Each fifth year rabbinical student writes and delivers a senior sermon. I delivered this sermon on 11/17/2012 to the HUC Cincinnati community. It speaks of the need to redefine masculinity in America and challenge the way our culture connects manhood with violence, dominance, and control. It is time for men the join in the fight against gender violence. We must become allies. One of the fist things we must do is challenge the image and definition of masculinity that is contributing to the violence.
We at Reyut are working to foster conversations within the Jewish world about unhealthy understandings of gender. Join us!
Ari Lorge
Toldot 11/17
Advocating for the Voice of Jacob
There is an old story. A man walks into a synagogue he has never
been to before. He recognizes the
service up until the Torah is taken out. As expected the Rabbi processes with the Torah
for the hakafah. He comes to a
certain spot in the synagogue and suddenly bends down with the Torah and then
continues. The man had never seen
anything like that before, so he approached the rabbi after the service. “Hello, Rabbi, I’m a visitor in the
community. I really enjoyed the service,
but I’m wondering if I can ask you a question.
I noticed that at a certain point in the hakafah you bent down
with the Torah. I’ve never seen that
before. What is the meaning of that
tradition?” “You know I’m not sure why
we do that,” replied the rabbi, “It was a tradition in the community before I
got here. Let’s ask Mrs. Nussbaum, her
family has been here for generations, she’ll know why.” They found Mrs. Nussbaum at her usual spot,
by the sugar-free cookies, at the Kiddush.
When they asked her, Mrs. Nussbaum responded, “Well, you know, before we
renovated the synagogue there used to be a low hanging beam in that spot and if
you didn’t duck you would whack your keppe. I don’t know why we still do it.”
Judaism is a religion with a
rich tradition of passing down customs, history, and values. We take pride in this fact. It is something which defines us. We speak often of a shalshelet ha’kabbalah
– a chain of tradition. For something to
be authoritative we refer to it as Mi-sinai, from Mount Sinai. If anyone doubts me on this, go into a
student pulpit and suggest changing the version of Adon Olam the
congregation sings…I dare you! You can’t. It is unthinkable because the things we pass
down, and which were passed down to us, hold the greatest value. However, sometimes, like the story about the hakafah,
we perpetuate what we inherit without thinking critically about what we’re
receiving.
Passing
on our heritage is a vital responsibility.
It is important for us to approach this task with intentionality. In addition to the enormous riches contained
within the tradition, there are aspects of our heritage which must be
contextualized, lest we unintentionally pass on something harmful.
In
this week’s parashah, we heard the story of Jacob and Esau and their struggle
for their father’s blessing, birthright, and love. We teach this story to children in our
religious schools. Through the text an
instructor can teach about parental favoritism, about sibling rivalry, about
lying and dishonesty, about many things.
We often do this in order to frame the behavior we find problematic in
the text. We use Isaac and Rebecca as
negative examples of parents. However,
there is a problematic aspect to the story we overlook.
In our parashah we read that
Isaac favored Esau because he was a hunter and an outdoorsman. We read further that Rebecca favored Jacob
because he was a mild child who stayed in camp.
When we tell this story we convey to the audience an ideal of
manhood. Boys learn that if they want to
earn their father’s love they should be like Esau; outdoorsy, dominant, dumb
and brawny. Boys learn that these traits
lead to acceptance into masculine peer culture.
We also learn that a boy like Jacob, mild mannered, sharp witted, and
someone who was a help around the camp, is favored by the mother. These traits will not endear you to your
father or to other men. In two verses we
have unintentionally taught anyone who encounters this parashah how to be a man. Moreover the masculinity we have promoted is both
dangerous and damaging. As Michael
Kimmel, the foremost scholar on constructed masculinity in America wrote, “The
belief that violence is manly is not carried on any chromosome, not soldered
into the wiring of the right or left hemisphere, not juiced by
testosterone. Boys learn it.” In this case they learn it from the
Torah. This lesson, combined with
countless others over the course of a lifetime, can lead to a toxic
understanding of masculinity. Judaism
has a responsibility to respond.
You might ask why? What is the hurt? What does it matter if a young boy or girl
learns that being a man means being dominant, powerful, and violent? I would argue it matters a great deal. Our culture’s definition of masculinity is
contributing to the pervasive levels of gender violence in America. Uplifting Esau masculinity and silencing
Jacob masculinity have helped establish and sustain unprecedented levels of
gender violence. Nearly 1/3 of women
report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend at some
point in their lives, more than one in five women experience completed or
attempted rape while in college, and a study in 2001 found that 20 percent of
adolescent girls were physically or sexually abused by a date. Don’t fall into the trap of denying this is a
Jewish problem. The statistics for the
Jewish community are roughly equivalent to the national numbers. I state these statistics not to shock, rather
to accurately portray a picture of the world in which we live; we live in an
age of Esau.
If we want to address gender
violence, we have to address a definition of manhood that is rooted in concepts
of power, dominance, and violence. Embedded
in America’s definition of masculinity is the subjugation of women by men. Should we want to create a safer society, we
must change the way we understand masculinity.
We must re-define manhood. In the
age of Esau masculinity, we must advocate for the voice of Jacob.
