CBR15Bingo: Politics (feminism, inter-community politics, personal politics)
Both of these texts engage with what religion means to the writer and how they engage with their religious communities with a more radical and transformative mindset. Reading them in close succession was an interesting look into how feminist, progressive religious women struggle to find their place within structured organizations. However, they are coming from two very different faith traditions and two very different personalities as well. As someone who reacts strongly with the personality of the writer (see how often I use “irritated” to describe my feelings about a writer during my reviews), I meshed better with Haviva Ner-David than with Sara Mills, so that colors my review here.
Life on the Fringes is Ner-David’s account of trying to live a feminist life within Orthodox Judaism, and a look at her approach to halakha. I appreciated the combination of memoir and religious law and how deeply she was thinking about both. As someone who wants to convert to Judaism, I connected a lot with her insights about the Torah and how she was thinking through her choices to wear tefillin and tzitzit and to try to pursue rabbinic ordination. I did find her hopes to be somewhat naive at times in terms of thinking that it wasn’t going to be such a big deal that she was trying some of these things or being surprised at how strong the backlash was to her trying to applying to YU for s’micha. I also didn’t love the section she wrote about homosexuality, which surprised me enough with its tone that I checked when the book was written and realized it was 2000. (“…part of me, I must admit, is inclined to the idea that homosexuality is a perversion.”) Her basic idea is that the verse prohibiting anal sex is accurate and we just need to embrace certain Torah prohibitions, but gay men should be allowed to fully take part openly in religious life, with the congregation just accepting gay couples and not asking them about their sex lives (“This approach does require that the homosexual man who wishes to remain in the halakhic community accept that one kind of sexual act between him and his partner is considered sinful, but it removes homosexual love and even physical intimacy (aside from anal sex) from the realm of sin.”). Besides that section, which is not aging well, the rest of the book holds up in terms of its content. I am glad that I read this book, as even though I didn’t agree with everything she wrote, it did make me think deeply and it’s always good to get some intellectual stimulation.
Take This Bread is about Sara Miles’s sudden conversion experience when she takes communion randomly. The power of this experience of communion reduces her to tears after a life of complete atheism, and she ends up a believing Christian who starts a food pantry at her church. This is also a part theology, part memoir book. I found her to be a more irritating author, which colored my reaction to this book. It took a while to get to her conversion experience and I wasn’t very interested in what struck me as bragging about her journalistic adventures in Latin and South America, as well as her experiences in restaurant work. It had the vibe of someone who wanted me to see how cool and left-wing they were, and how much they’d done for the worker’s struggle. I don’t mean to lessen the actual work she did, but it felt like the NY Times opinion page for the first 50 pages. I read a lot of 1960s-1970s left magazines (Whole Earth Catalog, etc) when I was a kid and there’s a certain self-satisfied air to them that this book also had. The bits where she talked about what G-d is and her experience of transcendence were very well done and I enjoyed those. Overall, this one was more of a struggle for me to get through and continued to cement that Christian thinking is not for me personally. If you are a Christian and more to the left politically, you will probably love this book. It is a strong thesis statement about the importance of being confronted with the fact that the church is made up of everyone, even people you don’t like, and you have to actually face that to become closer to G-d.