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Friday, January 17,,1986 41
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vicious to be printed in the
to her own experiences and
motivations while maintain-
ing a quirky sense of balance
and humor.
Take, for
the
premise of her essay onthe
,need today- for ethical
mentors:
"My earliest memory per-
taining to ethies, and my first
ethical mentor, date to kin-
der n and to a ritual we
had at the school water foun-
tain called 'frontsies and
backsies.'
"Frontsies meant that you
let a kid cut in front of you as
,
Times.
,
"I found the negative let-
ters relentless," says Schnur.
"They said I had performed
a disservice and mocked my
Judaism and they used me as
an argument against ordain-
ing women rabbis. But I was
just being intellectually
honest.
'I'm fed up with being de-
fensive about my religious
beliefs;" she says with some
heat. Then, softening her
tone, she adds: "I see my
feminism as an ethical issue.
I'm severely offended by the
place of women in Ortho-
doxy. It's not a halachic
issue, it's a boy's club issue."
Schnur says she was dis-
tressed• by the sense of
"smugness and arrogance"
from Orthodox readers.
"They didn't listen. They just
dismissed me out of hand."
And she was upset at the lack
of "a middle ground" in the
hundreds of letters she and
the nmes received. Either
they attacked her in the
strongest /terms or, in a
backlash prompted by the
publication of some of the
neglitive mail, they rallied to
her defense, praised her
"remarkable honesty" and
'wonderful insights" and
criticized her Orthodox cri-
tics. "Your writing in the late
20th century invoked a 19th
century response," wrote one
supporter.
This schism between the
Orthodox and non-Orthodox
saddened Schnur but did not
surprise her. "It's very real
and very deep," she said.
"None of the letters I receiv-
/ed straddled the two camps.
"It's clear that I do two
things that are mutually in-
compatible," she added: "try
a creative approach and be
very Jewish.''
What is also clear from her
essays, though obscured in
the ideological debate that
followed, is that she is an in-
telligent, gifted writer who is
not afraid to probe deeply in-
(1.- 1" -
,
.
"Frontsies meant
that you let a kid
cut in front of you -
as you stood in
line for a drink."
you stood in line f9r a drink.
Backsies meant you let a kid
cut behind you.
"A complex moral micro-
cosm presented itself in the
world of frontsies and back-
sies, with a wide range of
available moral responses.
'There were, for example,
those kids who always asked
for frontsies (ethical hedon-
ists); others who generally
went 'for backsies (immoral-
ists — requesting permission
to infringe on others from
someone who was not, him-
self, affected); those who gave
backsies (collaborationists),
and those who manipulated
the water fountain line into a
political opportunity (Mach-
iavellians), granting frontsies
to members of the Mammals
Club, backsies to girls with
frizzy hair and to the abject
Corinne Willis.
"There were kids, like
myself, who never asked for
either frontsies or backsies,
but who, lacking a moral
backbone, gave frontsies.
"And then there was my
,
first ethical mentor, Judy
Simon, a school crossing
guard much older than the
rest of us who, one day in line,
refused frontsies to Buzzy
Chateau. "You should stand
where you end up, Buzzy, like
the rest of us," she said, with
great probity, I thought.
Another time she gave front-
sies to Corinne who, probably
in ber whole life, had never
been given frontsies by any-
one. Judy then went to stand,
herself, e the back of.the line
(Christian ethicist). .
"I try not to think too
much about the implications
of people being elaborately
greedy in relation to a com-
modity that they don't real-
ly want, in this case a squirt
of warm, ferrous water from
a fountain whose metal hood
we were careful never to
touch with our lips." -
Or this sampling from an
essay (of the five "Hers" col-
, umns she wrote, the one of
which she is most proud)
about the other side of the
Talmud, not the Talmud of
disciplined logic but of
demons and imps and magic:
"What has always fascin-
ated me about rabbinical
texts 'is how the selfsame -
material that entrances ra-
tionalists can also hold
dreamers captive.
"The reason for this, I
think, is that the Talmud is
one of the most undexedited
books in the history of pub-
lishing. Not only does it lack
punctuation, vowels and a ta-
ble of contents; not only is it
written in a language (Ara-
maic) that students are never
formally taught; but abstruse
arguments are also interlard-
ed with petty ones, gossip,
bits of moral exhortation and
homeopathic remedies, in-
sults and superstitions.
"To someone uninitiated in
its ways, it reads like a-Sur-
realist text: -
'It is forbidden to read Ben-
Sira. Abaye said, why so?
Continued on next page
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