In the province of Quebec, when a couple gets married their names remain the same. From one perspective, this is a lot easier than all the paperwork to change one’s legal name after marriage. From a different perspective …it sometimes leads to other bureaucratic conundrums (so what name to I put on this cheque to pay my kid’s friend’s mom back!). While here in Quebec this is actually a legal matter, in other modern Western countries, many women make this choice as a statement of independence (which is different than those who do so because of an already developed career under their maiden name). From this week’s parsha, however, one may be able to extract a bit of perspective on marriage and independence.
Before discussing marriage, let us look at the end of Parshas
Emor, where there is the story of Shelomith’s son who was stoned to death for blasphemy
and cursing God. Put that way, the story sounds appropriately…biblical.
Obviously cursing God is a grievous sin, particularly from someone who had
lived through all of the miracles in Mitzrayim and the splitting of the Sea.
But the story, or the way it is presented in the Torah, is a bit…odd:
“There came out among the Israelites someone who was the son
of an Israelite woman and an Egyptian man. And a fight broke out in the camp
between that half-Israelite and a certain Israelite man. The son of the
Israelite woman pronounced the Name in blasphemy, and he was brought to
Moses—now his mother’s name was Shelomith daughter of Dibri of the tribe of
Dan—” (Vayikra 23:10-11).
The Midrash adds a great deal of important information that
helps us understand exactly what the fight was about and why the nameless man
was specifically described as the son of Shelomith. Let’s face it, not many
people in the Torah are identified by their mother. To recap for those who are
not familiar with the Midrash, as the son of an Egyptian, the blasphemer did
not have a patrilineal line to connect him to a tribe. His mother, however, was
from the tribe of Dan, and so they went to live among them. Some in the tribe
felt he didn’t belong…and, well, one thing led to another. (If you’re
interested on the Personal Parsha Prose insights on this Midrash… https://cthedawn.blogspot.com/2020/05/blog-post.html)
There are many aspects about this small section of Torah
that are unexpected and interesting. The history that led to the situation is
complex, but at the heart of it all is a critical idea that identity matters on
a family level. In building a civilization, which is what the Children of
Israel were doing (and which we must continue to do), who you are matters.
This is not to say that Bnei Dan were correct in evicting
this man from their camp because he had no patrilineal line – that is a far
more complex question. It is, however, a recognition of the fact that the Torah
wants us to build cohesive units within the greater nation. The great monument
to Hashem’s eternity that is Klal Yisrael is make up of units* and tribes and
families and, eventually, individuals. But each individual has significance to
the units they are part of.
This concept also appears earlier in the parsha when the
Torah discusses the daughter of a Kohein: “If a priest’s daughter becomes a
layman’s wife, she may not eat of the sacred teruma; but if the priest’s
daughter is widowed or divorced and without offspring, and is back in her
father’s house as in her youth, she may eat of her father’s food. No lay person
may eat of it—" (22:11-12).
Now it is clear that the daughter of a kohein would be able
to eat from the teruma while she was still part of her father’s household; and
it makes sense that if she should be widowed or divorced and without children
that she would likely return to her father’s household. If she returned to her
father’s household, surely, she would have to be able to eat what the rest of
her family ate. However, as the commentator Chizkuni points out, these verses
teach us that while she is married to or the mother of those who are not
kohanim, she does not have that status. She is fully part of the family and
tribe of her husband and/or her children.
Many people in the modern era would take issue with this
idea – that a woman’s “identity” should be absorbed into her husband’s
identity. Afterall, women are powerful forces unto themselves, and the idea
that a woman should take her place in society based on her husband is almost
blasphemy (ok, I couldn’t resist). Sure, they would say, it made sense when a
woman needed a husband to survive in the world, when the marriage partnership
was divided between provider and nurturer, but today women are often the
breadwinners, or at least the equivalent earners to their partners, and being
independent is not a survival challenge.
The argument makes sense,,, when you are focused on the
individual. The Torah, however, is focused on the community. The community is
Klal Yisrael, it’s the tribe, and it’s the family. Marriage, from a Torah
perspective, is a building of units. When two people get married, they become
one unit and that unit must have solidarity in their identity. That concept in
no way negates the importance of each woman’s sense of self, but it forms a
necessary process in the raising of children, in the fostering of identity
within a family unit, and in the recognition that the klal is what we are
essentially building.
It is easy to get caught up in ideas of rightness when
talking about identity. What other topic is so ripe for the argument of
self-fulfilment? So much has changed in the last 150 years in the status of women
and the socialization of men and women that it is terribly easy to immediately
assess the Torah as ignoring a woman’s right to her own identity. That argument
misses the larger picture because it leads to a false narrative. Independence
and self-fulfillment are important – without question – but, to spin John Donne’s
famous quote: no woman is an island.
I wish you all a wonderful and beautiful Shabbas and may you
all feel yourselves included in the units of the nation.
*by units I mean the association of groups of Tribes together
in the Midbar.
