A Newfound Respect

By Douglass Delman

It was going to be spring break, but I hadn’t planned to go anywhere. I was a grad student, and I needed to stick around town and use the time to get some extra work done. So, I had the slight problem of not being able to attend services those two weekends of spring break. It probably would have been possible to just drive to a Conservative synagogue somewhere in town, but I wasn’t exactly going to take the initiative to do that. Attending services every weekend wasn’t that critical for me.

The semester before I had really started getting into attending Conservative Friday night services at Hillel and I really felt the difference. I felt strongly that Conservative Judaism was for me. The way it allowed both men and women to participate equally in every practice was in line with how I viewed Judaism should be. With all the experience I had gathered up until then, Reform Judaism strayed too far away from what the Torah laid out, but Orthodox Judaism was stuck in the Old World for me—at least this was how I saw it at that time.

That’s when two Orthodox friends of mine suggested to me that I spend Shabbat at a rabbi’s house they knew in the Orthodox part of town, so that I could attend services. I could have given them a polite, "no," but they promised me that I could leave at any point if I wanted to, in case I would get too antsy. I had my issues with the Orthodox form of Judaism, but I could be open-minded enough to spend a little time with them over a Friday night, especially since it was Spring Break.

It was during that first evening that I had a conversation that would forever change how I would look at Orthodox Judaism. I started chatting with a woman I met there. She was married and about my age.

I don’t know how the conversation turned in this direction, but I started saying why I could just never be Orthodox. Women were not allowed to read from the Torah. Men and women had to sit separately at synagogue, and women had to cover their hair once they got married. It didn’t take much convincing to make me think that Orthodoxy was oppressive of women. She countered my assumptions and said the words I will never forget, "Wait, I don’t feel oppressed!"

For some reason I had never asked an Orthodox woman if she actually felt oppressed because of her religion. I just assumed that she had to be that way because that’s how current society dictated it had to be. Assigned gender roles were simply oppressive. She told me some thought provoking things. She told me that she likes how her husband isn’t as tempted to check out other women when they’re walking to synagogue, or when he has any activity in the neighborhood because all the other women all dress modestly and thus don’t invite men to get the wrong idea. She said a synagogue is a place for concentrated davening, not a place to scope out how everyone looks. Then the Jewish family can walk home together. My concerns were all normal, common and valid. But as we continued to talk, I found that I assumed and prejudged before I really looked at every perspective of the issue.

With my initial wariness removed, I began to discover why so many people value their Torah-observant Judaism so much. I had been brushing off an eternal practice because of my viewpoint that was limited to what a temporary, critical society had led me to believe. I learned from my repeated interaction with members of their community, that Orthodox women are not forced to live under the rule of their husbands. In our free country, they choose to live the way they want to. It gave me new perspective on Judaism, and women’s role in Judaism. I gained a whole new respect for Orthodoxy that I had not previously had.

Douglass Delman holds a B.A. from The College of William & Mary and an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University.  He grew up in Toms River, New Jersey, and is now living in Baltimore, Maryland.  Douglass has been active in both the Conservative and Orthodox Jewish communities of W&M, JHU, greater Baltimore, and Vienna, Austria.

[Posted 6/7/05]