists in modern Israel. At weddings today, all except the oldest women dance in a style that is identical to that of the men. Women in the Old Country were also responsible for a variety of

ceremonies designed to protect their families and communities from evil spirits. For example, after a new house was built, the women would pour a bit of water and wave a cloth over each hand

and say [in Kurdish], “Get out, go from here devils. Enter good spirits. You should have sons and daughters, grooms and brides.” 23

When a woman would become pregnant for the first time, other women would teach her about pregnancy. These teachings included information about properly disposing of fingernail pairings so as to avoid miscarriage and other fertility advice.24 Many charms existed

for easy childbirth. Once again, because of the paucity of evidence, | we can only assume that there were certain women who knew more

charms than other women, women who were consulted by other women for assistance in charms to keep away evil spirits and to have easier pregnancies and childbirths. From the limited evidence available it seems that the role of midwife was an important option for women in the Old Country who sought exceptional careers. According to Brauer, the midwife

Ritual Expertise in the Modern World 131 would accompany the new mother to the menstrual house. This hut, built outside of the village, was always well populated. The new mother would stay there until the end of the period of impurity.?>

We can only speculate about the women’s knowledge that was passed on in the menstrual hut. The midwife was also responsible for protecting the new mother and baby from Lilith and other evil spirits. For example, the midwife would hit the new mother three times and say (in Kurdish), “Get out Lilith!”26 The midwife was an expert in both the physiological aspects of childbirth and the religious ones. In one of the very few studies ever done on the role of midwife in a premodern society, Lois and Benjamin Paul looked at

the midwife as sacred specialist in a Guatemalan village. They found that the midwives had much in common with shamans— evidence of divine election and ecstatic journeys. The midwives were well respected and the role highly professionalized.2” The traditional role of midwife is one that no longer exists in modern society. Well-trained nurses who are called midwives work in ob-

stetrics’ wards of hospitals, but they have neither the prolonged personal contact with the women and their families nor the expertise in the spiritual realm that constituted the role of midwife in small, premodern villages.

In Kurdistan, women would immerse themselves in the river following their period of menstrual impurity. Two other women would accompany the menstruant to the river, help her immerse, and guard her on the way home. Again, we can only speculate as to

what special ceremonies, songs, laws, and customs the women needed to know in order to do this job properly. Today in Israel, there are still women who work at the mikvah [ritual bath], super-

vising the women who come to dip. However, these women are closely supervised by the (male) rabbinate. At an interview with the

woman in charge of the mikvah in the neighborhood adjacent to the Day Center, I was told that the mikvah attendants have weekly meetings with the rabbis in which they are repeatedly told not to decide anything by themselves. Rather, any time the slightest question arises, they are instructed to call the rabbi. Today, the attendant’s job is limited to checking the women to make sure that they have prepared properly for the immersion and to watch and make sure that the woman immerses all of her body in the ritual bath.

132 Women as Ritual Experts Vulnerability of Women’s Religion Modernization has a paradoxical effect upon women’s religious lives, sometimes bringing in its wake a dramatic widening of religious Opportunities and sometimes resulting in institutionalized attacks upon women’s rituals, “normativization” of male religious structures, and the denigration of women’s health and reproductive expertise. As Kurdish and other Middle Eastern women have come to Israel and increased their knowledge of normative Jewish rituals, there has been a concurrent decrease in women’s traditions. Brauer’s book abounds with examples of women’s religious and nonreligious rituals in Kurdistan. Most numerous are the wedding and childbirth rituals. But equally interesting are women’s holidays such

as Shabbat Banot [Girls’ Sabbath] on the first Sabbath in the month of Adar (approximately March). On this day the girls would

organize into groups, each with a leader, and collect wood, sing ritual songs, and act rowdy. They used the wood to heat bath water, and all the girls would bathe. The wood was also used for an oven in which they made special cakes called bride cakes. Two weeks later,

on Purim night, the girls would again meet and bathe in water heated from the wood that they had previously collected. The bathing was supposed to make them beautiful like Queen Esther. Girls and their mothers would make henna and the mothers would paint all the girls, wash them, sing to them as to a bride, and throw roses and nuts at them. This ritual complex is one of many that has totally disappeared. The traditional female-oriented religion of the Middle Eastern women has suffered a number of direct and indirect attacks at the hands of modern, male-oriented society. The most striking example concerns holy tombs. Two of the most widespread and important rituals that women perform at tombs (men generally do not perform these rituals) are lighting candles on behalf of needy family

members and leaving the candles to burn next to the tomb, and kissing and touching the tomb in order to establish close contact with the holy person. At a number of tombs in Israel, the Ministry of Religion has prohibited the lighting of candles, ostensibly because of fire hazard (although most of the tombs are in solid stone buildings) and asked

the male guards at the tombs to enforce this new prohibition. In

Ritual Expertise in the Modern World 133 addition, at one very sacred shrine (the tombs of Shimon Bar Yochai and his son Elazar in Meron) a high metal fence has been erected around the tombs. This fence prevents pilgrims (mostly women) from touching the tomb or from lighting candles next to

the tomb. For women, whose traditional religion was intensely relationship-oriented both in terms of attempts to establish intimacy with deceased ancestors and in terms of rituals aimed at preserving the well-being of beloved descendants, prohibiting candle lighting and building fences around tombs must be seen as a serious affront. Cross-culturally, this is not an isolated case.28 A common effect of modernization is to define the male sphere as normative for the entire society. This may help explain why so many Middle Eastern women have begun participating in traditional male rituals—once the male realm is defined as normative, women may choose or be forced to abandon their traditional female practices in order to take part in the mainstream religion. In the beginning of this chapter, whenever I pointed to widening religious opportunities for women, I in fact looked at quantity—

women have more niches in the multi-layered modern religious world. However, this discussion has not adequately addressed the status and power of those niches. While it seems that with moderni-

zation women may increase their ritual repertoire, it is not clear that a quantitative increase always translates into more power (spiritual or profane) or more success at thinking about and working out ultimate concerns. In fact, a frequent effect of modernization is to change the meaning of women’s rituals, from acts that are

necessary for the well-being of the entire community to acts that affect only the individual women themselves. Modernization may mean that women’s traditional rituals are now evaluated in light of “modern” knowledge, and modern “wisdom” often labels women’s religion as irrational superstition—or even witchcraft. Rabbis bombard the Middle Eastern women of Jerusalem with admonishments to ask a [male] rabbi or [male] scholar whenever they have questions about Jewish ritual observances. These women were not accustomed to turning to a male authority in order to properly conduct their religious lives. In the Old Country men and women did not participate jointly in most religious rituals, and women were usually in charge of female matters such as kashrut

134 Women as Ritual Experts [food taboos], menstrual taboos, and women’s mourning rituals. In modern society, much of this has been taken out of female hands. Rituals to avert the evil eye, many of which were female rituals in the Old Country, are often no longer perceived as necessary for the well-being of the community. Young couples getting married today may permit their grandmothers to smear henna on their hands (a traditional fertility ritual), they may even enjoy the ritual as a way of strengthening ethnic identity, but this smearing is no longer seen as an absolute prerequisite for the future fertility of the couple and

the well-being of the community. In the Old Country, the line between official required-by-Jewish-law observances, and folk, unofficial, not-required-by-Jewish-law rituals was all but nonexistent.

It is in modern Israel that many of the traditional female rituals have come to be seen as old wives’ tales. As modern technology penetrates the traditional female reproductive sphere—a sphere that was both physical and spiritual--women

may lose important specialist functions. Not only midwives, but fertility, infertility, and child health experts become replaced by modern medical personnel, and women’s traditional knowledge becomes denigrated. The medicalization and resultant despiritualization of childbirth and fertility—relating to birth as a biotechnical rather than a magical-spiritual event—has, in many cases, undermined one of the most important treasuries of female religious power.

