Abstract
This study explores how religious women become legitimate actors in the public sphere and analyzes their agency—its meanings, capacities, and transformative aims. It presents a novel case study of Israeli Modern-Orthodox Agunah activists who engage in highly politicized collective feminist resistance as religious actors working for religious ends. Embedded in and activated by Orthodoxy, they advocate women’s rights to divorce, voicing a moral critique of tradition and its agents precisely because they are devoutly devoted to them. Such political agency is innovatively conceptualized as “devoted resistance”: critique within relationship, enabled by cultural schema, and comprising both interpretive skills and “relational-autonomy” capacities. This study contends that understanding agency within religious grammars reveals its underlying logics, highlighting how structures shape the meanings and realization of women’s varied “agentive capacities.” It challenges current dichotomies like feminism/religion, resistance/submission, and autonomy/dependence. Overall, the author argues for a nuanced, culturally specific, capacity-based, relational approach to analyzing religious women’s agency.
Why Agunah Activism?
Who is to say if the key that unlocks the cage might not lie hidden inside the cage? People do not tend to give up on the things they love very easily. . . . [Through this observation], seeming self-conflicts can be understood as full expressions of personhood and desire—traces of multiple devotion.
Given the current “eruption of the religious in the public sphere” (Turner 2011, x) and its implications for gender politics, this study answers the call for further examination of the religion, politics, and gender nexus. The study’s gender lens highlights not only how the religion/politics juncture structures gender inequality, but also how religion facilitates challenging gendered power relations. It exposes the rich multiplicity of religious women’s voices (often marginalized, flattened, or mistrusted), exploring how their piety informs political activism. Indeed, religious women’s burgeoning activism worldwide, within multiple and distinctive modernities (Deeb 2006; Herzog and Braude 2009), raises fascinating questions regarding how religious women become legitimate political actors, how their involvement transforms the public sphere, and whether it promotes gender equality (Rinaldo 2010, 2013). In addition, there is growing interest in locating religious women’s agency—a subject’s capacity to act upon the world—and understanding it on its own terms (Bracke 2008; Mahmood 2005). In this article, I ask what religious women’s political agency means, what it comprises, and how this relates to becoming legitimate political actors, potentially transforming both culture and the public sphere. My findings diversify the meanings of both devotion and resistance, and identify more fully what fuels and shapes political agency. Consequently, such a gender perspective broadens the investigation of the multifaceted nature of social and religious change.
This article is part of a larger qualitative study of Modern-Orthodox 1 Agunah activists in Israel—religious women engaging in feminist resistance in the public sphere, struggling for Jewish women’s rights to divorce. 2 The novel case of Agunah activists defies simple binary categorizations, inviting deconstruction of many either–or conceptualizations characteristic of scholarship on the intersection of gender, religion, and politics. As Orthodox women, they are learned and rigorously observe Halakha (Jewish law) within pious communities. As activists, they engage in highly politicized gender resistance in public spheres, both religious and civil. As Israelis, they are educated professionals inhabiting patriarchal frameworks in a modern liberal-democratic Westernized nation-state. I investigate the women who embody this paradox, specifically asking: What enables Agunah activists—socialized to modesty, apolitical domesticity, and obedience to religious authority—to contentiously enter the public sphere at all, let alone justify resisting gender injustice? Thus, this study contributes to the scholarly debate regarding women’s agency in gender-traditional religions and scholarship on religious women’s activism, currently heavily focused on Muslim contexts. Its analysis of Orthodox women’s local activism illuminates both how feminisms around the world are diversifying and some fascinating similarities among them.
The Agunah field is particularly well suited to an exploration of women’s agency because activists are censured by dominant gendered religious discourses for expressing political agency, therefore feeling the need to consciously reflect upon, and justify, it. Furthermore, activists expose the linkage between agency, structure, and power: They challenge the State-authorized Rabbinic Courts’ policy by which recalcitrant husbands’ “free will” trumps women’s rights to be freed from dead marriages—leaving them chained, passive, extorted, and suffering.
I offer an innovative conceptualization of religious women’s political agency as “devoted resistance.” I elucidate its particular modes, enacted by Agunah activists, articulated within specific religious grammars, and rooted in interpretive and relational capacities. Expounding upon the agency/structure debates and complicating the submission/resistance debates, I argue that activists’ devoted relationships with the religious structures in which they are embedded inform their ability to resist culture from within and transform the public sphere.
Locating Religious Women’s Agency
Women’s agency in gender-traditional religions is a topic of great interest and heated dispute for scholars of religion and gender as well as among feminist activists (for reviews, see Avishai 2008, 2010; Bilge 2010). The initial paradigm considered religion a hotbed of patriarchy and primarily viewed religious women as victims duped by false consciousness. However, despite modernist predictions of religion’s demise, religions in the secular age are thriving. Studies show many women do not opt out, instead expanding their involvement and even enlisting in conservative religions (Rinaldo 2010). This prompted an influx of studies explicating women’s attachment to conservative religions and conceptualizing their agency. Studies show religious women practice resistance (Israel-Cohen 2012; Koren 2005; Salime 2008), feel empowered or liberated by religion (Griffith 1997; Wolkomir 2004), and/or use it instrumentally to achieve extra-religious ends (Chen 2005; Chong 2006).
Some studies on resistance argue feminists of faith value both religion and feminism as integral to their selves, often struggling publicly to uphold both (Hartman 2007; Henold 2008). Since both religious conservatives and secular feminists often treat religious feminists’ stance as oxymoronic and inauthentic, they practice dual resistance—towards patriarchal religious norms and (secular) feminism’s othering of religion. Insisting their piety is not (only) about strategic “choices” refutes lingering implications that women’s best interests lie in “liberation” from religion (Hartman 2007).
