After the background, the actual story.

[drwex]

It's possible that the prefaratory posts (part 1, part 2, and part 3) will be more interesting than this, the actual story I want to tell. So be it. Since this is a lot about Judaism and feminism I'd be particularly interested in hearing thoughts from my female Jewish friends. But don't let that stop the rest of you from adding thoughts.

This is about the differences between my own son's bar mitzvah, and the bar mitzvah of a friend of his the week after. I take as given that attempts to include other people and give other people opportunities do not exclude me - or rather should not. But that's what ended up happening and it's stuck with me enough to prompt this whole series of posts.

As I've mentioned I was raised fairly standard suburban-American Conservative Jewish. I know the prayers well enough that I can adapt to local variants in melodies and the service has a pace and a rhythm that feels comfortable. For my own son's bar mitzvah I was pleased to play greeter, welcoming people as they came in. During the service I was able to move around, spending time with family, friends, visitors. I didn't really have to pick up a prayer book (the Siddur) most of the time - I just knew what was going on and when I didn't, I could pick it up from the folk around me. There was a sense of comfort and community that transcended my own ambiguous relationship with G-d.

I did worry about the non-Jews there - to what degree would they be lost or uncomfortable? There are some things in the Bar Mitzvah service that are done in English but most of it is in Hebrew. Judaism, as I've noted in the earlier posts, is full of odd little traditions and things that have been made up and passed along that don't necessarily make a lot of sense to anyone else (or even to us, sometimes). It has been very helpful to read the responses from some of the non-Jews in attendance on how they connected to what went on.

Before I go on it helps if you know that Hebrew is a heavily gendered language. It's not just that we refer to G-d as the Father, and King, both of which are explicitly masculine words. We also say "Bless(masculine)" rather than "Bless(feminine)". The religious structure of the prayers - what we ask for, how we ask, what we give thanks for - is very much oriented around a father-headed household. We give some nods to the matriarchs of the tribe, but with very few exceptions they get short shrift.

If one is Orthodox, things are heavily sex-segregated and women are forbidden from open participation in many religious practices. Part of the choice K made was having his bar mitzvah at this Conservative temple where his mother, his aunt, and his (female) cousin could be active participants in the service. It was also a big deal that one of his teachers from the (Orthodox) Chabad where he started his learning crossed the picket lines (so to speak) to come to this service. Not only did she come to a mixed-sex service she even stood on the bimah with him and helped lead a prayer. So issues of women and Judaism figured prominently in planning and having my son's event.

Still, the bottom line is that Conservative Judaism - even with the changes made to include women as leaders and participants - is still a patriarchal religion with a male-dominated theological structure. Women have to work to be included. Not so for the second bar mitzvah.

The second celebration was at Chavurat Shalom in Cambridge. The Chav, as it's called, is a very Reform, egalitarian, modern congregation. I was a little taken aback when I went there and picked up their prayerbook. They've replaced the entire Siddur with something of their own creation. This isn't just doing the traditional prayers and things in English so that Americans can follow along; it's a wholesale revamp of what it means to do a Shabbat service and bar mitzvah within it.

It was one of the most alienating experiences of my life.

As someone mentioned in a comment to an earlier post, returning to a congregation of faith one has grown up in can be very much like coming home. On the surface these Chav worshippers are people I should fit in with. They're white, suburban Jews with a strongly egalitarian, feminist, modern sensibility. Their goals, described in the front of their Siddur are laudable: inclusion of women, recognition of the evolution of faith, etc.

But the product? Well, let me start by saying you do not make things more equal by arbitrarily replacing 50% of the masculine-gendered phrases with feminine-gendered ones. They've also taken out all the references to G-d-as-father and replaced them with G-d-as-mother and G-d-as-nurturer imagery.

On the surface that's not overtly wrong - those images are part of the tradition, even if significantly underplayed. It makes sense to me that they ought to be more emphasized and understood as part of the totality. But remember that analogy about the jewels? Part of what it means to be Jewish in this model is to struggle with the hard stuff. You engage with what interests you, not just scooping up the easy bits. Passover is a great example of this - it's full of difficult and contradictory stuff. Every so often I think I understand it a little more, not because someone has made it easier for me or taken out the contradictions but because I worked to understand.

If you read the Torah (all of it, not just the good bits) you see G-d depicted in ways that are unpleasant, to say the least. Those Jewish patriarchs weren't saints, to put it lightly. We had lots of prophets full of brimstone and dire warnings, though you'd never know that from the Chav. What they presented was this soft and cuddly G-d, all about the caring and nurturing, with the rough edges and uncomfortable bits filed off or hidden away.

