Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times! I am Rabbi Avi Killip, I am here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Mechon Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. Hi! How are you?
Rav Eitan: Alright, always a pleasure to be here with you.
Rav Avi: So here we have more of a thought question, as opposed to a yes or no, or a can I or what do I do if.
Rav Eitan: I don't know if that's good or bad, but…
Rav Avi: A little more exploring to be done here. "My partner and I are expecting a baby very, very soon. We don't know if we will be having a girl or a boy. For a boy, we have a clear sense of what the traditional brit milah ceremony looks like. For a girl, it seems more murky. It feels like traditionally there is no ritual to enter a baby girl into the covenant. We have seen people use water, a tallit, milk, and blood to enact a brit. What are your thoughts on these rituals and the possibility of some sort of ceremony for a girl?" So, there's a lot to unpack here. I'm very curious to hear your thoughts.
Rav Eitan: That feels like an open question. Good. Okay. And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this too, so I want us to circle back to that. I guess I have a couple of general thoughts about actually questions like this, even before getting into kind of the substance. What is it like to sit with a question that is responding to very new sets of assumptions in society, in Judaism, and trying particularly in the context of ritual to cobble together a response to that. I maybe want to just share three thoughts on, like, how we should approach questions like this. So, the first is -- and I think the questioner is attuned to this -- there's not necessarily a clear and obvious precedent from the past here.
So, we do have background on welcoming girls into the Jewish community. Very traditional practice of naming the girl when the father traditionally had an aliyah to the Torah, whether it was the first shabbat or the first Monday or Thursday after the child was born. And, you know, that was a ritual event, and the rabbi or chazzan or someone saying a mi sheberakh and formally pronouncing the name. And there is certainly that piece, and a naming component, I would imagine, is always gonna be a part of any ceremony for girls that develops and plays out, that people embrace. And you also have the tradition of the zeved habat, more outside of Ashkenazi culture, kind of celebratory welcoming, again with lots of verses and more of a family-based affair as opposed to synagogue ritual-oriented, and invocations of the seven prophetesses that the Talmud talks about as potentially being role models for the daughter.
So I think there's clearly stuff there, but I think if I'm understanding the questioner, there's something more about beyond the niceties and celebration of this birth, it's a covenant welcoming ritual. And I'll say, as the father of a daughter and two sons, there is an intense power to the brit milah and to having your son actually be physically altered, right, that we have not yet -- I don't know if we want to or don't want to -- we have not yet created some kind of equivalent of that for girls. And there is no clear analogue or precedent to that. And just to give that a little more kind of, a little more flesh on those bones, we have to remember just the appreciation of what it was to have a daughter as opposed to a son was so dramatically different, even recently, but certainly back in the crucible of rabbinic culture.
To me the most striking text in this regard is in the Talmud, in Kiddushin, reflecting on the kind of random hand that people get dealt in life, and it says the world cannot be sustained without boys and without girls. Without males and females. Ashrei mi shebanav zecharim, lucky is the one who gets boys, oy lo l'shebanav nekevot, woe to the one who gets girls. And that is a statement, it may overlap with some, you know, issues of ontological worth in the larger culture, but it is just a very real socioeconomic statement. It was worse news to have a girl. It was less resources that were gonna stay in your house and your clan, and all kinds of consequences of that. We live in a really different world -- I feel like principle one is to recognize that we're gonna have to sort of figure this out ourselves, with the building blocks that we can put together from the tradition, but it's not just gonna sort of, the tradition is not gonna spit out an answer to this as if it has an algorithm to just give us the answer.
Rav Avi: So that's important for us to remember. It's not just that it was a mistake, it fell through the cracks, but it was always an equally happy occasion; at least on the societal level, perhaps for the parents it was, and probably for many parents it was, but there was really a reason for the difference in ceremony, in ritualization of the moment of these births, and if that's not the case now, then we actually have a different situation on the ground, not just a different approach to the same situation.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, a hundred percent. And it doesn't mean fathers and mothers didn't love their daughters and see themselves in them -- that clearly was the case, but there wasn't all kinds of socioeconomic and other reinforcement of this being an unbelievable moment, and it's part of us living in a world where we take for granted that the gift of a child is the big deal. And then it's almost like an added detail whether they're a boy or a girl. That's really new.
