INTRODUCTION
Contested sacred sites, over which different religious groups assert claims to exclusivity, have drawn scholarly attention to the interaction between religion and politics in and over space. Religious studies scholars, geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists have extensively theorized about the ways in which space functions to produce new or renewed religious (and religious-political) identities in conflict and vice versa — the ways such identity-processes transform the meaning and significance of space. However, the gendered dimensions of inter-communal religious-political disputes over sacred space, and women's roles in these site-specific conflicts, have been largely neglected.
This neglect is startling for two reasons. First, contested sacred sites are almost universally gendered. Their very sacredness is often entangled in a gendered division of roles, practices, bodily presentations, and of space. The contours and makeup of such divisions are not universal but their various permutations, including those that seek to break down strict gender roles and practices, are inherently gendered. As Doreen Massey explains, when we think of space, we must bear in mind that “[p]articular ways of thinking about space and place are tied up with, both directly and indirectly, particular social constructions of gender” (Massey Reference Massey1994, 2). Second, the discourse and practice of both the political and religious actors involved in contestation are, again, highly gendered. To paraphrase Verta Taylor, whether or not women actually participate in such contestations — and they often do — “gender dualist metaphors supply the cultural symbols” that all actors in these conflicts “use to identify their commonalities, draw boundaries between themselves and their opponents, and legitimate and motivate collective action” (Taylor Reference Taylor1999, 21). This article argues that a gender analysis of contested sacred places can enrich and sharpen both our description of the “choreographies” of such sites, and our analytical understanding of the contemporary dynamics of conflict in these sites; in particular the processes that give rise to the problem of “indivisibility.” Using a case study of Orthodox Jewish women's activism for access to Temple Mount/al-Haram al-Sharif, this article demonstrates how attention to gender and to women's engagement in inter-communal conflict over sacred places can illuminate unique intra-communal processes that aim to make a contested sacred site increasingly indivisible for parties to the conflict.
SITUATING THE ARGUMENT: INTERDISCIPLINARY CONVERSATION
We can roughly divide the current literature on contested sacred places into two approaches. One is largely based in political science and strives for generalizable theory. The second is interdisciplinary — spanning religious studies, geography, anthropology, sociology, and history — and is more descriptive, aiming to chart the “choreography” of shared/contested sacred sites. The latter, by its nature, includes more attention to some gendered aspects of religious sites and to women's religious practice, while the former largely sidesteps it. In both instances, however, analyses of the gendered dynamics of inter-religious conflict are missing.
In political science, contestations over sacred sites have been examined through the prism of the problem of “indivisibility” (Hassner Reference Hassner2009). Much of the political science literature has attempted to investigate the reasons why certain goods come to be seen as indivisible. These point to either particular characteristics or histories of certain goods that make them seem indivisible (Hassner Reference Hassner2003; Hensel and Mitchell Reference Hensel and McLaughlin Mitchell2005; Toft Reference Toft2005) or to the process by which political actors bargain over these goods (Fearon Reference Fearon1995; Goddard Reference Goddard2006; Reference Goddard2009). While different, these two approaches nevertheless share a common feature. They each tend to focus on actors that are exclusively male, or that are assumed to be male, and conceive of processes as un-gendered.
The interdisciplinary literature, on the other hand, focuses on the “choreographies” of specific sacred sites. It addresses the dynamic dance, or evolving relationship, of various actors around these sites that run a fluid and changing spectrum between sharing, coexistence, toleration, antagonism, and contestation. Being more descriptive, this literature is more attuned to ways in which sacred sites are experienced and constructed by a wide array of actors, both elite and grassroots, and how politics, religion, and the everyday are enmeshed in such places (Barkan and Barkey Reference Barkan and Barkey2014; Breger, Reiter, and Hammer Reference Breger, Reiter and Hammer2009). The careful ethnographies and histories of specific sacred sites in this tradition, therefore, often acknowledge the gendered aspects of these spaces, whether in terms of these sites’ identity (who or what is worshiped) and visitors’ practices (who worships and in what way) (for just a few examples: Bowman Reference Bowman2012; Carmichael et al. Reference Carmichael, Hubert, Reeves and Schanche2013; Dubisch Reference Dubisch1995; Rountree Reference Rountree2002; Reference Rountree2006; Stadler and Luz Reference Stadler and Luz2014).
