From HuffingtonPost.com:
Maureen Dowd recently wrote about the Catholic Church’s negation of women. It seems like that’s a frequent headline: Women Negated by Religion. Or: Women Still Negated by Religion. Too often, it’s true. It’s true in enormous, striking, unavoidable ways that deny women ownership of their own bodies and prevent them from taking control of their own lives, let alone their communities. I hope I don’t appear insensitive to this reality when I point out another, quieter, but equally unavoidable trajectory. For some women, leading a religious community is not only normal, it is a critical part of their experience of themselves as women.
We live in a world of religious extremes, filled in and fleshed out by the necessary subtleties of people’s real-life experiences, in the spaces where religious ideals clash with or facilitate mundane existence. I performed a service at which a young Orthodox girl stared at me in open horror as I touched the Torah. In her mind, I’d contaminated the Word of God with my corrosive, forbidden femininity. And yet, the majority of students entering many seminaries are women.
Being a clergymember has always been about being a woman for me. I was trained by a woman clergymember, and the rabbi I work with now is a woman. I spent two years serving with a male rabbi, and, you know, I dealt. I am a lay cantor at a synagogue in central New Jersey. I’m twenty-four years old. I’ve been serving a congregation since I was fifteen. For those of you who don’t know what a cantor is, that’s the person who stands up on the bima (alter) with the rabbi and sings in Hebrew. OK, there’s a bit more to it, but that’s what you see when you walk into a synagogue. Jewish clergy come in pairs: rabbis and cantors.
Read the full article at HuffingtonPost.com.