Rav Avi: So I think that's both important to remember and worth stating and really acknowledging how hard that can be for many parents and individuals to hear, even knowing that's in our history, even just hearing you quote that text.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So that's piece one, we're gonna have to take this on, and it's not gonna be solved for us. The second thing I think is really important, this is especially important, that I want to hear your thoughts on, is I think whenever we create rituals, we want to be creating them such that they will eventually seem like they are completely timeless. We want to do them in a way that even if we are conscious of them being never innovative and new, we are attempting to place ourselves in the moment and certainly the people who will look back 200, 300 years from now as if this is something we inherited from our ancestors. And that's less of a guideline of do this, don't do that, but it means the things we should be looking for are things that will resonate as not being, let's say, circa 2015 North America, but somehow being the product of a historically transcendent Jewish tradition.
Rav Avi: So we don't say let's ritualize a certain Beatles song as part of our ritual, that everyone will do from now on.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, and being ironic about it, and any number of ways that I think people hedge against being, like, fully sort of in that space. There's a sense of, like, yeah, even though it may be, I think anyone who's been involved in any kind of ritual creativity has that moment of self-doubt, of can I really take seriously what I'm doing right now? But that the goal is to get somehow to the other end of that. So that's piece two.
And piece three is to recognize that these things are not solved overnight, that actually what happens when you stand on a frontier like this is a lot of people are gonna do lots of different kinds of experimentation, some of the experiments are going to be gosh-darn awful, some of them are gonna be priceless gems that will endure forever, and sometimes -- I like your framing of this, that this is less a sort of yes or no question, because the halakhic text that I want to quote on this is a framing that is under-used, I think, in a lot of contemporary contexts, which is a few places where sages say lo omar b'zelo issur v'lo heter, I will neither give you an answer on this that X is forbidden, nor that X is permitted. There's some degree of, I gotta see how this plays out. I'm not sure. And that it's actually sometimes a responsible halakhic response to say there's not yet an answer to this, other than perhaps to say this seems like a really terrible idea, and this seems like a no-brainer to include somehow no matter what.
And there are some elements here that I think present themselves -- as I said, the naming piece seems like that feels like a no-brainer; some incorporation of a cup of wine and borei peri hagafen seems like a no-brainer, and other elements that relate to celebrating just the joy of receiving the child, brachot upon receiving good news and shehekheyanu, and things of that sort -- those seem easy, and, like, they should make it into any frame. Beyond that, I actually feel committed to being a little bit unclear and non-standard for a while. I don't know -- how do you think about this on this substance?
Rav Avi: Well, I'll give you one more question, and then I'll weigh in, which is I think I'm totally with you in understanding the value of seeing different ceremonies and I actually myself have a son and a daughter, and for my daughter's ritual felt the need to come up with something new, even though I've been to so many beautiful rituals for girls in the past, and I could have drawn from them. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on whether the ritual all in all should be framed based on the brit milah ritual -- should it feel like the same kind of moment when I show up to a brit milah, or is there value in saying no, this is different and it needs to be different?
Rav Eitan: Yeah. Well, look -- at the end of the day, the anatomy is not gonna be the same, and unless you're really going to institute a new physical flesh-cutting ritual for girls, which, you know, there are some -- I think it's fair to say -- outlier voices that have advocated that, I think that's probably not gonna stick. I think you're stuck with a certain degree of difference on that front. And when there's difference like that, that's real, my general inclination is to not completely run away from it, but actually to embrace it and see how it plays out differently.
I think where I'm much more agnostic is well, but how about all the non-circumcision pieces of the brit milah? Should those more or less be copied over? I mean, things that are not even really strictly part of the brit milah but we think of, like the naming paragraph. For my own daughter, truth be told, most of those things I did copy. We did basically like the same special paragraphs in birkat hamazon, the Grace After Meals, that are done at a circumcision, with modification for things that, you know, talk specifically about that mitzvah. And, you know, the naming paragraph and all of that, we copied over, because I think my sense was, those weren't really ever that gendered or that essentially different.
