The Surprising Lesson Israel Taught Me About Gender
When I was younger, I thought the religious divider between men and women was primitive. Living in Israel taught me otherwise.
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This is a guest essay by Leigh Hartzman, who moved from Canada to Israel 24 years ago and writes the newsletter, “Becoming Israeli.”
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I peered through the holes of the iron fence, just like I did when I was a little girl at the zoo, trying to catch a glimpse of the elephants. I remember pressing my face against the cold metal until my father lifted me up so I could see them in full view.
But today, I was not staring at elephants. I was trying to catch a glimpse of my son reading from the Torah on the bimah in the men’s section of the synagogue. I stood in the women’s section, a small area on the side, fenced off by an iron decorative divider.
Beside me stood Sivan, my best friend. Since I have no family in Israel, she has become my family. We stood there together, peering through the metalwork, searching for a way to be part of this milestone from behind the iron curtain. I could make out my son in a crisp white shirt and white kippah, standing with his father, both wearing tallit and reading with Rabbi Moyal, the spiritual leader of our village. It was a special moment for them: a bonding that I watched from afar.
As a modern woman raised in a secular society to believe that equality means being in every space a man occupies, this should have made me fume. In North America, Jewish life is a landscape of choice. Streams like Conservative and Reform Judaism are givens. They were built on the Enlightenment theory that if we are equal in life, we must be equal in prayer.
Much of the push to remove the divider, the mechitza in Hebrew, was driven by a desire for assimilation. Early Reformers in the 1800s wanted to prove they could be integrated citizens, so they adopted “family pews” to mirror the architecture of the Protestant churches of their neighbours. They believed that if the Jewish family was to survive in the modern world, it must worship together. The Conservative movement followed a century later, dismantling the divider to mirror the modern home, ensuring that the family remained the core of the spiritual experience.
But in Israel, outside the big cities or Anglo enclaves, those streams are fringe. In a village like ours, there is only “The Synagogue,” and it is Orthodox. This is partly because the Chief Rabbinate of Israel (the supreme Jewish religious authority) holds the legal script of the state, but it is also a deeply rooted cultural phenomenon. Many Israelis are secular, yet they still hold to the peculiar logic that the synagogue (which they mostly do not attend) should continue to be a traditional one. They want the original, ancient script preserved, even if they only choose to hear it once a year.
So, naturally, all the boys in my son’s class had their Bar Mitzvah in “The Synagogue.” You got to miss school Monday morning, throw candies at your buddy and, afterward, eat burekas and drink grape juice. My son wanted that communal experience, not to have his Canadian mother shlep him to one of the few Reform synagogues in Israel where his friends would not understand the traditions.
The Orthodox tradition prioritizes kavanah (intention), believing that separation protects the sanctity of prayer from the distractions of the opposite sex. It is an interpretation focused almost entirely on why separation is good for the men — or, at least, that is the only side of the conversation we are ever invited to hear. There is rarely a discussion in our secular world about why it might be good for the women.
I had never been in an Orthodox synagogue before I moved to Israel, except as a tourist in Poland, Hungary, and Portugal. I remember the beautiful balconies that overlooked the men’s section from a great height. I would imagine the women looking down, judging the men like God from above.
If I were still in my twenties, I would be a vocal feminist at this arrangement. But middle age has a way of shifting the light. Now, I imagine a Polish woman named Sonia, sitting in the balcony in 1935 with her teen daughters, feeling a secret sense of relief. For a couple of hours, she has a break from her husband’s long rants about the rising price of coal or the brewing political unrest in Warsaw. She has a break from his complaints about her dry honey cake or his cross-examinations about why she needs to buy so many stockings. Finally, she has quiet. Finally, she has quality time with her daughters and her God.
After living through marriage, career reinventions, and a divorce, I laugh at what modern Western society taught us about relationships. For most of human history, marriage was a functional, communal arrangement. It was about land, lineage, and survival. It was never about friendship or finding a “best friend” until recent modern times.
But as we became equal in the public sphere and the dividers came down, culture taught us that we must also find an equal and total partner. As the relationship expert Esther Perel often notes, we are now conditioned to seek a spouse who serves as our soulmate, lover, and psychologist all at once. This modern message places an impossible burden on a single human connection. It suggests that if we are not doing everything together, we are somehow failing at the “togetherness” we were promised.
Two years after my eldest son’s Bar Mitzvah, I stood behind that same iron fence for my twins’ B’nei Mitzvah. Sivan was there by my side again. But the world outside had changed. It was October 30, 2023, just weeks after the single-worst day in the State of Israel’s history.
In Israel, we have learned that separation isn’t just a religious choice; it is a survival strategy. As modern and Western as today’s Israeli society is, when it comes to life and death, we return to these “archaic” divisions. When war breaks out, the dream of “sharing everything” evaporates. The men suit up for reserve duty, and the women stay behind to hold the world together. The mechitza is, in many ways, a blueprint that is still very present, illustrating the way war eventually cleaves an Israeli family.
A week before their B’nei Mitzvah, the twins were supposed to meet Rabbi Moyal at his small home synagogue to learn how to put on tefillin. But the Rabbi was running late and said he must reschedule. Shortly after, rocket sirens blared that Tuesday afternoon. We ran for our bomb shelter, and the four of us and the dog huddled in silence. We waited for the familiar echo of the Iron Dome: the distant thud that usually signals safety.
But this time, there was only a roar. A crash of total destruction followed, a sound that felt like the world was splitting open. It was a violent sound that vibrated through our teeth and shook the very foundation of the shelter. A rocket had hit the Rabbi’s home, including the synagogue. The only things that weren’t destroyed by the blast were the Torah scrolls.
Because the Rabbi was running late, he was alive. Because he was running late, my sons were alive. I’m still trying to parse the difference between a “late appointment” and a miracle. I realize that I no longer have the Western luxury of being certain about either.
Sivan and I peered through the iron fence, our arms around each other. I watched my sons, their father, and the Rabbi ascend to the Torah, everyone safe and in one piece. The men were on the bimah, carrying the weight of the scrolls, just as they would one day carry the weight of ceramic vests and rifles.
We were on the other side, but I felt strangely where I should be. Maybe Judaism is onto something. Maybe division isn’t so bad after all in certain circumstances. Maybe we are meant to do things separately sometimes, to hold different ends of the same life. I was crying and I was divided, but I was exactly where I belonged. How wonderful and insanely complicated Israeli society is — such a convergence of ancient and modern everywhere you turn.
A beautiful essay. May your sons grow strong and may they somehow never know war. Somehow.
Very well-explained. I can relate as a former feminist, now with a change of perspective. I am also from Canada, living in Israel for 34 years.