Bible by the Bay - Santa Rosa
Sunday, December 14, 2008, 1 - 5pm
Congregation Shomrei Torah
2600 Bennett Valley Road, Santa Rosa
Love, Loyalty, and Loathing
Biblical Unions Through the Lens of Gender
Keynote Address, 1 - 2:15 pm
How do cultural expectations about gender affect the relationships of biblical husbands and wives? What happens when norms for appropriate gender behavior are transgressed? These questions arise in the unions of Rachel and Leah with Jacob, in the marriages of King David, and even in the prophetic metaphor of the marriage between God and Israel.
Professor Rachel Adler is Professor of Modern Jewish Thought and Judaism and Gender at Hebrew Union College-Los Angeles. She was one of the first theologians to integrate feminist perspectives and concerns into the interpretation of Jewish texts and the renewal of Jewish law and ethics. Her groundbreaking 1971 essay, "The Jew Who Wasn't There," is widely considered the pivotal work that launched Jewish feminism
in the United States. She is the author of Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics, a National Jewish Book Award winner in Jewish Thought (1999). Adler is a contributor to the Women's Torah Commentary and is writing on the book of Leviticus for the weekly commentary Reform Voices of Torah. Her current articles include "Those Who Turn Away Their Faces: Tzara'at and Stigma" in Healing and the Jewish Imagination.