But yeah, there was a different kind of tone, where to the extent you are, you know, bought in and invested to the ongoing power of brit milah not just as like, well, what can I do, the Torah says I have to circumcise my son, but there's something powerful about the removal of the foreskin as a deep act -- there's something deeply potentially powerful in a different way of not having to do that for a daughter. And yeah, I'm inclined to not completely flatten it, even as I think there are pieces of the brit milah, at least what's conventionally become part of that, that are gender-blind. For sure I want to say the creamed herring has to stay at both events. That there's no question.
Rav Avi: So I really agree with you that the brit -- I want to start by acknowledging that a brit milah is really a profound event. Anyone I think who's ever been to a brit milah, whether it was in someone's home or whether it was in a shul or in a synagogue, can tell you that those events feel different. It is so striking that there is something holy, something special, something sacred, and sometimes even scary that's happening in that moment, that of all rituals to try to build a parallel to, this one might be the hardest, because it's so physical.
The only other ritual I've ever witnessed that I think felt viscerally the same is a shochet once came to my rabbinical school and shechted three chickens, and being in the room while that was happening, I think, had a similar feeling of, this feels holy and horrible and I kind of want to look and I kind of want to look away, really hits you very viscerally. So I just want to name that as something that right from the start makes it very hard to build a parallel ritual, unless you really invite in blood, and I think that's where the motivation to do that comes from, and it's not something that I am drawn to actually doing. I see that as the challenge, and I think that's also where the motivation the person who wrote the question described people using different liquids, be it milk or honey or oil I've seen, or water, that you want to really have something happen, you want to create a ritual that it feels like there was a moment before and there was a moment after, and something changed during that moment. And that's the moment when this individual, when this baby, really joined the Jewish people.
It's incredibly profound, and it's a high bar to try to meet. And I think with the sexual difference, it makes us even more eager to say I want my daughter to be as much a part of the Jewish people as my son. So I, I used to really have an aversion to the idea of naming baby girls with the first Torah service. That felt to me like it was belittling and we should wait, and we should build up, and we should have a big ceremony in the same way.
Rav Eitan: I was like, folding it into something else.
Rav Avi: Right. And then when I sat down to try to think about what is the most meaningful way to bring my own daughter into the Jewish people, I kept coming back to the idea that actually Torah is an incredibly profound way to bring girls into the covenant, and to say women don't share in this blood covenant, but they do share in Torah and mitzvot as their way of participating in the covenant, and particularly for me in my life, both living mitzvot but also studying Torah have been the way that I feel a part of the covenant. And so in the end, coming almost full-circle, I thought, well, what's the ritual I want to create? Maybe really the ritual I want to create involves bringing this child, naming this child with a Torah open on the amud. We ended up --
Rav Eitan: So what did you do?
Rav Avi: We ended up not doing that. I ended up doing a ritual that was separate specifically at a specific time with, you know, with the full brunch afterwards, but including --
Rav Eitan: Glad to hear you are a traditionalist on that front.
Rav Avi: -- and including some words of Torah. We included words of Torah from the parsha of the week that my daughter was born, and some words of Talmud from the day of the Daf Yomi that she was born. That was our way of including that. And we included a tallit, wrapping the daughter in a tallit, which is something I think that's becoming more popular as part of this ritual, and like you suggested, and having brachot that are said over a cup of wine, drawing on that significance of wine as a transitional marker in all of Jewish rituals. And I think the idea there is really what you described, of pulling on something ancient, wanting to look into the tradition and say what's already there that we can draw on.
Rav Eitan: So let me ask you, though, are there any things that you feel like in this sort of quest for maybe creating a lot of space for experimentation but perhaps having some things where you're like, well, you should definitely do that, or that's a bad idea -- is there anything you feel like is a bad idea, either to do or not do? It seems like you have some personal feelings about introducing the bloodletting in some way, but I don't know, beyond that, how else do you think about maybe some boundaries?
Rav Avi: I don't know exactly what I would say is off-limits. I think that rather than what you do as a ritual, I think the way that you approach it, the attitude that you have towards it, is very important. And in terms of treating the moment as a holy moment and treating the moment as if it's something profound that really matters, and this can go wrong in a boy's brit milah ceremony also. It's such a heavy moment, I think sometimes there's a tendency to let some of the air out of the room by cracking a joke or making light of it, which I always feel lis a little bit of a missed opportunity when I see that happen at a brit milah, and I think the same can be true of a girl's ceremony.