The scholarly focus on resistance agency has been criticized for conflating the terms, and rejected for its underlying submission/resistance dichotomy. The claim is that accounts biased by a “romance of resistance” (Abu-Lughod 1990) ascribe women agency or victimhood by the degree to which they align with Western liberal feminist progressive politics. Instead, a new category of religious women’s agency has emerged that reads performance of gender-traditional religious norms as a form of agency (Avishai 2008; Mahmood 2005). This “doing religion” approach emphasizes subjectivation as a form of agency, asserting it is more consistent with religious subjects’ experience of complying for religious ends. However, feminist scholarship’s newly prominent focus on individuals’ self-constitution and self-transformation is itself being challenged for neglecting structural constraints and questions of women’s oppression (e.g., Einspahr 2010).
Thus, the debate regarding whether religious women have agency raises questions about the very meaning of “agency”—a pertinent yet contested concept for both modernity and feminism. In other words, identifying agency among believers is closely tied to who is searching, what for, where, and why. For example, while secular skepticism regards religious agency as deficient at best, recent scholarship endeavors to locate it—thereby integrating religious people into a central modern category, and/or (re)defining agency outside the secular liberal context (Bracke 2008). Mahmood (2005, 14–15) maintains that the meaning of agency “must emerge through an analysis of the particular concepts that enable specific modes of being, responsibility, and effectivity.” Accordingly, scholars are urged to take religious motivations “seriously” (Bilge 2010), stop translating religious terms into their supposedly underlying secular meanings (Mack 2003), and, instead, ask “what agency means in relation to specifically religious grammars” (Bracke 2008, 63).
Answering this call, some scholars reject the liberal identification of agency with rationality, self-control, or uninhibited free will, instead locating religious agency in docile obedience to religious norms and surrender to divine will (Mack 2003; Mahmood 2005). This resonates somewhat with my findings, yet an overly simplistic pitting of liberal-Western “autonomy as free will” against religious “agency as submission” essentially asks: Which individuated being (human or divine) is in control? Instead, I build upon the notion that we are all relational beings and agency is “an action within relationship” (Gergen 2009, 82). This correlates with feminist conceptualizations of “relational-autonomy” whereby agents, both “psychically internally . . . and socially differentiated,” exhibit a range of agentive capacities as “emotional, embodied, desiring, creative, and feeling, as well as rational, creatures” (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000, 21). This view elicits a need to examine agentive competencies constituted within religious relationships.
Using the concept of “devoted resistance,” this study straddles these divergent lines of inquiry, innovatively locating agency in Agunah activists’ resistance within a collective feminist movement as devout subjects pursuing religious aims. Attuned to activists’ religious grammars, drawn from historic Jewish tradition and contemporary Modern-Orthodoxy in Israel, I examine what agency means within relationships among Agunah activists (as pious relational subjects), divine will, Jewish/Orthodox discursive and normative traditions, institutions, and society.
Religious Women’s Political Agency: Introducing Devoted Resistance
I examine Agunah activists’ political agency, asking what enables them to become legitimate political actors in the public sphere. I hereby join the conversation about religious women’s activism, which currently concentrates mostly on Muslim contexts (e.g., Charrad 2011). This literature examines the myriad effects of religious women’s activism on the public sphere, nation-state, politicized religions, shifting gender politics, and diverse modernities. I build upon the notion that religion, gender, and politics are not only contested terms but also simultaneously constructed and mutually influenced (Herzog and Braude 2009).
I wish to make explicit some commonalities in this literature: The first is a correlation with social movement theory regarding religion’s multiple and contradictory roles in politics, as a force that supports or challenges the status quo. Religions supply resources for mobilization, including collective identities and “symbolic repertoires” that inform movements’ cultures and strategies (Williams 2002). The second is a tendency to describe religion as nonmonolithic, historical, discursive systems of practice and belief that constitute and interact with power relations, reflecting a cultural approach to religion (for a review, see Edgell 2012). Applying Sewell’s (1992) understanding of structure/agency, this means that religion is a structure of resources and varied cultural schema, which enables and limits religious women’s agency (individually and collectively) in particular and differential ways.
A central claim of this scholarship arises from these shared premises: Political agency is tied to women’s interpretive use of religious schema—texts and meanings underlying society’s structures. For example, Rinaldo’s (2013) “pious agency” comprises deployment (“pious activating agency”) or reinterpretation (“pious critical agency”). 3 This seems somewhat parallel to the compliance/resistance binary, although Rinaldo emphasizes that the types are not dichotomous and both are forms of piety. Bucar’s (2011) “dianomy” as moral agency is also discursive, and her “creative conformity,” both citational and critical, further undermines the dichotomy. To a certain extent, Deeb’s (2006) concept of “authentication” is another example, whereby activists use religious knowledge and interpretation to transform and delegitimize “traditional” religious norms of preceding generations. This, Ben Shitrit (2013) asserts in her case studies, is experienced as individuals’ autonomous choice to oppose traditional societal norms. In other words, regardless of whether the end result of the activism (intentional or otherwise) is reforming or endorsing religious patriarchal gender norms, religious women’s political agency is deeply linked to their interpretive capacities. 4 My study supports this claim, diversifying its empirical evidence, yet also uniquely examines what, above and beyond interpretive capacities, enables and legitimizes religious women’s activism.