If you ask a group of young
men and women to describe a “real man” you get strikingly similar answers no
matter the group. Men should be strong,
dominant, in control, respected, independent, tough, powerful, athletic, and
aggressive. Men should be Esau. Why are the responses similar? We receive these notions of masculinity from
the same places. They come from family
and friends, religion, TV, media, the toys with which we play, and almost every
aspect of our culture. As we spend more
and more time in front of screens of various sizes our images of gender are
constructed ever more narrowly.
Moreover, the messages sent
to us about masculinity are growing increasingly tied to violence and control. Just go to the local toy store if you doubt
me. Many have talked about Barbie’s
changing shape, but did you know GI Joe’s biceps calculated into real life
equivalents have gone from 12.2 inches in 1964 to 26.8 inches in 1998? Essentially, they’ve gone from large to
crazily disproportionate. Or think of
the difference between Adam West’s Batman and Christian Bale’s Batman. Even more timely might be Sean Connery’s image
of James Bond compared to Daniel Craig’s which is even more amped up. These images are constructed to reflect our
understanding of what it takes to be manly.
Over the past several decades there has been an intensifying of the power,
violence, and strength needed to prove masculinity. We are living in a society that glorifies the
image of Esau over the image of Jacob, and Esau’s biceps are bigger than ever. Nowadays, instead of a hunting bow, he uses
an assault rifle and a helicopter to fulfill his father’s request for fresh
meat.
You say, surely it is
possible to break out of this boxed-in definition of masculinity. It is not easy to do so. Society works hard to keep men inside this
box. Our education about gender norms
starts early. At a very young age we
begin to act as, what has come to be called, the gender police. Those of you with children in elementary
school know this. Try sending your son
to school wearing pink or purple. My 4
year old niece knows that purple is a “girls’” color. We teach these expectations to children. Then they, like the adults around them, can
serve as gender police.
If boys or men do not
conform to every aspect of this society’s definition of masculinity they are
quickly labeled by their gender policing peers in order to call their manliness
into question. They are called, “Sissy, whipped,
fag, mama’s boy, or worst of all, simply a girl…” Gender policing exists at every age, and leads
to the suppression of men’s authentic selves.
It has also become militant in recent years. We’ve seen a sweeping series of suicides in
the last ten years by heterosexual boys who could not tolerate the attacks on
their masculinity which they received because they expressed a belief or hobby
that lay outside of the boxed in definition of masculinity. Boys and men who want to get by learn quickly
to put on a hyper masculine mask.
The consequence of this is
that we are teaching men and women earlier and more pervasively that the definition
of masculinity is rooted in notions of power, control, and dominance. When this is coupled with a terrible, yet widespread,
cultural belief that women are subordinate to men we have a dangerous
combination: a combination that leads some men to make sexist jokes, and others
to control, abuse, and perform violence against women. For most of us though, it leads to hiding the
“Jacob aspects” of who we really are. We
put up an Esau-like front for the benefit of other men and quietly acquiesce to
beliefs and actions we know are wrong. It
is time to speak out, and it is time to stand up.
The truth is nobody fits
this definition of masculinity. No one
can live a healthy life acting like Rush Limbaugh and looking like GI Joe. Yet men are working harder than ever to try. Most of us are tired of it. We are tired of bending to avoid the
invisible beam during the hakafah.
I think most of us want to stand up for the Jacob aspects of who we
are. We are men who like football and French
impressionism, who like boxing and the ballet, who like NASCAR and knitting. These things do not make us manly or
effeminate. They simply make us who we
are. We refuse to conform to any one
image of masculinity.
Moreover, as men, there are
some aspects of the current definition of manhood we reject outright. We will not hide that we think sexist jokes
are offensive. We will not hide our
disgust of our culture’s sexualization of coerced and subjugated young girls and women by
making them the pornographic norm. We will
not hide that we wish for our romances with women to be relationships of
mutuality, and this does not make us whipped.
We will not hide that we wish to see women achieve every aspect of
equality in our society, that we are ready to give up heterosexual white male
privilege and power to see it happen. That makes us strong not weak. It is time to redefine masculinity to allow
for both the Jacob and the Esau parts of us; to allow for a real and complex
sense of ourselves to be expressed in public.
Our Jewish communities must
lead the way in this movement. After
all, we are descendants of Jacob. We
have a tradition of rejecting society’s image masculinity and defining it for
ourselves. We could be the
revolutionaries in this work. In the
Jewish community we must challenge unhealthy understandings of gender in our
synagogues and schools. We must teach
against our tradition when we abhor the messages it sends. We must begin these conversations with our
youth and our adults. Will this end
gender violence? Sadly, it will not. Will it create a Jewish society that is not
willing to tolerate it and silently acquiesce to it? Yes it can.
It is not manly to dominate; it is not lady like to be submissive. It is Jewish to stand up and be counter-cultural when the cultural norm promotes injustice and subjugation. It is Jewish to respect and honor all
creatures no matter their gender. It is
Jewish to be true to who we are.
In America, one in four
women is a victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in her
lifetime. Even one in the entire world is too
many. It is time we stopped thinking
this is solely a women’s issue. It is a
men’s issue. It is a Jewish issue. It has been said that the paramount moral
challenge of this century will be the struggle for gender equality in the world. Men must be allies in this struggle, but we
must challenge the way all of us, men and women, think about masculinity. It is time to stop pretending this is not a
pervasive and systemic problem. As
husbands and wives, as sisters and brothers, as mothers and fathers, as friends,
as Jews we have an obligation to respond.
Let us all leave this service ready to say that change will come, and let
it begin with me.
