Kathleen Horton, author of “Suckling at the Breast of God: Women and the Rhetoric of Faith,” writes, “How people of faith come to understand God and live lives of faith is determined by the rhetorical effects of textual, material, and abstract cultural artifacts and the specific arguments they present.” Horton asserts that faith in God is a rhetorical construction.
This is not the same as asserting that God does not exist, or that faith is merely fiction. This is an assertion not about the existence of God, but about one way to understand human relationship with God. Horton writes that people come to know and experience God through rhetorical interactions. These may be reading sacred texts, praying, viewing iconography, engaging in religious ritual, or through the mediation of other cultural artifacts. Through examining these rhetorical interactions, we come to understand more about how people understand, know, and experience God and a life of faith.
This summer, I am reading in preparation for ENG-L495, and undergraduate thesis-type program at Indiana University. Specifically, I am examining Hasidic Jewish communities and sacred texts, and I have a particular interest gender and women’s faith. Horton’s doctoral thesis was one of the first things on my reading list that I delved into, mostly because of the curious title. Her writing has continued to intrigue me, and it has provided a justification for examining faith in the context of rhetoric and composition studies.
My reading list contains a conglomeration of literacy studies, rhetoric/discourse theory, theology, Jewish law, history, and books about specific religious communities. Several books have slightly stuffy but informative and academic-sounding titles such as, The Status of Women in Jewish Tradition. They are concerned mainly with Talmudic law, rabbinic teachings, and various Jewish movements with respect to women.
Other books are titled somewhat differently. One of my favorites is, Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls, by Stephanie Levine. Another is, Appropriately Subversive: Modern Mothers in Traditional Religions, by Tova Hartman Halbert. Both of these books concern the religious and spiritual experiences of women and girls in traditional and patriarchal religions. Both books explore the tension between religious tradition and belief and navigating coming-of-age as smart, talented, strong and spiritual females in circumstances where the adult female (and female child) role is clearly delineated and limited. The roles for female are not only limited in authority, family roles, and community expectations, but also in how the female individual is expected to approach, know, and come to a relationship with God.
An interesting pattern has emerged.
Many of the traditional law interpretations and seminal books on Hasidic life construct the Hasidic female in a very particular, and I think rather flat way. Sefer Hasidim (“Book of the Pious,” a collection of the teachings of three medieval German Hasidic leaders that contain instructions for daily life), for example, constructs women as a role that only supports men’s holiness and men’s nearness to God. The wife’s duty is to her family, and her husband – her responsibility is to make sure he can fulfill his religious duties. The writers of Sefer Hasidism spend a great deal of time figuring out how to keep men from sexual sin and focused on God . It is imperative that men be preserved from sin, and yet women may only be objects which can lead to sin, or prevent sin. Judith R. Baskin writes that Sefer Hasidism has a “blindness to the possibility that women are also spiritual and moral beings” (9). This book is grounded in its cultural context; it cannot be applied directly to contemporary Hasidic life or thought, yet it does provide a window into the theological history of the Jewish woman and her expected relationship with God.
Clearly, there is a substantial gap between prescribed religious roles for women based on legal and sacred text and rabbinic teachings and women’s actual religious experiences within the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic tradition. The relationship between God and woman articulated by the body of Hasidic teachings seems quite different from women’s actual encounters and experiences with God.
I am only beginning my reading – the pattern that is emerging is far from a thorough study. Perhaps in further research this pattern will cease to exist. For now, though, it is fascinating to me and it is driving my further exploration and thinking into this topic. What can examining Hasidic women’s religious and spiritual experiences through the lens of rhetoric and discourse theory tell us about the nature of human relationship to God? Why is the legal, rabbinic, “official” experience so different from the actual?
Works Cited:
Horton, Kathleen. “Sucking at the Breast of God: Women and the Rhetoric of Faith.” [doctoral thesis] Eugene, OR: University of Oregon. 1995.
Baskin, Judith R. “From Separation to Displacement: The Problem of Women in Sefer Hasidism.” AJS Review. 1994. 1(19): 1-18. Text.