In particular, drawing on insight from feminist theory and feminist geography (Massey Reference Massey1994; McDowell Reference McDowell1999), some of these studies have explored the gendered ways in which space is divided, inhabited and interpreted, paying attention to public/private aspects of sacred space, embodiment, women's compliance with and contestation of particular practices, and to gendered symbols and meanings attached to these sites. Another, related set of writings has grappled with transformations in women's access to religious spaces, authority, and texts, and their explicit or subtle contestation of existing gendered divisions in mosques, synagogues, churches, temples, as well as various clerical hierarchies or institutions of religious learning (Agadjanian Reference Agadjanian2015; Bano and Kalmbach Reference Bano and Kalmbach2011; El-Or and Watzman Reference El-Or and Watzman2002; Falah and Nagel Reference Falah and Rose Nagel2005; Grossman and Haut Reference Grossman, Haut, Grossman and Huat1992; Katz Reference Katz2014; Morin Reference Morin2007; Prickett Reference Prickett2014; Zion-Waldoks Reference Zion-Waldoks2015).
However, a sort of division of labor between the two sets of literatures — from political science on the one hand, and from an interdisciplinary angle on the other — has prevented insight on the gendered dynamics of sacred spaces to be included in the task of generalizable theory about inter-communal contestation of sacred places. The political science research tends to focus only on male religious and political actors because of their clear visibility in public discourse and the academic literature. The interdisciplinary scholarship, when explicitly addressing both gender and women's practice, has rarely looked at how women participate in inter-communal conflict in sacred sites. Inadvertently, this could give the false impression that women's worship is characterized more by syncretism, sharing and coexistence among different groups, and less by inter-communal contestation and religious-political conflict. The commendable feminist commitment of much of this literature has focused its interest on women's adherence, resistance, or negotiation of patriarchal practices (Sered Reference Sered1986). Its attention to intra-communal gendered contestations, however, has not been marshaled to shed light on inter-communal conflict. Drawing on the strengths of the two literatures and bringing them in closer conversation with each other, I hope to show how gendered processes link the intra-communal with the inter-communal.
Specifically, I show how women uniquely participate in the current production of a particular sacred space as one that cannot and should not be divided. I argue that women's activism, and the symbolic deployment of gender more generally, operate in two ways: First, the removal of intra-community divisions, and second, the domestication of the holy. To make a contested sacred place increasingly indivisible in the inter-communal context, women activists work to dismantle various intra-community, largely Orthodox-motivated divisions. Divisions between men and women through spatial segregation and role differentiation, divisions between women (married and unmarried, young and old, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi, diasporic or native) through ritual practice, divisions between private and public life, and perhaps most importantly, divisions between the religious and the secular in emotional attachment and preoccupation with the site. These efforts aim to elevate the centrality of the place in the consciousness of their wider communities, bringing in new constituencies that were formally excluded from the site and thus making the potential of dividing it, or the preservation of its current divided state, increasingly more difficult.
The work of domestication furthers this cause of enhanced centrality through attachment by transforming the apparent nature of inter-communal contestation in the site. Women intentionally strive to transform the conflict from one dominated by exclusive practices dictated by religious zealots, to an arena that is also characterized by women's intimacy, closeness to (as opposed to fearful distance from) the holy, everyday activity for children and families, personal moments and celebrations, docility and inclusion. Women labor to change the issue from one championed solely by actors considered “extreme” or religious virtuosi, to one that is increasingly “mainstream.” But by moving the cause of the struggle over the site from a fringe or radical preoccupation to a mainstream attachment, women activists hope to contribute to the entrenchment of the conflict and strengthen the position that militates against division or egalitarian sharing of space.