I posit Agunah activists enter the public sphere as “connected social critics” (Walzer 2002) practicing “devoted resistance.” Recently coined by Hartman and Buckholtz (2014), this term draws from their analysis of classic ancient Greek and Jewish canonical texts, examined from the alternative vantage point of “supporting characters.” Such characters are closely related to dominant heroes, authority figures who subsequently betray the very culture they purport to represent. This shatters the supporting characters’ trust, identity, and cultural-meaning networks. In response, they express “devoted resistance,” perilously asserting their challenging, subversive, critical voice into the relationship, resisting culture’s desecration while speaking in its name. Hartman and Buckholtz argue that traces of such devoted resistance are retained—by culture’s transmitters—within the muffled margins of hegemonic cultural narratives.
I innovatively apply this freshly coined literary term to contemporary women, illustrating its resonance with Agunah activists’ experiences, conceptualizing it as a form of political agency, and elaborating its modes. “Devoted resistance” highlights Agunah activism’s relational nature, giving rise to an exploration of varied agentive capacities, beyond the interpretive. It elucidates how religious women’s activism can be fueled and facilitated by devotedly remaining in relationship with the very tradition one critiques, enabled by the same cultural schema that underpins structures activists both uphold and resist.
Contextualizing Agunah Activism
Personal status issues ignite heated disputes over religion’s role in the public sphere of the first and only Jewish nation-state. Despite extensive progressive legislation ensuring women’s rights, Israel accords sole jurisdiction over citizens’ marriage and divorce to “religious authorities [who] are the most powerful opponents of equal rights for women” (Feldman 2011, 13). State-authorized Rabbinic Courts—all-male and under ultra-Orthodox control—enforce severe gender discrimination, which negatively affects all Jewish women in Israel regardless of religious observance (Weiss and Gross-Horowitz 2012). In its most radical feminist framing, which not all activists subscribe to, Agunah activism implicates nonegalitarian marriage, religious institutions, and the nation-state in women’s subjugation.
The Agunah struggle links three overlapping fields—gender politics, Jewish-Orthodox politics, and national Israeli politics. Therefore, it is unsurprisingly spearheaded by Orthodox women who are knowledgeable and skilled agents in both Halakhic discourse and the civil system, holding dual citizenship in the religious and civil spheres (Feldman 2011). In fact, religion and state issues were rarely addressed by Israeli secular feminism prior to Orthodox feminism (Graetz 2003). As Rinaldo (2008, 1800) notes regarding Indonesia, it is the “entanglement of religion with civil politics that is redefining the public sphere, and broadening it to include women’s voices and bodies.” Orthodox Agunah activism also complicates the “religious-secular cleavage” paradigm (Peres and Ben-Rafael 2006), challenging the Israeli tendency to label critics of religious institutions “anti-religious.”
What I term the Agunah movement grows directly from Orthodox feminism’s historic “Torah learning revolution,” cultural literacy that significantly increased women’s participation in, and leadership of, Jewish life (Shilo 2006). 5 In the early 1990s, following an extensive legal campaign and Halakhic training, Orthodox women entered the Rabbinic Courts in the revolutionary professional capacity of Rabbinic advocates (toanot rabbaniot), predominantly motivated by the Agunah issue (Shamir, Shitrai, and Elias 1996). Agunah activists work privately or through NGOs, including the International Coalition for Agunah Rights (ICAR).
Although goals and strategies differ, collectively the movement works to abolish, circumvent, or, at least, severely limit the pervasive abuse, extortion, and systemic discrimination against Jewish women in divorce processes. Despite a relatively small number of activists, the movement’s public campaign has achieved substantial success over the past quarter century 6 : Agunah activists helped hundreds of women obtain a get (Jewish writ of divorce), instigated public debate, led educational campaigns, passed groundbreaking legislation, petitioned both Rabbinic and civil Courts, accrued political power, including sway over appointments of Rabbinic Court judges, and promoted numerous solutions to the problem (most unimplemented).
Activists’ erudition and professionalism gain some Orthodox respect, though support often depends on framing activism as rescuing Agunot from abusive husbands. Overt systemic critique—which gains traction for the issue in the “secular” media—is virulently censured by Rabbinic discourse, which delegitimizes feminism as heretical, radical, disloyal, and dangerous (Hartman 2007). Overall, two opposing Orthodox trends directly influence the Israeli public sphere: increasing gender segregation and fundamentalism (Heilman 2007), and assimilation of gender equality into religious norms and narratives (Irshai and Zion-Waldoks 2013).
Methods
My findings draw from a larger qualitative study of Orthodox Agunah activists in Israel. The research is grounded in hermeneutics and critical theory, and is feminist in its aims and methodology. In 2009–2012, I recorded 33 in-depth interviews, later transcribed and approved by participants, and conducted four participant observations (in Agunah advocacy organizations, a Rabbinic Court, and an Agunah’s postdivorce celebration). My analysis utilized tools from grounded-theory and narrative analysis (Wertz et al. 2011).
Being an Israeli Orthodox feminist previously active in this field, I used my amicable relationships with activists to recruit participants. I chose only women directly involved in the field, asking each to share her “story as someone active in the Agunah field.” Although I categorize Agunah activism as feminist politics, participants do not all self-identify as feminists. Participants do all self-associate with various nuanced streams of Modern-Orthodoxy, and three are ultra-Orthodox. The narratives of a few outliers, currently relatively disassociated with Orthodoxy, are not discussed here.
