Video: The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology

This lecture invites us into a rich cultural world, usually envisioned as the temple of the intellect, and reveals how it actually places the gendered body at center stage.

Yakir Englander

Yakir Englander speaks about his 2021 book, "The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology."

"The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology" invites us into a rich cultural world, usually envisioned as the temple of the intellect, and reveals how it actually places the gendered body at center stage. With the sympathy of a former practitioner and the insight of a theologian, Yakir Englander grapples with the challenges of sexuality to a life of piety. 

Susannah Heschel and Daniel Boyarin respond to Yakir Englander’s new book.

Speakers are: Yakir Englander, author, former HDS Women's Studies in Religion Program Research Associate (2014-15), current National Senior Director of Leadership at the Israeli-American Council; Daniel Boyarin, Hermann P. and Sophia Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture, UC Berkeley, currently Caroline Zelaznik Gruss and Joseph S. Gruss Visiting Professor in Talmudic Civil Law, Harvard Law School; and Susannah Heschel, Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.

Moderated by Ann Braude, Director of the Women’s Studies in Religion Program and Senior Lecturer in American Religious History.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

[MUSIC PLAYING]

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology, March 24, 2022.

ANN BRAUDE: Good evening. I'm Ann Braude, the Director of the Women's Studies in Religion Program here at Harvard Divinity School. And I want to extend a very warm welcome to our online audience as well as to those who, for the first time in two years, are here joining us in person in the James Room of the newly opened Swartz Hall. It's my very first time standing behind this podium in this beautiful new room. And I've been here for 22 years, so it's a big event.

Let me invite our online audience to let us know in the chat where you're Zooming in from just so we can have a little bit of community with those of you who are not here in the room. I know we have an international audience tonight, and I send special greetings to those of you who are in very distant time zones. Thank you all for joining us for this celebration and discussion of the newly published book by Yakir Englander, The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology.

It's a great honor that today, we have two of the most distinguished scholars of feminist studies in Judaism, Susannah Heschel and Daniel Boyarin, to help us engage and discuss this path-breaking book. The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology is the fruit both of Yakir Englander's unusual intellectual autobiography, of which more in just a moment, and of the year he spent here at Harvard Divinity School as a research associate in the Women's Studies and Religion Program. I well remember when we received Yakir's application, and Susannah Heschel as a member of our advisory committee at WSRP, tried to explain to our search committee just how unique is the perspective that Yakir Englander brings to the academy.

He's one of very few voices that lovingly brings together the world of the yeshiva in which he was raised with the world of feminist theory that he studied during his doctorate at Hebrew University, his post-doc at Northwestern, and his year here at the WSRP. His first book, Sexuality and the Body in the New Religious Zionist Discourse, was published in both Hebrew and English, which set the model for this book as well which was published first in Hebrew in a version that was aimed at a rabbinic audience. And now, in the text that we have today in a version aimed at us, an English-speaking audience who need to be introduced to the world of ultra-Orthodox thought.

You can see that Yakir is a bridge-builder. As a peace activist, he worked to build bridges between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish youth in his role as International Vice President of Kids for Peace. And he now works to build bridges between disparate Israelis and Americans and a surprising array of Jewish voices as director of the Gvanim Leadership Program at the Israeli-American Council. What I most appreciate, Yakir, is his ability to communicate his love of the text and of the traditions of Jewish pedagogy.

During his year at the Divinity School, he managed to make love of Jewish texts so contagious that a group of HDS students studied an entire tractate of Talmud with Yakir. It took them well into the summer after they were supposed to have gone on vacation. They just kept studying and studying until they finished the entire tractate. I'm not sure that's happened at HDS before or since, but it's really something to celebrate.

So let me now briefly introduce our two distinguished respondents who I know are well-known to many of you. We will first hear from Daniel Boyarin who is the Taubman Professor of Talmudic Culture and Professor in the departments of Near Eastern Studies and Rhetoric at the University of California at Berkeley, as well as an affiliated member of the Women's Studies program. He currently serves as the Gruss Visiting Professor in Talmudic Civil Law here at Harvard in the Law School, where divinity students are taking full advantage of his course, The Talmud for All.

He served as a visiting professor here at the Divinity School in 1997. He's the author of nine well-known books in Jewish studies including Judaism: the Genealogy of a Modern Notion, and he's very well known in gender studies for his books Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, as well as Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. His next book, which we look forward to, is called The No State Solution: A Jewish Manifesto.

After we hear from Professor Boyarin, we will hear from my friend-- Daniel is now a friend, we've only gotten to really know each other this semester-- but for many years I've known Susannah Heschel, the Eli M. Black Distinguished Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. In addition to her earned doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania and her four honorary doctorates from universities in the United States, Canada, and Germany, she holds her most significant degree, the Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School, where, quite a few years after her graduation, she delivered the Dudleian Lecture, which is the oldest named lectureship at any university in the United States. And she delivered that here at the Divinity School in 2005 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the admission of women to the school, entitled From Jesus to Shylock, Christian Supersessionism in The Merchant of Venice.

She's well known for her pioneering publications on Jewish feminism as well as her contributions to Black Jewish relations and civil rights. While her own scholarship focuses on Jewish and Christian interactions in Germany during the 19th and 20th centuries, including the history of biblical scholarship and Jewish scholarship on Islam, her most recent book is The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in Nazi Germany. And we very much look forward to her forthcoming book, Jewish Studies and the Woman Question, which she is co-authoring and editing with Sarah Imhoff.

Now, let me say just a few words about our plan for the evening. Each speaker will make brief remarks, I've asked them for no more than 15 minutes. And then, they will have a chance to respond to each other before we open to questions from the audience. We will give Yakir an opportunity to respond after we've heard from Daniel and Susannah. For those of you here in the live audience, when we get to audience questions we will have microphones which we'll have a student moving around with the microphone.

And for those of you who are online, please place your questions in the chat, and we will add them to the queue. So Daniel, may I ask you to come to the podium? Professor Boyarin.

DANIEL BOYARIN: Thank you. I'm going to bring my copy of the book up because I want you to see how challenging it was. Every one of these little copper darts-- they're called book darts-- is a place where I stood still for a while and just thought. Now, Yakir knows that I actually found reading this book quite a troubling experience.

So we're going to proceed in the order of the Passover Haggadah from the less, how shall we say, less [INAUDIBLE] to the happier moments. I actually am very troubled by this book. Not by the scholarship, the scholarship is excellent, but by the presentation. And I'll say what I mean.

First of all, I begin with the title. The Male Body in Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Theology. Now, one thing I know is it's tough to hold authors responsible for titles because the people who want to sell books can be quite aggressive about the title. But this title is particularly troubling for several reasons. First of all, I'm troubled by the whole term ultra-Orthodox

I think this is a seriously problematic and almost pejorative name for a religious group, not even a sect, but a group of modern Jews. And what even more to the point, and this is going to bring me to the fundaments of my critique, not in the slightest a unified or monolithic group. Now, the book itself pays more attention to the fact that it's not a monolithic group. I want to say that to be fair.

