Posts Tagged ‘shuls’
Return to Shul – Women and Children First (or At Least Not Last)
- Synagogues in the United Kingdom are preparing to reopen after several months.
- It is clear that this will not mean – at least for the foreseeable future – doors opened wide again to all comers.
- Whether or not the 30 person limit applies to all services – which is not yet clear – it is certain that social distancing requirements will limit the numbers able to return.
- I have seen it suggested that we should prioritise men who need a minyan to say kaddish and other men who want to pray with a minyan; and I have seen suggestions that in order to maximise the number of adult men who can pray with a minyan, we should allow men into the women’s spaces, exclude children, and effectively open the synagogues only to adult males of 13 and above.
- That would be a disgrace and a disaster.
- I have no difficulty in perpetuating a Judaism that requires communal prayer to be focused on a minyan of ten adult males; it’s anachronistic, but so is much of my religion. I don’t find it distasteful (and yes, of course, I might if I weren’t a man) provided it accommodates the needs of women and children as much as the needs of men.
- I can belong to a religion where the community services build on a core of 10 men, so long as they build out from that to provide a service that helps everybody to pray and makes everyone feel that their prayers are nurtured and appreciated as much as anyone else’s.
- I cannot belong to a religion that thinks that women’s prayers matter less than men’s; or that children’s prayers matter less than adults.
- Yes of course some women are as happy praying at home as in shul; or happier; and the same goes for some men.
- But some women find it easier to pray when supported by the prayers and songs of the community; and their rights and needs must be respected as much as mine.
- So once we have 10 men in the shul, remaining spaces must be allocated in a way that reflects the needs of women and children.
- (As to saying kaddish, there are women who wish to say kaddish in a communal context too.)
- We do not live in the eighteenth century. Prevailing moral sensitivities have refined since we were in the largely-mythically reverenced shtetl; the systematic belittling of women in ritual Judaism from those times owed more to our reflecting the surrounding culture than to any religious requirements. “You go and set out the kiddush while we pray musaph” is a cultural chauvinism, not a reflection of Jewish values; and it has no place in today’s world.
- Lockdown has hopefully taught us all to empathise more with those who are perpetually cut off from the kind of communal life that some of us – I for one – have previously taken for granted; it would be a disastrous end to lockdown if a handful of active and healthy adult men rushed back into the shul with relief and slammed the doors in the face of those who don’t “need a minyan” or who cannot get to a minyan whether they need it or not.
- Lockdown will have served a massively beneficial purpose if from now on our communities concentrate on including as many people as possible, in whatever ways possible; there is no excuse for ever having a shiur again on a weekday that does not offer a live-streamed version as well as catering for those who prefer to attend physically; the same for our weekday services (and hopefully it will not prove impossible in the reasonably medium-term to devise a halachically acceptable way of live-streaming shabbos services too); and similarly there would be no excuse for reopening shuls in a way that made women and children think that their prayers mattered less than men’s.
The Sceptic Blog 