On transitions, gender, and motherhood in Israel

June, the month inundated with lovely transitional moments, can be a parent’s nightmare. As a mother of four, my diary this time of year is packed with end-of-year performances, parties, graduations and all forms of celebrations. While once such events were saved for major milestones like diploma graduations and weddings, now I am expected to show up at all minor events as well, from gymnastics shows to fourth grade art displays – and even a painful but fun mothers versus daughters end-of-year basketball match. (The fourteen-year olds beat us easily, and my knees are still protesting.)

June, the month inundated with lovely transitional moments, can be a parent’s nightmare. As a mother of four, my diary this time of year is packed with end-of-year performances, parties, graduations and all forms of celebrations. While once such events were saved for major milestones like diploma graduations and weddings, now I am expected to show up at all minor events as well, from gymnastics shows to fourth grade art displays – and even a painful but fun mothers versus daughters end-of-year basketball match. (The fourteen-year olds beat us easily, and my knees are still protesting.)

Yesterday, though, the back-to-back events for my 12-year old son and three year old daughter challenged more than my multi-tasking abilities. They provided a painful reminder of what it means to be a mother – a woman – raising children in the religious, patriarchal school system in Israel. As I went straight from kindergarten graduation to junior high school yeshivah orientation, I watched two pivotal moments in the socialization into gender roles– and felt myself, my female feminist self, slipping away from my children’s identities.

At the kindergarten party, where girls received pink bags, and boys received green ones, the theme was a traditional Jewish wedding. One boy was dressed up in a bowler hat a black jacket while one girl put on a long white dress and veil. All the boys stood up an accompanied the “couple” across the room under a makeshift huppah (bridal canopy) held by a few fathers in the audience, then the boys danced around to some lively music as the rest of the girls sat on the side and watched. Following the dance, all the fathers were called up to hold a tallit, a ritual prayer shawl, over the couple and the boys. I know that princess dresses are a favorite in the dress-up box, but I do not understand how on earth this event was relevant to kids at this tender age. They were being socialized right here into the notion that marriage is everything, and that boys are the active ones and girls are the bystanders. Moreover, the message was that a ritual object can only be touched by the men – the fathers were the strong ones, the public ones, and the owners of anything religious. It reminded me of the time I brought in a shofar, a ram’s horn, to show a group of seventh grade students before Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year when the shofar blasts are a central feature of the service. As I passed the object around and kids attempted the difficult task of blowing it, as soon as a girl tried, one of the boys – a totally non-religious boy, mind you – shouted out in horror, “She can’t touch that! She’s a girl!” As if just resting a female hand on a ram’s horn outside of the context of a religious service is entirely abhorrent.

It should have come as no surprise when, at the end of the party, as if to reinforce the centrality of the gender messages, a man got up to do the thank-yous and introduced himself as “representing the men – that is, the husbands of the PTA.” So here we are, in June 2007, in a young, upper-middle class, educated community, of mixed religious and non-religious Jews, where the audience of women included professionals, and at least one doctorate – a man gets up sounding like he stepped out a 1950s American sitcom, where the women “do the kids” and the men do all the “important” things, like public speaking and acts of physical strength. There was a direct line from kindergarten to marriage, in performance and in life – where gender roles are everything.

I went from there to my son’s new yeshiva, a classically boys-only space. We sat there, boys and their parents, in the middle of the Beit Midrash, the central all-purpose room in a religious school. Here, with the holy ark up front, a large stand in the middle, and rows and rows of tables and chairs, boys pray and learn, and probably more. We heard from the principal and from teachers about the importance of study and keeping commandments. In the middle of the event, one man stood up and announced that it’s the last chance to pray the afternoon service, and ten men stood up and collected themselves in the courtyard to pray.

It was indeed striking and sweet that the teachers are young, seemingly gentle and caring men who I’m sure my son will like. But this is not a male dominated place – this is a male only place, where women are not to be found anywhere anyplace other than the secretary’s office and perhaps an occasional English teacher. I looked around at all the mothers in the room – many with hats and other traditional head covering, all but me wearing long skirts, all effectively accepting our roles and costumes. Speaking was male; praying was male; teaching was male; studying was male; life was male. Boys are going to learn that everything important in life can be found here, in this institution. They will be fully empowered to take ownership of the religion and of society, with nothing holding them back, other than silly restrictions of their overprotective mothers whose job it is to keep them fed and clothed.

