Hanukkah at the Roots: Night 6 - Patriarchy

Arlene Goldbard is a writer, speaker, social activist, and consultant who works for justice, compassion and honor in every sphere, from the interpersonal to the transnational. She is a past board president of The Shalom Center.

Of all the afflictions to which we are prey, the most insidious, troubling, and stubborn are those in which human beings—unwittingly or not—collude in their own oppression. Case in point: patriarchy.

Large numbers of women support social proscriptions on their gender’s power and agency. From Phyllis Schlafly to Marjorie Taylor Greene, the leaders among them deny others the right to control their own bodies. In doing so, they aggrandize their own power, becoming honorary patriarchs, caucusing with the guys and providing some type of cover—however unconvincing it may be—that frames outright oppression as merely a matter of opinion.

Through “internalization of the oppressor“ (to use Paulo Freire’s phrase), a dominant social group grooms and persuades those deemed lesser to accept damaging beliefs and social arrangements. In the feminist movement of the 1960s, this was well understood. Consciousness-raising groups multiplied as women supported each other through the painful yet liberating process of bringing to awareness and rejecting oppressive beliefs, propelling them toward right action.

Then as now, in pursuing full human rights, democratic power, and self-determination, feminists must confront two forces: those who promulgate and uphold patriarchy; and those who serve them.

This always reminds me of a text from Numbers (13:33). When scouts were sent to explore the promised land, fear overtook them. “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves,” they reported, “and so we must have looked to them.” Note the sequence: internalized powerlessness shrinks us, and that amplifies the power of the oppressor.

Denial of human rights, including the right to bodily autonomy, has come to a pass we could not have foreseen in the sixties. Women are expelled from hospitals and forced to bleed nearly to death before doctors will remove the nonviable fetus imperiling their lives. Hoping to collect a bounty, strangers denounce women desperate to escape forced childbearing. When Amy Coney Barrett was asked whether overturning Roe vs Wade would force people to give birth against their will, she replied “Why don’t the safe-haven laws take care of that problem?” These laws provide drop boxes at hospitals and fire stations where newborns can be abandoned anonymously.

I pray we will see a day when every human being, regardless of gender, race, religion, orientation—all categories of identity and difference—will secure the guarantees laid out in the inspiring and powerful Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. In 2017, a UN working group amplified article 3’s statement that “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person” by proclaiming “The right of a woman or girl to make autonomous decisions about her own body and reproductive functions is at the core of her basic rights to equality, privacy, and bodily integrity.” Please read and share these, urging your allies to use them to oppose patriarchy.

The Shalom Center recognizes that a root spiritual crisis feeds every social crisis. This social crisis is what they call a wicked problem, one featuring so many intersections and entanglements that it’s hard to know where to begin. To me, the root cause is a kind of individualism that fosters greed and indifference. Although we have the capacity to join together to right injustice, our market-obsessed culture provides far more encouragement to separate ourselves, to acquire money and power as insulation from the suffering others endure.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said it best:
 

“There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. A silent justification, it makes possible an evil erupting as an exception becoming the rule and being in turn accepted.”

In a society guided by universal human rights, all humans will have the same wide range of choice and opportunity. For women, this will begin with total liberation from the mind- colonization of sexism, and continue with the removal of all obstacles to full participation and influence in shaping both personal life and society and its institutions, from pay parity to the absolute right to bodily autonomy.

May tonight’s Hanukkah light illuminate the double nature of this challenge, defeating the cruel, self-interested shock-troops of patriarchy and freeing those they have groomed and persuaded to follow them.

— by Arlene Goldbard

Read/Watch/Listen:

Read the inspiring and powerful Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and a UN working group’s 2017 amplification of women’s autonomy, equality and reproductive health.

Action Items:

Share the inspiring and powerful Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and a UN working group’s 2017 amplification of women’s autonomy, equality and reproductive health with at least three friends right now.

Kavannah

by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

We light the 6th candle
in honor of the moon’s renewal
as the sliver of a curving light
rekindles in night sky
And we honor Shekhinah
Goddess dwelling in Her people,
Appearing, disappearing, reappearing
Like the moon
and the body-souls
of women
Long denied
Their choice of conscience
In the living of their bodies
Yet resisting that oppression
As they choose Rosh Hodesh
For a festival of joy renewed.

Blessings

midrashic translations by Rabbi Arthur Waskow

Baruch atah / Brucha aht Yahhh, Blessed are You, Breath of life, Ruach HaOlam, Interbreathing of the world, asher kidshanu b’mitzvot, vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Hanukkah, Who makes us holy by connecting with the Breath and with each other, at this moment to kindle the light of Hanukkah to see our cousins.

Baruch atah, <Brucha aht> YHWH {Yahh} Eloheinu, Ruach haolam, she-asah nisim — lo v’chayil v’lo v’choach ki im b’ruchech — l’horeinu bayamim hahaeim baz’man hazeh.

Blessed are You, YHWH [Yahhh] our God, Breath of all life, Who has brought about amazing deeds — not by might and not by power, but by Your Spirit — through our forebears in those days and in ourselves, this very season.

Baruch atah / Brucha aht Yahhh, Blessed are You, Breath of life, Ruach HaOlam, Interbreathing of the world, sheh-hechi-anu — who fills us with life; v’kimanu — who lifts us up; v’higi-anu lazman hazeh; who carries us to this very moment.

Light shamash / helper candle and Candle 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, & 6 of Hanukkiah.