THE SITE(S): AL-HARAM AL-SHARIF/TEMPLE MOUNT AND THE WESTERN WALL
Since the year 2000 and the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada, tensions over Jerusalem's “sacred esplanade” have again come to dominate the discourse of religious and political actors. Encompassing the Dome of the Rock, the Al-Aqsa Mosque, and abutted by the Western Wall, the area has been one of the thorniest issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and has had a revival of sorts with the increasingly religious tone that has come to characterize the discourse of both parties to the conflict. While this article focuses on the gendered dynamics of the current iteration of contestation, a glance back is in order. In 1929, in what historian Hillel Cohen has dubbed “Year Zero” of the Arab-Israeli conflict, violence between the Arab population of mandatory Palestinian and Jewish residents and immigrants swept the land. In Jerusalem, the catalyst for tension around the Western Wall area — holy to both Jews and Muslims — “was the erection of a screen on the pavement that would separate Jewish male and female worshippers,” which the Jewish community repeatedly attempted since the turn of the century (Dumper Reference Dumper2002, 77). Historians writing about these events have observed that attempts to install a screen, meant on the face of it simply to separate Jewish women from Jewish men in prayer in accordance with a particular Orthodox practice, implicitly conveyed (whether intentionally or not) — and indeed were perceived as such by the Arabs — as an attempt to assert control and dominance of the shared Jewish-Muslim space (Charme Reference Charme2005; Mattar Reference Mattar1983). Regardless of actual political sovereignty, which at the time was in the hands of the British Mandate, both parties to the conflict seemed to have assumed that the group that gets to dictate the gendered division of space would also be the group that gets to symbolically claim ownership of that space.
Today, gendered separation at the site of the Western Wall is at the heart of an entirely different conflict. Jewish women of Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, and secular strands, organized under the title of Women of the Wall (WoW), are currently contesting the limitation on what women are allowed to do at the area to which they are confined. They demand to read from a Torah scroll and lead public prayer, and have been repeatedly arrested by the police and criticized by the Orthodox administration of the site.
Other women, espousing more conservative Jewish or Muslim religious-politics, take a vastly different approach to the feminism of Women of the Wall. Orthodox Muslim women activist for Al-Aqsa, called murabitat, deny any claim by Jews to worship at any part of the esplanade, from the Haram al-Sharif area to the Western Wall. These are strictly Muslim religious sites, they argue, and Jewish religious claims to hold these places sacred are a fraud. Women for the Temple, an Orthodox Jewish movement that seeks to hasten the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple on Temple Mount al-Haram al-Sharif and who engages in ascent to the site and in advocacy, expresses an ambivalent view of Women of the Wall. Some of them argue that though WoW's challenge of Orthodox gendered traditions is misguided, WoW's emotional bond and connection to the holy site and their presence there help strengthen the “centrality” of the whole area of the sacred esplanade by raising Jewish consciousness about its importance. Others, however, criticize not WoW's feminism, but rather their focus on the Western Wall, which some Temple activists see as a space devoid of “central” religious significance in comparison to Temple Mount. They see the Western Wall as a synagogue like any other, and are dismayed by Jewish acquiescence to worship at the site in lieu of Temple Mount, which has been left for exclusive Muslim worship.
Even this brief description gives us a sense of the dizzying engagement of women in contestation over this sacred space that has been so central to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the layered gendered dynamics and debates over this space. Given this fact, it is quite surprising that little discussion about the gendered nature of inter-communal contestations of this contested sacred space has been included in the enormously voluminous literature on this topic.Footnote 1 In what follows, I present a case study of Women for the Temple — as part of a larger project I am working on that also includes the two other women's movements mentioned above — to outline some of the insight a gender lens could provide us for the analysis of processes that give rise to indivisibility in contested sacred sites. The materials presented here were collected from several sources. First, I contacted leading activists, some formally affiliated with Women for the Temple and others who work independently but coordinate with the group. With their permission, I conducted ethnographic participant-observations in six women-focused events in the summer of 2015, each lasting between three to five hours.Footnote 2 These included guided Temple Mount ascents, guided Temple themed tours, ritual exercises, and a short course. Second, I reviewed literature for women collected from the activists I met, from the group's website, and from other Temple related organizations. Finally, I reviewed videos of eight women-focused seminars by Women for the Temple, each lasting between 40 minutes to two hours.