According to anthropologist Clifford Geertz, through ritual is generated the belief that religious conceptions are true and religious directives, sound.?? For the women of this study, coming to Israel [aliya] resulted in both a sociological and a theological reorganiza-

tion of tradition. In the face of their new, halachic education, the

women are no longer absolutely convinced (nor interested in strengthening the belief) that their traditional religious conceptions

are sound or their rituals efficacious. In addition, the increased mingling of the sexes in modern Israel has led to the disintegration of autonomous women’s world views.

Innovation and Tenacity A new ritual created by the Day Center women (and other women similar to them) is that of throwing unlit candles at tombs of saints.

Ritual Expertise in the Modern World 135 The impetus for this was the prohibition on lighting candles and the

metal bars put up around some of the tombs. At certain tombs the women continue to light candles despite the signs and the guards. But at other tombs, where there is absolutely no possibility of lighting candles or touching the tomb, the women have begun throwing unlit candles through the bars of the metal grating at the tomb itself. The aim of the ritual is the same: by donating something to [the tomb of] a saint, they earn the nght to request help from God. And by creating some kind of physical connection between themselves and the tomb, they strengthen the bond or relationship between living Jews (themselves) and righteous ancestors who will then be reminded to intercede with God on

behalf of the women and their families. In this ritual the women show great flexibility and innovation in dealing with new situations. Together with a deep concern for sacred tradition, the women are willing to develop new religious rituals that meet their current needs. This sort of “invented tradition” is a rather typical instance of people responding to a novel situation through creating a ritual that refers to old situations.° In one of the few studies investigating the religious lives of elderly

Jews, Barbara Myerhoff looked at a Jewish Senior Citizen’s Day Center in California. Writing about the ritual life of the center, she

found that the old people “revitalized selected features of their common history to meet their present needs, adding and amending it without concern for consistency, priority, or ‘authenticity.’”3! Myerhoff noted several instances of traditional rituals consciously

being changed in order to meet the current needs of the senior citizens. In particular, she described a new ritual called a ‘graduation-siyum’ that was held at the end of a course in Yiddish history. A siyum, or completion, is traditionally held when a group of men finish studying one volume of the Talmud. The ceremony at this graduation-siyum combined elements from an American gradua-

tion and a traditional Eastern European siyum. The graduationsiyum, like all rituals, had to be convincing and appear authentic. In Myerhoff’s estimation, this new ritual successfully linked two distinct realms of meaning and experience into a strong ritual drama. The new ritual transcended contradictions, fused disparate elements, glossed conflicts, and provided a sense of unity.32 In this ritual the senior citizens “exercised their basic human prerogative,

136 Women as Ritual Experts the right to indicate who they are to the world, to interpret themselves to themselves instead of allowing accident and history and reality to make that interpretation for them.”33 Ritual establishes continuity, both personal and collective, and continuity is an especially important concern for the elderly. The parallels between the graduation-siyum and the new rituals performed by the women of the Day Center are important. In both instances rituals have overcome disjunction; two realms of experience have been fused into a meaningful unity. The old people combined traditional elements with modern innovations in order to form new rituals that both allowed them to establish continuity between the past and the present and to publicly say who they are. For the women of the Day Center, this meant that they managed to join together elements of modern, Zionist ritual with traditional,

women’s petitions (in the case of the Tu b’Shvat ritual) or to overcome modern resistance to traditional women’s rituals by changing the outward form but not the inward intent of the ritual (in the case of throwing candles at tombs). These women, through their rituals, interpret themselves to the world, saying: We acknowledge that we live in modern society and respect its innovations, but we choose to interpret these new prohibitions and rituals in light of our traditional, female experience. The domestic nature of the religious experience of Middle Eastern women means that they are in charge of many of the religious symbols and rituals that reach people at the basic or gut level of emotion and childhood memories. In particular, the role of food in religious observance should not be underestimated. Many of the second and third generation secular Israelis whom I interviewed declared that the one type of ritual that they still find meaningful is the consumption of traditional foods; the aroma of nut cookies baking, the texture of Shavuot rice pudding, the taste of the Sabbath afternoon stew are not easily eradicated. And it is women who have the specialized expertise that the preparation of these foods demands. It may be relatively simple to convince someone that a different doctrine is “truer” or to force someone to accept a powerful ecclesiastical hierarchy. However, the myriad of rituals performed by women to protect their babies are often private, personal rituals, conducted outside of the formal, official religious structure and

Ritual Expertise in the Modern World 137 filled with strong emotive power. Most of the daughters and granddaughters of the Day Center women have rejected most formal and legal Jewish observances (for example, they drive on the Sabbath), yet they continue to place protective amulets beneath the mattresses

of their babies’ cribs. Women who may be willing to risk their | hypothetical happiness in the world to come would not think of taking a gamble concerning the well-being of their children in this world.

It seems likely that because women frequently stand on the fringes and sidelines of institutionalized religion, and because women often lack access to sacred texts, they can easily absorb new rituals and discard old rituals. The Day Center women, who cannot read, describe all religious rituals as “written in the Torah.” Because they in fact cannot know exactly what is written in the Torah, they

do not feel a need to consult rabbinical authorities before adding new rituals, such as tree planting, to their repertoire. A certain flexibility seems to be a common characteristic of female religiosity in patriarchal societies. For the women of Jerusalem, safeguarding the health and fertility of their descendants is a major religious concern. With the advent of western medicine, the women’s traditional herbal and ritual efforts on behalf of their offspring have become less valued., However, because the women’s traditional approach to health and fertility allowed for the use of very eclectic means, they have been able to reinterpret and refocus their ritual activity. Mothers and grandmothers are no longer the primary dispensers of medical care, and the old women profess that if one is sick, infertile, or about to give birth it is advisable to consult a western doctor. However, “none of it will help if God has decreed the opposite.” Instead of providing direct medical assistance, the elderly women now devote a great deal of time, energy, and expertise to influencing God to grant good decrees.

Conclusion: The Making of a Ritual Expert

“Rabbinic Judaism was produced within a patriarchal society by a

group of sages who imagined a man’s world, with men at its center.”! Within the context of normative Judaism, there seem to be few opportunities for women to develop ritual expertise. Yet, as we have seen, the women of this study are highly adroit performers of a wide range of religious rituals. We will now consider some of the factors that serve to encourage women, within patriarchal reltgious systems, to become ritual experts. The data described here indicate that women who control resources—knowledge, space, mobility, fertility—have greater oppor-

tunities for developing ritual expertise. The Jerusalem women describe a shift from relative ritual powerlessness when young, to intense ritual respect and involvement in old age and especially widowhood. Neither their personal beliefs nor the institutional framework within which they live have changed. What did change was their control over opportunities to act upon, to actualize, their religious beliefs. In old age they control their finances and time in a way that was impossible when younger. This new freedom allows

them to enlarge their ritual world to include holy tombs, synagogue, the Day Center, and the Israeli Defense Forces. Women acquire expertise in arenas that are important to them. The women of this study, like many women in many cultures, have a great deal invested in relationships with their families. Protecting 138

Conclusion 139 beloved family members is their ultimate secular and religious goal. Because the women have a clear agenda of priorities, they are able

to utilize the male-oriented religious system to meet their needs. The women domesticate religion, using, for example, the Torah service at synagogue as an opportunity for making personal petitions of God on behalf of their loved ones. A complementary strategy used by the women is to redefine female as normative. One of the clearest instances of this process is their claim

that the “greatest mitzvah” is the same as the “greatest mitzvah for women,” while male religiosity is fairly consistently described by the women as “other.” These women are systematically excluded from most sources of institutionalized power and prestige. They (and their foremothers) have developed an alternative scale of measuring value and worth: a good woman cares for family and neighbors, prepares traditional kosher foods, donates to charity, tends the tombs of kin and Saints.