But this presentation is already very troubling. And I'll go into just a little bit of detail on that. What Yakir has done, and he knows that this is what I'm going to say. We had a very friendly conversation with the help of a bottle of Slovenian wine--

[LAUGHTER]

--about this. What Yakir has done is he has, for the most part, given I think a very striking, rhetorically compelling picture of the most extreme version of a certain line of thinking in contemporary Jewish thought. This extreme version is not even, much as it would like to present itself as, a continuation of-- and that point comes out in the book, but I think it's not central enough. It's not even a continuation or a faithful continuation or an accurate continuation of pre-World War II Jewish theology about bodies, about male bodies, about Torah, about marriage itself.

It's in part, in large part a reaction, one version of a reaction, against the rupture and tragedy of Jewish life in the Jewish world and the Jewish people that took place during World War II. I don't need to name that tragedy or the source of that rupture.

And again, in fairness, all this is in the book, but the primary presentation is so effectively in the presentation of that extreme version that I think that certainly the naive reader-- and all I mean by naive here is the reader without much background or context-- is almost bound to think that is the way that the-- I can't use the word ultra-Orthodox I hate it-- the Haredisa Jewish community by and large, enacts their lives.

Now, I have never, ever been a full participant in that life. But I've been close to it, very close to it, for many years in different ways, relatives, I've spent extensive time in kollel and in yeshivas of that type as an adult as well as my grandfather's world. That was very, very much of that into which he introduced me.

And it doesn't, in my view, articulate the sense of the life of these communities that I have experienced. Now, I will allow for one possibility, which is that Yakir's work is more characteristic of the Israeli than the American. The yeshivas that I know are Lakewood, Telshe, Ner Yisroel in Baltimore, which are absolutely in that Haredisa Litvak, Lithuanian world, but are not really represented in the picture that you give of the ideal.

And the chapter that I found most illuminating, personally, was the chapter on Slobodka towards the end of the book, which describes-- and I'll just fill in in a sentence or two what I'm talking about-- describes much more closely the way I have experienced the modern Lithuanian yeshivas, worlds in which dignity, cleanliness even, a kind of what we call edelkeit, which is the ideal of these yeshiva participants, which means nobility as I'm sure all HDS students know, and with a kind of delicacy and gentleness in part symbolized by what I consider to be one of the great possibilities for handshakes in the world, namely this, which the antisemites, of course, hated and then the Zionists hated it too.

So there is much to critique in the Haredi world, much to critique in the [INAUDIBLE] and Lithuanian yeshiva communities in the world. I will be the first to say that. And a lot of what needs serious critique has to do with gender and has to do with the place of women.

Although I will say that my great-grandmother and all my aunts were famous for their learning, not of Talmud, but my great grandmother was known for knowing the whole Bible by heart from beginning to end, in Hebrew of course, and for starting schools and schools for women and things of that sort in the heart of the world that you're describing, Yakir, in Telshe in Lithuania before they came to America.

So there's a picture here that is significant, and I wish, if I were allowed a wish, that it had been more broadly contextualized and contrasted. There's more I could say, but I don't want to take up too much time. I found it telling, and with this I'll finish, that many of the descriptions, particularly in the very promising and useful chapter about the hagiography, as you call it hagiographies. By the way I don't think there are Jewish saints. I think that's already-- but you didn't say that, I'm sure, in Hebrew.

And somehow it got translated just as responsa got translated into Q&A. So you've got to watch out for your translators also when you can. But so many of the texts that are used in that chapter, especially, but not only in that chapter, are anonymous. This suggests to me that the people writing them were, themselves, somehow-- it suggests to me, I can't prove it-- were somehow outliers, very extreme voices, that probably or I have very good reason to think would have been very, very controversial had they exposed themselves.

And last, really last, when I was in my 20s, a young student of Talmud and such matters-- now an old student of Talmud and such matters-- but I got very, very involved in Musar. I found it extremely compelling largely, initially, through reading Chaim Grade's wonderful novel, Zemach Atlas.

And I went to talk to my teacher about it, my teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary, who was himself at Slabodka Talmud. And he said to me, don't read any Musar books anymore, just [HEBREW] and [HEBREW] and nothing else.

So there was-- and you mention it, you cite it, that there was a powerful internal critique of this extremism. And yet, somehow, the message of the book is that this is the dominant and practically the only strand of thought about maleness in the yeshiva world. I'm finished. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: It's wonderful to be here at the Divinity School. And I thank you, Ann, for inviting me. It was wonderful, also, to hear what Daniel said, and I also agree with so much of what you said, Daniel. Thank you. And Yakir, I've known you for some years, and I think this is a fascinating book.

I think it's a groundbreaking book. And as I read it, I was thinking of Al Raboteau's book from years and years ago, his first book on slave religion because it was also a groundbreaking book, which means, essentially, there was no historiography to wrestle with. This is a new book, and I think some of the points that you raised, Daniel, are precisely the issues that will be taken up in the future.

But this is what happens when something is foundational, when it opens a new field. And you've brought, Yakir, some amazing texts and amazing ideas for us to think about, to think about not only in terms of Judaism, but of course as students of religion, many different traditions. And that's what I'm interested in.

I also come, as Daniel does and as Yakir does, from a family that is what is called ultra-Orthodox or Haredi, very, very pious. I come from a Hasidic background, not from Lithuanian background, but it's all right. We're friends now. But I understand why that world is so compelling.

It is a world, as Daniel said, of nobility, of gentleness, of compassion. And in fact, I was told actually by my father that there's one word to characterize Judaism, it's rachmones, it's compassion. It's compassion of God and its the compassion of human beings for God, for God, as well as for other human beings. I see in that world joy, seriousness, and passion, lots of passion.

And that's what I think you're bringing out in your book, Yakir, and that's what I'm going to talk about it. And what I also talk about, really, is the larger question for me, which is what does it mean in the world of men that you're talking-- we're in the women. What is the absent presence because you can be absent, but you're very present. And sometimes what's not stated can be, in fact, the most important thing in a text, as we all know.

So what is this all about? It's about the desire to be holy, to be holy, to lead a life of sanctity, of piety. But the question that I always have wondered about, and I don't understand, why is holiness, cultivating the holiness of the soul, so dependent on control of sexuality, the body, and gender segregation? Why is that? And it's in all religions.

So that's what I've never understood. And of course, what Yakir, you talk about is this desire of the yeshiva world not just to have a place, a yeshiva where you study, but to make the whole world into a yeshiva. The whole world. It's more than that.

