Half a revolution
Op-ed: Rabbi Yosef encouraged women to fulfill themselves; upon his death, Sephardic haredi world has lost real chance of significant feminine change
More than being the rabbi of his male followers, the late Rabbi Ovadia Yosef
was the most important rabbi of his female followers. The man should not only be credited with releasing agunot (abandoned wives) from their marriages and significantly easing the prohibition against hearing women sing, but mainly with the good and sensitive spirit towards the weak gender among haredi communities.
At the entrance gate to the Porat Yosef Yeshiva, where tens of thousands assembled, sat an elderly woman next to her husband, surrounded by masses of men who treated her presence in a relatively natural manner. None of them spat, cursed or threw a stone as is the custom among Orthodox Ashkenazi communities.
A man's actions and words define him more than anything, but Rabbi Yosef's last journey – which was marked Monday in full glory in the presence of an enormous crowd – clearly indicated that he was a relatively liberal man: Men and women stood together, crying side by side, in the biggest funeral in the State's history.
Internal Criticism
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Rabbanit Adina Bar Shalom, daughter of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, says exclusion of women from public domain violates Torah. 'Halacha treats women with the utmost respect,' she clarifies
The wives of Shas followers are not afraid of preening themselves, wearing feminine clothes and decorating themselves with jewelry. They will not apologize for going out to work or for choosing to plan their family. The aversion in haredi life towards an independent feminine entity, which is not defined through the husband or father, hardly exists in the daily life of Shas members. It's enough to take a look at the activity of Rabbi Yosef's eldest daughter, Adina Bar-Shalom, who established the first haredi college for girls in 2006, to understand the kind of home she was raised in and how she became as much of a pioneer and revolutionary as her father.
Rabbi Yosef encouraged women to fulfill themselves, to go out to work and study, and provided them with a practical and immediate solution in the form of the El Hamaayan religious educational network, thereby releasing much more than 1,000 agunot from the prison of reality which begins in the kitchen and ends in the bedroom.
In this sense one can say that he defeated the Lithuanian system by converting the approach which sees a woman as the sum of her days of menstruation, and did not hesitate to talk directly to women, listen to their troubles and allow them to make progress and utilize their skills to the fullest.
Find seat for female successor as well
Rabbi Yosef's critics will argue, and rightfully so, that he did not succeed in completing the feminine revolution, but the real criticism should perhaps be directed at the women themselves, who are letting the men quarrel and fight over the identity of the successor instead of caring about their own future: Thousands of Sephardic girls in the haredi world are still considered a second-class match. They are shamelessly excluded from seminars and educational institutions, thereby being deprived of proper social mobility.Rabbi Amsalem, the courageous man seculars became so fond of thanks to his mental strength, was silenced and rolled in tar and feathers, and in the Emmanuel affair left Rabbi Yosef and his convoy free of any real involvement in such a blatant exclusion of women. The Sephardic world of Torah, which favors affection and closeness over the complete separation, lost the real chance of a significant feminine change this week.
The black clothes and wide brim hats of Shas' members and leaders turned the tables and mixed the wheat and the chaff. The high waves of Lithuanian Orthodoxy once and again swept those whispering on the rabbi's ear to the shores of a world detached from the dream of progress, and sentenced a large public of women to come to terms with their fate.
It's possible that towards the end of his life, the rabbi preferred to delve into the Torah. Perhaps he was sick and tired of the power and control struggles in the party, but the fact that not a single woman found her place in Shas' parliamentary representation is definitely another sign of the alarming regression in the haredi woman's status. The only female figure who could earn such a mandate is Rabbi Yosef's daughter. The Torah sages should find a seat for a female successor as well.