Agunah activism, heavily linked to Halakhic/legal expertise, correlates with relative privilege. All are educated professionals: Most are certified Rabbinic advocates and/or lawyers, with some therapists and academics. At ages 32–72, all are middle class, mostly Israeli-born, of Ashkenazi descent, and concentrated around Jerusalem (Orthodox feminism’s hub). Contrary to stereotypes, the overwhelming majority of Agunah activists are married and all are mothers of several children.
My position as insider/outsider enabled a strong rapport. Participants, usually wary of speaking on record since their public image determines political efficacy, showed rare openness. My position as both researcher and trusted ally committed to them and the shared cause requires critical self-reflection and delicate ongoing negotiation, since “as an intimate insider, ‘the field’ is not only my site of work and learning, but . . . my place of personal belonging” (Taylor 2011, 19).
Agunah Activism as Devoted Resistance
I now demonstrate how Orthodox Agunah activists, armed with their belief in, and relationship to, religion, and spurned by hegemony’s betrayal, are mobilized into political action to influence how religion and gender are interpreted, practiced, and enforced in the public sphere. I denote four modes of “devoted resistance” grounded in Agunah activists’ narratives: modest politicians, reluctant activists, religious reformers, and visionaries. Each stance stems from both agentive relational capacities and discursive interpretive skills, making use of tradition’s symbolic repertoires to articulate and justify religious women’s political agency.
Modest Politics: Legitimating Women’s “Desire” for Political Activism
Feminists have long criticized Halakhic Judaism for naturalizing essentialist gender differences, sanctifying and codifying them, then linking women’s dignity, domesticity, motherhood, and modesty to justify and enforce women’s exclusion from public religious life and leadership (Greenberg 1981; Irshai and Zion-Waldoks 2013). This is particularly frustrating for Modern-Orthodox women, fully assimilated educationally and professionally into secular fields but considered second-class citizens in religious contexts. Thus, Agunah activism is perceived, by activists and their Orthodox detractors alike, as an aggressive trespassing of gendered boundaries.
Liat, a bright, modestly dressed activist in her thirties, described feminism as symbolically standing up from behind the mehitza, a ritual-partition barring women’s entry into the religious public sphere:
[Feminism means] standing up for my rights . . . not being ashamed of what I want, not being ashamed of my desire to be like someone else [i.e., a man]. . . . [My friends] said, “What? I don’t have that need at all.” . . . [But] I won’t be put behind a mehitza all my life and also be expected not to have a need. . . . [It’s] demanding what I want, standing up for who I am.
7
Liat’s account incorporates both a Western discourse of autonomous will, rights and identity politics and an Orthodox delegitimization of women’s desires for political agency. Liat’s friends shame her by pathologizing her “unnatural needs.” Yet by reading the personal as political, she claims her desire is a legitimate response to social exclusion. In fact, she posits, it is the very act of shutting women out that shuts down their agency and renders feminists at odds with what it means to be a normative religious woman. Women who express and enact (unsanctioned) desires, women-qua-agents, represent “a movement toward greater self-definition of needs” which threatens the religious patriarchal status quo (Hartman 2007, 119).
This rhetoric of political agency as perilous desire or unnatural need, common in activists’ narratives, echoes the pervasiveness and import of “modesty” (tsni’ut) as constructed in Orthodox praxis and discourse. Englander and Sagi (2013) claim that current Halakhic regulations of modesty form the pinnacle of hegemonic Rabbinic efforts to exclude concrete women, and their voices, from discursive religious and public spaces. Modesty laws, they claim, negate women’s embodied selves, rendering them objects desired and imagined by and for men, all in the name of morality. Thus, Agunah activists’ desire for embodied self-expression and their capacity to insert willful vocal selves into the public sphere challenges hegemonic gendered rules of “modesty” and morality.
Within this logic, some activists try to downplay the more contentious (read: ostentatious, or masculine) aspects of their work. They report feminizing their practices to become “non-confrontational” and “clean,” or regulating their desires—“purifying” their intentions and denying identification with “flag-carrying,” politically driven “militant” feminists with “an agenda.” If one strategy is minimizing conflict between activism and modesty, another is co-optation. Such activists use modesty to obtain legitimacy in the public sphere. This form of “accommodating protest” (MacLeod 1992) entails conforming to the requisite dress code, donning the head covering of normative pious women, and, as one activist, Miri, joked, “preferably, being the happily married mother of seven.” Miri further admitted that she “dresses like this” (i.e., modestly) partly because other activists who “said too much” were “blacklisted” as “anti-religious.” Losing legitimacy meant losing “their capacity to speak the language of Rabbis, . . . to be heard.”
However, negotiating modesty is not merely a matter of strategy. As Orthodox women, Agunah activists are constituted by Rabbinic discourses. Modesty is not an externally imposed obstacle, but a cherished value. Yael, a middle-aged Rabbinic advocate, mother, and grandmother, reported being accosted in the Rabbinic Courts for her supposedly fraudulent performance of piety:
Sometimes you’re in the Rabbinic Courts and you’re cursed, people said to me, “You destroy families,” “You religious woman, take off your hat!” I’m exposed to all sorts of things people can say in a corridor full of people. . . . I don’t react at all. It can be momentarily uncomfortable, but it’s not some conflict or anything . . . because I know I don’t ruin families [laughs] and I know I’m not, that I’m a woman with a hat by right [laughs], I wish there were more religious people like me!
Yael is unshaken because she “knows” modesty, family values, religious belonging, and morality converge in both her head covering and her activism, differentiating her from both fundamentalists and “secular” feminists (compare Ingersoll 2003). It is she who represents a preferred version of what it means to be pious in the public sphere. Thus, she partakes of a “give and tug of meanings” between social movements and dominant power holders (Steinberg 2002, 208).