THE SHIFTING GENDERED TERRAIN
In 1967, as a result of the Six-Day War, Israel came to occupy the Old City of Jerusalem, which from 1948 was under Jordanian control. In order to avoid additional turmoil, Israel immediately handed back the management of the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount site to the Islamic Waqf and established what has been called since the “status quo.”Footnote 3 The Haram area would be de facto (if not de jure) a place of worship exclusively for Muslims while Jews and others could visit, but only as tourists. Below the Mount, the Magharib neighborhood was demolished and a plaza was constructed in its place next to the Western Wall area, which became a de facto exclusive site for Jewish worship. This division of space prevented additional conflict and was generally agreed to by religious authorities on both sides. Israel's chief Rabbinate, in accordance with the historical opinion of Orthodox rabbis, determined that it was halachically forbidden for Jews to pray at Temple Mount. Their rationale, motivated by a mixture of religious and political considerations, was that Jews who ascend to the Mount could inadvertently desecrate the holy spaces within it due to halachic problems of the purity or impurity of Jewish ascenders entering the holiest of places (Cohen Reference Cohen1999).
In the 1970s and 1980s, however, radical activists from the Jewish settler movement camp began to intensify their contestation of this halachic ruling and argue for Jewish ascent to the Mount and for prayer there. For them, it was imperative to reclaim the holiest of Jewish sites in preparation for the rebuilding of the Temple. Defying even the opinion of the settler movement's spiritual guides, Rabbi Avraham Yitzchak HaCohen Kook (1865–1935) and his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982), a growing number of activists and rabbis issued halachic interpretations that permitted and encouraged ascent to the Mount.Footnote 4 The ideology and actions of the various groups involved in this new form of contestation of the site have been meticulously documented in the academic literature (Ariel Reference Ariel2001; Dumper Reference Dumper2002; Gonen Reference Gonen2003; Gorenberg Reference Gorenberg2002; Inbari Reference Inbari2007; Reference Inbari2012; Leppäkari Reference Leppäkari2014).
As much attention as these activists garnered from scholars of “fundamentalism,” they remained for a long time, up until the 2000s, at the fringes of Israeli public opinion. The question of political sovereignty over the site remained, of course, highly contested with both Israeli and Palestinian political leaderships reluctant to relinquish their claim. However, on the question of the religious arrangement at the site, the activists for Jewish ascent, prayer, and eventual construction of the Temple, failed to elicit much support from most Israelis. The reasons for this are plainly visible when reviewing the literature on these groups. Largely, they are described as fanatics, extremists, irrational zealots, prone to apocalyptic violence, and most often sporting the kind of bearded look — including occasionally even arms or explosives — that has become a cliché of the modern “fundamentalist” of all strides in the Middle East. These profiles are clearly gendered, they describe exclusively men, and the literature addresses only male actors. The limited appeal of these activists among mainstream Israelis is inseparably connected to the image of the devious and violent (male) messianic fanatic.
In the 21st century, however, there has been a shift in Jewish Israeli public opinion on the question of worship at the site. A 2013 survey, for instance, found that 59% of respondents, including both religious and secular Israeli Jews, stated that Israel should permit Jewish prayer at Temple Mount.Footnote 5 In a 2015 survey, 80% of respondents supported the facilitation of Jewish prayer there through various arrangements (either through unlimited access, temporal or physical division of the site between Muslims or Jews, or just on special religious occasions).Footnote 6 In the 2013 survey, 30% supported the building of the Temple on the site, while 45% objected to this idea and 25% said they “don't know.” Ultra-Orthodox respondents in both surveys tended to be most against Jewish prayer at the site, while religious-Zionist (datiyym leumiyym) and secular respondents both showed similar degrees of support. Surveys, of course, could be quite unreliable. While right-wing outlets find majority support for Jewish prayer, the more left-leaning Peace Index has have found in a 2014 survey that 56% of Israeli Jews support the continuation of the status quo at the site. But even Peace Index reflected a growing dissatisfaction of respondents with the status quo, showing that many Orthodox, traditional and secular Israeli Jews support a change to the status quo to enable prayer (49%, 46.5%, and 44%, respectively).Footnote 7 Visits to Temple Mount by Israeli Jews have also risen markedly. According to Israeli police data, in 2009 there were 5,658 Israeli Jews ascenders to the site (this figure refers to ascenders with a religious purpose, as opposed to simply Israeli Jews and non-Israelis who visit strictly as tourists). By 2016, 14,054 Jewish ascenders visited the site.Footnote 8
