During this service, we took the familiar prayers and then listened to ones in a different voice. This book of the Torah that we are currently reading, the whole Exodus story, is very familiar. The Israelites flee Egypt, and, of course we have the familiar story of the parting of the Red Sea, the celebration of the Israelites, and Miriam and the women dancing and singing, G-d giving the laws to Moses.
As this is the Women’s Shabbat, it would be logical and obvious to point out the many contributions of Miriam to the entire story. We hear about Moses often, but Miriam has a different voice. While Moses is the leader, the one who talks to G-d, the one who receives instructions and power from Him, it is worth noting that Moses would not even be alive if not for Miriam, as well as her mother, Pharaoh’s daughter, and the midwives. Miriam hides her brother when the death of all Israelite males is ordered, she sends him to Pharaoh’s daughter (who does take him in), and Miriam then helpfully suggests his own mother to nurse him.
After the parting of the Red Sea, she is a leader for the women. Later, during the period of wandering, she questions Moses’s authority and is punished for this with a skin disease. That should be a lesson! Many years later, a great female leader of the Israelites questioned Moses as well. She said the following: “He took us forty years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!” That leader was Golda Meir. But the legacy of Miriam is redeemed when she dies in a waterless place, and G-d forms a spring for water. This highlights Miriam’s contributions to people as she died attempting to care for them and serve them.
In the interest of relating the stories of Moses and of Miriam to my life, I have to talk about psychology. Two stories about psychology come to mind and relate to the interactions of male and female leaders. Both came out in the ’80s, when I was in graduate school. Both are about famous Jewish psychologists, pairs of men and women working on the same issue. See if you think there is value in that different voice when you hear the stories.
The first is about Sigmund Freud. Who has not heard of the father of psychoanalysis? But have you heard of his daughter, Anna Freud? She was a psychoanalyst in her own right and also the keeper of her father’s legacy of letters. (For you young ones, people actually wrote letters and kept them.) In a 1984 issue of The Atlantic, it was revealed through that sudden discovery of these letters that Freud made a very big mistake. It would take a long time to explain the mistake, but let’s just say to keep this family-friendly that a headache is sometimes just a headache. I am loosely cherry- picking details from the story, but here it is:
Freud thought his female patient suffered from that great female disorder of “hysteria,” which caused all her headaches (cue the sarcasm here). In actuality, Freud’s great friend and surgeon had left gauze packing behind in her nose from a surgery. It is reported that Freud fainted when he saw all the blood when the packing was removed and the patient was reported to have said disdainfully, “And that’s the stronger sex?” Needless to say, that cured the headaches. Anna Freud carefully guarded all the letters between the two doctors to keep her father’s reputation intact — maybe a little like Miriam saving the life of Moses to go on and become a great leader. And Anna Freud went on to become a psychoanalyst specifically caring for children, lending her voice to this field.
In the second story, a famous psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg developed a theory of moral development. He presented a series of dilemmas to youngsters and was interested not in the solution to the dilemma, but their reasoning for the solution. In one dilemma, a man’s wife is going to die of a disease. A pharmacist has the cure but will not give it to the man unless he pays a lot of money, which the man does not have. (This was all before crowd funding). Is it wrong for him to steal the drug to save the life of his wife?
Kohlberg rates two children, Jake and Amy, on the basis of their moral development. Jake comes out higher than Amy, more moral. He uses logic and makes a judgment based on justice. He is clear that one should steal the drug as it is a matter of saving a life. Amy is rated lower on the scale of moral development. She is unsure about stealing the drug; maybe there was another way to negotiate the issue.
Kohlberg’s colleague, Carol Gilligan, worked with him on this research and she found it problematic that Amy was rated at a lower level. For Amy, according to Gilligan, the dilemma was not just clear calculation, it involved care for others. Amy considered some of the following: What would happen to the wife if the man goes to jail? Isn’t the pharmacist in the wrong? Gilligan wrote her observations in a book called In a Different Voice. Gilligan says that you can think of justice and rules, and also of caring and relationships. Gilligan does not say that all men think only about justice and all women think only about caring, although she says this tends to be the case according to her research.
Of course in later years, researchers will view thought processes on a continuum and not in a binary fashion of men on one side, women on the other. Gilligan does not say that one view is better than the other; rather, she is saying that a theory of morality can’t be looked at from the male form of life as the only form. How can we trust a theory that has such an inequality at its core? To Gilligan, the highest form of moral development involves both justice and caring.
Is Moses the interpreter of justice and Miriam the caring one? Does he listen to the voice of the Almighty? And does she then listen to the voice of the people? It is not so clear cut; but, I do think there are different voices and different contributions, and they matter. I think as well that the highest form of morality should involve thinking about justice as well as thinking about caring for and about others. Maybe on that we would all agree.
Shabbat Shalom!
Beverly Hoy gave this d’var at the Women of CSS shabbat service on Friday, Jan 22.