The women described in this book emphasize aspects of Jewish religious culture that affirm women’s lives. For example, they interpret almost all of the Jewish holidays in terms of those elements at which they, as women, excel: from the female perspective, food preparation

defines the calendrical cycle. Nancy Falk has suggested that, “given no exposure to an alternative vision, women [in ritual] may simply rearticulate the values that lead to their own bondage.”* My work

suggests that when women are given a chance to speak for themselves (which is why fieldwork is an especially appropriate research method for studying women), we may find that women’s rituals articulate more than one value system. The Day Center women consistently

reinterpret aspects of mainstream Judaism that are either hurtful to women’s self-image or irrelevant to women’s life experiences. For example, modesty is seen as a matter concerning God rather than men, the essence of Jewish theology is understood to be that those who are on the bottom today may very well be on the top tomorrow, and observance of Jewish law ts an efficacious way to convince God to protect your family.

Diffuse and fully embedded within the profane world, the religious rituals of these women are often indistinguishable from the daily flow of their lives. They possess few specialized sacred objects

or instruments—candles and kitchen utensils suffice for most of their rituals. They believe that the perfectly religious woman is one

140 Women as Ritual Experts who devotes herself to maintaining good, moral relationships with neighbors and poor people. They see saints and prophets as belonging to their extended families. Once we begin looking for religion

within the profane world rather than outside of it, we begin to discover realms of religiosity that are not limited to those times, people, places, objects, and events that seem extraordinary; we begin to see religion as potentially interwoven with all other aspects of human existence. It does seem that in societies in which women are excluded from significant public or formal religious activities, they may become experts at sacralizing the everyday female sphere.

How does sexual integration/segregation affect women’s ritual participation? The ethnographic data recorded here presents no clear-cut answer. On the one hand, sexual segregation means that women are less assimilated into the dominant, male-oriented culture. On the other hand, the Day Center women appreciate their recently increased access to the male sphere of learning. Natalie Davis, in her study of the effect of the Protestant Reformation in France on the religious lives of women came to a parallel conclusion: Calvinism was assimilationist for women (women’s status was somewhat raised and women were related to more like men) and the

Catholic Counter-Reformation was pluralistic (men and women kept their distinct religious characteristics), yet neither eliminated the subject status of women.3

Sexual segregation is important, yet on its own it does not sufficiently explain why and when some women become ritual activists. Rather, there seem to be a constellation of relevant factors: control of resources (especially time and mobility), frequent opportunities for groups of women to gather and construct a shared world view, recognition of female ownership of certain parts of the cultural landscape (for example, the kitchen), and the ability to reinterpret or domesticate the great tradition. The meaning of patriarchy 1s that power is unevenly distributed between men and women. Because of women’s subordinate status, their religious world is particularly vulnerable. In modern Israel, this vulnerability is manifested through institutionalized attacks upon women’s traditional domain, in defining the male as normative and in the devaluation of certain areas of women’s expertise. At the same time, women’s religion demonstrates a remarkable tenac-

Conclusion 141 ity, which stems from its domesticity, its coherence, its personal structure and aims, and its flexibility. The elderly, Middle Eastern women of Jerusalem are part of a female-oriented tradition that, over the course of centuries, developed ways to sacralize and enrich the lives of women in patriarchal societies. As scholars learn to shift attention from what men and texts say about women to what women say about themselves, new conceptions of human religious experience begin to emerge.

Glossary of Hebrew Terms

aliya: coming from the diaspora to Israel; lit. going up bar-mitzvah: ceremonial coming of age for Jewish boys at age thirteen

| bracha: blessing (see Chapter 7) dati: religious (in modern Israeli usage: Orthodox) Gan Eden: Heaven hacham (pl. hachamim): wise man, scholar halacha (adj. halachic): Jewish law hametz: food that is not kosher for Passover havdalah: ritual at the end of the Sabbath and holidays haredi: ultra-Orthodox hiloni: secular kaddish: prayer said for the dead kashrut: the system of Jewish food laws kiddush: blessing recited over wine at Sabbath and holiday meals

kosher: foods that Jews are permitted to eat | maaseh (pl. maasiot): tale

masorati: traditional | matzah: unleavened bread eaten during the holiday of Passover mezuza (pl. mezuzot): amulet hung on doorways of Jewish houses (see Deuteronomy 6:9) mikvah: ritual bath Mishna: early compendium of Jewish law (second century B.C.E.second century C.E.)

mitzvah (pl. mitzvot): divine command, good deed 142

Glossary of Hebrew Terms 143 rabbanit: rabbi’s wife, learned woman seder: ritual meal commemorating the Exodus from Egypt eaten

on the first night(s) of Passover |

Sefer: lit. book, often used to mean Pentateuch segula: charm _ gukka: outdoor booth used during the holiday of Sukkot tallit: fringed prayer shawl worn by Jewish men Talmud: compendium of Jewish law and lore (second century B.C.E.-sixth century C.E.)

tefillin: phylacteries Torah: Pentateuch; often used to indicate all of Jewish law and holy books yeshiva: seminary

zaddik nistar: hidden saint zaddik: saint, righteous one zechut: merit (honor, reward, right, virtue) ziara: pilgrimage (in Arabic) Zohar: Jewish mystical text

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Notes

Introduction 1. Walter Zenner, Syrian Jewish Identification in Israel (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1965), p. 133. Discussing the intermingling of the various ethnic groups in Jerusalem, Zenner more than twenty years ago wrote that “while stereotypes persist, there is considerable mingling and a residue of common experience, particularly that of the war for indepen-

dence and the common background of the holy city.” Throughout this book, wherever it is relevant, I point out ethnic differences.

2. R. J. Z. Werblowsky, “Women... And Other. . . Beasts,” Numen 29 (July 1982), pp. 123-124.

3. Various renditions of deprivation theory remain among the most popular explanations for women’s religious involvement. These theories show that women (and other deprived groups) use religion as forms of protest. I believe that undue emphasis upon what women concretely “gain” through religion leads to oversimplified analyses of the actual content of women’s beliefs. The classic statement of deprivation theory is I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1971). 4. See Robert Redfield, Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago: Univer-

sity of Chicago Press, 1956), for the classic description of the “great tradition” and the “little tradition.” Gananath Obeyesekere in “Theodicy, Sin and Salvation in a Sociology of Buddhism,” in E. R. Leach, Dialectic in Practical Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), argues that the two traditions are holistic and indistinguishable. Noy made a similar point, writing that among Jews there is not much tension between folk and official religion, because people see their [folk] practices as part of 145

146 Notes the official religion, usually not even being aware that a given practice is local or limited to their ethnic group. Dov Noy, “Is There a Jewish Folk Religion?,” in Frank Talmage, ed., Studies in Jewish Folklore (Cambridge, Mass.: Association for Jewish Studies, 1980), pp. 273-286.

5. On this issue see Edwin Ardener, “Belief and the Problem of Women,” in Shirley Ardener, ed., Perceiving Women (New York: Wiley, 1975); Sharon Tiffany, “Models and the Social Anthropology of Women: A Preliminary Assessment,” Man 13 (1978), pp. 34-51; Phyllis Kayberry, Aboriginal Women: Sacred and Profane (London: Routledge and Kegan

| Paul, 1939). 6. Rita Gross, ed., Beyond Androcentrism: New Essays on Women and Religion (Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press for the American Academy of Religion, 1977), p. 10.

7. See Rosemary Ruether and Eleanor McLaughlin, eds., Women of the Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Tradition (New

York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Nancy Falk and Rita Gross, eds., Unspoken Worlds: Women’s Religious Lives in Non-Western Cultures (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).

8. Among Pentecostal Christians, for example, women can attain valued spiritual power, but men still are in charge of the church hierarchy. See Elaine Lawless, “Shouting for the Lord: The Power of Women’s Speech in Pentecostal Religious Service,” Journal of American Folklore 96 (1983), pp. 434-459. Also see Carol Lois Haywood, “The Authority and Empower-

ment of Women among Spiritualist Groups,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 22:2 (June 1983), pp. 157-166. 9. David Moberg, The Church as a Social Institution: The Sociology of American Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1962). 10. See, for example, William Christian, Person and God in a Spanish Valley (New York: Seminar Press, 1972), p. 160. 11. See, for example, Margaret L. Arnott, ed., Gastronomy. The An-

thropology of Food and Food Habits (The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 1975).

