Renee Rabinowitz
Renee Rabinowitz, a retired lawyer whose family fled Nazi-occupied Belgium when she was a child, was settled into her aisle seat on an El Al flight from the U.S. to Israel, her adopted country, after visiting family members in New York.
Soon her assigned seatmate, a middle-aged Hasidic Jew, showed up. He had a brief conversation with the flight attendant in Hebrew, whereupon the flight attendant offered Ms. Rabinowitz a “better” seat farther forward in the cabin. She reluctantly agreed to move.
But when the flight attendant affirmed that the request to move was because the Hasidic man had requested it, she was disturbed. Why should she be asked to move because it was against the religious scruples of some man to sit next to her? You can read the whole story here: “She Was Asked to Switch Seats. Now She’s Charging El Al With Sexism.”
Being asked to switch seats on an airplane may seem like a minor thing. But the question remains: Why should she, a woman, be asked to move to satisfy the religious beliefs of a man? If his beliefs forbid him from having contact with a woman, isn’t it up to him to take responsibility for the consequences of those beliefs? Shouldn’t he be the one to move, or to forego the flight altogether if no one else wants to move to accommodate his strict—and rather rigid—religious beliefs?
Are women really second-class citizens in the eyes of God, so that they must always yield to men when there is a conflict of convenience or of religious principles? After all, Ms. Rabinowitz was an observant Jew herself. In fact, she was the widow of a Rabbi. But she did not interpret the Torah in such a strictly literal way as the man who insisted that the Torah prohibited him from sitting next to an 81-year-old grandmother.
We could go through an extensive survey of religious maltreatment of women over the ages. But we’re not going to do that. Instead, here’s a simple principle:
One way to judge the level of spiritual development and enlightenment of a particular religious group is to look at how it treats women.
Perhaps that’s a bit provocative.
But I do believe it’s a valid test.
The lower the status of women in a particular religious group, and the worse they are treated, the less spiritual that religious group is. And the higher the status of women in a particular religious group, up to full equality with men, and the better that group treats women, the more spiritual that religious group is.
Mind you, this is not the only test of a religious group’s spiritual level. But I do believe it is a fairly accurate one.
Let’s look at it a little more closely.
For more on an alternative to inerrancy, please click here to read on.
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