Women are Jews, too.

I recently found out that the Conservative synagogue in Bogotá doesn't allow women to read from Torah or wear tallit. Oh, did I mention that I'm the coordinator for a 5-day Jewish summer camp for the synagogue starting next week?

Brief explanation: For you non-Jews out there, I should give a brief background on what this means. First, some vocabulary. Torah = the five books of Moses, that scroll thingy that you saw your friends read from for their Bar/Bat Mitzvah. Tallit = Prayer shawl that is worn during morning prayer services, at weddings, and a few other times. In the vast history of the Jewish people, women were not allowed to read from the Torah or wear tallitot (actually, according to Wikipedia, originally women were allowed to wear tallitot until the Medieval period? I should probably do some more research on this), but that changed for the Reform and Conservative movements at some point in recent history. OK now back to your regularly-scheduled blog post...

Me being my naive self, seeing that men and women sit together at services, seeing that women serve on the synagogue board, etc etc - well, I just assumed that women could read from Torah and wear tallitot. Turns out I was wrong. So, me (again) being me, kind of freaked out. I've been struggling with the question of whether or not you can belong to a community that doesn't accept you for who you are - and more specifically, whether you can be part of a Jewish community that doesn't recognize the way that you practice Judaism. You probably know that I'm into egalitarianism in general, and in my Jewish life, grew up in a congregation that had a female rabbi and that didn't differentiate between men and women in any way (other than the brit milah). Not to mention, Conservative synagogues in the US allow women to perform these mitzvot, so why not here?

Turns out I'm living in Latin America. See previous post about sexism.

There are a few people at the synagogue who are working on this, but it takes time. And so many people, including women, are stuck on "tradition" - the same people who openly express wanting to allow pork in the synagogue, the same people who didn't raise their children as Jews. **Addendum: I don't care if you eat pork or don't raise your kids as Jews. But then don't go telling me which traditions I should think are important and which traditions should change.** Why is it that the sexist traditions are always the last to change?

I don't want to impose my beliefs on others - if a woman doesn't want to wear a tallit, my goodness, she should not have to wear a tallit. But if a woman wants to wear one, well, she should have that right. Especially in a synagogue where women count as part of a minyan, where women serve on the board, where women are an integral part of the religious aspects of the community.

I just remembered from my childhood the pictures of all of Temple Emanu-El's past presidents on the wall. I remember a sea of male faces, with one female face, how that always stuck with me. I was always proud of her.

**Addendum, June 10** Just saw this cartoon and think it applies.