The one thing I will say is, I push people to use the word "brit," to use the word "covenant" when they're talking about creating a ceremony for a girl, rather than a simchat bat, which would just be a celebration of a daughter or saying a baby-naming and leaving covenant out altogether. I think there's a real value in including that word "brit," and maybe that we could even come to a time when you could use the Yiddish and I could say I'm going to a bris, and you won't think necessarily oh, that means a baby boy's born, which is definitely what would happen if I told you today.
Rav Eitan: That's interesting. So as an orienting piece, you would just say part of the way maybe we'll get to the right outcome is having the right attitude about what we're trying to do, and what we should be aiming for in some way is this is a covenantal moment, not just a celebratory moment.
Rav Avi: Yes, exactly. So, another element that we haven't discussed yet is an issue of when do you do this ritual. Again, with the brit milah, we have a very clear idea that we do this on the eighth day, and I think a lot of times parents of baby girls struggle with an idea of do I map that on and do it on the eighth day, do I do it sooner, do I just do a Sunday morning so that it's easier on everyone's schedules? Curious if you have thoughts on that.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. You know, I have, I would say, dueling impulses on this. The kind of ordered mind enjoying thinking about, like, the significance of legal categories part of me is drawn to the idea of well, if it's gonna be serious, it's gotta have a date, and it's gotta go a very specific way. And, you know, some people have said let's do it on day eight, and in the same way you have other people who advocate for day 15, because if in Parshat Tazria, in Leviticus chapter 12 there's a juxtaposition between seven days that the mother who gives birth to a boy is impure, and then it says and on the eighth day, circumcise him, suggesting that perhaps the entrance into the covenant is only complete when the woman's period of impurity is done -- since the period of impurity in that chapter for a daughter is 14 days, they'll say, well, the day to have that public marking is the 15th. And whether you go with the eighth or the 15, which are the two main numbers I've heard thrown around --
Rav Avi: Yeah, I'll add one more, which is I've heard of naming on the next Rosh Chodesh, with the idea that the first day of the month, that that's a cycle for women which I think works when it's not a whole month from now.
Rav Eitan: That's right. And another version of that also, is doing it on day 30 or 31, kind of parallel to the pidyon haben redemption of the firstborn, because the Torah basically seems to assume that children are only kind of really viable one month into their life, they only really have a kind of social value at that point. And so there's people who I know have done that. If you're really gonna stick with, so I guess let's say, day eight or day 15 or day 30, 31, that would be inflexible, and there is no doubt that there is something that is incredibly powerful about that inflexibility, the same way there's the power of shabbat in part derives from it coming whether you're ready for it or not, and all the special holidays, et cetera.
That said, and I remember going through this process when my daughter was born, there's something that's a big pain in the neck about that inflexibility, and I don't just mean that from the perspective of the inconvenience, because chas v'shalom I should say the inconvenience is something we should take seriously in the context of mitzvot. At the end of the day, like, yeah, mitzvot demand things of us and we organize our lives around them. But I mean it in the sense that there are for sure ways in which the inflexibility of that date makes it less of a communal event in the case of many boys. Either you're doing it early in the morning, so people are gonna get there before work, or you're doing it in the middle of the day because people don't really care whether everyone who's going to work can come, but then there may be fewer people there, and sure, close relatives will come, but it makes it less of a big deal.
You have something on a Sunday morning or a Sunday afternoon in the shul -- a lot of times a lot more people will turn out, and I don't know if we should so quickly snub the possibility that well, maybe actually our flexibility around that with the dating of girls will enable the Jewish community to be affirmed in a deep way of taking the birth of a girl very seriously, because it will be scheduled at a time that will draw more people into those events. Again, I'm really sympathetic on both sides. I would say this is something where also we have to see how it sorts out, but I guess you're hearing a resistance to feeling like there's one clear answer to that.