The slow shift from fringe to mainstream of the importance of Jewish prayer at Temple Mount has also been characterized by a shift in the emphases of the activists working on this issue, and in their gendered composition and discourse. Since 2000, Women for the Temple, alongside other female activists, have worked to paint the struggle in softer and less threatening colors. Instead of the fanatics of the Jewish Underground who wanted to blow up the Dome of the Rock, these women say they want to ascend to the Mount ostensibly in the name of religious freedom, sharing, openness, and closeness to the divine. They say that they do not wish to provoke Muslims or the Israeli police, but simply to mark their wedding day, their daughter's bat mitzvah, or for personal prayer. They present their ascent as a negotiation between the unique experience of the holy and the mundane routine of life and weekly visits. While many ultra-Orthodox and Orthodox rabbis still forbid ascent out of what they consider respect for the awe, fear and distance one should maintain from the holy, the women speak of closeness, intimacy, and desire toward the holy, that women are uniquely positioned to feel. In this way, they strive to domesticate the space as well as the debate around it, packaging it as less intimidating and explosive to the general Israeli public. In the course of this process, they also reconfigure the space from one that is divided and separate, to one that is united and ultimately indivisible.
INTRA-COMMUNAL DIVISIONS
In the mid-2000s, discussions of women's roles in Temple activism among activists committed to the cause upheld a division of labor. According to Yonit, an energetic activist in her mid-30s, the idea the women promoted at the time was that men should focus on men's work — for example training Cohanim (priests), researching and elaborating on aspects of Jewish law pertaining to Temple Mount ascents and to Temple reconstruction, and on political, legal and advocacy work. Women, they hoped, would focus on women's “traditional” work for the Temple, for example the sewing, weaving, and dying of the priests’ clothes or the parochet, the ark's curtain, and other handicrafts. Yonit told me, however, that there were very few women at the time that proved talented in these fields, while a large number of them were excellent in event organizing, public relations, outreach, tour guiding, coordination, public speaking, political lobbying, teaching, and religious guidance. Given this reality, the division of labor was not sustainable and each activist began to contribute according to her talent. Yonit, for example, established an online forum and an e-mail list, and started guiding groups in monthly ascents.
Women's organizational capacities were evident in a Shavuot event in which I participated during 2015 that was dubbed a “targil” or “tirgul” (exercise) for the celebration of the holiday in the Temple, attended by about 200 participants. Cohanim or priests dressed in white robes and head-clothes, a choir of Levites (Temple servants), and a row of rabbis, occupied center stage in the proceedings. However, behind the main action, it was clear who was running the show. The group of Women for the Temple arranged the food, the ceremonial offerings, and the props and details of the scene meant to re-enact the scene at the Temple. They constantly instructed all male participants, told them where to stand or sit, what to do next, and even berated them when they were not following their script or when they got distracted. If the men were the lead actors, it was plain to see that the women activists were the authoritative directors.
Nevertheless, much of the women's work today does target women and women's issues as they relate to the Temple. The Women for the Temple organization, which is made up of a core of 25 dedicated activists, and an additional circle of 100 women involved in different capacities, runs courses and lectures mainly for women on a variety of topics. The women's ages span from late 20s to 60s, most of them born in Israel but also include some who emigrated from the United States and elsewhere, they are largely Ashkenazi although a few key activists hail from Mizrahi families. Their official mission, as they articulate it, is to: “strengthen the connection to Temple Mt. and the awareness of the Temple's absence in the public and private lives of the People of Israel, raising Temple Mt.-awareness among women specifically, and among the People of Israel in general.” The organization focuses on women through arranging monthly ascents “according to the strictest halachic rules and with qualified male and female guides,” as well as “training of female halachic guides and consultants for Temple Mt. issues.” They also recently started to arrange special ascents for brides and for bat mitzvah girls.Footnote 9 This targeting of women, while appearing to encourage sex-segregation and division of labor, is interesting in its contents, which often defy segregation and break several forms of gender based divisions including in roles, space, bodily preparation, motivation, and finally, divisions between the religious and the secular.