I'm still not sure G-d exists, but I'm pretty sure if G-d exists then G-d is not a Care Bear. This was Care Bear Judaism, and that was a problem for me. Wrangling my religion around so it properly includes and credits women is necessary so let's get to the wrangling. I had no problems disregarding the Biblical prohibition on mixed-fiber fabrics and see previous post about lobsters. I can treat the one or two sentences on homosexuality the same way. But none of that seems to me to require a wholesale revamp.

Because in making this effort to revamp things to be open-arms and inclusive the result is that I got lost. Watching people at the Chav service stumbling over the artificially feminized blessing one says before and after reading Torah, I felt sorry for them and ever-more-alienated. I expected to be among my people, coming home, and what I got was a bit of a rude awakening.

Jews like to say that G-d closes one door so that another can be opened. Maybe this writing is part of the new door that got opened for me. It sure is a lot to think about.

Comments

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

My guess was that the likelihood of this conversation was directly proportional to your presence, big surprise.

[drwex]

It would be a fun discussion. And don't worry about it being all about you. One of the ways that people relate to others' religious is through their own upbringings and chosen traditions. Having been to ... oh, a couple... ceremonies within your tradition I think it's a valuable exercise to bring that out.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

I've recently read two articles which discuss much of the situation some of us have seen regarding the umbrella under which our tradition is found:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/panmankey/2013/05/wicca-and-the-fork-in-the-road/
Relevant quote:

Wicca was originally meant to be a term that applied only to people who were initiated into a specific tradition of Witchcraft. There was no way to become a “Wiccan” (or become one of “the Wicca”) without an initiation. This was the system of Gerald Gardner (or perhaps his initiators), his initiates, and later his imitators and admirers. Almost every “Wiccan Tradition” owes a tip of the hat to Gardner, his system became the dominant one (even in traditions that might have predated Gardner, this is called the “Gardnerian Magnet” by scholars), and most groups that use the word “Wicca” can trace their origins to Gardner, one of his followers, or his Book of Shadows.

Please note, even though the author of that piece identifies as an initiated witch (within the concept of Wicca as discussed in the excerpt) he also suggests that the genie is out of the bottle on the prescriptivist/descriptivist use of the word "Wicca", and also suggests that calling what isn't initiatory Wicca (but uses some of its visible framework) watered down or bastardized is both a value judgment and incorrect.

He says that in response to this article:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/sermonsfromthemound/2013/04/the-pagan-umbrella-is-leaking/

wherein another initiate says
Many of the people who don’t want to identify as Pagan complain about the dominance of watered-down Wicca style rituals and ideas. They also assume that the simplistic version of Wicca presented by many 101 books is what initiated Wiccans practice. [...]

As a polytheist, initiated, Gardnerian Wiccan, I would really like it if eclectic Paganism was not “watered-down Wicca”. Create your own rituals; don’t bastardize ours. And please don’t assume that I am a duotheist, or a “soft” polytheist. I once spent some months on a polytheist mailing list, and was amazed by the hostility to Wicca. Just because some Wiccans have misrepresented your tradition, don’t assume that we’re all going to do so.

I will comment on my thoughts about this in another comment.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

One of the reasons I fall so strongly on the "please call what you do something other than Wicca" side of things, beside the fact that it's the path I'm working on, is that so many of the most vocal on the other side of it suggest that "Wicca is whatever you want it to be - there are no rules to follow! I started doing this so that I'd have no one in charge of me."

If there are no standards for what Wicca is, then who is to say that praying to Satan isn't Wicca?

But of course it's not, they say ... but how do they justify that?

Sure, you can charge for education/training in "no rules Wicca" - which then creates a customer/seller relationship, given that there is no accreditation system for the no rules teachers. And then the teacher OWES the student, even if it later turns out the student is unworthy.

There is a history that few of the "no rules" people know about:
from the first article -
There are a few definite “fork in the road” moments when it comes to the use of the word Wicca. The first one occurred in the early 1970′s when the first “how to” books began to appear. Now nearly anyone could get their hands on a version of Gardner’s system, which was especially appealing in the United States, a country far too big to make an “initiation only” Witchcraft viable. (We are certainly not “Gardnerians All,” but the influence of Gardner’s system is impossible to ignore.) By 1975 there were complete collections of Witch Rituals available, most notably Raymond Buckland’s The Tree (which uses the term Seax-Wica in the title), Ed Fitch’s Magical Rites From the Crystal Well, and Lady Sheba’s Grimoire. It became completely possible to create your own Wiccan Tradition in the privacy of your living room, as long as you were willing to change the definition of the word Wicca.

There are, however, some points Jason fails to mention - if any copy of Gardner's system got out in how to books in the 70s, it was a violation of oath, so, how much is it to be trusted?