Rav Avi: Yeah. On that I'll also say, maybe this is part of my being sold again on the idea of using the Torah service to connect this ritual for girls, is that that is time-bound, that this idea of naming the girl at the next Torah service, which I always saw as because I don't really care to wait, could also be seen as because I want to do this mitzvah as early and as soon as possible, and I want to do it the next time I see the Torah, I think to myself, wow, and this baby is gonna be a part of that, that that could also be a powerful dynamic.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. I think that's right. I want to just cover one last piece here, which the questioner didn't explicitly raise, but I think is important. In some ways it's a much larger discussion, but just to touch on it here. One of the things that comes up in the context of developing new rituals is not just a question of what to appropriate and collect from the past, but are there any things that are actually being generated anew? And specifically the question of liturgical creativity and the creation of new brachot. I've certainly been to celebrations like this and I will confess to you I often find these to be very jarring experiences for me, where there's new brachot that are written and composed for the occasion.
Sometimes they're just modified versions of existing ones, so places where people will do a ceremony for girls and they'll say barukh ata hashem elokeinu meelkh haolam asher kidshanu b'mitzvotav vetzivanu, the normal command formulation, l'hakhnisah brita shel avraham avinu, to, you know, welcome her into the covenant of Abraham our father. Now that's just a feminization of the line said at a circumcision, where it seems pretty clear the plain sense of the line in the circumcision is just as Abraham was circumcised, so too this child is being circumcised and brought into that ritual -- clearly when it's translated to a girl's covenant ceremony, it means something more like Abraham was the first Jew, and sure, male Jews happen to have this circumcision rite that marks that, but we're welcoming her into that as well.
There's a way in which that's obviously extremely powerful and I understand it; it raises a whole other set of questions of who was authorized and for what purpose to display what kind of liturgical creativity? And we've had a bias for a long time in the tradition, essentially more or less since the closing of the Talmud, to retire the bracha form as the medium for creativity. You find a lot of explicit medieval statements about that -- you know, they start writing mi sheberacks, they write other things that are the way they make up tefilot, but they don't necessarily play with that form. And one of the real questions here is, what are or ought to be the red lines, the guidelines, however you want to think about it, for what if anything is appropriate in that regard.
Rav Avi: Yeah. And the flip side of that is to say when I hear those brachot, I think wow, this is serious. This was worth writing a new bracha.
Rav Eitan: That's clearly the motivation behind it. So in that I'll just offer one final text on this, which I just find very thought-provoking. I don't know exactly where it leads us. I myself might be extremely conservative when it comes to the creation of liturgy or even, like, responding to newly created liturgy, that this text, I think you have to grapple with. And I think it goes back to what we said at the beginning about this being a very different time. Rabbenu Manoach of Narbon, in his commentary on the Rambam's Mishneh Torah, the great Maimonidean code of law, is grappling with a problem which is familiar to many who pray the evening prayer regularly, right before the amidah, at least if you live in the diaspora, there's this long bracha, baruch hashem l'olam amen v'amen, which ends hamelekh bikhvodo tamid aleinu l'olam va'ed v'al kol ma'asav. And it's a whole real bracha, like with G-d's name at the end in a normal form. That blessing is not mentioned anywhere in the Talmud. And it is a complete interruption to the flow of the rest of the evening service where the last bracha after the shema is haskhivenu, it's about going to sleep, it's clearly the last thing.
And so you have here stuck in, in a place where it doesn't really belong, and in a bracha form in a way not clearly Talmudically authorized, this whole liturgical intrusion. And Rabbenu Manoach is trying to understand how could anyone have written this thing? Like, someone wrote this after the Talmud. It wasn't codified. They came along and wrote this new thing. And there is a tradition which then he cites which is, well, there was a need to kind of stay longer in the synagogue in order to prevent people who came late to davening -- apparently it's not a new phenomenon -- from being left behind at the end while they were catching up, and this was kind of, they didn't want people to walk home alone at night, so this buffer was kind of added in, in order to, you know, give a little more time to the stragglers to catch up. And he said what you learn from this is a more general principle about liturgy, which is the giants of every generation, the gedolei hador, are empowered implicitly by the Talmud and rabbinic authority to invent -- this is his language -- invent new brachot for situations that arise, that they understand to be unprecedented.
