If Meir Soloveitchek Could Menstruate

In my last post on the topic, I pledged to say no more about the topic of patrilineal descent than I already said in an article published on Interfaithfamily.com last March. But an internet discovery has forced me into it, and persuaded me I need to add on a bit to what I said in that article.

Granted, in the article I was limited by a word limit imposed by my editor, and couldn't say everything I wished to about the topic. I left out, for instance, a possibility raised by Harvard scholar Shaye Cohen in his book, The Beginnings of Jewishness, that the rabbis extrapolated matrilineal descent from a more general understanding of kilayim (various prohibition relating to "mixed kinds"--yoking an ass and an ox together, or sowing two kinds of seed together). That discussion was particularly damning to the idea of matrilineal descent, since it raised the possibility that the rabbis had extrapolated the matrilineal principle from a discussion about whether a mule was "more horse" or "more mule." I can think of nothing the Jewish community should spend less time doing than figuring out if children with one Jewish parent and one non-Jewish parent are "more horse" or "more mule." I decided to leave this argument out, since even Cohen notes that it is one of the least plausible of the possible origins of matrilineal descent, and since, in writing for a website whose stated aim is to encourage Jewish choices among children of intermarriage, I felt it best not to expose children of intermarriage to the idea that Judaism regarded them as something akin to a mule.

The oft-repeated lie about patrilineal descent that comes out of the Orthodox community, and out of Conservative officialdom, is that it represents a break in the very nature of Jewish identity, by turning Judaism into a matter of upbringing rather than of automatic fate. But this week, I stumbled upon an article by Meir Soloveitchek, an Orthodox rabbi and cousin to Joseph Soloveitchek, one of the towering Orthodox decisors of Jewish law in this century. This article pretty well discredits the claim made by proponents of matrilineal descent that they are upholding the notion that Jewishness is a matter of fate, not faith.

Like Shaye Cohen, Soloveitchek rejects the idea that matrilineal descent has anything to do with the "certainty" of maternity--that is, the idea that a child's mother can always be known, while a child's father cannot. Unlike Cohen, however, Soloveitchek chooses to focus on the halakha about the status of a child whose mother converted during pregnancy. Traditional halakha holds that such a child is Jewish by birth and does not require conversion, as the child of a Jewish mother--even though the child was conceived through a non-Jewish egg. From this, it can be concluded that genetically imposed fate cannot be the reason for matrilineal descent.

Soloveitchek chooses instead to focus on a presumed qualitative difference exists between the kind of upbringing a mother gives her child, and the kind a father gives his child. Mothers, Soloveitchek, argues, are the source of mercy and nurturing love within the family; fathers, on the other hand, are the source of stringency:

The mother, on the other hand, will always see her child, no matter how old he may be, as the baby she bore. According to tradition, when the book of Proverbs describes a king reprimanded by his mother, it refers to Batsheva's reproof of her son Solomon after he married the pagan daughter of Pharaoh: “What, my son? And what, child of my womb?”No matter how old a child may be, Rabbi Soloveitchik observes, for the mother, the image of the baby, the memory of an infant held in her arms, the picture of herself playing, laughing, embracing, nursing, cleaning, and so forth, never vanishes. She always looks upon her child as upon a baby who needs her help and company, and whom she has to protect and shield.

For this reason, Soloveitchek concludes, the mother is the source of a chil's Jewishness because of the kind of nurturing love she will show to him, a love that extends throughout the child's life, into and through adulthood.

It really is hard to find a more retrograde view of motherhood than the one Soloveitchek presents. There simply is no evidence to substantiate the claim that mothers have a harder time than fathers allowing their children to grow up, or that mothers are more merciful and indulgent than fathers. Indeed, it would not be putting it too mildly to say that Soloveitchek's vision of smothering Jewish motherhood comes not from the Torah, but from Portnoy's Complaint.

Reading Soloveitchek's article, I am reminded of something Gloria Steinem once said in a famous piece she wrote called If Men Could Menstruate. Noting that white men consigned black men to poorly paid jobs because they were "stronger", while consigning women to poorly paid jobs because they were "weaker", Steinem said unequivocally that logic has nothing to do with oppression.

Nonetheless, Soloveitchek's bizarre understanding of family dynamics is worth bringing up whenever the Jewishness-as-automatic-fate defense of matrilineality is dredged up. It shows that, like white men underpaying black men because they are "stronger" and underpaying women because they are "weaker," the Orthodox community will embrace contradictory, morally dubious arguments to keep out thousands of people through whom the blood of Abraham continues to flow.