Indeed, for many activists, modesty has more to do with interpersonal behavior than concealing clothing. Yael later explains that “a Jew needs to have social values, a personal morality,” and “what God wants” is people to “respect others” versus pursuing “self-honor.” Similarly, Simcha, a pioneer in the field, explains her successful mobilization of a chief Rabbinic authority:
I’m not the advertising type, I don’t externalize . . . everything with me is very modest. [The Rabbi] liked that I’m a modest human being . . . who wants to do for the public and not for myself.
Simcha, like women activists worldwide, frames her vocal political struggles in a feminized form, as selflessly caring for others.
Agunah activists are “artfully transforming the meaning of the discourses used to dominate them, [providing] their claims with credibility” (Steinberg 2002, 224). Modesty’s stated aim—to express moral values and promote the public good—remains, yet the means of its daily practice shift radically (from hiding women’s sexualized bodies to respecting and humbly serving others, through Agunah activism) and its political function is reversed (rather than censuring women’s political desires and voices, it enables them). Activists reclaim the concept of modesty, enlisting the same symbolic repertoires mobilized to exclude them from the public sphere, to legitimize and define their political agency.
Reluctant Activists: Relational Duties and the Denial of Free Will
Stepping out of bounds, especially to challenge Rabbinic authorities in the name of women’s right to divorce, can only be justified by “properly” pious Orthodox women when absolutely “necessary.” Many Agunah activists present a “reluctant activist” model, whose motto is, “I wish I didn’t have to (do/think/be this terrible thing), but this is on you, Rabbi.” They frame their radicalized activist identities and strategies as a necessary evil, a regrettable exception, or a temporary anomaly. They contend that, in light of their dire framing of the situation, “it is time to act, Lord, for they break your law” (Psalms 119, 126).
Reluctant activists articulate a political agency rooted in a lack of free will, in relational obligation, and in a transferred moral responsibility. A classic example of this is Orit, whom I interviewed at a crucial moment of indecision regarding her future as a Rabbinic advocate:
I was a little suspicious of [veteran activists who]. . . . hate the Rabbinic Courts. . . . [I thought they] loved to hate the Rabbinic Courts, that was my feeling. And I come from a place that’s . . . loyal to the system and very loyal to Halakha. . . . It’s good that we have a religious judiciary, and Jewish law is good and we believe in Halakha. . . . [But one] can’t ignore everything that’s heard all the time. . . . [I] move and wander . . . it accumulates, it slowly, slowly builds up in you, the feeling of helplessness facing the Rabbinic Court. . . . Let’s talk about where I am now . . . it builds . . . case after case after case . . . another decision and another decision . . . until finally, it becomes the feeling I have today, really helpless, a dead end [sighs] enough. . . . I have nothing to look for in the Rabbinic Court. . . . I’m sitting here with this case today saying, “What do I do?” The heart pounds and the stomach churns . . . because what assistance am I going to request from the Rabbinic Court, how will that help me? . . . I’m pointing to my throat, yeah, suffocation, a sense that . . . I don’t want to go there to ask for help, I don’t want to.
Despite Orit’s best intentions, a temporal, spatial, and cognitive process of distancing took over. This overpowering journey washed her far away from the safe mainstream “we,” and treacherously close to where those “Other” activists seemed to be, leaving her adrift and helpless—lacking in belonging and agency. Stressing how overwhelming this was justifies her precarious new position by keeping her intentions intact. Her move from being motivated by compassion for Agunot to systemic political critique was an act of survival, for she was tethered and suffocating, even though her radicalization itself is a source of pain. It is her embodied self that expresses how, although her alienation from the Rabbinic Courts seems like disloyalty, it is in fact they who betrayed her trust. Orit’s powerful account of transgression and migrating loyalties ends with a defiant statement of resistance agency: “I don’t want to.” But is she any less pious now, than when embarking on this journey? Has she gained or lost “agency”?
Like Hartman and Buckholtz’s (2014) literary characters, Agunah activists relate closely to people in positions of power meant to embody the highest cultural values. It is from this unique vantage point that they encounter Rabbis in the act of transgressing these very values. As a result, Orit undergoes precisely what Hartman and Buckholtz describe: the emergence of a forced awareness of deep moral fissures resulting in a visceral trauma that shatters assumptions about what she thought she knew and trusted. She experiences “the betrayal of these values in deeply relational terms” (Hartman and Buckholtz 2014, 11).
Devoted resistance is activists’ response to “something they love being compromised, something sacred to them being profaned” (ibid., 9). A particularly vivid description of this experience is found in Hadas’s heartbreaking parable, comparing Agunah activism to caring for her suffering friend:
Who will help these poor women? They’re there, I’m already there. For God’s sake, who will help them? . . . I’m in the commitment stage now. I’ll give you an example, I have a friend who is [dying], . . . she’s at home. It’s so hard for me . . . to see your friend dying . . . she’s no longer in control of her body . . . she needs to be carried . . . she’s very big and very heavy because she accumulates liquids . . . very, very, very difficult to see this . . . and to care for her physically . . . and on the other hand to be nice, and give her vitality and strength and . . . bring some happiness to that sad house. Every time I leave there I just close the door, walk ten steps and start crying. I told my husband, “That’s the last time I’m going to her, enough, I don’t have the strength.” But if I won’t be there, who will be there? . . . When I’m there she always smiles, so it’s worth it for me. So I know how to do something and I know how to do it well, so I’m there. . . . It’s already part of a system of commitment. This [Rabbinic Court] system is rotten to the core but you know how to do it, you know all the Halakhic arguments . . . you’re up-to-date, you’re strong, they don’t try to pull one over on me, they don’t yell at me anymore. . . . If I won’t do it, who will? . . . I don’t know, I’m stuck.
