Mi va'mi haholchim?
https://twitter.com/SorryIra/status/1457462328186781714
(This isn't meant as a criticism of RSA, or of Ger specifically. We know that many religious gatherings across the Orthodox world would look exactly like this. I am just so struck that beneath the rhetoric of nashim b'mai zachyan, and the tears of the Yiddishe mama, and the rest,
is the reality that many of the members of the religious community of which I see myself a part live with the unquestioned and not-needing-to-be-questioned default state that women are completely absent in religious spaces.
And not only is that not seen, but if it were raised, the answer would be that the absence of women is what constitutes those as religious spaces.
Moshe Rabbeinu thought that chag laShem required baneinu u'bnoteinu. If the question were asked today, would we be fine parking the women in Egypt for three days and letting the men go out to the midbar to worship?
If minimally we can constitute a religious polity without half of the Jewish people, and maximally the religious polity is defined by the exclusion of half of the Jewish people, where does that leave us? [Especially those of us who are in that half of the Jewish people.])
I've spend a lot of time think about citizenship these past few years. GWU professor (and former grad school colleague) Denver Brunsman wrote about the role that British naval impressment served in structuring a negative definition of citizenship in the early republic.
What it was to be a citizen was not be the sorts of people who could be kidnapped by the British navy and forced into service: A subject of the king. A slave. And a woman. Those were the people who weren't free to determine their own destiny, and that was what a citizen wasn't.
(It wasn't subtle. One founding-era figure said that impressment "put petticoats on them all.")
What struck you about that list when you read it?
What struck me was birchot hashachar.
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