So what is the Haredi society? Some say that it's anti-modern, Avi [? Ravinski. ?] Some say it's focused on the text rather than human beings, Chaim Soloveitchik. But perhaps the Haredi world, in some way, is in fact quintessentially modern. Why? Because it's obsessed with women, and the woman question is the modern question.

In all facets of life, religious and otherwise, the female body is the Musar problem as modernity is the woman problem. It's her body that's the site of both honor and shame, transgression and negotiation, invention of tradition and the revolt against tradition. So modern Jewish thought, in all varieties of religion and religionlessness, is all about the construction of the pagan and the secular, which are usually identical, but through various alternating Jewish alliances with Christianity or with Islam. And the danger of the pagan is the danger of femaleness, while the danger of the secular is the danger of women.

This Musar is extraordinarily powerful. And I assume you're referring, Daniel, to Professor Lieberman. And I also read Zemach Atlas, the work of Chaim Grade. And I actually knew him. Musar, this obsession with one's ethical life, a life of interiority, there's really no English translation for it. But it has a haunting presence.

Once you enter the world of Musar, whether you enter the physical yeshiva or you read a text, you'll never be the same. It stays with you. It's inside of you forever, and it's hard to think about anything else. It takes control of your mind. And Musar, Yakir writes on page 89, establishes quote, "The boundary between the soul and the body through a sharp distinction between reflective and non-reflective existence. The reflective mind," he writes, "on the one hand is the unique sign of the divine image in man. On the other hand, all other objects in the world, including the non-reflective body, are not essentially human."

It's a very interesting passage. Every page of the book is interesting. But this leads us to a complex and fascinating set of theological problems. Men and women are separated in orthodox synagogues, and the degree of orthodoxy is measured largely by the height and thickness of the separation. And even by himself, the male body at prayer is divided by the gartel, the belt that he ties around his waist that separates the upper part of his body, the mind, the heart that prays, from the lower part, namely digestion, genitalia, that are the concerns of women.

The gartel divides the male body between male and female. So this separation, the mechitza of the synagogue, is not only in the synagogue, but it's in the male body itself. And of course, women have no such mechitza because they are entirely of one part. There's nothing to divide. That upper male body, Yakir writes, is quote, "The unique sign of the divine image in man." An implicit reiteration of Jewish understanding, I would say, of incarnation, the incarnation of God in Torah and of Torah in men.

And this is elaborated in what he discusses, Yakir discusses, the understanding of men making love to their wives, to show compassion to the woman the way God shows compassion to human beings. What we don't hear is of women, like God, showing compassion to men. So the goal is to create sanctity, to live a holy life.

And men and women both strive for that holiness. Yet, that sanctity is created not only through prayer, study, observance of Jewish holidays, but also through sexual behavior by infusing an eroticism in nearly all that is undertaken. And it is very much an erotic world, the Haredi world. What is true and puzzling is that there's an intense atmosphere of homoeroticism in Haredi society, that it's the natural result of men living in an all-male community in a yeshiva, especially during their adolescent and teen years.

They study and debate, they play and tease one another. And I quote what Yakir writes on page 127. He describes young adolescent boys learning sections of Talmud dealing with female virginity, seduction, and even rape, quote, "Without having any personal reaction. They are expected to be immunized from sexual arousal even when reading explicit physical descriptions of women from Talmudic texts."

Of course, we know they do react, dreams and fantasies. Sex is sex, even in the Talmud, and especially if you're a 14-year-old boy learning and living in an all-male setting. But what happens to that erotic energy? So it's as if the goal of Haredi society, and I would say of many pious societies and religions, the goal is to produce homoeroticism. And we should take that seriously.

What is the link between homoeroticism and the holy? That's a question that I keep wondering about. We know that homosexual relations are rampant in many yeshiva communities and in island communities, such as Bnei Brak, a town in Israel. The yeshiva creates the homoerotic longing that it simultaneously condemns, you know what Lord Alfred Douglas called the love that dare not speak its name, or the well of loneliness of Radcliffe Hall. But perhaps, it also creates tension that heightens the erotic.

For the Haredi community, as Yakir makes clear, the issue is not just love and sex, but that flesh can be dangerous, even contaminating of holiness. So boys are taught from age three to pee without touching themselves. Male masturbation is forbidden. Women may masturbate and make love with other women.

One sees quickly how radical gender taboo creates a mentality that can also justify radical racial difference. Gender and race, as we well know as students of religion, enable each other. Sex with a Gentile woman and a Jewish man is a sin for which there is no repentance, the Zohar says. But it happens.

But how does this male world look from women's point of view? And in fact, women are actually not absent from this all-male scene. On the contrary, there is an omnipresent conscious and unconscious awareness that men have of women's presence even when women are absent. That absent presence of women penetrates men's souls. It brings dirty thoughts even during prayer-- gazes from the women's gallery in the synagogue, on the streets, in the shops.

The result? Haredi men call for increased segregation in buses, even on sidewalks. Haredi men experience this penetration on many levels. They penetrate Torah with their circumcised penises, and that's the only way to understand Torah, as Elliot Wolfson has shown. They are imaginatively or actually penetrated by their male study partners, havruta.

And while they are supposed to penetrate their wives, in fact, they are penetrated by women. She enters the public square, the street, tempting men. In his mind, his imagination, she carries out an inverse sexual intercourse. She penetrates him.

Why the obsession? One might say that women possess men, not simply to seduce them into heterosexual relations, but also to endanger their homoeroticism. And women are, therefore, taboo. Now, as much as women and sex are taboo, men must enact heterosexual marriage and penetrate women. It's a commandment. But what's it like?

Ultimately, the Haredi problem is not that sex is simply condemned or repressed, but rather, how a man, filled with homoerotic desire, marries a woman and fulfills an obligation of heterosexual intercourse. How is homoerotic desire created within an intensely-- how is heteroerotic sex created within an intensely homoerotic environment? How do women experience relations with such men?

OK, men should not touch themselves for pleasure. How is it for a woman when she touches him and he touches her? A man who has been forbidden to experience sexual pleasure through touching himself, how does he touch her? Is the divine compassion for her that the man is told to express through sexual intercourse experienced by her as divine compassion?

To whom does a virgin belong? Her father possesses her as a daughter, but does not mark her with his penis. The first intercourse that she has with her husband turns her from virgin into a Jew. She bleeds, as [? Avital ?] [? Essid, ?] who was a fellow here, has written about. That's how a woman becomes a Jew.

Now, I have no doubt that there is great joy, passion, and love in many or most of these couples in the Haredi world. I think there's enormous passion in that world. But I also think that they are struggling with the same problems we are, the modern problem-- how to keep love in sexual pleasure. Too many Haredi women report that they experience the wedding night as rape by a man they barely know. And consent is not only about saying, yes, it's about knowing the person and feeling known by the other.