This tragic grotesque representation compares working with the Rabbinic Courts to a losing battle, trying to breathe life into a decaying cumbersome body. Hadas’s emotional embodied experience in the Courts resembles the gendered task of tending to a dying friend. The devastation of their moral collapse is not rejoined with withdrawal (Orit’s fantasy of no longer going there) but countered with continually reentering the relationship (as Hadas does literally), refusing to give up on it. Hadas’s repetitive question “Who will help these poor women if not me?” leaves the listener wondering about her agency. She frames herself as ethically bound, religiously called, and personally devoted—she is active, skilled, experienced, successful, committed—agentive, but “stuck,” herself a victim of the collapsing rotten system, wondering if anyone will ever save her and put an end to the misery.
This parable casts Agunah activists as capable caretakers, duty-bound to do anything “necessary” to ensure the survival and protection of the weak, even if it is contrary to self-interest. To some feminist ears, this may ring uncomfortably of self-sacrifice and victimhood. This combination of active resistance with inevitability and lack of choice is best understood in religious grammar, whereby “the energy to act in the world is generated and sustained by a prior act of personal surrender” (Mack 2003, 156). When Hadas considers desire she asks: “What do we really want? What does God want us to want? . . . Not what I want, but what God wants me to [want], how things should really be.” One’s authentic will is not truly one’s own. Within these “self-divine” and “self-institution” relationships, activists experience themselves as passive, helpless, or stuck yet also as empowered to resist fervently and care skillfully for the sake of salvaging these same relationships.
Reluctant activists both deny and claim moral responsibility: Like Jonah, the Biblical prophet, they reluctantly respond to a divine duty, a moral obligation derived from a position of relative privilege. They blame others’ betrayal for their own raging crusade into the public sphere and its potential fallout. Like Biblical prophets rebuking kings, they clarify that they are God’s loyal emissaries and it is the authorities, not the activists, who strayed from the path and must repent for their moral failures. And yet, they remain painfully loyal and devoted to tradition and its broken institutions, and actively care about healing them.
Religious Reformers: Corrective Action, Moral Authority, and Agentive Ambivalence
While the following model also ties political agency to moral responsibility and religious duty, it is more collective in nature and emphasizes women’s willing appropriation of authority and representation. Agunah activists often speak of their political activism as religious reform, a collective duty to sanctify God’s name for the sake of the collective. According to Jewish tradition, it is God’s believers—as individuals and as a community—who are responsible for God’s moral image or its ruin, through their normative behavior. When a fellow Jew’s immoral public behavior desecrates God’s name, it becomes a religious duty to publicly denounce him. Moreover, the Talmud (Brakhot 19b) teaches that “anywhere there is a desecration of God’s name—no honor is accorded the Rabbi,” thus clarifying the hierarchy—God’s moral code trumps Rabbinic honor.
This conceptualization is reflected in a deeply spiritual confession by Tali, usually a no-nonsense politically minded Agunah activist:
I really believe in what I do, I really believe it’s a sanctification of God’s name . . . my activism makes me feel like a better human being, it gives meaning to my existence. This struggle . . . makes me feel more connected to God, because I have no doubt that this is a sanctification of God’s name. This is what God really wants us to do. I’m also strengthened by the women we help, and “one who saves one soul (nefesh) of Israel, it’s as if a whole world has been saved,” and it’s, really, what we do here every day is saving lives (nefashot).
In stark contrast with Rabbinic portrayals of Agunah activists as rebellious feminists who undermine and destroy religion, Tali tells a story of spiritual connection, recasting her political resistance as the holy work of sanctifying God’s name. Aligning herself with God confers her position with existential meaning and legitimacy, tying her piety to moral authority, self-fulfillment, empowerment, and social change. In other accounts, this life and death framing extends from saving individual women to reviving religion—offering a viable relevant cultural option that Israeli Jews will practice out of free choice and desire, not political coercion.
Activists’ arguments for religious reform, or corrective action, claim a disruption occurred in tradition’s transfer of moral authority. Lilach clarifies,
When I fight for this [Agunah] woman, it’s clear to me . . . that I’m doing what God wants me to do. . . . It’s just a little hard to explain [why] that’s not exactly what the Torah said. . . . As one [Modern-Orthodox] Rabbi told me: “We’re getting her out of this, now [smiles], the only question is how.”
In other words, once moral authority has been appropriated, the question becomes determining the legitimate means to achieve divine ends. Naama, for example, an accomplished professional from a prominent Rabbinic family, ponders what is appropriate and what she truly “wants”:
I feel like screaming; on the other hand, maybe that’s a desecration of God’s name. I don’t want . . . I as a religious woman, I do want there to be Rabbinic Courts. . . . [But] I feel that place has to be revolutionized. . . . As an Orthodox religious woman, I want this system, I believe in it, in its idea, in protecting the Jewish home, the family unit. . . . I want everyone’s . . . marriage to be according to the laws of Moses and Israel. I believe that’s what protects the people of Israel. . . . But we’re . . . doing this to ourselves. . . . This religious system . . . which today is actually a political [system, makes] you feel like throwing away this whole system, like, taking it, deconstructing it, and building it anew. That’s what I think needs to be done.
