God is not to blame for gender inequality

To hear folks on the right tell it, there is no such thing as gender inequality in America. They come up with all kinds of reasons to explain it, despite the statistics that say otherwise, but the most inexcusable reason is that it’s what God wants because God made women to be inferior to men. Sadly, it is the same answer we hear in our own Jewish world when it comes to how women are discriminated against in our ritually rigid communities.

God, this reasoning goes, created a man, Adam, long before God created Eve. When God realized that Adam needed help, God took a rib from Adam’s body and turned it into a woman. God didn’t need that rib, of course, but it was God’s way of signaling that women were meant to be men’s assistants, their gofers, not their partners. (See Genesis 2:22.)

There’s so much more that they can point to in the Bible to make their case, including in this week’s doubled-up Torah portion, Matot and Masei. In its very first few sentences, this week’s reading makes it very clear that women are intellectually inferior to men. Women, after all, can’t even be trusted to make proper vows. That’s why if a father hears about a vow his daughter made, or if a husband hears of a vow his wife made, they have God’s permission to void those vows. The only possible way to explain that is that women lack the intellectual capacity to make their own decisions.

Ironically, we hear the same absurdities coming from the left, but for a different reason. Because too many people buy into what “the Bible” says, they need to discredit that God had anything to do with writing the Bible.

I have a message for both sides: You’re holding your Bibles upside down. The part of “the Bible” that you quote so much is the part of the Tanach we call the Torah—God’s Torah — and God’s Torah seeks to level the playing field where gender is concerned. It does so, in fact, right at the beginning—in the woefully mistranslated Genesis 1:27 and Genesis 2:22.

There is no such person named Adam, women were not an afterthought, and none of Adam’s ribs were used in creating Eve.

Here is what that text actually says: “And God created the human [ha-adam] in God’s image, creating it in the image of God—creating them male and female.”

Because the verse says God created a single humanoid creature and then adds that God created “them male and female,” that strongly suggests that the First Human was a hermaphrodite, meaning it was fully capable of reproducing itself.

This is reinforced somewhat by the First Human being created in God’s “image.” God doesn’t have a physical mage, but God does have an image of a different sort: as a self-creator. This “adam,” this human, was meant to be self-creating. “Adam,” I should note, comes from the Hebrew word adamah, which means “ground,” “earth,” “or “soil.” It is not a name.

Turning to the creation of women, we can thank the King James Version of the Bible for how that part of the story got twisted out of shape.

In Genesis 2:18, God realizes that this self-creating being, having been placed in the Garden of Eden, which supplies all of its wants, lacks any real incentive to create anything. God, therefore, decides to create an “ezer k’negdo.” The KJV translates that as a “helpmeet” for the human. In other words, God decided to create a “helper” for the First Human, meaning an assistant, a gofer, and at times a “companion.”

A more exact translation would be “a helper opposite him,” but the word “ezer” does not allow for that translation in this case because in the Tanach, there is only one “ezer”: God. Abraham’s servant and Moses’ second son are both named Eliezer, for example. It means “God is my help.” The word “ezer” is associated with God in other names, as well. God is no one’s gofer and neither was the “ezer k’negdo” meant to be.

God did not remove a rib from the First Human to create anything, much less another person. The word “tsela” is almost always translated as rib in this one context only. It appears in one form or another in the Tamach more than 50 times, however, and in each case the word translates as a full side of something.

God takes one of the hermaphrodite’s sides, fills in the flesh on both of the sides, and we now have what the text calls an “ishah,” meaning a woman. The second side is then referred to—for the first time in the Torah—as an “ish,” meaning a man. (See Genesis 2:22ff.) That the word for woman appears before the word for man appears is significant because, in a way, “woman” comes before “man” in Genesis. When it came to creating humans as we understand what a human looks like, “ishah” came before “ish.” She was no afterthought.

Our Sages of Blessed Memory also noted something truly significant regarding her creation. The First Human was created from the “dust of the adamah,” as Genesis 2:7 puts it. The First Woman was made from the side of a humanoid. Having been created from “better stuff,” that meant that women were endowed with more positive attributes than man, including being given greater understanding. (See Bereishit Rabbah 18:1.)

All of the above led the late 19th century rabbi and biblical commentator Samson Raphael Hirsch to state that “in this way, Scripture attests to the complete equality of woman.” After all, he has the brawn, but she has the brains. (There is a reason God tells Abraham to listen to his wife. [See Genesis 21:12.])

So much for using Genesis to support gender inequality, and for thinking that women are intellectually inferior to men.

But wait! Isn’t the intellectual inferiority of women the whole point of the opening verses of this week’s Torah reading, Numbers 30:2-17? Women cannot even be trusted to make proper vows. God gives fathers the right to annul the vows their daughters make, and gives husbands the right to do the same for their wives. That isn’t something to be taken lightly because making a vow and then not honoring it is a sin.

Numbers 30, though, does not say what its critics insist it says. Regarding the father’s right to annul his daughter’s vows, this ability to do so is only for “a woman in her youth,” “bi-noo-reha.” That word has a legal connotation. It refers to a young girl who is at least 12 years and one day old and only extends until she reaches the age of 12 1/2. From that point on until she leaves home, her vows are valid from the moment they leave her lips. Her father has no say.

The husband’s right to annul his wife’s vows is also limited, as is discussed on folio 79a of the Babylonian Talmud tractate Nedarim, which deals with vows and oaths. His ability to nullify a wife’s vow is limited to vows that involve self-denial or personal suffering on the wife’s part, out of concern for her physical or mental health. He may do so, as well, if the vow would affect the marriage in some way, because he is, after all, a party to such a vow and has a right to have a say in it. He has no power over any vow that doesn’t fit these categories, however.

There is also a matter of accountability to consider in his case. If the husband says nothing when he hears of the vow, regardless of what category it falls under, and then annuls it on another day, thereby preventing his wife from honoring the vow, the sin is on his head, not hers. A father who delays nullifying his 12-year-old daughter’s vow bears no guilt. Seriously, though, how many 12-year-olds are capable of making rational vows?

The bottom line is that Numbers 30:2-17 is not what it seems on its face, and has nothing to do with a woman’s ability to make her own decisions. The fact is that Chapter 30 makes it very clear that vows made by adult women who are not married are theirs to make.

We see gender inequality in parts of our own narrower world. Women may not be called up to the Torah and are forbidden to study Torah. They have to obey their husbands, including in intimate relations, and so forth.

Regarding intimacy, the Torah itself gives the wife all the power, and denies any of it to the men. Men, as our sages explained it, are commanded to have children, but women are not so required, even though only she can give birth. It follows, then, they taught, that if a man wants to fulfill his obligation, he had better treat his wife lovingly.

The Talmud specifically states that women may be called for an aliyah but then adds as an aside not to do so, because the men would get upset. In several places, the Torah requires both men and women to study Torah, although men have twisted that one way out of shape.

Gender inequality exists, but it’s a sin, and so is using God as the excuse.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

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