Now, in tribute to a student at Harvard Divinity School who sadly graduated before I got here, Emily Culpepper, remember? I want to bring to your attention, some of you may have been to museums where Jewish religious objects are displayed. They'll show a Torah scroll, maybe a kiddush cup, tefillin, a tallit. Sometimes, especially in Germany, they show a circumcision knife, something I've never quite understood.

But I want to show you an object that I have not yet seen displayed in a Jewish Museum. You know what this is? I brought one for everybody so you can pass them around.

This is-- there-- you can take one, pass it around.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

ANN BRAUDE: We have extra ones.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: This is a bedikah cloth. This is the cloth that women use, wrap around their finger and insert in the vagina twice a day during the week following menstruation to see if there's any blood or stain that needs-- yeah-- or whether they are quote unquote, "clean." Because after you finish menstruating, you wait seven clean days before you can have intercourse again with your husband. Now, I bring this to you because I wish this would be more on display because these are things I think should be brought into the open and understood.

The vagina is actually the most frequently discussed anatomical body part in the Talmud by religious men who discursively claim authority over it, discussing in detail the size and shape of its leaks, and examining the cloths that women have to use to examine themselves twice a day after menstruation. Is the stain on the cloth blood from the vagina or from the uterus? This, the rabbi determines.

The vagina, then, is the woman, or perhaps, the fetishized woman. As Naomi Schor writes in her book, Reading in Detail, there is an inherently fetishistic process in that incremental fragment cathexis whereby the individual parts eventually crowd together and usurp the original hole. Or, as Emily Apter has written in her book on fetish, "The detail has just this tendency to prick consciousness, to encroach on the terrain of inner feelings, to expand to the point of obsession."

It is not the vagina alone or the stains that it produces on white cloths, but rather, it's the reading of the fetishism of reading. That is, not the stained cloth or the vagina, but the interpretive process of the rabbi's interpretations that constitute the male fetish that dominates the Haredi world. For women, this is part of sanctifying ourselves, bringing the stained cloth to the rabbi for his scopophilia and determinative assessment.

Is she permitted to her husband's penis, or must she wait again for seven clean days? One of those quintessential religious experiences that religious Jewish women have that can either feel like horrific shame, or glorious erotic arousal-- bringing your stain bedikah cloth or underpants for the rabbi's inspection. The rabbinical discussions create the sense of the vagina's mystery, otherness, and sacrality. The rabbis take over the vagina, but perhaps don't feel they fully own it, an insecurity that leads to a fetishization.

And this helps me understand a bit about this obsession with sexuality, its fetish as the perversion that regulates all the rest. In his essay in fetishism Freud points to the quote, "Chinese custom of mutilating the female foot and then revering it, like a fetish, after it has been mutilated, it seems as though the Chinese male wants to thank the woman for having submitted to being castrated," end quote. It is to me a perfect definition of patriarchy, or perhaps the patriarchal wish.

One might think that women, without a penis and with our vaginas appropriated, that we might feel castrated. And yet, the vagina fetish belongs to the men of the Talmud perhaps as expression of their anxiety. Appropriating the vagina, controlling what comes out and what and when they may go in is a sadistic erotic that creates the extraordinary notion of [HEBREW]-- The phallus is the foundation of the world, the one and only tool to properly penetrate and understand Torah.

And so, Yakir, I thank you for your book, for giving rise to a great attention to the material that you've presented. You've actually gathered some extraordinary data for us to think about, and you've certainly stimulated us to think more deeply about the nature of religion, the holy, the body, and sexuality. I thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

YAKIR ENGLANDER: Yeah. Thank you so much for being here today. Thank you for the Women's Studies and the Divinity School, to the Jewish Studies, to the Studies of Women Gender and Sexuality, and thank you for hosting us. Thank you for giving me a year to take to breathe outside of the work of the conflict in Israel and Palestine, and to be able to breathe and to write, and to heal.

Thank you so much to Daniel for your words. I was worried for a second that we will all agree, and then it will be so non-Jewish dialogue. So Daniel, [? [HEBREW]. ?] And Susannah, [? [YIDDISH]. ?] One thing that I was so-- people ask me, why did you write about men? Why you didn't write about women?

I felt it will be not [HEBREW]. It will not be modest if a man-- even if my pronouns is he, him, first incarnation, I'm not sure about myself. But still, I can't do it. And I needed someone to say the words about the women in the ultra-Orthodox So thank you so much for giving voice. I am so looking forward to see the books that will be much more important about the women's bodies in the ultra-Orthodox world.

So what I want to do with you tonight, I want to say something about how I write books. When I wrote my book in Hebrew, the title was like half a page because I wrote it to the ultra-Orthodox and I wanted them to read it. Now, the critique was that ultra-Orthodox people start writing me emails, or phone calls when they did some of them didn't read emails, and they complained that I'm too soft, that I'm writing to the rabbis and not to them because I could be more harsh.

And I said, it's true I wrote it to your rabbis I went to do change from inside. When I wrote it in English, I wrote it not only for the Jewish readers. I actually didn't write it to the ultra-Orthodox because they will read, probably, the Hebrew version. I want to write it as an example for people who deal with religion, sexuality, and the body, Jews and non-Jews, to be able to try to understand something very deep when we say words as body.

And therefore, I tried to give the language-- and of course, if you go to the footnotes so you understand that of course the [HEBREW], the deep genre of questions is not Q&A. But I tried to give words to people who will understand it, and they will not feel oh, it's only for five people in the academy. I want the general audience to join to this [HEBREW] and to study together.

But tonight, I want to take you to the journey that I'm walking in the past two years after I finish rewrite this book and my translator who tried to render it. It's not to translate, to render it, Dr. Henry Ralph Carse. And what I want to do with you, I want to invite you to a journey and to take you a little bit to how I'm thinking about the book today and about this question. So let's start with the question of why the ultra-Orthodox is such a fascinating example.

Why there is disproportion of books, academic books, that is written about the ultra-Orthodox Sometimes, for sure in Israel, when you look on the percentages of the community, this is not the largest Jewish community. And I think that when you leave the Jews, when you leaves the gossip, when you leave the complications with Israeli army and with hipster [? Hasidisch ?] and all of that, I think that they ask a very interesting question, or they have a desire that we all actually want too.

And the desire is, how can I feel free? Freedom-- but here comes the second part-- without feeling daily anxiety? Because many of us in Western society, we feel free, but there is a price. We feel a huge amount of anxiety. And the ultra-Orthodox when I think about their project, and I don't think that they-- the ultra-Orthodox don't try to give you definition of things which is another thing that we try to do in the academy. They don't care about that. But this is actually what they wish to do.

There is a verse in Leviticus that says that God says to the Jewish people you are my slaves. And the Jewish interpretation for that, one of the Jewish interpretation of that, says you are my slaves and therefore you are my slaves, but you are not slaves to anyone else. It's like, it's better to be the slave for God, but at least you don't need to be a slave for so many complications that life brings us.