12. Susan Reynolds White in “Men, Women, and Misfortune in Bunyole” shows how a model shared by all members of a society may in fact be elaborated from the perspective of only one group within that collectivity. Collective representations contain a point of view and a set of interests associated with a particular social position. Susan Reynolds White, “Men, Women, and Misfortune in Bunyole,” Man 16:3 (1981), pp. 79-84.

13. See, for example, Mary H. Beech, “The Domestic Realm in the Lives of Hindu Women in Calcutta,” in Hanna Papanek and Gail Minault, eds., Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in South Asia (Columbia, Mo.: South Asian Books, 1982), pp. 110-138.

Notes 147 14. See, for example, Lois Beck, “The Religious Lives of Muslim Women,” in Jane I. Smith, ed., Women in Contemporary Muslim Societies (London: Associated University Presses, 1980), pp. 27-60; Virginia Kerns,

Women and the Ancestors: Black Carib Kinship and Ritual (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). Religion and family do not always combine so amicably for women. For examples of conflict, see Tsultrim Allione, Women of Wisdom (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984);

Sebastian P. Brock and Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Syrian Orient (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Catherine Ojha, “Feminine Asceticism in Hinduism: Its Tradition and Present Condition,” Man in India 61:3 (1981), pp. 254-285. 15. Fustel de Coulanges, The Ancient City (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956 [1864]).

16. Israel Kimhi, “Aspects of the Human Ecology of Jerusalem,” in David Amiram, Arie Schacher, Israel Kimhi, eds., Urban Geography of Jerusalem (Berlin: Gruyter, 1973), pp. 109-122. 17. Tosafot on the ZJalmud “Sotah” 21b, elaborating on the Talmudic edict forbidding a man to teach his daughter Torah. 18. Lisa Gilad, Yemini Jewish Women (Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University, 1982), p. 62, documents that Jewish women in Yemen were actually forbidden to read because it was believed to be against Jewish religion, that rain would pour for ten days on end and crime would flourish if they were to learn, and that a woman should never be higher than her husband. It is only since the Enlightenment in eastern Europe that many Jewish women have become educated, although there always were a few exceptional women (often daughters of great rabbis who had no sons) who managed to learn despite the cultural norms.

19. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, “Women, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview,” in Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Women, Culture, and Society (Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), pp. 17-42. 1. Old Women as the Link Between the Generations

1. See Harvey Goldberg, “Rituals and Family Life among Libyan Jews,” Israel Ethnographic Society Reprint Series, No. | (1975), for a discussion of ancestor worship and memorialism among Libyan Jews.

2. Christian, writing about saints as personal patrons, noted that “women are more likely to fix on personal patrons than are men. This is true especially with regard to her children—at childbirth, when they are ill, or when they go away from the village. The woman has more to ask of her

148 Notes patron after than before her marriage. . . . Such a close relationship carries over into old age when practical requests from the woman still center on the children, now grown up, and when there is a deepening of the personal,

affective ties between the woman and the divine patron” (p. 133). The

of the Jewish saints. ,

Jewish women usually do not have a particular patron but feel close to all

3. Stephen Gudeman, “Saints, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” 4merican Ethnologist 3:4 (November 1976), p. 726. 4. Samuel Youssef Benaim, Le Pelerinage Juif des Lieux Saints au Moroc (Casablanca: Published by the author, 1980). 5. Lucy Garnett, The Women of Turkey and their Folklore (London: David Nutt, 1893), pp. 31-32. Several of the women of my study originally

came from Turkey. Placing written notes in the hands of corpses was probably an urban custom, because few rural Jewish women would have known how to write. The Kurdish, Moroccan, and Yemenite women do emphasize women’s visits to graves of family members, both in Israel and in

the Old Country. 6. These customs are not unique to Jewish women. See Dale Eickelman, Moroccan Islam (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976), for a discussion of pilgrimage and saints in Morocco. Ben-Ami has made a

careful comparison of the Jewish and Muslim cults of saints in North Africa. Among the similarities between the two are the belief that the dead saint can appear on earth (both in dreams and in person); the belief that the saint can either bless or curse; the fact that most of the saints are local; the

types of activities (especially healing) performed by the saint; and such personal characteristics as religious knowledge, charity, and modesty. The differences are (and, according to Ben-Ami these are the determining factors) that there are many more types of Muslim saints than Jewish ones (types of Muslim saints include warriors, politicians, judges, as well as healers and intercessors); some Muslim saints do not allow women to visit their shrines (this is never true of Jewish saints); Muslim shrines are more beautiful and expensive than Jewish ones; and at Muslim shrines there is sometimes sexual promiscuity (that never happens at Jewish shrines). He also points out that most Muslim saints, unlike Jewish saints, are alive. And, unlike among Muslims, for Jews there are no saints who claim to have inherited their sainthood from biblical figures. See Issachar Ben-Ami, Worship of Saints among Moroccan Jews (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1984, in Hebrew).

7. Both Jayanti and Berger-Sofer, in their studies of the ultra-Orthodox women of Mea Shearim, found that the mother-daughter tie is the most important affective tie. Rhonda Berger-Sofer, Pious Women: A Study

Notes 149 of Women’s Roles in a Hassidic and Pious Community: Mea She’arim (Ph.D. dissertation, Rutgers University, 1979). Vimala Jayanti, Women in Mea Shearim (Master’s thesis, Hebrew University, 1982). According to Gilad, in Yemen the young girl would play with her father, but as she grew up she was expected to fear him and gradually sever her connection to him.

By puberty, there was often no contact between fathers and daughters (p. 61). On the other hand, siblings are very close (p. 88). Feitelson noted the warm relations among women affines (among Kurdish Jews), commenting that mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law traditionally got along very well. Dina Feitelson, “Aspects of the Social Life of Kurdish Jews,” Jewish Journal of Sociology 1:2 (December 1959), pp. 201-216. 8. Sheila Kitzinger, Women as Mothers. (New York: Random House, 1978), p. 56.

9. Note the parallel between old women who mediate between descendants and ancestors and saints who mediate between descendants and God. 10. A number of the biblical matriarchs are believed to have conceived on Rosh HaShana. See Jalmud Rosh HaShanah 1 1:a. 11. Kerns, p. 7. 12. Beech, pp. 110-138, esp. pp. 120-121.

13. Loring M. Danforth, Death Rituals of Rural Greece (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982). 14. Moshe Shokeid, “An Anthropological Perspective on Ascetic Be-

havior and Religious Change,” in Shlomo Deshen and Moshe Shokeid, Predicament of Homecoming (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 89.

15. Pirkei de Rabbi Eliezer, 4S. 16. On candle-lighting rituals of Muslim women, see Edward Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1926). Candle-lighting rituals are also performed by Christian women. For brief descriptions, the best source is Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image

and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). Another fascinating study of candle rituals can be found in Evon A. Vogt, Tortillas for the Gods—A Symbolic Analysis of Zinacanteco Rituals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). 17. See Shulhan Aruch, Orach Haim 263:3 and Mishna Berura 263:12; Talmud “Shabbat” 25b.

18. B. M. Levine, “History of the Sabbath Candle,” in Essays and Studies in Memory of Linda R. Miller (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1938, in Hebrew), pp. 55-68. 19. Mircea Eliade, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1987), Vol. 4, pp. 400-417.

