A Book to Stitch the Rift

By REBECCA PHILLIPS

HOUSES OF STUDY
Ilana M. Blumberg
182 pages. University of Nebraska Press. $24.95.

I read much of Ilana Blumberg’s new book, Houses of Study, while sitting on the wrong side of the mechitzah during a recent Sunday morning prayer service. I was on the women’s side, and the only person there. Though my husband and I normally pray with an egalitarian minyan, that weekend he was observing a yahrtzeit, and since it’s difficult to find a Sunday morning minyan—even where we live in Brooklyn—we traipsed to the local Orthodox shul, Blumberg in tow. As I sat quietly reading the intimate details of the author’s struggle to reconcile feminism and Orthodoxy, the men who came for the service, scheduled to start at 8:45 am, struggled to find the eighth, ninth, and tenth males needed for them to pray. And while they were warm and hospitable to my husband—offering handshakes, asking him if he wanted to lead, making sure he knew when to say kaddish—no one came over to welcome me, or to ask if I needed help following along. During the 45 minutes it took for the service to get started, and the subsequent half hour or so of prayer, I related perfectly to Blumberg. Houses of Study was the ideal book to have with me for this experience; it is an intimate portrait of a woman’s alienation, anger, confusion, determination, and resignation about the place of women in the Orthodox world.

Houses of Study is actually a collection of four long essays, spanning Blumberg’s life from the time she was a teen studying in Israel before going to college, to her life as a new wife and mother in a small Jewish community in Michigan, where she teaches. The book chronicles her experience in Israel during the mid-1980s, and the harsh realization that her male counterparts were getting more out of their time in yeshiva than she was at the women’s yeshiva. A second essay details her literary ancestry: as the granddaughter of a Hebrew scholar, language and literature are in her blood, as is the confusion over the place of women in the synagogue. The book follows Blumberg to graduate school, where the writings of George Eliot have as much influence on her as any rabbinic texts, and where both a love affair with a non-Jew and a futile attempt to start a women’s prayer group help lead to her temporary disillusionment with traditional Jewish practice. And finally, we meet Blumberg with a family of her own, content in both her literary and Jewish lives, and able to look back at her struggles with Orthodoxy and rejoice at how much has changed.

The best part of Blumberg’s book is the reader’s ability to rejoice along with her; the changes that Blumberg chronicles are remarkable, and recognizable to any reader familiar with the modern Orthodox world. Her earlier essays read almost like letters from a bygone era, even though the periods she writes about were at most 20 years ago. Her experiences were just on the cusp of major changes in Jewish women’s education and Orthodox synagogue life. While the girls’ yeshiva she attended in Israel was housed in a dumpy building where the kitchen doubled as a beit midrash, and which had unclear goals or curriculum for female students, yeshivas for girls now flourish and are as well endowed as the houses of study for boys. And while Blumberg attempted to form a weekly women’s prayer service at the University of Pennsylvania, she was met with resistance from the larger community, who insisted on investigating the legality of such a group. Now such groups are common. Twenty years after she graduated, Blumberg’s high school offers Talmud classes to girls—it’s no longer considered a prelude to “licentiousness”—and women in New York can study classical Jewish texts at the Drisha Institute. Just a few years earlier, the landscape and opportunities for women like Blumberg, women who had one foot in the Jewish world and one foot in the secular world, was very different.

While it’s clear that a great deal has changed for Orthodox women since the time Blumberg first encountered these issues (despite my own recent synagogue experience, of course), what is less clear from her book is how much Blumberg herself has changed. One gets the sense that throughout Blumberg’s journey she has learned that the Jewish experience is not black and white, that wearing a skirt or a head covering does not necessarily determine what kind of Jew one is, or what kind of life one leads. But it’s frustrating that Blumberg doesn’t detail any real closure at the end of her book. I finished the book and felt unclear about where exactly Blumberg stands. What kind of synagogue does she attend now? How will she raise her young daughter? Will she be able to fully reconcile her husband’s Reform background with her own Orthodox one? Will her daughter always sit behind a mechitzah, or will she prefer an egalitarian environment? And will her daughter’s choices be okay with her as a mother?

But perhaps final answers like these don’t matter, because Blumberg’s faith transcends these questions. In the last essay in the book, when she writes about meeting her husband, Ori, Blumberg writes of the article of faith that appears on countless synagogue walls and above numerous arks: “Da lifnei mi atah omed, know before whom you stand.” To Blumberg, this phrase is of utmost importance: knowing before whom she stands is how she defines her Jewish experience, her level of piety, how she lives her daily life, and the people she chooses to be with. Even at her time of greatest disillusionment, when she wore pants in public for the first time and stopped attending group prayer services, Blumberg still studied Jewish texts and still prayed every day. Despite her misgivings, her disenchantment, and her resistance, in the end Blumberg never forgot before whom she stood. Her struggles to live as complete a life as possible were not for the sake of Orthodoxy, or for the sake of feminism, or for the sake of literature, but for the sake of her relationship with God. This is, ultimately, what it means to her to be Orthodox, and it’s clear that, despite a lack of clarity or finality about her choices, it is through prayer, teaching, and now motherhood, that Blumberg will work to perfect that relationship—and therefore help to perfect the closing of the rift between her secular and religious lives.