And I think that the ultra-Orthodox, for sure the Lithuanian [? [HEBREW] ?] that I'm speaking dedicated this book to, they try to tell you be a slave, or submit yourself to the Jewish text. By the way, it's interesting, it's not to God, it's to the Jewish text. But then something is happening when you are 100% submitted your life only to the Jewish text, then almost any interpretation is welcome. So you gain the freedom.

And they also want to believe that you will gain freedom from anything else that will disserve you from being submitted to the Jewish text. So I want to give you a small example from not radical, but totally normal rabbi in the ultra-Orthodox community. So we tell a story about two students who study in havruta, the dialogue that we have.

And one of them said, you would not believe, last night I dreamed about God. So his havruta tells him there is no chance he dreamed about that. So he said, wait a minute. I'm telling you, I was dreaming about God. He said, no chance. So he said, how do that I didn't dream about God?

So he said this. The Jewish text says that one only dream about what he dedicated his life in the past day. You study with me Jewish texts all day. When did you had time to think about God?

[LAUGHTER]

Now, why it's such a good story that is, by the way, quoted in so many of the majority ultra-Orthodox books, because the challenge that they have, the ultra-Orthodox community, this community, is that at one point they submitted themselves so much to the text that they got freedom even from God. So you have these stories about students and rabbis who just like, it's the time to stop learning and you need to go to pray, and they can't make themselves to go to pray. Or, as one of them said, I pray Talmud.

Like, I say very fast the words, and then I am with the Talmud. I mean, look at the yeshiva world. They have the prayer books, the Seder, but then just under that they have the Talmud. So you submitted yourself, and then you've got freedom from everything. And I will come back to that.

The challenge is that we are human beings and, therefore, we are leaving. And you can't do it. It's a beautiful story. As one of my friends, who is an ultra-Orthodox head of yeshiva with 12 kids, he told me-- he's very upset about the ultra-Orthodox world sometimes-- and he said, you know what is our problem? We are genius to raise kids. We are [? catastrophic ?] in raising adults.

Kids needs beautiful story-- yes, no, black and white, kosher, non-kosher, Shabbos, non-Shabbos. Try to raise adults like that. It will become unhealthy community. And the major challenge that they have, or they identify, is their bodies. And this is where Susan, you said everything. I don't need to say anything more.

The body is not only the body, and this is what I try to show in the book, very fast in the '50s and '60s, it's only in the writings. Today, it's in the life. The body becomes also my feelings when I don't feel well. My body becomes my desires. My body becomes my sisters. My body become the street. And you name it. And for sure, the non-Jewish community, et cetera, et cetera. And then you have a problem.

So what they try to do in the body? What they tried to do is that they want to create safe zones where I can live freely with my body. The way how I'm speaking now is a very yeshivish way. I don't think what's my hands are doing. But it's a safe zone. No one is going to be hurt by my hands now.

And they try to push the safe zone more, and more, and more. So we start in the yeshiva and then what happens when you have the [HEBREW], a man, a man, and the text? And they all have a huge desire toward the text and they love the text. And then sometimes, it's like, oh, we both love the text, and we love the text, and we love the text, and I like you, I love the text, I like-- I love the text, I love you.

This becomes a problem. And the rabbis today in the 21st century, they speak about that. Do they have solutions? Some of them try to deal with that. In chapter 6, I dedicate a whole chapter to a rabbi who pushed the boundaries so much because he cared about the students that at one point he decided to leave the ultra-Orthodox community.

Because he said, I cannot be there and hold this theology. It will not help them. It will not help me. And today, he is doing incredible other things.

Now, I want to speak about a few challenges. Two kind of challenges. One is an inner ultra-Orthodox challenge. The challenge is, first of all, that as we are walking with the bodies and the ultra-Orthodox community, fascinating, decides sometimes to live in the middle of Western society. It's like in the middle of [INAUDIBLE], in the middle of Brooklyn. My friends from Brooklyn, we know that.

It's not that they are living in a city like in Israel where I was living that I never saw even a modern Orthodox Jew until I was like 18. Here, they open the door and they see some are in Brooklyn. This is one challenge.

The second challenge that you mentioned is the Zionist movement. I mean, the Zionist movement, what they try to claim is, Jews, we must have bodies. They kill us because we don't have strong body. This is what we do. This is what we need.

We can't continue to live in the text. The text killing us. We must have bodies. So this is a second, because they are living in Israel, many of them. And, of course, what you mention when we come to women.

What do they see when they see a woman? As one of my friends said, it's not can they have sex. Can they have intimacy? This is a very hard question. Go and speak with my sisters. They will have a lot to say about that.

But now, I want to go back to us. And I will end with that. I want to come to two points that I just want to think. And I'm thinking and living it and thinking about that in the past two or three years a lot. I mentioned the ultra-Orthodox community created the institute, the yeshiva, as a safe zone. And one of the gifts in this safe zone that they let themselves is to fail but in a safe way.

There will never be a rabbi, I never met a rabbi who will say you're stupid. There are some rabbis that maybe they will say it's a stupid question, but then it means that you got the biggest compliment. But actually, they will let you to fail in a safe way. And my question to us is, the people with the body, where are the safe zones that we can create?

Safe zones where we can live our bodies and souls, our complexities and anxiety, and live there and try to see what's happening and that it will be safe? In a way, it's very easy to critique them, but there is so much to learn from them. I want to see this high school, this college, I want to see where is the Center of Cuddling where Harvard trains people, students, to cuddle? How to ask consent? Where do we teach people how to caress?

We need to learn from them, and this is what I want to bring you by reading this book. Let's also learn from them-- not what they do, not the solutions-- let's learn about what they try to do. And I will end with the second part.

You remember what I said that it's their main mission, their main mission is, how we can be free and not feel anxiety? What I want to suggest the next writer, is to try to see where are these areas in our lives. As someone who went to pray in mosque for six years when I was a peace activist-- I'm not anymore, I'm living here, but I was-- I immersed myself into the Muslim prayer, and actually, I learned a lot about submit yourself and then gain freedom.

I wonder where is the secular people of us can do it? I went to offer may be in BDSM? Can you submit yourself in order to feel hold and safe? Maybe we need to do something that the academy is really hard to do is to go out and to see what the similarities and what the gifts that we can learn from each other? How we can live our bodies together with prayers? This is my wish for this book. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

ANN BRAUDE: Thanks to all of you for three really extraordinary pieces of thought. I've been waiting for 22 years to hear passionate disagreement and loving critique at a Harvard Divinity School lecture. So I thank all of you from the bottom of my heart. I'm going to give everybody up here a chance to discuss and respond to what they have heard from the other panelists for a few minutes. And then we will have questions from the audience.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: Well I would say that some years ago, actually when I was a student here, I had a friend who came out of the yeshiva world who said to me one day, Jews don't pray. Prayer is Christian. Jews say words. We're obligated to say those words, but prayers as a concept is not Jewish. And of course, he's wrong.

