Ki Seytsey and a Feminist Defense of Halakhic Egalitarianism / כי־תצא און אַ פֿעמיניסטישע פֿאַרטיידיקונג פֿון הלכישן עגאַליטאַריזם

This is a weekly series

of parsha dvarim (Tōrah commentaries) written by an orthodox atheist transsexual anarchist, with guest posts from comrades. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance, and it's crucial that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns Judaism. We aim to offer comment which is true to the pshat (i.e. engages with the plain meaning of the text, especially when it's difficult) and uses Tōrah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

An appeal

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The men are fighting

Parshas Ki Seytsey contains a litany of various laws, beginning with rules governing the taking of a war-captive as a wife and ending with the injunction to remember what Amalek did to us in the wilderness and to wipe out their memory (known as “Parshas Zachor”). Along the way, we encounter many commandments having to do with marital relations, divorce, loans & interest, food justice, vows, the death penalty, cross-dressing, respecting parents, bird-shooing, shatnez, tsitsis, crushed testes, mamzers, the Amonites and Moavites, wet dreams, waste management, refugees, sex work, tsoraas, and workers' rights.

One of the laws in our parsha describes intervention in a fight:

Here is a mitzvah that has been followed all too well throughout halakhic history: when men are having an argument, do everything you can to make sure women don’t get involved. At the risk of having my hand cut off, as a halakhically observant and egalitarian woman, I have to respond to Misha’s dvar Torah, Pinkhos and the Feminist Case Against Traditional Egalitarianism. The core of his argument, as I understand it, is that maximally obligating women in the mitzvos both weakens communal halakhic commitment and erases gender difference as a meaningful axis for diversity of religious practice.

While both of these points are legitimate challenges worth addressing in their own rights, neither in fact arise from problems with halakhic egalitarianism as an ideology. In his effort to position weakness of commitment and gender erasure as stemming from the feminist push for egalitarian Jewish religious practice, Misha makes a number of strikingly antifeminist arguments about “women’s work,” the core of which have already been hashed out during the Second Wave. Rather than giving a point-by-point rebuttal, I will address Misha’s arguments as part of a broader articulation of what it means to be a feminist halakhic egalitarian.

As a movement, halakhic egalitarianism is young and in need of more rigorous statements of its values. My framing, then, centers on the more interesting conflict for religious feminists: how can we, as feminists, devote our lives to a system of religious obligation like halakha, with its history of misogyny—or any system that makes claims of absolute authority upon us?