The kitchen counter was piled with challah breads, the crayons were put away because within minutes writing would no longer be permitted, and Bethia Straus was finishing the usual Friday evening dinner for more than a dozen–16 this night. She was racing sundown to do it, but with the swift calm of a veteran who knows she will win the race.
One last phone call, from her husband, Paul Quintas–“Hi. Come home.” One last instruction to the children–“Guys, we’re not watching TV anymore; it’s Shabbos.” And then, a few minutes before the official candle-lighting time of 5:41 p.m., out of cooking clothes and into dressy black, surrounded by her husband and three young children, she ushered in the Sabbath.
Straus lit five candles. She waved her hands in the air toward her three times, symbolically drawing in the Sabbath peace, then closed her eyes and silently, intently prayed.
And with that, conventional time halted, and another kind of time began. It was the Jewish Sabbath, or Shabbat, the period of rest and spiritual enrichment from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday that Orthodox Jews like Straus regard as a profound gift from God.
“Shabbos is just amazing,” said Straus, a transplanted Brooklynite whose speech has lost neither its accent nor its speed. “Right up to the last minute, you’re on the phone, you’re cooking, and then the minute it starts, everything stops. If you’re not done cooking, you have to freeze it. If you want to know how the Yankees did, too bad. It can be the most important thing in the world, but on Shabbos, the most important thing in the world is you, God and your family.”
The importance of the Sabbath to Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman has opened a curtain on modern Orthodox Judaism, which is also Straus’ world.
“They are the liberal wing of the Orthodox world,” said Columbia University journalism professor Samuel Freedman, whose new book “Jew Vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry” (Simon & Schuster, $26) examines what Freedman describes as a civil war going on among various factions of Judaism.
“The whole idea of modern Orthodoxy is to reconcile observance of the mitzvot [commandments] and the idea that the Torah and oral law are the revealed word of God, to living in the modern world and fully partaking in it.”
And nowhere, arguably, has that reconciliation proved more thorny than in the role of women.
To an outsider, the Orthodox rules concerning women would seem anything but modern. Women cannot be rabbis. They cannot read from the Torah, the Jewish Bible, during religious services. They sit in a women’s section in the synagogue, behind a divider called a mechitzah. They are not counted in a minyan, the quorum of 10 adults necessary for public prayer.
For some Jewish women, these restrictions make Orthodoxy simply unacceptable.
“We don’t choose to subscribe to rituals and practices that in our view establish a second-class status for women,” said Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a co-founder of Ms. magazine and author of “Deborah, Golda, and Me: Being Female and Jewish in America” (Crown Publishers, 1991). “For me, it’s absolutely untenable.”
But for Straus, 39, who considers herself both wholeheartedly Orthodox and thoroughly feminist, it is utterly fulfilling.
“In a way, a lot of decisions are taken away from you–where you can eat, what you can eat, what you can do,” said Straus, who is now home raising her children in Skokie and awaiting her fourth in January. “But by the same token, spiritually, your life is expanded.”
Straus kept her maiden name, worked in the U.S. attorney’s office in New York as a law student and now serves on the board of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. Her strong belief in women’s equality has occasionally caused her pain within the Orthodox community she dearly loves.
She and her husband were among the first members of Young Israel of Skokie, but left because the congregation decided not to bring the Torah to the women’s side so the women could touch it with their prayer books, as the men do. But she is committed to change, within the bounds of Halakha, or Jewish law. Her feeling about the prohibition against women rabbis, for example, is ambivalent.
“I’ve grown up in America; why can’t women do everything?” she said. “On the other hand, I understand that you’re dealing with a tradition and laws that are thousands of years old. You don’t go messing with these. You want to change things, you do it gradually.”
The efforts of women like Straus to change some things have reverberated through Orthodox Judaism.
“Even in the ultra-Orthodox world, [women’s participation] is a very big issue, and people are responding to it,” said Rabbi Asher Lopatin of Anshe Sholom B’nai Israel Congregation, a young modern Orthodox synagogue in Lakeview.
Orthodox Judaism is a highly diverse denomination whose adherents range from the black-hatted ultra-Orthodox to the modern Orthodox branch of Joe Lieberman.
It has become riven by factionalism between its left and right wings, which differ over whether observant Jews should participate in the secular world or be separate.
Its modern branch, which has moved toward stricter observance in recent years, itself is engaged in a similar battle as even liberal Jews have grown dismayed with popular culture.
But day to day, modern Orthodox women are engaged in the joys of their community, the most central one being Shabbat (Hebrew for “sabbath” pronounced in the modern Hebrew Sephardic way, though many American Jews use the Eastern European pronunciation of “Shabbos”).
“I would not have survived medical school without Shabbos,” said Barbara Robinson of Skokie, an obstetrician-gynecologist who taught herself to study medical textbooks without taking notes so she could do it on Saturdays. “I had a reprieve that everybody else didn’t have.”