[LAUGHTER]

But it was striking to me first, that he would come out of that world with such a notion, but also that he was aware of the Christian and in a sense, constructing his Jewish in relation to the Christian even coming from what a lot of people think of as a very isolated community. And it made me start to wonder to what extent should we think in those terms?

In other words, it may not just be the modern scientific scholars of Judaism who respond in some way to Christian concepts, but even in the yeshiva world. I don't know. How widespread is that awareness of Christianity and the desire to respond to it?

DANIEL BOYARIN: Responding more to what Susannah is saying right now, it occurred to me in reading the book and also in previous reading how much of Musar is actually a response on the one hand to a challenge from Christianity, and on the other hand to a challenge from [HEBREW]. I mean, I think a large part of what's going on in Salanter, Israel Salanter, is a kind of understanding that there is, from his perspective, something lacking in the extreme intellectualism of Lithuanian Litvak piety to which he's responding.

But along with that comes also a sense of how un-Talmudic so much of the modern perspective that you're describing is, how anti-Talmudic it is in so many fundamental ways. That it's not only a shift that you note from before World War II 'till after World War II, but certainly the discourse of sexuality. I'm not claiming it's totally disconnected from the Talmud and there's nothing in the Talmud that instigates it, but it's almost diametrically opposed in so many ways to-- yeah, I think that's enough. I've said enough tonight.

YAKIR ENGLANDER: I think a few things about prayers. One of the challenges with interfaith dialogue that I've seen in my life is that the Jews very fast become jealous on the Christians. And I shared with a class yesterday, and I want to give you an example. So you come to the synagogue in the morning. You have 45 minutes to Shacharit, to the prayer of the morning.

Now, it's kind at the same time that I was praying in most of the Catholic monasteries that I visited and prayed with them. Now, the difference is that in this 45 minutes, the Catholic monks said eight Psalms. The Jews said half of the book. Now, the question is, why?

Why we can't just be there and feel the psalm or whatever the prayer is, the [HEBREW] in the body. And I think that it shows a challenge that it's really hard because of some decisions around the learning of the text. I think something that you mentioned before when we met, which is totally true which is really bothering, that in some, some, [INAUDIBLE] only some, of the very Hasidic, actually, communities, there is not anymore in the new synagogue a women's section.

It's like they don't even understand that women should pray, or they think that women should pray at home with their kids. Try to do it with 12 kids. So there is some decisions that we need to reflect on. I have a question for you, Susan, that is walking with me for a few years. If someone will come to you to say I want to write the book about the female body of the ultra-Orthodox and she wants-- I hope it will be she-her or they-them with a female body-- if she wants to write it to the ultra-Orthodox woman, what the way-- how she should write it?

Because the critique is so complicated, as you just bring us, like it so makes sense that this is a problem, that how do you write text to readers when you need to help them, to walk in their shoes? Something that I struggle with my books and work.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: Now, I understand. I think it's a great question. I'm going to be thinking about that. And I think what we have is really a conflict that we're all talking about, that on the one hand, we're talking about a world that, as Daniel said, is about nobility-- the edelkeit, yes.

And on the other hand, I look at the politics of it and I'm troubled. And it's both. And how do I keep the two in balance? I don't know.

Well, why is this not part of the Jewish ritual objects on display in a museum? What is the absence here? This is, in fact, what defines a woman's life. It's a constantly used item. So why is that omitted?

So I had a Hasidic wedding. And in my family, there's a cloth that the bride is supposed to have over her face. And I always thought, oh, my cousins, they look like they're a cow being led to the slaughter. They can't see anything. And then actually, when I got married I just had a little nothing, and then I realized, I don't want to be seen in this moment.

That the cloth was not just to let people not see me, but it was to allow me privacy of not being seen. And so yes, to be behind a [HEBREW], yes, it's to be hidden away. I can say why should I be hidden away? Let the men sit back there. And on the other hand, it's the opportunity to not be seen. And that's valuable for human beings and especially for women in this society and-- yeah.

On the other hand, why is that conflict even necessary in the first place? How can we overcome the need that we have this conflict in how we understand? So yes, and that is the question. And I think it's an unresolved problem for all of us who study religion and especially women in religion. And in connection with that, I just want to say with Musar, with this East European Musar movement that really gets under your skin-- and it is really, yeah-- it's this feeling of being seen all the time by God. All the time, wherever you are, God is watching you and being seen.

And I wonder about icons in Eastern Europe. And the icon is not something that you venerate. The icon sees you, responds to you. And I wonder if there's a connection, the fact that Musar grew up in that environment, in Orthodox Christianity with iconography, not in among, I don't know Protestant Lutherans or something. So I just-- I don't know if anybody's ever looked into that, but it's of interest to me, to be seen. This is such a female issue.

ANN BRAUDE: That's a wonderful question. May I take questions from the audience? OK, let's see. Yeah, if you'll hang on for one second, you're going to get a microphone. Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Great, thank you so much for coming this evening. Really refreshing and interesting discussion. I wonder-- so I haven't read the book, I apologize in advance. But obviously, a lot of the discussion this evening focused on sexuality in the male body. Is there a discussion in the book about other elements of the male body. So for example, maybe sickness, health, I'm sure you could discuss at length different organs, growth, age, those sorts of things. I'd be curious to hear your perspective. Thank you.

YAKIR ENGLANDER: So 100%, yes. And thank you so much for asking this question. In the book-- but it's totally OK not to read it--

[LAUGHTER]

--in the book.

ANN BRAUDE: No, it's not.

[LAUGHTER]

YAKIR ENGLANDER: In the book I try to ask questions about different kinds of bodies and how this community, in their writings, how do they think about that and what the results of that. So I just want to give you maybe two examples. So one question is about a person who has become older, when the rabbis become older and they have challenges with hearing or seeing. And what you see is actually that some of these rabbis celebrate that.

So one of them, he said he couldn't hear anymore. I don't know if you know, but on Friday, one of the top ultra-Orthodox rabbis passed away. And on Sunday, the funeral was with half a million people who came. And his father, who was an incredible leader, he had challenges with hearing. And he disagreed to have any machine to help him.

And he said, I was waiting for years that people will not disturb me to learn, so now, how many words they will have energy to write me. So it was before emails. So I think it's an interesting example, or for example, some of them had problems with seeing and they took off the glasses, of course, when they walk to the street so they don't even need to deal with question about modesty and the other gender.

But another thing which is interesting is about feelings, the body and feelings, or is the body when the body don't ask us what we want. OK, so for example, what do you do with dreams? OK, it's an interesting question. Can you reflect about the text in dreams?

