07/22/2007

Author finds comfort in 'Houses of Study'

Blumberg makes important life connections

By ELIZABETH KANE BUZZELLI

Special to the Record-Eagle

I didn't expect beauty.

In fact, I expected little from a book called "Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books” by Llana M. Blumberg, an assistant professor at Michigan State University.

My immediate expectation was a book of limited appeal — maybe a bit about the love of books, something about coming of age in Jewish Orthodoxy.

What I didn't imagine was a spiritual memoir steeped not only in religion, but in doubt, in feminism, in wonderful books, and all of it making connections — not only with the writer's life, but with anyone who reads her.

After extensive study in her religion as a child, Blumberg expected to spend a year "in intensive, single-sex yeshivas in Israel before returning to America to attend university. In these yeshivas, Jewish texts would be both bread and water of life. In these houses of study, there would be no afternoon periods of math, science, literature or social studies. Instead, there would be Torah in all its many manifestations, in the widest sense of the term: Jewish learning from the span of centuries, a rich spectrum of rabbinic voices, morning to night, Sabbath to Sabbath, every season of the year. This school would never end.”

What she found in Israel instead was that as a woman, the term yeshiva (seminary) didn't apply to her.

"Girls and women went to mikhlala (women's college), not yeshiva.”

For women, she writes, it was less than welcoming: "We had school five days a week in the same building in which we lived ... seven of us sharing a bathroom, a kitchen, three bedrooms. It was small and dirty.”

Nothing was as she'd hoped. There was no inclusion. No study of the Torah as the men studied. During a welcomed rain, she walked among others but "felt invisible, over and over I was surprised that people did not attempt to walk through me as they would wade through water.”

There was diminishment of spirit and hope. Being somehow relegated to a lesser species lessened her, and yet there were teachers, women who made an impact: "... Our teacher lifted phrases like thin threads of gold onto her fingers to make shining bridges of them as she spoke words, now lightly, now ironically ...”

And then came adulthood and the university years where she discovered books other than those of her religion. On reading George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss,” she found "the powerful authority of her narrator was an authority I had already bowed to, for years and years, a submission I had learned and desired in the reading of almost every novel. It was the submission to someone else's story, the agreement to put oneself into their hands, to let them take however much time they needed to set the scene, to build suspense, to foster care, to indulge suffering, then to provide comfort, to resolve.”

The secular world and the world of Orthodoxy collided in her mind once she'd begun her university studies.

"The fantasy of being the woman with her head covered posed for me a great dilemma. Even as I could imagine such a marriage, could imagine such a husband and such a life (in Israel), I knew that I was redeeming bad merchandise. I knew I should not want to cover my hair; I knew I should be on the side of the women who fought against it, but when I saw my future, I could not help but see hats and scarves.”

With her religion so important but her idea of herself as a woman at odds with that religion, Blumberg sought answers in the literature of her people and in the chosen literature of her culture. Not willing to choose, she eventually finds that she will be a part of both, as she has always been.

"It has never been the masses of women who do not pray that the rabbis find worthy of fearful rebuke; it is women who want to pray publicly, who want to pray, that cause trouble. Male zealousness can be troubling to authority, yes, but female zealousness for anything is always seen as zealousness for being female.”

Blumberg appears to have reached a kind of accommodation — a place for the secular and the religious in her life. She puts aside the parts of Orthodoxy that would have her be submissive and learns to live peacefully inside her own skin. Married now and living a life of academic studies, she teaches Judaic Studies. She has made her own place in the world and, along with other female scholars, "We have written dissertations and now books on the translation of the sermon into a women's form of Hebrew literature, on the Midrashic responses to women's birthing bodies, on the laws of menstrual purity, on a major female Hebrew modernist writer, on Victorian women and the ethic of self-sacrifice.”

In her houses of study: religious and secular, she has found her place and is comfortable there. Now with a daughter, Priya, she can see reason for her struggle and take pride that her daughter's future, while still Orthodox, will be of equal value, in equal study, in equal expectations of success, as a male's.

Elizabeth Kane Buzzelli can be reached at ebuzzelli@aol.com