Summary: Judith Plaskow, "Jewish Memory from a Feminist Perspective,"in Weaving the Visions ed. Plaskow and Carol Christ 39-50

Mary Beth McLendon

In this article, Judith Plaskow discusses the traditional Jewish textual view of Jewish women and the ways that modern feminists have approached and dealt with that view. She introduces the issues by quoting Moses in Exodus 19:15, "Be ready for the third day; do not go near a woman" and suggesting that this quotation effectively denies the presence of Jewish woman on Mount Sinai as well as within the Jewish tradition as a whole. (39) She explains that one might be able to accept the implications of this quotation that women are only passive, impure, and invisible on the basis that these words were initially spoken in a time long ago if this quotation were simply a part of the past, but, alas, this text is also "living memory."(39) Equally significant for Plaskow, is her view that a tension exists between this textual characterization of Jewish women and the lived experience of Jewish women as agents within the Jewish tradition; she claims that feminists can "re-remember and recreate history." (40)

Plaskow describes the Jewish Torah as "the partial record of 'God-wrestling' of part of the Jewish people" because the text contains the experiences of illumination and mystery in the part of Jewish men who are interpreting their own experiences. (42) She claims that many historical Jewish texts are prescriptive rather than descriptive of Jewish women's reality. To support her assertions, she explains that the Jewish Kabbalists also view the Torah as interpretation and not a pre-human divine entity. In discussing the two meanings of re-writing "history" she has used, Jewish rabbinic re-writing which took place after the destruction of the second temple on the one hand and modern feminist historiography on the other, she notes that these two kind of re-writing are frequently in conflict with each other, though they don't necessarily have to be; both kinds of re-writing strive to incorporate history as a part of the living memory of the Jewish people.

Plaskow argues that feminist historiography "must be combined … with feminist midrash, or storytelling, and feminist liturgy before it becomes part of a living feminist Judaism" because historiography expounds on events that human memory does not recognize. (44) Feminist midrash are significant because they utilize imagination and transform historical documents into narrative, which is much easier to digest. She describes this recovery of history combined with invention as helping to "recover the hidden half of the Torah." (47) Plaskow explains that feminist liturgy, which combines speaking and acting has been a widely used arena for re-remembering women in history in recent years; the celebration of Rosh Hodesh as well as feminist haggadot have ritually helped make women's history present.