Rav Avi: Wow.
Rav Eitan: So the people in that generation, it's not that they felt that they had a freewheeling right to do whatever they did, but they were like, there's something really important here, and we need to create a bracha to address it. Whatever ends up emerging as the liturgical expression for a brit bat, let's say, to use the preferred term you're suggesting, or some version of that, I think has to come out of that spirit of Rabbenu Manoach, a sense that it's not just because we're entering into this space of, you know, we're gonna make up all kinds of things just to make our kind of ritual life more real; there's a response as I understand it to a kind of unprecedented moment of feeling that we can and therefore need to mark the birth of girls in a way that our ancestors, for all kinds of other reasons, didn't. And again, my own inclination is to try to do that in as conservative a way as possible, but for those who are more inclined to kind of have that more robust baruch function, I think that Rabbenu Manoach piece is an important text to think about.
Rav Avi: That's helpful. I want to add one more piece -- I want to come back to the idea, once we're talking about the liturgy and the language that we use, back to that question of do we base it off of a male ritual or are we creating something new, and just raise the question of when we're trying to create ritual for today's Jewish women, do we have to go back to images of Jewish women, or can we use the same images of men? So the question of if Abraham was the first person to enter into the brit, do we have to look for a female who entered into the brit, or can we base it off of Abraham and call on Abraham? In the ceremony that I created, I had that wavering in terms of whether or not to use the song "Hamalach Hagoel Oti," which talks about the ne'arim, the boys, about Jacob's children, and wondering whether or not those ne'arim include my daughter, or do I need to find some song that speaks about females. And I've also seen people use kise shel eliyahu, a chair of Elijah, which is typical part of the bris milah ceremony, and I've also seen people translate that to say kise shel miryam, they want to bring in a female prophet instead of using the male prophet. And so I think that's also a question that comes up in these new rituals, and I'm not a hundred percent sure what the answer is.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. I would say I have reasonably strong feelings about that, that go as follows. One, it feels really important to create space for people to bring in the images of foremothers and great female figures from the past, and to kind of supplement some of the imagery around that as a way of just broadening the canvas that we're painting on in these contexts. And a lot of that draws on traditional things, the Sarah, Rivkah, Rachel, Leah quartet has very old pedigree in terms of being evoked in ritual spaces, and I think beyond that, that's all good.
And, and I think this is a very important "and," I think the future of a gender-sensitive and balanced Judaism will be severely if not fatally hampered if we don't have a way and feel comfortable and proud of telling our girls that the male figures in the tradition are their role models as well. And for that matter, obviously the reverse, that boys should be able to identify character traits in Sarah and Miriam as things that they want to aspire to, mistakes they want to avoid, because I think for two reasons. One, if you're gonna read Beresheet bet and the story of the first man and the first woman only through the lens of a certain gender essentialism of woman tempting the man and leading him astray, you're -- all kinds of big tzurus and problems that you're not gonna get out of.
And more to the point, at the end of the day, our Biblical tradition and our rabbinic tradition are completely and totally dominated by men, and that is not gonna be undone because that is the nature of that text. So, unless you're going to walk away from that corpus, which, look, emotionally I understand why some people have that response, but if you're committed for one reason or another to not doing that, part of that project is yeah, you know, Sarah's there with Avraham, but Avraham is kind of more the first Jew than she is at the end of the day. When you open up Lech Lecha, I want and need my daughter not to feel that that's a moment of exclusion just because of his gender, even as, again, coming back to my first point, of course there's a sort of supplemental work of raising the volume on voices that were perhaps quieter for millennia.
Rav Avi: Thanks, I think that's a really helpful and important frame to think about this. So, I've -- this was a great question, I really enjoyed this conversation. I think we opened up a lot of interesting thoughts, both about ritual, ritual creation, language, babies, and then even a little bit of gender in our tradition and what it was, and what it can be.
Rav Eitan: That's great. Let's check back in 200 years and see where we are.
Rav Avi: Great, it's a date.
Rav Avi: If you have a halakhic question you'd like answered on the show, email us at halakhah@hadar.org. You can also leave us a voicemail at (215) 297-4252.