The politics of sex...again.
1:37 p.m.
Dr. M published her first book a few years ago in which she examines the judaization of Christian gentiles. I confess, I’ve read the introduction and part of the first chapter and that’s all. But anyway, her lecture the other night was on her most recent research topic, an examination of women as witches and practitioners of magic in rabbinic literature. She discussed references in the Babylonian and Jerusalem talmuds, based on the injunction in the torah that “thou shalt not suffer a sorceress to live”, pointing out the rabbinate’s need to consolidate power after two failed rebellions (the dates have escaped me here, but one of them was the Bar Kochba uprising) and the feeling that because women were carrying on in this underhanded way, it undermined them somewhat.
Because women are involved in the home to such a great deal, with the preparation of food, the raising of children, the tending of the sick and the dying, and of course in birthing, all things that are more or less closed to men, the rabbis considered these “mysteries” a source of power for women. They surmised that they drew their power from the earth, whereas they themselves drew it from God (in the sky). This actually jives pretty closely with what I learned in the goddess class I took a few years ago where female religion is cthonic, of the earth. Dr. M had several different stories and examples illustrating these things, where a man and woman performing the same rituals producing the same results would be hailed in two completely different ways: his would be a miracle, hers was considered witchcraft. It was considered that witchcraft was “natural” to women, and that most women practised it.
After the actual lecture there was time for questions, and there were some good ones. I was standing at the back, in the vestibule actually, and it took Dr. M a long time to see me with my raised hand, which also gave me more time to formulate what I wanted to say. I observed that no one had mentioned sex and its obvious significance considering that men were (and to a great degree still are) in charge of religious ritual. I wasn’t sure when the segregation of men and women in the synagogue had occurred, but it had been done so that men would not be distracted at prayer by lustful thoughts engendered by the presence of women (it turns out that this happened a couple of centuries after the time Dr. M was discussing, but I still felt it was valid). It was so obvious to me that men, who are really not able to control their body’s reproductive urges in the same way that females are, would look upon women as having “bewitched” them, and would blame them in some way for their own mind-over-matter shortcomings. For this reason, since they could not control their own reaction to femininity, they attempted in other ways to control women themselves, restricting their participation in religious ritual (called exemption but actually ending up being exclusion) and viewing their arcane activities as witchcraft.
This seems so obvious to me, yet I was the only person in that whole room of smart people to speak it out loud. Is sex still a taboo subject, or have we become so intellectualized that we can’t talk about it in such an environment. Afterwards, at the reception, I spoke more in detail with Dr. M about my observations, and she had to agree with me. But then, she is a woman. I wonder if a male scholar would be that open to this particular interpretation.
[I changed the photo in yesterday’s entry, if anyone has any questions as to what a slider looks like.]
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