Community Blog

    Shabbat Shalom! This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Shelach, in which God instructs Moses to send forth 12 agents, one from each tribe, to scout out the Promised Land and the people who already live there. Ten of the twelve come back terrified of the prospect of conquering the land. They say that giants dwell there, and they bewail [again] ever leaving Egypt, certain that they will die if they try to settle their new homeland. Only two, Joshua and Caleb, are courageous enough to say that they believe in God’s might and aid to their cause, and that they will indeed be successful in settling the bountiful land of giants and giant crops. The Haftarah parallels this story more neatly than some other parshiyot and their accompanying readings from the prophets, as it tells of Joshua sending two spies of his own into Jericho right as they are about to enter the land, forty years after the events of the Torah portion. 

    Of course, in both the Torah and Haftarah, the scouts/spies are men, but the true hero of the Haftarah is a woman. Rahav is identified as an “isha zona” most often translated as a harlot, but possibly also an innkeeper or a madam. In any case, she is an independent woman, which has always been treated as a danger to society. She makes her own decisions about her city, the Israelites, and God, and assists Joshua in conquering Jericho, displacing the social order that cast her out into the outskirts of the city and community (she literally lived the wall that enclosed the city). 

It is often the people on the margins who see most clearly the injustices around us. Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, legislation that sought to fight discrimination on the basis of sex and gender in educational settings. Unfortunately, still these 50 years later, women, girls, and gender and sexual minorities continue to be marginalized on the basis of their supposed biology or gender presentation. 

Last week, a news story bemoaned the horrors of being “canceled at 17,” because a group of teenagers socially ostracized a classmate for sharing his girlfriend’s nudes without her consent. Honestly, I’m a little confused how he didn’t get in more trouble for essentially having child porn on his phone, the naked pictures of someone under 18. In response to the piece, social media was flooded this past week with stories of lists written in girls’ bathrooms of boys to avoid, and the hurt feelings of the boys who have lost the access to other people’s bodies that they feel entitled to. Though the original article by Elizabeth Weil was overwhelmingly considerate of the assaulters’ points of view, it also gave voice to some of the dynamics at play, and why girls and women feel more certain than ever that this is the time to speak up. For the high school students Weil interviewed, coming back into schools after a year or more of isolation and dealing with boundary violations for the first time in a while or ever, they realized that they didn’t have to live with those violations. That school without harassment was actually possible. If it was possible with online classes, it should be possible in the physical classroom as well, and they wanted to push their administrators as much as their classmates to understand this. 

“We were given the space and a lot of time,” one girl reported to her school board in an attempt to rally more institutional support, “to reflect on why that kind of behavior was tolerated at school.” While Title IX is often cited in cases of collegiate sports, or other sex-separated activities where girls are likely to be explicitly and institutionally excluded, cases in recent years throughout the country have successfully advocated for utilizing its application in the fight against sexual harassment and assault in schools. Women and girls cannot be expected to learn equally if they are busy fearing for their safety. 

Meanwhile, as women and girls are fighting for their rights to go to school without being touched against their will and to maintain their reasonable rights to privacy, the courts are stripping away the bodily autonomy of everyone with a uterus, and will quite possibly soon extend such repressions to other sexual and gender minorities. I’ve spoken before about where Judaism stands on abortion, and where Reform Judaism stands on equity for all, so I shouldn’t need to explain how today’s court rulings and the ones likely to follow violate our religious freedoms and values. It is a danger to our lives and our rights, and I am horrified and terrified for what it will mean for so many in our community. And, these regressive laws will disproportionately affect those who are already additionally marginalized by factors other than sex and gender. People who live in poverty, people of color, people who live in underserved areas, they will be the first to be harmed by constrictions on their bodily autonomy. People like Rahav, who live on the outskirts, who see the harms caused by their societies, and whose lead we should follow when it comes time to fight for the freedom of all and a more equitable future.

This Shabbat and always, may we look to those on the margins for clarity in assessing the evils of our world, may we fight for and support the rights and safety of the marginalized, and may we always, always, remember that each living human is responsible for their own body first and foremost. Each person has the right to decide how and when their own body is touched and by whom. Each person has the right to decide how and when to build their families and with whom. No person has the right to exert their sense of entitlement over someone else’s living body and breathing soul. I pray for a safe and healthy future for us all, free to live our values and to be our authentic selves without fear of state repression. Amen and Shabbat Shalom.