He is also conflating, likely intentionally, the word witch and the word Wicca: "complete collections of Witch Rituals available", and then lists a work on Seax-Wica (Saxon Witchcraft) and the Crystal Well book (Sheba's work is another case entirely, and falls into the oathbreaking issue, from what I have been told)

Seax-Wica was an intentional creation of a Witchcraft Tradition which was NOT like Gardnerian Wicca (to which Buckland was initiated) - he made that system so he wouldn't violate his oaths.

Similarly for Ed Fitch and Crystal Well - he and others with him realized there was no way for everyone in the USA who wanted to, AND was possibly worthy of, being initiated, it's too big an area, not enough teachers for worthy students.

So, what do they do until they find a way to join an initiates group?

Fitch designed a completely new magical system which utilized many of the same sources which Gardner used to flesh out his system, yet ensured that none of what he published was oathbound - thus everyone who wanted some training could get it.

That system was later adopted without attribution or knowledge of its history, and that was done again and again, until few knew the source of it, but many thought it was the same Wicca as the Gardnerians et al did.

Fitch himself attended public rituals wherein the supposedly ancient book of shadows which the group was using was photo copied or hand-jammed copies of Crystal Well ... passed off as original work.

These are the things which lead me to the concern over the CareBear-ing of religion.

It also results in many of the people in "neo-Wicca" (as some have taken to calling it) thinking it is all sweetness and light - that there is no darkness or danger.

It's a fertility religion that celebrates the cycles of life ...

That includes death.
There is no rebirth of spring, in the Greek myths, without Persephone spending a winter in Hades.

Okay, rant over.

[drwex]

I read what you're saying as being less about "care-bearing" than about inauthenticity. I don't think I would ever claim that Reform Judaism in general, or what the Chav does in specific are "inauthentic" or "not Jewish." There are lots and lots of Orthodox who will declare anything non-Orthodox inauthentic and so on (see the stupid requirements on double-conversion for Jews emigrating to Israel, for example). But that wasn't what I was getting at, or trying to say.

What I think I might need to say more clearly is that this particular revolutionary take on the traditional Saturday and bar mitzvah service took the form of care-bearing and as a result alienated me because it removed core elements of Jewishness I was raised with.

Hrm. The perils of telling a story publicly for the first time. I seem to get more wrong than right.

Thanks for taking the time to type all that out - I appreciate the input.

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

We seem to be slightly talking past each other, yet without malice. I also think you are being more critical about what you wrote than needed.

I do not think neo-Wiccans are inauthentic as witches.

I think they are as Wicca.

And the ways in which they have removed, or never had to begin with, core practices of initiatory Wicca, have been ways which made it easier, nicer, less strict, and darn-well sweet.

The ways in which they are inauthentic as Wicca are ways in which a care-beared practice evolved.

eta
However, I do see your point that in the Jewish situation, the two have not gone hand in hand.

An interesting analogy/taxonomy (flawed as they may be) I have seen on the Wicca (initiatory) issue is this:
Paganism - Witchcraft - Initiatory Witchcraft - Wicca - Gardnerian (etc)
vice
Christianity - Catholicism - Holy Orders - Priesthood - Dominican (etc).

[drwex]

The way I read this (as a non-Pagan) is that there's a big group of people calling themselves pagan. Within that there are people who call themselves Wiccan, who are traditionalists and follow a certain set of practices and codifications. There are other people who have either loosened those practices to an unrecognizeable degree or simply made stuff up from other sources, yet still call themselves Wiccan. If I read it correctly it's that last group that annoys you.

Within Judaism we have a large set of people who call themselves "Reform" Jews. From a Conservative point of view we would still recognize them as Jews and with respect to their changes we would say "show your sources; show your work." Orthodox Jews would just say "no, that's wrong, stop doing that and by the way you're not really Jews either."

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

If I read it correctly it's that last group that annoys you.

Yes. If they called themselves witches it would be fine by me, there is also no getting the horse back in the barn.

I'm told that it is very different in the UK - there are Pagans and there are Wiccans, and what they mean by Wicca over there is the initiatory kind, and no one who isn't of that has any issue with calling themselves simply Pagan.

I like how your Conservative groups would deal with it.

There ARE, I must point out, very serious and dedicated Pagan Witches out there who do research, who show their work, who get great results. I do not think they are inauthentic witches.

Some of them are of initiatory traditions which are specifically not derived from the same sources as Gardnerian Wicca (and its cousins, sometimes collectively known on this side of the pond as British Traditional Wicca/BTW) ... some of us (and them) refer to what they do as Traditional Initiatory Witchcraft/TIW - to confuse things, because of the stricter use of the word Wicca in the UK, TIW type paths are known there as British Traditional Witchcraft ... confusion abounds.