I have no desire to wear tefillin.
Now, lest you think this yet another article about women wearing tefillin, I assure you it is not. I am not here to deplore the state of Modern Orthodoxy, or wax poetic about religious rituals. Rather, I want to talk about expectations. Or rather, how low expectations affect our religious lives.
In the Orthodox community, Jewish women are not expected to wake up at 8am every morning and strap phylacteries on their foreheads. Women are also not expected to attend prayer services three times a day. There is no commandment, or expectation, for a woman to take out a Talmud, or Bible, for that matter, and dedicate a couple minutes to Torah-study every day. Within our community, much less is expected of women with regards to communal and religious obligations than of men.
From a grade-school-kid perspective, it seems that women have struck a pretty sweet deal. We get all the perks of association and belonging, without any of the responsibilities. On a lazy Saturday morning, we can roll out of bed at whichever hour we so choose, with no fear of receiving disapproving or questioning looks from our peers when we stroll into synagogue at 10:30am. Nope—no negative press for eating inside when it’s too cold in the sukkah, and no remonstrative remarks for skipping services on the High Holidays when you’re not feeling well. No one’s going to turn down a date with a girl because she doesn’t learn daf yomi, or never attends night-seder.
So, what’s the catch? Why are we chasing after more homework?
The answer is simple: the lower the expectations, the harder it is to believe our contributions matter. Take the well-known story of a teacher who walks into a remedial level-classroom and mistakes it for high-honors. The teacher immediately treats the students differently—she expects them to do their homework, show up for class on time, and speak up. The students, accustomed to being treated like they’re low-priority, respond immediately to the raised expectations. For the first time, they are being given respect and trust. They respond with excellence. Accountability breeds reliability. Expectations demand results.
What do low religious expectations do to our ‘performance’? Low expectations make us apathetic and lazy. Low expectations make us feel useless and extraneous. The punch line: low expectations from others cause us to have low expectations of ourselves.
I was inspired to write this article after hearing a speech given by Leah Sarna, a senior at Yale University, at the 2013 JOFA conference. Sarna eloquently, and with astounding precision, addressed the problem of low expectations for women in the Jewish community. “The secular world asks a tremendous amount from women today,” said Sarna. “The religious world hasn’t really upped its demands. And, so far, us Orthodox feminists have hardly asked it to.”
Sarna quoted the term “the soft bigotry of low expectations” (used by President George W. Bush when he was working to implement education-reform). The term refers to the exact phenomenon Orthodox Jewish women experience in the religious realm—the lower the expectations, the lower our motivations, and, more importantly, the lower our desire to be religiously motivated.
Troubled by this realization, Sarna did exactly what we are all capable of doing: she worked to change the system. In her speech, Sarna describes how she and friend decided to attend prayer services every day. Her presence, and absence when she couldn’t make it, began to be noticed and acknowledged. “We even started to be mentioned in the daily announcements,” Sarna shared proudly. By raising expectations for herself when it came to ritual participation, she began to feel like a vital and significant part of her community.
In preparation for this article, I realized the extent to which I’ve internalized the message that my presence in the synagogue, or in the Beit Midrash, is insignificant. When I walk past the brightly lit windows of the Glueck Beit Midrash every day on my way home, it still astounds me that I’m not allowed inside. There is no such place for women on this campus, I think to myself. And, if there were such a place available, would I go? Would I make the trek out of my comfortable apartment to sit for an hour with a chavruta? Would I carve out the time in my busy schedule to learn material not obviously relevant to my day-to-day routine? Or, has the message that it’s simply not my chiyuv (responsibility), sunk in too deeply to backtrack?
As many are wont to point out, the problem, like most, is circular. Women feel marginalized and estranged during prayer services or in the study hall, and so they choose not to attend. Eventually, services learn not to expect their presence and do not prepare properly for the times when women do choose to attend. The system of marginalization spirals.
The solution must be arrived upon from both ends. Congregations need to start acknowledging, and expecting, women’s equal participation. A mechitza should never be lacking, and the women’s section should never become a storage area. High-level learning opportunities for women should be provided and encouraged in synagogues and universities.
The rest of the responsibility, however, lies with us. We have to start having higher expectations of ourselves. We have to start demanding that we show up on time for services. We have to start insisting that time be set aside for learning Torah daily. “Dedication—frankly, I think we need more of it,” said Sarna.
At Stern, many women have already begun raising the expectations, and opportunities have steadily begun to follow suit. In the recent year, important strides have been taken. On the men’s campus, Rubin shul offers a shacharit and (newly instated) m’aariv minyan for women every day. On the Stern campus, a communal shacharit takes place every morning in the Beit Midrash at 8:15am, and a special mincha with a minyan is available every Wednesday evening, as well as on Rosh Chodesh. Learning opportunities and peer-taught chaburot are becoming increasingly frequent and available.
So, no—we don’t have to lay tefillin to be dedicated.
But we do have to start believing, and internalizing, that our presence, in the synagogue, in the study hall, and in our communities at large, is just as essential and important as any man’s.
When we start to believe this, others will too.