150 Notes 2. The Dual Meaning of Religiosity; Women, Men, and Morality 1. Mitzvah, literally translated as “commandment,” often carries connotations such as “good deed” or “something that is pleasing to God.” The women of this study use all three meanings interchangeably and indeed are

usually unable to distinguish between good deeds that are and are not

required by Jewish law. |

2. Yona Sabar, “Kurdistani Realia and Attitudes as Reflected in the Midrashic—Aggadic Literature of the Kurdish Jews,” in Talmage, p. 292. 3. The women teach and encourage their young boys to be like little men, even in the religious sphere.

| 4. Berger-Sofer and Jayanti, in their studies of women in the ultraOrthodox Ashkenazi Jewish neighborhood of Mea Shearim, have noted other differences between male and female perceptions of religiosity. Berger-Sofer, for example, found that women are associated with worldly things (physical and material problems) and men with spiritual problems (p. 50). Jayanti found that simple faith is the central religious ideal for women, while for men it is not very important. And, while men are thought to be more spiritually sensitive, intellectual, rational, and have strong evil inclinations, women are considered nearer to nature, more emotional, and duller spiritually (Jayanti, p. 103). These differences do not seem to hold true for Jews of all ethnic groups. The women of my study, for example, would never claim that men are more spiritual and women more worldly. 5. The women do not seem to know exactly what the rabbi does with the money. It is enough for them that they have given money for a religious or charitable purpose. 6. Mi She-Berach is a blessing bestowed after one’s participation in public worship. The rabbi’s use of the Mi She-Berach strays a bit from official Judaism. The notion of a person (usually a saint or religious leader) giving a blessing is also widespread among Muslims. The Arabic word baraka refers to blessings or beneficient forces of divine origin. Muslims believe that God can implant a prophet or saint with baraka, and they in turn can transmit it to ordinary people. See the Encyclopedia of Islam (new edition), Vol. 1, part 2, p. 1032. Geertz has explained that different people have this divine force in different quantities. Marabouthood means possessing baraka, and it is shown by wonder-working or by lineal descent from the Prophet Mohammed. See Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). Westermarck, also having worked in Morocco, stresses that baraka allows the saint to see the future, travel magically, intercede for others, and make powerful curses. See Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco. 7. Iam simply quoting my informants, not expressing my own opin-

Notes 151 ion. I did, however, spend a great deal of time with the rabbanit and felt that she is a particularly difficult person to get to know well. 8. This is a frequent theme in the women’s conversation, connected to their fatalistic view of the world. 9. The Hebrew emunah is perhaps more accurately translated as trust or faith. 10. Older Middle Eastern women often pass around sweet smelling herbs in order to give others an opportunity to say the blessing that is traditionally said when one smells a sweet herb. 11. Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982). Note that when Gilligan refers to male or female moral development, she does not mean to indicate an absolute correspondence between women and one scheme of moral development and men and

another. Rather she is referring to two different themes or modes of thought. 12. Ibid., pp. 18-19. 13. Ibid., pp. 104-105. 14. Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion, 1800-

1860,” in Mary Hartman and Lois Banner, eds., Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).

15. Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977). 3. Between Woman and God 1. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in Michael Banton, ed., Anthropological Approaches to the Study of Religion (London: Tavistock Publications, 1969), p. 22. 2. Ibid., p. 28. 3. The issue of belief has been addressed by Rodney Needham in Belief, Language, and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 4, This name for God appears nowhere in written Jewish sources, and is indeed not permissible within the framework of Jewish law and theology.

Implying that God is associated with a particular country is in a sense a negation of monotheism. The women of the Day Center are aware of no such fine theological points.

5. Alan Dundes, “Wet and Dry, the Evil Eye: An Essay in Indo- | European and Semitic Worldview,” in Alan Dundes, ed., Zhe Evil Eye (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1981), pp. 257-312. 6. Zenner, Syrian Jewish Identification in Israel, p. 98.

152 Notes 7. This is the woman’s own perception of Jewish law. Actually, Jewish law does require the soldier to eat before going into battle. 8. Shimon bar Yochai and his son Elazar hid in a cave for fourteen years to escape the Roman decree against Jewish study. They received help from Elijah the Prophet. 9. Personal communication, Jerusalem 1985. 10. “Bli neder,” said frequently by the women, means “no promise” and indicates that mere mortals cannot promise anything because everything is in the hands of God.

4. From the Female Perspective

1. Otherwise, repeating the same blessing would be considered a wasted blessing [bracha le-batala} and so forbidden. 2. S. D. Goiten notes that the documents of the Cairo Geniza (which reflect Jewish life in Arab countries during the tenth through thirteenth centuries) show that, “piety in Judaism was paired with knowledge, namely

, of the holy scriptures and the ‘oral’ teachings [Talmud] derived from them” (p. 353). “Women were for the most part illiterate” (p. 109), and he argues that “the educational gap between male and female was the ultimate source and manifestation of the repression of womanhood in civilized societies” (p. 356). See S. D. Goiten, A Mediterranean Society, Vol. 11], The Family (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). 3. Shlomo Deshen, “Ritualization of Literacy,” American Ethnologist 2:2 (May 1975), pp. 251-260.

4. “Shma Yisrael...” or “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One” said three times each day by observant Jews, is the concise statement of Jewish belief in monotheism. ». Berger-Sofer, pp. 56-57. 6. Jayanti, pp. 103, 106. 7. Shulhan Aruch, Even HaEzer 21:2. 8. Berger-Sofer, pp. 51-54. 9, Jayanti, p. 129. Obviously, not all Jewish groups are the same. East European Judaism, for example, was influenced by the Enlightenment. Still, it is useful to cite this material because these particular issues are ones that cross ethnic lines. 10. The tallit is a four-cornered shawl or ritual garment worn by Jewish men during prayer. There is no similar ritual garment that Jewish women are required to wear during prayer. 11. Henny Harald Hansen, Daughters of Allah (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1960), pp. 119-120.

Notes 153 12. This contrasts with Antoun’s analysis of women’s modesty among Arab Muslims in the Middle East. He found the modesty code to relax for old women past childbearing age. Furthermore, Antoun stressed the connection between women’s modesty and male honor among the Arab population, whereas for the Jews of my study, modesty is purely a religious issue between women and God, and men have very little to say (and very little at stake) in the matter. Richard Antoun, “On the Modesty of Women in Arab Muslim Villages: A Study in the Accommodation of Traditions,” American Anthropologist 70 (1978), pp. 671-697. 13. For a concise English description of the Jewish holidays, see the Encyclopedia Judaica (Jerusalem: Keter Publishing House, 1972). 14. This is in marked contrast to Ashkenazi women who ask their rabbis frequent questions concerning Passover preparations. 15. Rita Gross, personal correspondence, March 5, 1986. 16. The women of this study have been in Israel for so long that their original pronunciations have become garbled. And most have such poorly

fitted false teeth, that it is not possible to differentiate their original pronunciations of Hebrew words such as hametz. 17. Passover is indeed also a New Year holiday. It is in the first month of

the year [Nissan] according to a system of ordering months that is no longer used. See Zalmud, Rosh HaShana 2a. 18. Falk and Gross, p. xvi. 19. Written Jewish sources also describe women as central to the miracle of Passover. For example, see Talmud, Sotah 1 1b.

5. Sacralizing the Feminine: Food Preparation as a Religious Activity

1. Douglas analyzing the laws of kashrut, touches on the parallels between temple sacrifice and kashrut. In both instances, only perfect specimens (people, animals) may enter the temple or be eaten. In both instances blood and bloodshed are excluded: blood and predators may not be eaten;

people who were in contact with blood or bloodshed may not enter the temple. Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” Daedalus (Winter 1972), pp. 61-81. 2. Eliade, p. 14. 3. M. Douglas, p. 61. 4. Ibid., p. 79. 5. Ibid., p. 79. 6. Joelle Bahloul, Le Culte de la Table Dresse, Rites et Traditions de la Table Juive Algerienne (Paris: A.-M. Metailie, 1983), pp. 189ff. Also see Judy Lael Goldman, “A Moveable Feast: The Art of a Knish Maker,” in

154 Notes Michael Owen Jones, Bruce Giuliano, and Roberta Krell, eds., Foodways and Eating Habits: Directions for Research (Western Folklore XL, 1981), pp. 11-18.

