Where I won't stand

A colleague asked me yesterday if we should organize a group to go to Women at the Wall.  This is my response.

Women of the Wall is my struggle, but it can't be my battleground.

From 1983-1990, I worked with battered women.  I saw my co-workers and I at the front line of the war on women.  We recorded information for petitions for protection from abuse.  Three incidents of violence were necessary.  We wrote down the details.  I have no idea how I sat there, but I was young and committed.  I'm grateful that more stories have not stayed with me.  But I see faces, I remember names.  Mostly I remember the strength and valiance of the women I met.

I walked away from that work but I have no illusions of having made significant change.  The shelters are still full, the hotlines are still ringing. 

Over time I have taken myself to a different place and a different stance in the struggle.  I am a lesbian rabbi - an impossibility in the eyes of many in a country where many consider women rabbis not to be rabbis.  I was trained to pastor and facilitate - in the eyes of many rabbis are decisors of law only.

I do radical things these days - like teaching a shiur in the modern Orthodox shul in my town, like leading services in the Reform congregation here, like going into the school and teaching sixth graders about Women at the Wall, complete with photos of Tefillin Barbie.   While people were leaving Women at the Wall yesterday, I was sitting in a doctor's office with my son, explaining to an Orthodox woman, an M.D. in training who was sitting in on our doctor's visit, "my son has two moms."

If I go to a place where there is a crowd, where people are being encouraged to hate, I may lose my center.  I may lose my ability to see the other, the one who is different from me, as essentially good.  A favorite poem, the Desiderata, says, "Speak your truth quietly and clearly and listen to others; they too have their story."  For my own spiritual well-being, I must preserve my ability to do this.  And for my students, I want them to be able to make their own choices about where to stand in this struggle.

The men who run this country are happy to engineer a fight between women over the Kotel.  It diverts women's attention (and that of much of the caring progressive overseas diaspora) from the rest of the issues that are so pressing.   Yesterday I heard Naftali Bennett on the radio saying (not in so many words) that the world cares about business progress, not about peace or human rights.  He and Yair Lapid and Binyamin Netanyahu have no problem dismissing demands for economic justice led by Shelly Yachimovich and calls to sit down to negotiations led by Tzipi Livni.  Women battle each other at the Kotel and the patriarchy wins again.

I am 100% in agreement with the values and ideals of Women of the Wall.  But I can't stand there today.  I have realized that I will die and the gender justice issues I have spent so much of my life caring about will live on.  But my life will have been a poem, a song, a testament to where women stood in this time.