“I love it,” said Sharon Schwartz, 31, a lawyer for an accounting firm who lives in Lakeview. “I can’t imagine not having it, and not necessarily from a religious standpoint. It’s a day for me to recharge, to see what I’ve done in the past week, to get in touch with my life.”
And she does not see different roles for men and women as denigrating to women.
“If you really read the Torah, women are held in much higher regard than men,” she said. “The reason men are commanded to do things women aren’t, like read Torah or wear a tallit [prayer shawl] or a kippa [skullcap] is that . . . men need that extra push.”
Far from being out of date with modern life, these women feel, Torah-observant Judaism has anticipated some of its most troublesome aspects.
Do overscheduled women feel exhausted and desperate for a break? There is Shabbat. Do people wish they had more family dinners? Shabbat. Do people feel socially isolated? Not in Orthodox communities, where the requirement to live within walking distance of a synagogue creates neighborhoods with powerful bonds.
“You’ve never seen anything like this community in time of trouble,” said Myra Weiss, of Skokie. “You can count on 100 percent of people coming through for you. And the core of it is Shabbat. Shabbat forces us to live on top of one another.”
“In summer, the parks and playgrounds are completely full on Shabbos, bursting with children and their parents,” said Marianne Novak of Skokie, one of a striking number of non-practicing women lawyers in the Modern Orthodox community.
The Torah even offers a way to maintain an exciting marital sex life, some women say, through the laws of family purity. Women are said to be “unclean” during their menses–a description that can make women outside the community recoil–so couples must abstain from intimacy for at least 12 days each menstrual cycle until the woman purifies herself at a communal ritual bath called a mikvah.
“It is the greatest gift to a sex life,” said Beverly Siegel, 52, a writer and documentary maker and mother of six from the North Side. “When you have little kids and you leave the house and say, `I’m going to take a long bath–that’s a luxury. You go home and it’s sort of like a honeymoon night. It’s fabulous.
“If there is anything that shows that God is a feminist sympathizer, it is those laws,” she said. “It gives women space to say to their husbands, `These 12 days are private time.'”
And sitting separately from men?
Siegel is no ultra-conservative; she was a member of the counterculture in college and remains a social liberal. But she values the mechitzah.
“I think it promotes more of a sense of spirituality,” she said. “I really don’t need to be with men, even my own husband. It’s distracting. And I like the whole communal aspect of being with women.”
Not all women like everything about Orthodoxy Judaism.
For some, the prayer Orthodox men are supposed to say every morning thanking God for not making them women is especially problematic.
“It grates on me; it grates on everybody,” Novak said. “But liturgy is a funny thing; in time, everything evolves. Do I think it will be gone tomorrow? No. But in time, will it disappear? It might.”
And Siegel thinks the occasional tradeoff, like her three daughters not being able to read publicly from the Torah for their bat mitzvahs, is more than worth making.
“I definitely get a lot more than I lost,” she said.
Even the women seeking more participation are not out for revolution.
“I’m not out to change Halacka. My goal is simply to be a little less invisible,” said Tzivia Garfinkel, head of Jewish studies at the Bernard Zell Anshe Emet Day School on the North Side, who was chairwoman of Chicago conferences on women, Halakha and modernity in 1997 and 1998.
Such efforts have resulted in the creation of 45 women’s prayer, or tefillah, groups across the country, including one that meets in homes in Skokie, where women read from the Torah but do not say prayers that require the 10-man minyan. The groups are the subject of passionate debate between those who contend that they fulfill a need among women and those who say they divide the community.
The Skokie tefillah group emphasizes learning as well as praying, reflecting Jewish women’s hunger to study texts they once were forbidden to read.
“There is a proliferation of high-caliber learning opportunities for women,” said Brigitte Dayan, managing editor of the Jewish Federation-published JUF News, who holds a master’s degree from Yeshiva University and spent two years studying at the Drisha Institute for Women, a respected women’s yeshiva, or school, in New York. “You can’t say to a woman that she can get a PhD in physics and she can’t learn her own texts.”
Modern Orthodox women are getting extraordinary Jewish educations, Samuel G. Freedman said, a phenomenon that contains the seeds of an inevitable clash.
“You’re preparing women for religious roles that don’t exist yet,” he said. “What do you do with all this desire, this upward mobility these women have in the secular world?”
These women may end up transforming Orthodox Judaism, suggested Rabbi Lopatin, particularly in light of a new program in Israel in which women are being trained to rule on some questions of Jewish law.
“The Halakha doesn’t change, but our understanding of what the Halakha is changes,” he said. “As women learn more, as they have entered the ranks of Halakhic authorities . . . new interpretations might arise.”
Straus doesn’t expect a swift move toward egalitarianism. “If you want equality, you leave this thing,” she said.
But greater spiritual fulfillment and respect for women, she thinks, can happen. And for her, marvelous things happen every Torah-observant day.