1979), p. 233. |

7. Barbara Myerhoff, Number Our Days (New York: L. P. Dutton,

8. Ibid., p. 256. 9. Jayanti, p. 145. 10. Ibid., p. 110. 11. Maurie Sacks, “Computing Community at Purim,” in Journal of

American Folklore 102:405 (1989), pp. 275-291. 12. This is the perception of the women themselves. 13. Bahloul, pp. 263-264. 14. Although the women themselves do not know why, several reasons

for eating dairy products on Shavuot appear in Jewish written sources. According to tradition, when the Israelites received the Torah, they did not

have any kosher meat to eat, so they had to eat a dairy meal. Also, the numerical equivalent of the letters that spell the Hebrew word “milk” [HaLaV] is 40, the number of days that Moses spent on Mt. Sinai when receiving the Torah. i5. A. Brauer, Jews of Kurdistan (Jerusalem: HaMaarev Press, 1947), pp. 274-275. 16. There are of course other female tasks connected to death, such as washing female corpses and sewing shrouds. However, these specialized tasks, at least in large urban areas, are only done by a few women. 17. For a discussion of a similar type of ritual see Anne H. Betteridge, “The Controversial Vows of Urban Muslim Women in Iran,” in Falk and Gross, pp. 141-156. 18. Laal Jamzadeh and Margaret Mills, “Iranian Sofreh: From Collec-

tive to Female Ritual,” in Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman, eds., Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), p. 51.

6. The Liberation of Widowhood: From the Private to the Public 1. Brauer, pp. 246-248. 2. Francis Hsu has suggested the use of the terminology of “kinship dyads” to allow anthropologists to look at the actual content of the various kinship relations in a given culture. Hsu points out that within the nuclear

family equal prominence is not given to all of the basic dyads (e.g., husband-wife, mother-son, etc.); one or more dyad is dominant. Francis Hsu, Kinship and Culture (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1971). Thus,

Notes 155 we may suggest that ties with husbands may be weaker in those societies where romantic love and free choice of marital partners play little or no role in mate selection. 3. Lisa Gilad, Ginger and Salt: Yemini Jewish Women in an Israeli Town (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1989); D. Weintraub and M. Shapiro,

“The Traditional Family in Israel in the Process of Change—Crisis and Continuity,” British Journal of Sociology 19 (1968), pp. 284-286. 4. Zenner, Syrian Jewish Identification in Israel, p. 255. 5. Donna Shai, “Family Conflict and Cooperation in Folksongs of Kurdish Jews,” in Shlomo Deshen and Walter Zenner, eds., Jewish Societies in the Middle East (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1982), pp. 273-284, esp. p. 279. 6. As Harvey Goldberg has correctly pointed out, there is an element of boasting in the women’s comments about the hardships they suffered in order to observe the laws of menstrual purity (Personal communication, Jerusalem, 1986). 7. Women who are not well nourished generally begin to menstruate at a later age and reach menopause at a younger age than do women whose

diet is adequate. Since most of the women of the Day Center lived their younger lives through periods of financial hardship and sometimes even famine, and the average woman of the Day Center is now in her seventies

or eighties, we can assume that most of the women have been postmenopausal for close to forty years. Yet according to the women, it is only in the past few years (since they have been old [their word] and/or widows) that their religious lives have taken on new dimensions.

8. Nancy Datan, Aaron Antonovsky, Benjamin Moaz, A Time to Weep (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). 9. Constance Brennan and Leo Missinne, “Personal and Institutionalized Religiosity of the Elderly,” in James Thorson and Thomas Cook, Jr., eds., Spiritual Well-Being of the Elderly (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas Publ., 1980), pp. 92-99. 10. Gilad (1982), pp. 43-44. 11. David Gutmann, Reclaimed Powers: Toward a New Psychology of Men and Women in Later Life (New York: Basic Books, 1987). 12. It is interesting to compare this with Daisy Dwyer’s study of Images

and Self-Images, Male and Female in Morocco (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), in which she found that among the Muslim popula-

tion as men age they are thought to develop from uncontrolled to controlled sexuality. Women, on the other hand, are believed to develop from pure young girls into dangerously, highly sexed old women. 13. Two other studies of the religious role of widows deal with widows

in the early Christian Church. See Rosemary Ruether, “Mothers of the

156 Notes Church: Ascetic Women in the Late Patristic Period,” in Ruether and McLaughlin, pp. 71-98. Also see the chapter dealing with the Order of Widows in the early Church in Mary Lawrence McKenna, Women of the Church: Role and Renewal (New York: Kenedy and Sons, 1967).

14. Brauer, p. 215. :

15. Ibid., p. 264. The lulav [palm branch], etrog [citron], willow and myrtle branches are held by Jewish males in synagogue each morning of the

holiday of Sukkot. 16. Ibid., p. 256. Tashlich is a ceremony for symbolically casting away one’s sins that is done on Rosh HaShana. 17. Ethnic synagogues are currently in a state of flux in Israeli society. Particularly in smaller towns, while a synagogue may be predominantly of one ethnic group, it is likely that people of other ethnic groups will also attend. In the Day Center neighborhood, where there are many synagogues

| representing a large number of ethnic groups, there is less intermingling. 18. Donna Shai, Neighborhood Relations in an Immigrant Quarter, Henrietta Szold Institute Research Report No. 149, Publication No. 499 (April 1970).

19. Yael Katzir, The Effects of Resettlement on the Status and Role of Yemini Women: The Case of Ramat Oranim, Israel (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1976), p. 38. Also, contrast with Howard Bahr’s study of “Aging and Religious Disaffiliation,” Social Forces 49:1

(September 1970), pp. 59-71, in which he found that among males only skid row men increased church attendance with age. 20. Gilad (1982), pp. 18-19. 21. In Ashkenazi synagogues in Eastern Europe, there was a woman who helped the other women follow the Hebrew service. No such job exists among the Middle Eastern women. 22. Zenner, “Saints and Piecemeal Supernaturalism among the Jerusalem Sephardim,” Anthropological Quarterly 38:4 (1965), p. 212. 23. The meaning of this expression is that of all of the various paths or gates leading to God, the one that is always open, the one that God always

responds to, 1s tears. Indeed, many prayerbooks are named “Gates of Tears.”

24. Hanna’s emotional prayer appears in Jewish sources as the prototype of how to pray. See Jalmud “Brachot” 31:a. 25. Fatima Mernissi, “Women, Saints, and Sanctuaries,” Signs 3:1 (Autumn 1977), p. 104. Muslim women are also great frequenters of holy tombs. However, in contrast to Jewish shrines, the sanctuaries of certain Muslim saints are off limits to women. And, in Israel there are numerous shrines of female Muslim saints (the only shrine of a female Jewish saint is Rachel’s Tomb). Canaan describes in detail the rituals performed at Mus-

Notes 157 lim shrines, and most are identical to those performed at Jewish shrines. See Tewfik Canaan, Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (Jerusalem: Ariel Publishing House, originally published 1927). 26. Gudeman in his study of a Panamanian village made much the same point: “for the countrymen it is not so much the exemplary lives of the saints as their mysterious powers which differentiate them.” Stephan Gudeman, “Saints, Symbols, and Ceremonies,” American Ethnologist 3:4 (November 1976), p. 714. 27. This seems to be different from trips to tombs organized by such groups as the Agudat Torah MeSinai, where no historical sites are pointed out.

28. Susan Starr Sered, “Rachel’s Tomb and the Milk Grotto of the Virgin Mary: Two Women’s Shrines in Bethlehem,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 4 (Summer 1986). 29. Victor Turner and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), pp. 28-29. 7. Ritual Expertise in the Modern World 1. Lourdes Beneria and Gita Sen, “Accumulation, Reproduction, and Women’s Role in Economic Development: Boserup Revisited,” Signs 7:2 (1981), pp. 279-298; Esther Boserup, Women’s Role in Economic Develop-

ment (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1970); Leela Dube, Eleanor Leacock, and Shirley Ardener, eds., Visibility and Power: Essays on Women in Society and Development (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).

