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And Male

MARLENE ADLER MARKS Special to The Jewish News

The following is an excerpt from an
article called "To Be Jewish and Male,"
written by Marlene Adler Marks for
Hadassah magazine. Reprinted with
permission of the author.

I love Judaism. But many of the
men I date seem merely to
endure it. What gives?
It is increasingly clear that
men and women, of a certain age and
social perspective, see Judaism from
two distinct views.
Wendy Mogel, a psychologist in
Los Angeles, works with couples try-
ing to bring Judaism into their lives.
"The women are so eager, but the
men are really afraid," she says.
"They have all this baggage that stops
them from even looking at what they
don't like."
It's time for this he said/she said
battle to be addressed explicitly, as it
affects how the Jewish community
looks at its future.
Take a look at the wealth of new
Jewish books. On the one hand, there
are shelves full of pessimism, all writ-
ten by men. In Alan Dershowitz's The
Vanishing American Jew (Little,
Brown), for example, the lawyer-pro-
fessor worries about assimilation,
intermarriage and Jewish continuity.
But what Dershowitz really seeks is
an answer to the question, "Why be
Jewish?"
"The primary reason why so many
Jews ... are marrying non-Jews and
assimilating today is that they do not
see any positive reasons for remaining
Jewish," he writes.
But women tell a different story
— not of the life of exile but, as in
the title of a new work by Joyce
Antler, of The Journey Home (Free
Press).
"Our experience as Jewish
women," writes Antler, history pro-
fessor at Brandeis University, "has

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been one of exile." Women today
constitute the most important
resource for Jewish revival."
How do we get men to see the
world as we do? To experience the
ownership,
enthusiasm,
competence
and pleasure
in contemporary
Jewish life? Is it
chutzpah to
think they can
learn from us?
In fact,
it is more
than
chutz-
pah; it is
sheer self- ,
interest.
The call
to spiritual-
ity among'
women often
mystifies men and
may be accompanied
by anger or jealousy
or both. Speaking at
a Hadassah meeting
recently, I asked a group
of 20 women to compare their
attitudes toward Judaism with that
of the men in their lives.
"He won't go to synagogue," said
one woman. "The most pleasure he'll
get is if I make a Friday night dinner
at home."
The irrelevance of the synagogue
for many Jewish men has different
sources. But it creates a wedge within
families. How can we expect that
Jewish men will one day encourage
their children in Jewish celebration, if
they are ambivalent about its mean-
ing for themselves?
Rabbi Steven Z. Leder of Wilshire
Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles,
through his group, 100 Jewish Men,

"

has had a great success rate over five
years in bringing men back into an
appreciation of Jewish life.
While some observers attribute the
problems of Jewish men to the
demise of the minyan, Leder says
they are wrong.
"The minyan didn't work all that
well either," he says, warning that
modern Jews tend to romanticize the
ties that formed
between minyan
members. "Men
came for prayer
in the morn-
ing and went
to work. At
night they
returned for
prayer and had a
drink and went
home. These men never
spoke to each other."
Today's Jewish
men need
another model,
an update on
the Mishnah
societies in
which pro-
fessional
men gath-
ered to study
and learn from
each other.
"I call Jewish
men 'God's
est creatures, '"
Leder says. "They're
raised to be competitive,
to fight each other, to work hard ...
But they do not know how to work
together as men."
Unlike Promise Keepers, "100
Jewish Men tells the men to go home
and be with their families — and to
take time for themselves."
Jeff Levine is a member of the new
group of 100 Jewish Men at Valley

Beth Shalom in Encino, Calif. "The
first time I heard the sound of 100
booming male voices in Jewish
prayer, it was really astounding," he
says. "I'd never heard anything like it
before."
How can more men be reached?
The question brought me back to the
beginnings of Jewish feminism. The
movement was successful because it
made women feel included, relevant
and involved in Judaism. Through
women's midrashim based on the sto-
ries in the Bible, for example, they
learned about themselves as mothers,
sisters, competitors and spiritual
beings. Women have, in the words of
E.M. Broner, "woven ourselves" into
the text.
Men have yet to do this, or to cre-
ate the lifecycle rituals that have
helped women see that Judaism
speaks directly to them. Women who
have helped create a daughter's nam-
ing ceremony or a tree planting know
how potent these ceremonies can be.
Men, too, need ways to mark their
passages.
Women, of course, can't tell men
what they need; but we can prompt
and encourage them to find them-
selves in a Jewish tradition that has
been so important to us.
When 100 Jewish Men first start-
ed, many men were uncomfortable
because women were excluded.
"They felt sexist. They thought that
the women would hate us. Men
being alone is deeply frowned on
in this society. It took men a while
to understand that they need a place
to be alone, and it is taking both
sexes a while to see that the syna-
gogue can be that place," says
Leder.
How ironic it would be to find
that by separating ourselves, we are
finally able to come together as
Jewish men and women. 0

