Questions to consider:
-Who is excluded from serving as a priest?
-Thinking about the obligations of a priest in Ancient Israel why might they be excluded?
-How do we feel about this exclusion?
§ Rabbi Yoḥanan says: They place on the Great Sanhedrin only men of high stature, and of wisdom, and of pleasant appearance, and of suitable age And they must also be masters of sorcery, and they must know all seventy languages in order that the Sanhedrin will not need to hear testimony from the mouth of a translator Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: They place on the Sanhedrin only one who knows how to render a carcass of a creeping animal [something the Torah explicitly says is impure] pure by Torah law.
Questions to Consider
-According to Rabbi Yochanan who can serve on the Sanhendrin? Who can not?
-According to Rav Yehuda who can serve on the Sanhendrin?
-How do we feel about these requirements?
"What We're Looking for In a Rabbi" Word cloud
Questions to consider
- Based on this word bank what do Jewish communities look for in a rabbi?
- What would you add to this list?
- What would you take away from this list?
- Who is your ideal rabbi?
Transference and the Female Rabbi
Some attitudes toward women rabbis reflect the long tradition of male rabbis and have become embedded in people’s psyches. “You don’t look like a rabbi” is a common refrain from people whose rabbis never were old men with beards but who have internalized that archetype. While the age of the rabbi plays a role here, one has to assume that this reaction has more to do with gender than with age. After all, these mythic old rabbis with beards presumably were young once. And what is the subliminal message of a Reform congregation’s decorating its walls with paintings of dancing Chasidic men? What people see right in front of them cannot always overcome the images enshrined in their unconscious, particularly when those images continue to be reinforced. At the bat mitzvah of the young girl who asked to wear matching dresses with the rabbi, two women were overheard talking afterward in the women’s bathroom: “It was a lovely bat mitzvah,” they said, “but who was that other girl up on the pulpit?”
http://www.lilith.org/articles/transference-and-the-female-rabbi/
Questions to Consider
-When you think of a Rabbi what images immediately come to mind?
-Do those images look like rabbis you have actually interacted with?
-Where do these images come from?
Female Rabbis Contend Sexual Harassment Persists
“When the power invested in a rabbi is embodied by a woman, some people are still very uncomfortable with that and behave in ways that, consciously or unconsciously, are efforts to reduce their power,” said Barbara Breitman, who teaches a class on ethical boundaries at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC). “One way of doing that is to relate to her like a sex object instead of like a Jewish spiritual leader and teacher.”
“Women rabbis are counseled to wear lipstick or told not to wear lipstick,” [Rabbi Hara] Person wrote. “We are told that our clothing choices are too revealing or too dowdy. Our shoes are too sexy or too old-fashioned. Our voices are too soft or too strident. We’re too emotional or we’re too cold. We’re called by our first names while the male rabbi is called Rabbi LastName. We’re called kiddo, babe, sugar, sexy, honey. We’re advised to get home quickly from a board meeting so that we can make our husbands happy.”
“Women rabbis extremely frequently receive comments about their looks in their congregations, their clothes, their hair, every body part,” [Rabbi Jill] Maderer said. “Our male colleagues do not receive comments about their looks, and I don’t think there’s an awareness that those comments carry a message that devalues our work because people are first relating to us on how we look.”
Rabbi Tiferet Berenbaum of Temple Har Zion in Mount Holly, N.J., said that she has been the recipient of comments about her appearance and clothing options. She said other women have judged her outfit choices during Shabbat and High Holy Days, almost as if she was at an awards show.
Particularly when she was pregnant, she received a lot of comments about her body.
“We’re trying to have business dealings, but then it always becomes personal because it then goes into our bodies, and that’s a challenge,” she said. “I always want to keep an open, loving relationship and conversation going with people, but I feel like my body is off-limits. It’s mine. I’m doing what I want with it. I don’t have to discuss or explain to anyone about it.”
Berenbaum said she has experienced more pushback from being a female rabbi than from being an African-American rabbi, with some directly telling her they took issue with her gender.
http://jewishexponent.com/2018/01/24/female-rabbis-contend-sexual-harassment-persists/?fbclid=IwAR2uQ725x7QE7S8fzJV0C043jBsdmFpyXYwbEHF4yvlq7DyqaNBw_ScK0Ac
Questions to Consider
-Based on the experiences of women rabbis, there is a bias that still exists today against women rabbis, where do you think that comes from?
-Who else might experience conscious or unconcious biases against them in the rabbinate/as clergy
-What can you do to confront and correct these biases?