How are we to understand the differential roles of men and women within Judaism? On the one hand, Jewish identity is conferred by women, not men. The child of a Jewish mother is Jewish; the child of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother is not. The source of this halachic rule traces back to the very first Jewish child, Isaac. Abraham already had a child, Ishmael, by Sarah’s handmaid, Hagar. Yet God insisted that only Sarah’s son would continue the covenant. Maternity, not paternity, was the decisive factor.
On the other hand, status is conferred by men. At the very beginning of the Book of Numbers, known in Hebrew as Bamidbar, there is a census:
“Take a census of the whole Israelite community by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.” (Numbers 1:2)
The men are counted, while the women are not. In this case, the reason is clear, as the next verse explains:
“You and Aaron shall record them by their groups, from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms.” (Numbers 1:3)
The census with which Bamidbar begins was intended to count those eligible for military duty. Traditionally, men fight; women protect. War has historically been a male pursuit.
However, other forms of status also pass through the male line. A king is succeeded by his son. A Kohen is one whose father is a Kohen. A Levite is one whose father is a Levite. Family heritages are governed by paternity, an idea implicit in the phrase “by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.” One great counterexample occurs later in the Book of Numbers in the story of the daughters of Zelophehad, whose claim to inherit their father’s share in the land of Israel—since he had no sons—is vindicated by God Himself. Yet, as a general rule in Judaism, identity is maternal while inheritance is paternal.
It is with trepidation that one takes up the subject of gender differentiation. It is a sensitive topic, and awareness of the complexities has only heightened in recent years. Despite the intensity of the debate, it is worth reviewing the Jewish tradition and its “twin-track” approach. Rabbi Barukh Halevi Epstein, in his Tosefet Berakhah, makes a linguistic observation based on midrashic sources: the words ben (son) and bat (daughter) are both shorter forms of other words. Ben comes from the word boneh, a builder. As the Sages famously noted:
“Call them not your sons (banayich) but your builders (bonayich).”
Bat, meanwhile, is a compacted form of the word bayit, meaning a home. According to this tradition, men build buildings, while women build homes. Rabbi Epstein adds that the word ummah (nation) comes from the word eim (mother). Thus, national identity, as well as personal identity, is maternal.
Recent research has cast scientific light on gender differences, although this often requires generalizing about the two genders. In 2002, Steven Pinker summarized the evidence in The Blank Slate:
“In all cultures, human males are more aggressive and more prone to physical violence than women. In all cultures, roles are distributed on the basis of sex differences: women tend to have greater responsibility for child rearing, while men tend to occupy most leadership positions in the public and political realm.”
Pinker argues that this pattern is sufficiently universal to refute the idea that gender differences are purely “constructed” products of culture rather than biology.
In The Essential Difference, Simon Baron-Cohen, professor of psychology and psychiatry at Cambridge University, argued that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, while the male brain is wired for system-building. Empathy is the ability to understand and relate to another person through emotional intelligence. System-building is the drive to analyze and explain phenomena by discovering the rules that govern them. As Baron-Cohen notes:
“Whilst the natural way to understand and predict the nature of events and objects is to systematize, the natural way to understand a person is to empathise.”
Carol Gilligan, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School, argued in In a Different Voice that men and women engage in different kinds of moral reasoning. Men tend to think in terms of justice, rights, and abstract principles, whereas women think more in terms of compassion, nurturing, and peacemaking. She describes:
“...two modes of judging, two different constructions of the moral domain—one traditionally associated with masculinity and the public world of social power, the other with femininity and the privacy of domestic interchange.”
The Torah reflects these differences. Our matriarchs, Sarah and Rebecca, both seem to understand better than their husbands which child will continue the covenant (Isaac over Ishmael, and Jacob over Esau). The Hebrew Bible contains many vignettes of strong women. The story of the Exodus features six key women who played vital roles in the redemption: Yocheved, Miriam, Shifra, Puah, Zipporah, and Pharaoh’s daughter, Batya. There are many other female heroes throughout the text, including Hannah, Deborah, Ruth, Huldah, and Esther. These women are characterized by their emotional-spiritual intelligence and the moral courage that flows from it.
There are only two cases in the Tanakh where the word “Torah” is conjoined with an abstract noun. One occurs in Malachi’s description of the ideal priest:
“The law of truth (torat emet) was in his mouth and nothing false was found on his lips.” (Malachi 2:6)
The other is found in the Book of Proverbs’ famous description of the “Woman of Valor” (Eshet Chayil):
“She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the law of lovingkindness (torat chessed) is on her tongue.” (Proverbs 31:26)
The difference between the dispassionate search for truth (Toras emet) and the passionate drive toward lovingkindness (Toras chessed) is precisely what researchers like Baron-Cohen and Gilligan tracked over thirty centuries later.
Hence the Torah’s distinction between the public arena and the personal dimension of identity. Status and position within a hierarchy—areas in which the Torah traditionally privileges the male—are quintessentially social and belong to the public domain. They represent the arena in which the struggle for power takes place. What is unique to the Torah, and what has always been Judaism’s greatest strength, is its emphasis on the personal domain, where love, compassion, and mercy are the primary virtues.
This explains the religious centrality of the home and family within Judaism. This is the primacy of the personal over the political. That is why social status follows the father, but personal identity follows the mother. Carol Gilligan makes a sharp observation regarding this:
“The moral domain is... enlarged by the inclusion of responsibility and care in relationships. And the underlying epistemology correspondingly shifts from the Greek ideal of knowledge as a correspondence between mind and form to the Biblical conception of knowing as a process of human relationship.”
When you want to measure the strength of an army, as at the beginning of the Book of Numbers, you count the men. But when you want to know the strength of a civilization, you look to the women. For it is their intelligence and care that defend the personal against the political and champion the power of relationships over the relationships of power.
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