2. Shlomo Deshen, “On Religious Change: the Situational Analysis of Symbolic Action,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 12 (1970),

pp. 260-274; Clifford Geertz, “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example,” American Anthropologist 59:1 (1957), pp. 32-54.

3. Marla Powers, Oglala Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), esp. p. 194. 4. V. Ebin, “Interpretation of Infertility: The Aowin People of South-

West Ghana,” in Carol MacCormack, ed., Ethnography of Fertility and Birth (London: Academic Press, 1982), pp. 141-159. 5. Katherine K. Young, “Hinduism,” in Arvind Sharma, ed., Women in

World Religions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 59-104.

6. It is likely that as the younger generation grow older, they will become more religious and to some extent replace the old women described

in this book. This is a common cultural pattern. For a study of a situation

158 Notes in which elderly people regardless of gender serve to preserve and transmit tradition see Charles Briggs, “Treasure Tales and Pedagogical Discourse in Mexicana New Mexico,” Journal of American Folklore 98 (1985), pp. 287314.

7. Rickie Burman, “‘She Looketh Well to the Ways of Her Household’: The Changing Role of Jewish Women in Religious Life, c.1880-1930,” in Gail Malmgreen, ed., Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760-1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 253.

8. Nancy Tapper and Richard Tapper, “The Birth of the Prophet: Ritual and Gender in Turkish Islam,” Man 22 (1987), pp. 69-92, esp. p. 87. 9. See Deshen 1970, esp. p. 266. 10. The Druse are members of a sect living in the Middle East whose

religion combines elements of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Druse have been persecuted in many of the Muslim countries in which they lived. Druse living in Israel serve in the Israeli Defense Forces.

11. Yung-Chung Kim, Women of Korea—A History from Ancient Times to 1945 (Seoul: Ewha Woman’s University Press, 1982). 12. Pamela Constantinides, “Women’s Spirit Possession and Urban Ad-

aptation in the Muslim Northern Sudan,” in Patricia Caplan and Janet Bujra, eds., Women United, Women Divided (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 185-205. 13. Erika Bourguignon, ed., A World of Women (New York: Praeger Publisher, 1980).

14. Donna Shai, “Changes in the Oral Tradition Among the Jews of Kurdistan,” Contemporary Jewry 5:1 (Spring/Summer 1980), pp. 2-10. 15. Sabar, in Talmage, pp. 287-296. 16. Yona Sabar, “Lel-Huza: Story and History in a Cycle of Lamentations for the Ninth of Ab in the Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Zakho” in Journal of Semitic Studies 21 (1976), pp. 138-162. 17. Paper presented at the American Anthropological Association 70th Annual Meeting, November 1971.

18. Brauer, Jews of Kurdistan. For a fuller description of women as professional mourners, see Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 19, Brauer, pp. 158-161.

20. There are several sources that mention the widespread use of amulets in Kurdistan. The richly illustrated catalogue of the Israel Museum

exhibition on Kurdish Jewry describes the numerous silver and embroidered amulets worn by women who believed they were in danger during pregnancy and childbirth. See the Israel Museum’s Jews of Kurdistan: Lifestyle, Tradition, and Art, Publication No. 216 (Summer-—Winter 19811982).

Notes 159 21. While it is obviously not good scholarship to “assume” that some-

thing must have been so because it logically should have been, when studying women’s history, which has almost entirely been omitted from traditional historical sources, certain scholarly liberties must be permitted. 22. Debbi Friedhaber, From the Dance Customs of Kurdish Jews (Published by the Jewish Dance Archives, 1974). 23. Brauer, pp. 61-62. 24. Ibid., pp. 126-129. 25. [bid., pp. 129-133. 26. Ibid., pp. 133-138. 27. Lois Paul and Benjamin Paul, “The Maya Midwife as Sacred Specialist: A Guatemalan Case,” American Ethnologist 2:4 (November 1975), pp. 707-720. 28. See for example, Elisa Buenaventura-Posso and Susan E. Brown, “Forced Transition from Egalitarianism to Male Dominance: The Bari of

Columbia,” in Mona Etienne and Eleanor Leacock, eds., Women and Colonization, Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1980), pp. 109-133. 29. Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” p. 28. 30. See Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 1-14; Richard Handler and Jocelyn Linnekin, “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious,” Journal of American Folklore 97 (1984), pp. 273-290. 31. Myerhoff, p. 9. 32. Ibid., pp. 104-105. 33. Ibid., pp. 107-108.

Conclusion: The Making of a Ritual Expert 1. Judith Baskin, “The Separation of Women in Rabbinic Judaism,” in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly, eds., Women, Religion, and Social Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), p. 5.

2. Nancy Falk, “Introduction,” in Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly, eds., Women, Religion, and Social Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), p. xviii. 3. Natalie Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975).

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Arnott, Margaret L., ed., Gastronomy: The Anthropology of Food and Food Habits. Mouton Publishers, The Hague 1975. Bahr, Howard. “Aging and Religious Disaffiliation.” Social Forces 49:1 (September 1970), pp. 59-71. Beck, Lois. “The Religious Lives of Muslim Women.” In Jane I. Smith, ed., Women in Contemporary Muslim Societies. Associated University Presses, London 1980. Pp. 27-60. Beech, Mary H. “The Domestic Realm in the Lives of Hindu Women in

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Blank Page

Index .

Aliya :

Aging process, for women vs. men, Brennan, Constance, 108

109, 15512 Burekas, 95

importance of, 58-61 : Candle lighting of Syrian Jews, 58 among non-Jews, 149716

as term, 19-20 Chanuka and, 98

Amulets, 26, 68, 129-30, 137, 158220 for Elijah, 56 Ancestors, 18-22. See also Saints on Festival of the New Moon, 29 lighting New Moon candles and, 29 on Sabbath eve, 30-32 reciprocity of relationship with, 125 symbolic meaning of, 3! women as guardians of, 21-22 at tombs, 116, 117-18, 132-33, 134-35 women as supplicants and, 18-21 Chanuka, 98, 101 Androcentrism, 16. See also Male, as Charity, 39-41, 76, 93, 96, 125

normative Jew; Patriarchy Childbirth, 25-26, 73, 130, 134. See

Antononsky, Aaron, 107 also Fertility

Antoun, Richard, 153712 Childhood of women, 103-4 Aowin women (Ghana), 122 Children Ashkenazi Jews, 14, 80-81, 150n4, food preparation ritual and, 92-93

153n14, 156721 of husband’s previous wife, 105 protective rituals and, 136-37 Bahloul, Joelle, 90, 93 religious practices and, 103-4

Barter, 93 religious world of women and, 106 Beech, Mary H., 26 unborn, 24-26 Belief, 50-51 women’s relationships with, 22-24

Ben-Ami, Issachar, 63, 14876 Cleaning, 81-82, 96

Benyamin, Hacham, 41, 43-46 Communal religious activity, 17 Berger-Sofer, Rhonda, 70-71, Continuity, and new rituals, 136

1504 Cooking. See Food preparation

Blessings, 78-79, 118, 15076 Crying, 116, 156223 Bourguignon, Erika, 126

Brauer, A., 15, 99, 103, 129, 130-31, Dancing customs, 130

132 Danforth, Loring M., 26 171

172 Index Datan, Nancy, 107 Girls’ Sabbath (Shabbat Banot), 132

Day Center God decor of, 112 contact between women and, 54-56, function of, 110-12, 126-27 137

new rituals and, 134-35, 136 omnipotence of, 52-53 Dead relatives. See Ancestors omniscience of, 51-53, 72 Death, 100, 129. See also Tomb titles for, 51

visiting value of religious acts and, 77

De Coulanges, Fustel, 10 Goiten, S. D., 1522 Deprivation, and religious Graduation-siyum ritual, 135-36 involvement, 14573 Gudeman, Stephan, 15726 Descendants. See Children; Fertility Gutmann, David, 109 Deshen, Shlomo, 66

