Adina Roth – Head of Jewish Life

The Complexities of International Women’s Day

Many years ago, as a student, I attended a meeting at university comprised of all the different women’s organisations. I was attending as the Gender Officer of the South African Union of Jewish Students, the equivalent of AJWS in Australia. I remember that there were also representatives from the Socialist Students Union and the African National Congress Women’s League.

As the gender officer of a Jewish students’ organisation, my platform was to be concerned with the horrendous violence and abuse levelled at women in South Africa on a daily, hourly basis. But in addition, I had religious concerns: I was concerned about the inclusion of Jewish women in communal and religious life in South Africa. I was happy to be there among a group of diverse women but soon my reverie was shattered!  A women stood up and spoke (actually, she shouted), from the Socialist Students’ Union. I still remember what she was wearing: a t-shirt with a Karl Marx print, her hair tied in two small braids and topped with a Che Guevara hat. She said to all present, ‘Be wary of thinking that the working-class woman has anything in common with the middle-class woman. You have nothing in common with them!’ She continued, ‘working-class women would do better to work with working-class men for societal change.’ Suddenly, as the only white, Jewish woman in the room, I felt a little self-conscious and as if some of the causes I wanted to speak about might not be received well among this audience. I wanted to talk about women not being able to read from the Torah in my community and how, when we had tried to read from the Torah, men had literally entered the space where the Torah reading was happening and wrenched the Torah away from us – a form of violence. But in that space, I felt as if my concerns were middle-class. I wasn’t fighting to put bread on the table or to ask why valuable resources were not available to my community.

Nevertheless, I stood up and told the story about the Torah and acknowledged that even though I was from the white, middle-class and deeply privileged part of society, I felt there was common cause among women as we all encountered patriarchy in different ways. 

I was reminded of this story when reading the United Nations Agenda for International Women’s Day this week. Every year the United Nations sets an agenda for International Women’s Day on the 9th of March and this year it is DigitALL: Innovation and Technology for Gender Equality. The agenda, as explained in ABC news, is about addressing the gender bias in the tech industry. While gender bias in the tech industry is deeply relevant and indeed, there is still a pay-gap between men and women across all industries, one might wonder about the pertinence of this theme for poor women. I could imagine my friend from the Socialist Students’ Union asking whether International Women’s Day addresses concerns about the world’s poorest women. In an article in the Indian Express from 2016, International Women’s Day is critiqued  as follows: For poor women, it is just another day to earn bread. Does International Women’s Day almost serve to widen the gap between the have’s and have-nots in our society?

To add to this discussion, I was struck by words used to commemorate International Women’s Day. Across many publications, people speak about how we are going to ‘celebrate’ International Women’s Day in a triumphalist tone, as though we have ‘arrived’ at the end of women’s struggle. One might think that because there is still so much to do around gender equality, it might be more apt to talk about marking or commemorating International Women’s Day and using the day not for pink cupcakes and patting ourselves on the backs, but rather as a day to raise awareness of the plight of women across the world.

Is International Women’s Day just for the rich? And is it a day where we praise ourselves without looking at how much work is still required? How do we mark this day in a way that is meaningful?

There is a very beautiful idea in this week’s Parshah that helped me reconcile these questions. In Ki Tisa this week we read the dramatic and explosive moment when just days after the people of Israel encounter God, experience revelation and receive the Torah at Mount Sinai, they build a golden calf and worship it. When Moses comes down the mountain and finds the people revelling, quite literally, in the worship of a sacred cow, he smashes the Ten Commandments into a thousand little pieces. It seems as if everything is undone.

Later, after the people have been punished and God has calmed down, Moses carves a new set of tablets and God writes the Ten Commandments again. The people are given a reprieve, a second chance, another chance at wholeness.  And yet, our tradition does not efface the story of the broken pieces. Once they are carved Moses is told to place ‘them’ in the Ark of the Covenant. Picking up on the plural of the word ‘them’, the Talmud in Tractate Bava Batra qualifies what was to be placed in the Ark: ‘The new tablets AND the broken tablets were to be placed in the Ark.’  In our holiest place, the Ark of the Covenant, the shards of the broken pieces were preserved alongside the spanking new set.

I think there is a profound spiritual and ethical practice involved in carrying the whole, new tablets alongside the broken pieces. Specifically for International Women’s Day, this image of the whole alongside the broken seems to speak to how we can engage with this day. We should address the inequality in the tech industry alongside the issues of deeper, systemic poverty for women in the global south. We can celebrate how far we’ve come in this struggle and reflect on the areas where so much work is still required around gender. Danielle Dobson puts it well in Smart Company, people can celebrate both what’s ‘strong’ and also what is still ‘wrong.’ In this way, International Women’s Day is a celebration and also a day for reflection and activism.

If we think about the whole tablets alongside the broken tablets as a metaphor, we are pulled into a dual way of being, to engage the brokenness of the world, alongside its goodness. Gerard Manley Hopkins praises the world in his poem ‘Pied Beauty’, when he writes ‘Glory be to God for dappled things.’ Dappled implies the beauty that constellates when light and shadow dance together – it is an invitation to ‘two-ness.’ If we can think of International Women’s Day as a dappled day, we can proverbially ‘do it all’. We can rail against diverse gender inequalities! We can celebrate triumphs while also railing and taking action against current injustice – and we can do all this, while still enjoying a pink cupcake!

Shabbat Shalom