Naama’s piety does not negate criticizing politicized religion or promoting solutions like “revolutionizing” and “deconstructing” the “system.” Such explicit phrasings are unusual since Orthodox feminism generally reduces tension by self-identifying as internal reform or quiet revolution, yet Naama evokes the notion of “holy rebellion” (Ross 2003). Religion’s wrongful politicization activates her political resistance as she yearns for authentic, prepoliticized religion, a “restorative feminism” that envisions a “revolutionary” return to Judaism’s imagined past for the sake of the future (Hartman 2005). But, as a religious woman, she is equally entrenched in her Orthodox commitment to institutions that “protect the people of Israel” by “protecting the Jewish home.” She worries that a woman “screaming out” in public against religious authorities denotes immodesty and in-group betrayal, potentially “desecrating God’s name.”
This tension does not pit Naama against herself. These are “traces of multiple devotion” (Hartman and Buckholtz 2014, 9) reminiscent of Barvosa-Carter’s (2007) concept of “mestiza autonomy.” Naama’s multiple I-positions are constituted relationally, by “syncretic or hybrid sets of endorsements” (Barvosa-Carter 2007, 18). Her capacity for situational flexibility, self-reflection, and ambivalence inform, rather than inhibit, her political agency. Such moral deliberation is itself a form of political agency (Sevenhuijsen 2004).
Visionaries: Resisting as Belonging and Becoming Proud Pioneers
So far, modes of devoted resistance were closely linked to agency as reactive or corrective and therefore somewhat contingent upon, and limited by, dominant leaders, discourses, and institutions. This final section explores affirmative modes of devoted resistance, which go beyond “what is” towards new cultural alternatives. It is in a way a reclaiming of desire, through agentive capacities of imagination, becoming, and insistence on belonging.
On a collective level, Agunah activists envision an alternative articulation of religious leadership better suited for the future of the Jewish people in modern-day Israel. Activists’ narratives characterize the current dominant Rabbinic leadership as flawed, failing, silent, passive, slow, inefficient, rigid, apathetic, alienated, and fearful. Though not explicit, analysis of their self-representations shows how they embody the converse image, described as persistent, critical, dialogic, creative, mobile, attentive, flexible, active, courageous, hard-working, connected, collaborative, and empathic. Such alternative political agency, which draws heavily on relational capacities (being literally response-able), feminizes and democratizes the public sphere, redefining both its participants and character.
On an individual level, many activists’ narratives link self-expression and self-realization with claiming the religious and public sphere, thereby transforming conceptions of what can—and should—be. Sarah, a renowned activist, described “exiting” her home to grow her activism into local and subsequently national spheres, framed as her “expanded home.” She traced how gradually “becoming” an activist meant becoming a “somebody.” In a republican logic of civic contribution, she describes how by fully “realizing her potential capacities” and “taking responsibility” for the common good, she perceived herself in ways and spaces previously unimaginable for women. This enables her to “contribute to the Jewish people” and, she explains, to realize a Modern-Orthodox ideal of agency: “turning fate (goral) into destiny (ye’ud).”
Sarah’s answer regarding religious women becoming legitimate political actors is multilayered: She is a proud religious pioneer, devout and learned Torah scholar, nurturing mother, humble public servant, and modest dresser, who asserts women’s right to “human dignity.” Crediting her “success” to her “true” motivations, she takes pride in embodying the unimaginable, and culturally legitimizing and normalizing anomalies. She blurs and expands the boundaries of her private-public “home” to include her gendered activist-self and the Orthodox feminism she promotes. Sarah’s “becoming,” “in spite of the times” (Braidotti 2008), feminizes and transforms the worlds she inhabits. Earlier I noted some activists’ nostalgia for an imagined Jewish past, yet here the focus is on creating possible futures. Agunah activists echo Biblical prophets not only as critics but as visionaries of an idealized future. In this sense, political agency grows from an ability to “imagine ourselves otherwise” (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000).
Agunah activists’ belonging to Judaism/Orthodoxy is like longing for a home, marking not only where they came from but home as an “on-going project entailing a sense of hope for the future” (Hage [1997, 103] in Yuval-Davis 2011, 10). Penina summarizes this identity work succinctly: “I’m a feminist, an Orthodox feminist . . . I feel that I work for my soul . . . I work in things that touch . . . who I am.” Penina asserts membership not only as a prerequisite for Agunah activism but as its future intended result. When asked what sustains her activism during difficult times, Penina answered, “Because I’m still part of the Jewish people.” The logic being that as long as one is fighting with/against/for it, one remains connected. Indeed, belonging is articulated only when threatened (Yuval-Davis 2012). The Agunah issue is a stage upon which Penina practices and reifies both feminist and Orthodox belongings, and it is her political agency that fuses them.
In contrast to oppositional politics associated with rejection, distancing, and disconnection, devoted resistance creates and expresses connection and belonging. Employing logics of care, contribution, and response-ability, it is by their very resistance that some Agunah activists reify their belonging to Jewish tradition, the Jewish State, and Orthodoxy. This devotion legitimates their political and cultural claims regarding the desired identity and future direction of Judaism and the Israeli nation-state. Their agentive imaginative capacities help them realize themselves through resistance, belonging, and becoming, transforming the worlds they inhabit.