Most of them do not go to this extreme of I'm dreaming about Jewish texts, but they will just count the dreaming time as not being in the world. One of them who is Reb Shlomo Wolbe, he actually was deeply influenced by some of the readings of Freud. And he said it's actually something very interesting that I'm trying to understand what does it mean for me, but it's not for you so let's leave it. OK? So this is one example.

The other example, which is very interesting, is about one of the rabbis, Rabbi Yechezkel Levenstein. He was a very famous rabbi there, and he said that as he become elder, an elder, he felt that he is crying more easily. And he said, I am not sure I can trust my tears because I think that it's not really my heart, but it's something in my being, and I'm worried about that. So it's interesting how the body played different roles in their lives. Thank you.

ANN BRAUDE: Any other questions in the room? Yeah, question there?

AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you for coming. This is sort of in a similar vein, but I was thinking about the comments you made about what would this look like in a secular setting, maybe what would submission look like. And I'm wondering if you-- what might embodied submission outside of healthy sex or sexuality look like in a secular setting or in a religious setting?

YAKIR ENGLANDER: Now it's open to all of us.

[LAUGHTER]

ANN BRAUDE: It's a great question, which is clearly going to require some more thought.

[LAUGHTER]

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

ANN BRAUDE: Oh, you-- OK. Would you like to--

DANIEL BOYARIN: Yeah, I might be interested in, and if I could hear it.

ANN BRAUDE: OK? You want to try it again?

DANIEL BOYARIN: And I do have my hearing aids in.

ANN BRAUDE: OK.

AUDIENCE: I think the question was basically what would embodied submission look like in a secular or religious context outside of sex and sexuality?

ANN BRAUDE: Well, I'm going to ask a--

DANIEL BOYARIN: It is a good question.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you. I'm going to read a question asked by Rachel Edelman who's a Professor of Hebrew Bible at Hebrew College and another past research associate from WSRP. She's asking about the movement within the orthodox world for women to reclaim checking the bedikah cloth because of the discomfort with the male prerogative in interpreting and ruling over the private sphere and the shame that may engender. So she's interested in your response to the shift in attitude towards female sexuality within the orthodox world.

YAKIR ENGLANDER: OK. So thank you so much for the question. So it's definitely a new phenomena that happening more in the modern orthodox community. I want to speak only about Israel. I'm less aware about the life today in American modern orthodoxy.

It's coming also to the ultra-Orthodox and I think it's a fascinating question because you see different ways of how women who become leaders, what they need to do in order to gain the credibility by the male rabbis, right? So it's like, when do they choose that even that the Jewish laws, the halacha, they still will go to the male rabbi just to be sure or to get a better confirmation. But still, we see a huge shift, a huge shift.

And you know what? Two months ago, I met the first orthodox rabbanit. Rabbanit is not-- so normally, rabbanit means the wife of the rabbi. But she's not the wife of the rabbi. She is a rabbi, and she was nominated by some of the top modern orthodox rabbis in Israel. And she is now the rabbanit.

And what is interesting that the knowledge that these women have in order to gain their credibility, I met very few male rabbis with such knowledge because they need to be better than the Pope. So this is about that. I want to answer to your question, and I was waiting because, again, I will answer from Israel. And I thought maybe we will have thoughts from here, but I want to give an example.

It's going to be a political answer. To believe in peace today as a Palestinian or as an Israeli is to submit yourself to something that is not realistic. But peace activists, by submitting themselves to the faith of the ability to change, they gain the freedom to live as if there is peace already now.

And this is the hardest thing to do in peace work. And I will tell you why-- because when you work with youths, as an example, and you teach them that the future can be different, you submit them to this unrealistic thing. When they become adults, they come to you and they say, why did you lie to us? You submit us to a narrative that is not real.

But then, when you see them when they become adults and they choose to live not to do peace only but to live with peace, you see that sometimes the submission to a narrative is giving you the freedom to be healed and then to heal others. Thank you so much for the question.

ANN BRAUDE: I'm going to bring one more question from our online audience from Dan Sklar. He says, Yakir, I'm struck by your characterization of the latent homoeroticism in the world of the yeshivah. I too believe there is a strong undercurrent and, in a don't ask, don't tell way, the dynamic is even prized. I must also admit in my own liberal Jewish world, I was embarrassed to hear a rabbinic mentor explain the Talmudic relationship of Reish Lakish and Rabbi Yohanan as towel-snapping, locker room talk. Why is there such a strong reluctance to name homoerotic relationships in literature when the text couldn't be clearer?

YAKIR ENGLANDER: [INAUDIBLE] you two scholars that text is your life.

[LAUGHTER]

DANIEL BOYARIN: I don't care to comment.

ANN BRAUDE: OK.

DANIEL BOYARIN: I've written what I have to say.

ANN BRAUDE: OK, so go read the book.

[LAUGHTER]

There was a question over here?

AUDIENCE: Hi, thank you so much. In your introduction, you speak about the gay pride controversy as being opening up this question of people actually knowing about gay people in this community and how that posed such an issue. In terms of continuing access to the internet and obviously to other forms of media, how do you think the masculine images are affecting how men within these communities perceive of themselves? And what do you see the future looking like in the next 10 to 20 years? Thank you.

YAKIR ENGLANDER: Thank you so much. So I will quote my good friend who is a head of a yeshiva, of like 15 different yeshivas, [? Rabbinach ?] Menachem Bombach, who said that the COVID changed the ultra-Orthodox world. In two years, it changed them in what will take 30 years because they needed to have internet at home. Not at work, but at home. It's a big difference.

But also for other reasons. For example, for the first time, the yeshiva world was closed for a few months, not all of them. We spoke before about the [HEBREW], did they agree, disagree, about that. But very fast, also, there is a government so there are changes. And then, for the first time for a few months, the yeshiva students were at home.

Now, it's not only at home. It's not at home in Philadelphia or even here it's very expensive, still the homes are big. It's like, two or three rooms for seven, nine people, both genders together. They are not used to that, to be there for a few months. And you see the change.

The way how you see today the change is when you go to NGOs like Hillel, not Hillel on campus like here but Hillel in Israel, or Footsteps, which are organizations that help people who decide to leave the community and only then, they help them just to make sure they don't try to convince anyone. But you see that the numbers tripled. So there is something with the change of life that hit.

One more thing that I think is very important to say, and this is where I 100% agree with Professor Boyarin, that when you look today on the ultra-Orthodox you always had an edge. So you had the edge of people who were between. They knew Bach and Mozart, and they read Oliver Twist, but also they were ultra-Orthodox Now, in the past before the Holo-- I don't speak before the Holocaust, I speak after the Holocaust.

