Wrestling with Jewish Learning By Casey Tova Markenson

You will be handed a sheet of paper. The paper will have a quote from the Torah or the Gemara or Abraham Joshua Heschel. The ‘what’ and ‘who’ and ‘why’ behind those sources will not be explained. You will read the passage and reflect on it with a partner. In ten minutes, you will share a piece of your conversation with the rest of the group. Then, the Jewish part of the Jewish social justice program you’re about to experience will be complete.

I have read and reflected on countless texts as part of that ritual. I don’t remember any of them. I do remember being embarrassed that I didn’t know who Rebbe Nachman was. I remember sensing that my training in literary criticism didn’t “count” as Jewish knowledge. I do remember every time I revealed that I misunderstood a detail or a Hebrew word, and all of the times that a (usually male identified) peer excessively explained it.  I remember feeling left out of an exclusive club, one that I was embarrassed to want to join to begin with.

In addition to the content of Jewish learning feeling alienating, I’ve often struggled with the pedagogy.  For example, at the start of my year as a Corps Member with AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps, the facilitator introduced Kashrut, traditional Jewish dietary laws, by asking the group to divide up in terms of “teachers” – those who had more familiarity with Kashrut – and “learners” – those who were less familiar. The “teachers” then taught the rules to the “learners.” By outing myself as a person who knew “less,” I was cast in the role of a person who can’t engage in or lead Jewish conversations. As rules and histories were explained to me, I was to listen, to be silent. I quickly grew tired of sitting through lengthy, impromptu lectures, so I stopped asking questions.

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Do programs where Jews inhabit the same spaces inherently make those spaces Jewish? That question has been on my mind in my role as the Communications, Outreach, and Marketing Strategist at Ma’yan, a Jewish feminist non-profit. At Ma’yan, we’re currently preparing for our next Research Training Internship (RTI), a 15-month research, activism and leadership boot camp for young Jewish women. Based on the model of Participatory Action Research, the RTI culminates in a youth led research project that explores the interns’ experiences and those of their communities. For the last RTI cohort, that meant creating a video about sexism in the media; in it, the RTIs analyze the texts and images that surround us, and critically examine the impact they have on our bodies and self-perceptions. As former RTI Helia Precel reflects, being constantly surrounded by photo-shopped images causes girls to dislike themselves, making them think “I don’t look like this person who I see all around me, so something must be wrong with me.” What, then, is the secret of the perfect, Jewish girl?

It’s a loaded question, especially due to the RTI’s pluralistic setting. The young Jewish women that we work with are predominantly white and have class privilege – while they’re likely to connect over the pressures of being female bodied and from their particular background, the spectrum of what it means to perform Jewishness can fracture that shared identity. Although the young women that we support all struggle with imposed expectations around Judaism, a modern orthodox girl who attends Jewish day school is facing different expectations from a girl in secular reform communities; they’re bringing distinct, if not disparate, relationships to Judaism to the conversation. How can that range of perspectives deepen the cohort’s connection, rather than splinter it?

While Ma’yan disrupts expectations around Jewish learning, it also renders that learning invisible. Digressing from the expected ritual of reading texts written by dead, straight, white, cis-gendered Jewish men de-legitimizes the Jewishness of the RTI. So what’s a Jewish social justice educator to do? When faced with the options of repeating activities that are authoritatively, indisputably “Jewish” versus wrestling with why Jewish programming is ubiquitously vapid, the default isn’t surprising. Or is it?

Writing the word “wrestle” triggered a memory: At the same AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps orientation where I was fated to be a person to whom Judaism needed to be explained, I remember reading the passage where Jacob wrestles with an angel. (And so I must rescind my earlier claim that my memory is void of any text that I’ve read in a Jewish setting. It may stand out because it closes with Jacob’s renaming, a change that I was on the brink of experiencing.) My reading of that story hinges on the act of wrestling – that challenging, rigorous engagement with one another, with our tradition, and with our narratives is key to what it means to be Jewish. In that case, we need to wrestle with the notion that Judaism belongs to people who hold a particular kind of knowledge. We need to argue for Jewish experiences that approach identity holistically. We need to push against the hierarchy between the learners and the learned.

Casey Tova Markenson is a feminist writer, scholar, and theatre maker. She currently works as the Communications, Marketing, and Outreach Strategist at Ma’yan, a Jewish feminist nonprofit in New York City. She holds a Bachelors in English from Carleton College and is starting an Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre and Drama at Northwestern in the fall. Casey Tova is an alumna of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps and ADAMAH: The Jewish Environmental Fellowship. Her work has been published in Skyd Magazine, Jewesses With Attitude, and Tenth Muse.