If you’ve ever visited a Synagogue, particularly a Hasidic Synagogue, you might have been surprised to see an area in the sanctuary for men to worship and pray that was separate and much larger than the area in the sanctuary created for women to worship and pray. After all, most churches today do not separate men from women and women now have equal rights with men in society in the modern, western world for the most part, so it seems strange to walk into a place where men and women are so deliberately separated.
Some of you might be bristling at the thought of men and women not being allowed to even sit together while they worship and pray and I want you to take a step back from that thought process. There’s a beautiful and faith filled reason for this separation even if you don’t agree with it and it is shared by some Pentecostal and Apostolic Christians as well.
If you were to ask someone of the Hasidic Judaic faith why the space for women is so much smaller than the space for men, they will simply tell you exactly what the Torah tells them:
Men are obligated to pray to Hashem (God) everyday, to meet with Him there at the Synagogue, to worship Him there. Women do not have the same obligation.
Seems a bit strange to say that women don’t have the same obligation as men to pray, don’t you think? Aren’t we all supposed to keep our relationship with our God and Savior strong by being in the word and praying continuously? I feel like I read that somewhere…
I don’t know about your experiences as women in the church, but to be honest I have felt at times like the leadership in the church expected me to believe that God views women differently, holds us to different expectations, and that we are not equal to men in His sight and His valuation of us. Let’s be real: the Bible doesn’t tell as many stories about women as it tells about men. It isn’t that there aren’t women in the word with amazing and powerful stories, but often the big name women were women we were reminded were divorcees, prostitutes, adulteresses, women who we are told God chose to use despite their situation and despite themselves. Despite themselves… David killed the husband of a woman he was already hooking up with but God used women despite their situations. Seems like a bit of a double standard but for a very long time I couldn’t put my finger on why the stories were told so differently about men and women in the similar situations. Even in the new testament, we see the scribes and pharisees bring a woman who was guilty of adultery to Jesus asking him to condemn her to being stoned…
But while I sat in church pews throughout my life til now, I have always questioned why didn’t they bring Jesus the man who was also guilty of adultery when they were so willing to bring and condemn the woman?
God is a just God but while the story gives Jesus the opportunity to remind us that we are all sinners, it shows us inequalities that existed historically and the retelling of it highlights inequalities that still exist. Rules about what is right and good have always been applied to women more strongly than they have been applied to men. Always. This is true in society and it is unfortunately too often also true in the church but this isn’t true of God.
Women have always been the workers. We keep the home. We cook. We clean. We carry babies in our bodies and raise them. We wash. We sew. We shop or garden or make the pickup order from the grocery store. We make the doctor appointments. We do everything! Now we also have careers, real estate and property, stocks, college degrees and higher education. We do it all from sun up to sun down and it has been that way since the dawn of time. Logically, there isn’t much time left for us just as there isn’t much time left for us to simply sit down to talk with God which is why women in Judaism aren’t obligated to pray daily.
But what does that mean about how God feels about women?
The stories of the men in the Bible and the women in the Bible vary greatly. Most of the time, men needed to have other men come and talk to them about what God was doing or what He wanted. Sure, there were men who spoke with God but they also struggled and had to be reminded who God was and they were rare. Do you see that with the women? Yeah… No… Me neither.
The women in the word did what they had to do to survive. They served their husbands. If they had none, they prostituted themselves if they needed to, because a woman’s occupation and income always had to come from men, or they slept at the feet of powerful men. If they were taken from their homes to be prepared to be a concubine, a woman forced into sexual slavery for a king, they didn’t fight against it because they had no right to fight against it. If their husband lied and said he was their sister so that other men wouldn’t be jealous of how beautiful she was, they kept up the lie. When they were raped for their master to have an heir and then discarded to die in the desert, when their husband was murdered because the king wanted them, if their father offered them to be raped by a crowd of men, whatever it was that happened, they bore it all in order to survive.
The women we see in the word do what I see women in difficult situations do everyday: they survived against all odds.