So you see that they were more on the edge today. Because of the numbers, the edge is not an edge anymore. Today, you have a huge, large number of ultra-Orthodox who are living, in a way, a very modern life. Why my book is still important also for them or they claim, at least in Israel, that it is important for them because still, this is the ideology of the Musar. So they feel that they are not good ultra-Orthodox They are not good enough in a way.

What you see today, and this is another thing which is interesting, is the influence of American ultra-Orthodoxy towards Israel-- that you have more and more rabbis who immigrate to Israel, and they bring voices from here. And the voices from here are bringing much softer versions of ultra-Orthodoxy.

DANIEL BOYARIN: Can I just say that I experience the continued use of the term ultra-Orthodox over and over again as aggression, as an assault. I said in the beginning why I think so. It's not ultra, it's a community of people who have made certain choices that are a response to modernity in one way or another that we can criticize, but they're not ultra anything.

And they're certainly not one group of people. And you know that very well.

YAKIR ENGLANDER: Of course.

DANIEL BOYARIN: So--

YAKIR ENGLANDER: Of course.

DANIEL BOYARIN: Listen.

YAKIR ENGLANDER: So maybe we can call them the Haredim, which is--

DANIEL BOYARIN: Much less upsetting term.

YAKIR ENGLANDER: Great. So let's call them Haredim, which is--

DANIEL BOYARIN: Or in English, we could call them shakers.

[LAUGHTER]

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: Tremblers.

DANIEL BOYARIN: That's what Haredim means.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: Tremblers, yeah.

YAKIR ENGLANDER: Hmm. Yes.

[? ANN BRAUDE: ?] Shakers.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: I would just add one other point that I'm struck by when I-- I grew up in New York, when I'm in New York, I guess I'd say. And that is, there's a way, not only among Jews but are many groups, groups that have been orientalized sometimes have an internalized desire to self-orientalize. And sometimes I wonder about that.

You used the phrase response to modernity, which I think is a problematic phrase for various reasons. I don't think there is a thing called modernity that one responds to, but one creates-- it's a rhetorical device, but one creates what one thinks of as the modern. And I wonder what role that plays.

In other words, the sense of being looked at, of being watched by God, or men by women, women by men, and so on. But there's also the external world. And religious people know that there is that external world that is also looking at them. And the question is, how does one respond?

So when Homi Bhabha talks about mimicry, I think he's also talking about that kind of self-orientalization-- how one presents oneself to the community that has orientalized one. And that's part of it too. I also wanted to just make a comment about women here, which I find it very striking that women have an intellectual and a moral responsibility that is really rather extraordinary, I think.

That is, women are in charge of the kitchen. So the food has to be kosher, and it's very easy to mix up milk and meat and make a mistake and not tell anybody. One can do that, easily. And the same is true with the laws of menstrual purity, of niddah. And of course, the punishment for it is terrible. Your soul is cut off if you violate, if you have intercourse during menstruation. It's a very serious sin.

And yet, a woman can easily not bring her cloth to the rabbi, just pretend everything's OK. So she has, first of all, the knowledge to know what to do, which is really quite extensive. If you've ever tried to explain to somebody how to keep a kosher kitchen, there's a lot to remember. And there is a moral authority that she has that's invested in women. If they cheat on this, everybody's soul is cut off.

So her responsibility, her moral, she's invested with a moral responsibility that I think actually, in some ways, goes beyond anything that a man has. Is there something that a man-- which I mean, he could also mix up meat and milk and make it right. But this is something really rather remarkable to me, this moral responsibility-- that she is trusted with that.

ANN BRAUDE: I think we can take one last question if there is one here.

AUDIENCE: Hello, thank you everyone so much for your discussion and commentary, especially wanted they think Professor Heschel for bringing us the bedikah cloth. I volunteer at [HEBREW], the egalitarian mikvah and work with a lot of people who follow laws of niddah, but I've never actually seen or used a bedikah cloth. So thank you.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: You can get them there.

AUDIENCE: Great.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

AUDIENCE: Next time I'll ask.

SUSANNAH HESCHEL: [INAUDIBLE]

[LAUGHTER]

AUDIENCE: Thank you. My question has to do with Musar a little more generally having read Yakir's book in our class on gender and Judaism with Professor Braude. And the only other time before reading this book when I had encountered any kind of talk of Musar in my Jewish communities that tend-- the communities that I've been in are more [HEBREW] liberal and tend to be non-denominational was, oh, Musar is Jewish mindfulness or Jewish meditation. That was the only context I'd heard it in, more as almost a response like Buddhism, sort of saying we have this within our own tradition. And I wondered if any of you had responses to that kind of use of Musar in other contexts.

YAKIR ENGLANDER: I think it's beautiful what's happening here now with the Musar movement in America. The Musar movement, just to remember, which started with-- it's a modern phenomena that started with [? Rab ?] Israel Salanter. But actually, of course, there are much more ancient books, as mentioned, [HEBREW] et cetera, et cetera.

I think the beauty here that as the Musar movement become only connected to specific places in Israel with the Haredi community, here in America, it's like you put seeds and you never know what will happen with the tree. Here, you see an incredible use of Musar from the Mishnah, from Mishnah [HEBREW] and up to Reb Israel Salanter or [HEBREW] et cetera, et cetera. And they use it as a way to bring mindfulness, mostly, into the Jewish life here.

And what is fascinating that, in America, I think that more and more I see synagogues, liberal synagogues, who hold so much of the wisdom of the Musar and they translate it to the lives, the complex life that we are all living at. And I think it's such a blessing to the Jewish world.

ANN BRAUDE: Thank you. Yakir, is there any final word that you want to give us before we end our conversation of your book?

YAKIR ENGLANDER: I just want to say thank you. I think that something that bring so much light for me is when people who are living activism coming together with academy, and we created what we say in Hebrew, [HEBREW]. Torah of life, the wisdom of life. And will this book help in that? It's a question that I will not know because it depends on the readers.

I want to end with a beautiful story from the Talmud about one of the rabbis that I think each one of us can bring it to our activism life. Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, that he was, of course, what we are dealing-- each generation, we have our dilemmas. So before he passed away, and we speak about one of the huge scholars in the Talmud, and before he passed away, he said, there are two roads or paths that are open to me. One will take me to heaven, and one will take me to hell. And I still do not know where I'm going to be taken.

And I think that if us, the students of the Divinity School, people who are listening to us, if we will take this wisdom and we will write and we will act with shaken, with [HEBREW], with the Haredim, I think it will be such a blessing to all of us. Thank you so much.

[APPLAUSE]

ANN BRAUDE: Well, thank you, Yakir, for returning to the scene of the crime where you began, or worked on, parts of this book. And thank you to both of our commentators. This was really such a rich conversation, and I felt your presence and your wrestling with this book and all that is in it. And I'm grateful to you and our audience for this conversation. Good night.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 2: Sponsors-- Women's Studies and Religion Program at HDS, the Center for Jewish Studies and Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2022, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.