Dirges, 128-29 Hair covering, 71-74

Domestic religion, 32-33, 90-92, 136, Halacha (Jewish law), 77-79

139, See also Religion Hansen, Henny Harald, 73 Donations, 67, 116, 1505 Health, 53, 57, 137

Douglas, Ann, 48 Henna party, 128, 134

Douglas, Mary, 90, 15371 Hindu women, 122 Dreams, 20-21, 44, 55-56 Hol HaMoed, 83-84

Dress, 74, 152710 Holidays, 79-86. See also specific Druse, 158710 holidays Dundes, Alan, 57 Day Center celebrations of, 111-12

Eliade, Mircea, 89 food preparation and, 93-101 Elijah the Prophet, 55-56, 62 redefined by women, 139

Embroidery, 130 women’s, 132

England, traditional rituals in, 123 Holy places. See Day Center;

Ethnicity, and synagogue, 112 Pilgrimage; Synagogue service

Evil eye, 56-58, 63, 134 Hsu, Rancis, 1542 Evil spirits, 130, 131 Husband. See also Widowhood

: relationship with, 22, 23, 104-6,

Falk, Nancy, 139 1$4n2 Fate, 54, 63, 75-76

Fertility, 24-26, 63, 134. See also Independence Day, 100-101!

Childbirth; Pregnancy In-laws, 105

Festival of the New Moon, 28-29 Innovation, 134-37 Food. See Food preparation; Symbolic _Israeli Defense Forces, 124-25

foods Israeli society, 14-15, 15-17

Food preparation

, holidays and, 82-83, 93-101 Jamzadeh, Laal, 102

as religious activity, 90-92, 101-2, Jayanti, Vimala, 71, 91, 150n4

136 Jewish law, 77-79, 105, 106

Friedhaber, Debbi, 130 Jewish liturgical calendar, 94

Garnett, Lucy, 21 Kaddish, 21

Geertz, Clifford, 49, 134, 15076 Kashrut, 88-90, 102, 15371

Gestures, 61-64, 113-14 Katz, Nina Dubler, 129

Gilad, Lisa, 104, 108, 113, 147718, Katzir, Yael, 112

149n7 Kerns, Virginia, 26

Gilligan, Carol, 10, 46-47, [5Intl Kim, Yung-Chung, 125-26

Index 173 Kissing Musical traditions, 129 of mezuza, 111 Muslim cults of saints, 14876, 156n25 and tomb rituals, 116, 117, 132-33 Myerhoff, Barbara, 91, 135 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 46-47

Korea, 125-26 Ninth of Ab, 128-29

Kube, 96-97 | Normative Jew, 65, 132-34, 139, 140 Kurdish-Jewish culture, 16 Noy, Dov, 14574 Kurdistan

Jewish life in, 13-14, 15 Oglala women (South Dakota), 122 male involvement with female rituals Oil, bottles of, 118

and, 133-34 Old age, 106-10, 138, 157n6

31 Oral tradition, 128

women’s religious functions in, 127- Old Country. See Kurdistan women’s traditions in, 132

Parents, 21-22, 105

Lag b’Omer, 112 © Passover, 80-85

Land of Israel. See Zionism rice cleaning and, 89 Literacy, 16, 66-71, 122, 147n18, 152n2 role of women in, 84-85 sale of non-kosher food and, 70

Maaseh (story), 74-76 seder, 83

Male, as normative Jew, 65, 132-34, symbolic foods and, 101

140 Patriarchy, 15-17. See also Male, as

Maoz, Benjamin, 107 normative Jew

Marriage. See Husband female flexibility and, 137

Maizah, 101 modernization and, 122 Menopause, 106-10, 15577 old women and, 109-10

Menstrual impurity, 106, 131 opportunities for women as ritual Messiah, 56 experts in, 138 Methodology of study, 10-12 vulnerability of female religion in,

women subjects, 4-6 140-41

Mezuza, 68-69, 111 women’s tomb visiting and, 117-18 Middle Eastern Jewry, 12-15, 122 Paul, Benjamin, 131

Midwife, 130-31 Paul, Lois, 131

Mikvah (ritual bath), 96, 106, 131 Petitions, and tomb visiting, 116, 118

Mills, Margaret, 102 Piety, 71, 81. See also Religiosity

Miracles, 59, 75 Pilgrimage, 19-21, 73. See also Tomb Mi She-Berach (blessing), 15076 visiting Missinne, Leo, 108 Politics, women’s involvement with, 52, Mitzvot, 77, 94, 150n1. See also 124

Charity Powers, Marla, 122

women’s, 35, 36, 37, 39 Prayer, 37-39

Modernization Pregnancy, 25-26, 130. See also invented traditions and, 134-37 Childbirth; Fertility

religious choices and, 121-27 Public realm, and domestic religion,

women’s rituals and, 132-34 120

Modesty, 71-74, 153712 Purim, 86, 99, 111 Moral behavior

female religiosity and, 35, 139-40 Rabbi

men and, 35, 37 money collection and, 40-41

Moral development, 46-48 women’s rituals and, 133-34 Mourner, professional, 129 Rabbinic tradition, 17

174 Index | Religion Spiritual guardianship domestication of, 26-33 the dead and, 18-22

study of women and, 6-10 descendants and, 22-26 Religiosity. See also Piety food preparation and, 92-93 Day Center programs and, 111 public ritual and, 110

halacha and, 79 of soldiers, 124-25

male vs. female, 34-39, 1504 Stories, reinterpretation of, 74-76

old age and, 107-8, 110 Storytelling, 128

Religious leaders. See also Benyamin, Symbolic foods, 97, 101

Hacham; Rabbi; Zohara, Synagogue service, 96, 108, 112-14, Rabbanit 156717 43 Syrian Jews, 58

and male vs. female religiosity, 41-_ women’s use of, 27-28, 139 Religious lessons

given by rabbanit, 41-43 Tears. See Crying given by rabbi, 43-46 Tomb visiting, 14875. See also

Religious ritual, personal vs. Pilgrimage nonpersonal, 28 childhood memories of, 103-4

Religious traditions, preservation of, Day Center trips and, 111, 114-20

122-23 | preference for, as ritual, 114, 118

Rice cleaning, 82, 89 Torah, 27-28, 66, 114

Ritual bath (mikvah), 96, 106, 131 Touching, and tomb visiting, 132-33

Rosaldo, Michelle, 17 Tree planting, 29-30, 60, 98, 137

156n16 124

Rosh HaShana, 84, 96-97, 101, Tu b’Shvat, 30, 67, 98-99, 101, 111, Turkey, 123

Sabar, Yona, 38, 128 Turner, Edith, 114, 120

Sabbath Turner, Victor, 114, 120

candle lighting and, 30 |

food and, 94-96, 101 Ultra-Orthodox Judaism, 17 male vs. female perspective on, 96 Unborn children, 24-26 observance of, 36

Sacks, Maurie, 91 Weather, talk about, 52

Saintliness Welter, Barbara, 47-48 in men, 36-39 Wheel of fate, 75-76

in women, 34-36 White, Susan Reynolds, 14612 Saints, 50, 115, 147n2, 148n6. See also © Widowhood, 108-10, 138

Ancestors Writing. See Literacy; Torah

Scholars, respect for, 69-70

Sephardi Jews, 14 Yom HaAtzmaut (Israeli Independence 10, 113, 140 | Yom HaZicaron (Memorial Day), 59

Sexual segregation, 17, 47-48, 80, 109- Day), 100-101

Shabbat Banot (Girls’ Sabbath), 132 Yom Kippur, 85-86, 101 Shai, Donna, 112, 128

Shavuot, 97, 1S4n14 Zenner, Walter, 58, 104, 115

Shokeid, Moshe, 27 Ziara. See Tomb visiting Sickness. See Health Zionism, 58-61, 112

Social networks, 126-27 Zohara, Rabbanit, 41-43, 46, 128