What was I doing there? Sitting amongst the bandanas, handbags, and lipstick, I felt myself pulled into the double set of female constructions as “modest/covered” and “beautiful/thin.” But there was something more. There was something so inherently passive and minimizing about being the mother of a son in yeshivah. We sat there, accepting our fate as entering the role of outsider in the man’s world – in our young sons’ world. My insides were screaming.

When my son was in kindergarten, I was a big piece of his life. I carried him, hugged him, played with him, and told him stories that kept him riveted. Now, I find myself knowingly sending him into a world where he will very soon be taught to see me as a second-class citizen. There is going to come a day, not too far off, I fear, where he will look at me knowing that he has more power than me, more social capital, more ownership of society and of our religion. He will see himself becoming a man, and surpassing me in everything. He will ultimately value his teachers, his friends and his rabbis – and himself, the man – more than me. I feel like I want to send him back to kindergarten. And then I remember that only an hour ago, kindergarten wasn’t looking so much better.

The rabbi announced that he would like to open up the floor to a discussion of parents’ expectations and questions (ironically, that discussion never materialized – the entire approach of the evening was of the rabbis talking and everyone else listening, which said a lot about the school as well). When he mentioned expectations, I whispered to my son and husband, “Expectations? I’d like them to turn the boys into feminists.” My husband looked at me with horror. “Don’t worry,” I smiled, “I’m not going to say that out loud.” Of course not – such a statement would at best alienate my son to his teachers before the year even starts. At worst, it would get him kicked out of the school with a letter or conversation along the lines of: “So sorry, there’s been a mistake, you’re not who we thought you were. Take your mother and go to the Reform school where you belong.”

“Some things you have to get at home,” my husband smiled, obviously relieved but also appreciative of my point. It’s true, there is a lot of gender awareness in our house, expressed by kids as much as by adults. When we are cloistered at home, I am generally confident that my kids are fully internalizing notions of social equity and justice. Everyone cooks and serves, boys and girls do laundry and look after the baby, and all of us are equally capable of studying, working, playing sports, working the computer, and fulfilling ritual roles. Most importantly, my kids – 12-year old boy included – express outrage at social injustices, whether about gender, race, ethnicity, or class. And my kids are also vehement vegetarians, horrified at the notion of human beings being so cruel to animals as to actually eat them. Still, as soon as we open our doors to the outside world, especially the religious world in which we still dwell, I feel like entering an abyss. Where outside in the wider religious world are boys taught to treat women as true equals? Absolutely nowhere.

We need a feminist religious school for boys. We need a place where women are not seen as caretakers of boys but as their leaders and role-models alongside men. Perhaps a co-ed feminist school would be even better, but I think men teaching boys about feminism is what I’m really after. Does such a thing exist in the religious world? Not to my knowledge.

In the meantime, here I am, sending my son to yeshiva because the only other option is to leave the religious framework – often tempting but also, somehow, not what I want. I am a deeply religious person, and I want to own the tradition. I just want to rid it of the needless, painful elements of inter-personal enslavement. “He has to get it from you,” I told my husband, accepting the inherent irony. But there it is – men are the ones who have to teach boys to be feminists.

Of course, therein lies the problem. Because the cadre of Orthodox feminist men is tiny indeed. And as Professor Harry Brod, world-renowned expert on masculinities and himself a Jewish man from Brooklyn, New York, says, there will never be a mass movement of feminist men. Men have too much to give up.

So while I search for ways to make my son a feminist and keep myself as a strong part of his life, I’m terrified. I’m terrified of what will happen to him – and me – if I fail in my attempts to inculcate my family in feminist and religion side by side. Without systematic, structural support, without a space – even a small space – within the educational system, I’m not sure I have a chance. It’s all on my shoulders, and those of my feminist, mild-mannered husband. That’s quite daunting indeed.