Conclusion
Qualitative analysis of Modern-Orthodox Agunah activists’ accounts, which attends to their culturally specific religious grammars, exposes the logics of their political agency and its transformative potential. I adopt Hartman and Buckholtz’s (2014) literary term “devoted resistance” and further develop its political and cultural implications. Devoted resistance clarifies how feminist activism may derive from religious commitment rather than its breach, how activists’ political agency is fashioned within relationship with religious institutions, communities, traditions, and divine will. I identify devoted resistance as devout subjects’ loyal dissent—arising from within culture, speaking critically in its name and for its sake. It is an insistent, active, embodied presence in the public sphere, articulating both connection and critique of domination and hegemonic discourse. Such political agency is mobilized and enabled by activists’ multiple religious/cultural, moral, and relational commitments, values, and skills—rendering their motivations, capacities, and ends, religious and relational.
I outline four (interlaced) stances of Agunah activists as political actors: Modest politicians refashion, negotiate, and reinterpret their desires and ensuing actions to be “modest,” more gender-appropriate and/or more pious, morally worthier. Reluctant activists accede to divine will or the duties of care, “activated” into willful resistance by hegemony’s betrayal. Religious reformers align themselves with the divine, thereby appropriating moral authority and representation of the common good, engaging in moral deliberations of appropriate desires and means. Finally, visionaries reclaim their desires and transformative imaginations, becoming response-able pioneers and creating, through their individual and collective self-determination, the home to which they (be)long. Thus, it is Agunah activists’ very connectedness that legitimates, delimits, and gives meaning and purpose to both their piety and critical feminist action, to some extent merging the two. Collectively, Agunah activists’ devoted resistance transforms power relations, negotiates cultural meanings, and challenges symbolic boundaries.
These conceptualizations both resonate with, and contest, current scholarship on religious women’s agency and/or activism in several ways, predominantly by blurring prevalent dichotomies. My findings suggest religious compliance is not always diametrically opposed to gender resistance. Religious schema enables—even requires—Agunah activists’ feminist resistance. Thus, I concur with Bucar (2011) that critique is not radically separate from a habituated skill, that dissent and obedience, enactment and resistance, may coincide.
Current literature on religious women’s activism focuses predominantly on women’s ability to interpret religious schema. I propose this linkage between political agency and negotiating cultural meanings derives from studying activism in the context of (reformist or revivalist) “intra-religious movements” (in my case, Agunah activism as part of Orthodox feminism). In this sense, most Agunah activists’ contextual interpretive approach falls comfortably into Rinaldo’s (2013) category of “pious critical agency.” However, by focusing on what enables them to enter the public sphere per se, my study exposes additional, more varied, capacities associated with “relational-autonomy” (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000), for example, care and duty, transformative imagination and embodied becoming, moral deliberation and ambivalence, claiming response-ability, authority, and belonging. Such relational agentive capacities, obscured by a liberal view, go mostly unexamined in scholarship on religious women’s activism.
Thinking of agency as action within relationship (Gergen 2009), and, I add, its interstices, is particularly useful for understanding negotiating multiple or intersectional endorsements. It also returns the scholarly focus to activists’ “self-institution” relations, highlighting collective goals: “creation of better institutions and non-patriarchal forms of state power” (Einspahr 2010, 16). For Agunah activists, this central relationship is both morally grounded in, and mobilized by, religious discursive tradition. It is experienced in embodied emotional ways, activating them and informing their pious identities, practices, and belongings. This suggests an overlooked link between women’s religious subjectivation—their being/becoming devout—and resistance, structure, and nondomination.
Furthermore, interpreting agency in its culturally specific grammar is crucial, since its accounting, or meaning-making, depends on what Gergen (2009) terms communal traditions of “co-action.” As demonstrated, feminist resistance rooted in Jewish/Orthodox grammars does not follow dichotomous models of liberal “free will” or religious “submission”; instead it follows divine will into resistance, echoing prophetic duties of care, critique, and re-vision.
Finally, I contend scholarship tends to frame the question as whether religious women “have” agency, implying an all-or-nothing conceptual model. Instead, I suggest adopting something along the lines of Mahmood’s (2005) “agentival capacity” or Meyers’s (2004) “agency as competency.” This furthers three important analytic goals: First, it highlights the wide range of agentive capacities religious women may employ. Second, it enables a more nuanced conversation about degrees of agency, whether temporal (as in Meyers’s notion of “episodic agency” [ibid.]) or situational (as in flexibly managing syncretic endorsements; see Barvosa-Carter 2007). Third, viewing agency as competency stresses structural aspects, i.e. the role of gendered culture in forging or inhibiting specific capacities, and in determining their culture-specific meanings and expressive forms. Thus, Judaism’s canonization of marginal characters’ dissenting voices bequeathed a legacy of “devoted resistance” (Hartman and Buckholtz 2014) that subsequently empowers modern activists to realize their political agency. For these reasons, a focus on agentive capacities, specific grammars, and relationality allows for more nuance and multiplicity in analyzing religious women activists’ agency within complex modern political structures.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Professor Tova Hartman, Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy, Gilly Hartal, and Noam Zion, as well as the anonymous reviewers and the journal’s editor-in-chief, Joya Misra, and editors of this special issue for their insightful comments on various drafts of this article. I wish to thank my wonderfully feminist husband Ehud for all his love, editing, and child care.
This article is part of my dissertation, written under the supervision of Professor Tova Hartman and generously supported by the Gazit-Globe fellowship, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.
Notes
Tanya Zion-Waldoks is a doctoral candidate at Bar-Ilan University’s Gender Studies Program. She studies religious women’s activism, specifically Agunah activism and Orthodox feminism in Israel, examining the crossroads of gender, social movements, religion, and politics. Her dissertation explores change in traditional contexts, and investigates interactions between activists’ identities and strategies.