But surviving isn’t the only thing they did. The women of the word also exhibited an extreme amount of faith. When Esther was taken from her family to be a sex slave, she had faith that God put her there for a reason and risked her own life to save her people. When Ruth’s husband died, she went back to Israel with her mother in law and waited for a good man to do what was right, laying at his feet while he slept, completely humbling her self and trusting the God of her mother in law to deliver her to a good man who would provide for her. Rahab was a prostitute in Jericho who helped the men sent there to spy and when the walls came down, her home was intact and her life was spared, believing in faith that the God of this men was not lying. When an angel came to Mary and told her that she was going to give birth to the Son of God, she didn’t doubt and she didn’t fear. When women in the word were faced with something challenging or seemingly impossible, they might have tried to help God along, like Sarah did when she bowed to the custom of the day and handed over Hagar, but you don’t see them throwing out a fleece or needing to touch Christ’s hands to believe. They heard the promise, the whisper, the angel, Christ before them… They received the promise, the healing, the grace, and they carried on in their lives without having to be told again and again what they’d heard was true. Mary Magdalene had such faith and such closeness with Christ that she has been called the apostle to the apostles and there’s evidence of jealousy by the men over her closeness with Jesus because her faith drew her so near to Him. Her closeness, which came from her faith, got under peoples skin so much that people have tried to say she was his wife, as if the only possible explanation for being that cherished was that they were having sex. The “she slept her way to the top” trope is just as prevalent in the church and in history as it is in our modern world, but it wasn’t because of her vagina that she was close to Christ, it was because of her faith.
Despite hardship, when women draw close to God, they draw close, and when they receive a promise, they hold fact to it. There are men in the word who show equal faith, that is absolutely true. But I don’t see the men dealing with the same hardships or dealing with the hardships they face in the same way.
The women of the word are badass with a faith that is fierce and unrelenting, even in the face of jealousy, gossip, and lies… Like so many women I know and see every day.
The Virtuous Woman. Proverbs 31 has forever been held up as a ruler for women to measure themselves against in a way that is at times abusive, which I’ll address in another article soon, but what I find so powerful about it is that there is no parallel text talking about the virtuous man. Find it… You can’t… It’s not there. The virtuous woman works from sunup to sundown in every way to support and provide for her family. I think of what women have to do today to take care of their families and I am in awe of the women in Biblical times who had nothing of the technology to help the way we do now. If I want toast, I don’t have to grind flour and get up before the crack of dawn to make the bread; I open the pantry to the loaf I got the other day and grab a couple slices. I turn on the tap to fresh, clean hot or cold water; I don’t have to walk to a well. I have a washing machine and I get the privilege of complaining about folding the laundry; they had a set of clothing which they washed by hand without Tide by hand. And yet I see women today still working sunup to sundown. Every. Single. Day.
The truth about why the women in Judaism don’t have the obligation to pray every day is because as long as women have walked the earth, we haven’t had time to just stop and pray. I mean… When was the last time you finished your coffee while it was hot?
Yes, ladies, I said it. Kids or not, married or single, we are all such masters of the hustle we have to do to survive in this world that we don’t have time. We have to work harder then men to make the same amount of money: in the US, it’s 72 cents on the dollar, unless she’s disabled and then its 25 cents on the dollar. We aren’t taken as seriously as men in most situations.
And if that is not enough, we are far more likely to be the victim of crime, especially sexual crime, than any man ever because we are women… And we know it. That’s why we are always on alert and listening to our intuition, on the lookout for danger. We get apartments on the second floor. We carry our keys between our fingers thinking that’s going to save us. We learn self defense techniques and we carry mace, pepper spray, a whistle, or a gun. And it’s exhausting, right, that on top of everything else we spend extra energy to keep ourselves safe?
God knows all this. In the old testament, it was written into the rules because He didn’t want women to have another obligation on our already long list of things we have to do everyday. He gets it. That’s why when He would meet the men in the Synagogue, Jesus would meet women at the well, in the street, where they were cooking, where they worked. I’m not for a second saying that women do not have an obligation to work to draw close to God and to get in the word daily. I’m also not saying that that women have something extra special that men don’t or can’t have.
Too often we get it in our heads that if we are truly good women of God that we have to add more to our hustle and our day to day schedule in order to meet with God, and with that we also get it in our heads that if we don’t have the time to stop what we are doing to be with him that we are a disappointment to God.
God sees us where we are and He meets us there.
Women have the capacity for great faith, to find a way to survive against all odds, and to keep going, day in and day out, sun up to sundown, to make it all happen. God sees that. He calls that virtuous. And if you will stop beating yourself up and remember that praying continuously and talking with Him quietly throughout the day, you’ll realize that He will meet you right where you are at the well, at the grocery store, at the laundromat, in traffic, in the drive-through at Starbucks, at your desk at work when you see that one person that drives you batty, wherever you you are. You only have to open your heart and listen to what He says too.