Division of Roles
As an illustration, I want to bring here excerpts from a training class for women Temple Mount guides by Women for the Temple. Lectures on women's biblical/mythical role at the Temple elaborate on the fact that women participated in the preparation and construction of the Tabernacle (mishkan) and the Temple alongside men. These tasks were not a male duty, but rested with the entire People. In her lesson in which she used a PowerPoint presentation with models and paintings of the Second Temple made by a female artist, Zipora Piltz one of the founders of the group, explained, “We will not be priests and Levites (Temple servants) and will not light the menorah and the incense [as these roles are exclusively male]. What will we do then? There are issues that pertain to women in the Temple and we can focus on that when we guide [Temple Mt. ascents] … Men absolutely never talk about it, so when a woman guides women, we can offer this angle.” When guiding women's group, the focus, she said, should start with women's biblical role. Zipora explained, “to speak about women of the salvation generation of our day [today], we go back to women of the salvation generation in Egypt. In the famous midrash (rabbinic interpretation of biblical text) that talks about women's contribution to the Tabernacle, it says that they came first and donated their mirrors (mar'ot ha-tzov'ot):”
They were the first who came forward. The midrash states that the women of Israel had mirrors with which they would beautify themselves, and these were the same mirrors they used in Egypt [to make themselves attractive] for the men to continue procreation. “But Moses rejected them” [the mirrors — because they were made for temptation, to inspire lustful thoughts]. On the face of it it's a profane thing (davar shel khol), it doesn't make sense to bring it for a sacred thing. Hakadosh baruch hu (God) said to him, “Accept [them], for these are more precious to Me than anything, because through them the women set up many legions in Egypt [i.e., the children they gave birth to, when the men were despondent and did not want to procreate due to persecution].”
Women were not only the ones to come forward first for the cause of the Tabernacle, they also held a higher moral standard than the men of their generation, according to this teaching. While men were led astray, building the idol of the golden calf and wavering in their commitment to conquering the Holy Land, women remained steadfast. Zipora explained, “… Women did not take part in the golden calf sin, and also did not take part in the spies’ sin (khet hameraglim) … [Women] … had a special connection to the Land … And the holiest place in the Land is the place of the Temple. Already here we see a connection, a thread that connects the women to the Temple.”
Stressing what they see as women's biblical role in the building of the Tabernacle and in the biblical reclamation of the Holy Land, women activists work to recruit women to the contemporary contestation. In the halachic resources they provide for interested activists and the general public, Women for the Temple offer scholarly essays that elaborate on women's duty or mitzvah to build the Temple, alongside men, drawing on this biblical history of participation as they understand it.Footnote 10 While not contesting the monopoly of men as priests and Levites in the past and future Temples, the goal of the narrative they provide is to emphasize that the work for the Temple is not a male domain. Women set a biblical role model of activism that was even greater than that of men, and women today, activists instruct, must emulate their foremothers.
Division of Space
Most contemporary Orthodox synagogues have separate spaces for women and men in their services. The rationale for the separate women's section, called ‘ezrat nashim draws among other things on the gender separation in the Jerusalem Temple. Today when answering women's questioning of this segregation, community leaders and rabbis often provide an uncomplicated “this is the model of worship in the Temple,” or offer the more nuanced answer that the tradition maintains that separation existed during certain celebrations at the Temple (Joseph Reference Joseph, Grossman and Huat1992). Women activists for the Temple cause, however, stress the opposite — the lack of regular gender segregation in the Temple. Here again is Zipora's lesson. She addressed for the women attending her lecture the topic she titled, “Knowing the ‘ezrat nashim [women's court] in the Temple.” Using a model of the Second Temple, she explained, “The women's court did not exist in the Tabernacle and most of the period of the first Temple. Only in the last period of the first Temple, and in the second Temple, there was a very large women's court.” She went on to explain that, “The women's court was the main court. Anyone who was not a priest and came to pray at the Temple would enter here, to the women's court, that is were they would pray.”
An important element of the guidance for women on Temple affairs is the absence of the kind of sex segregation that exists in the Orthodox synagogue. Zipora elaborated to her audience that, “We know the term ‘ezrat nashim from the synagogue. We have an ‘ezra there that only women enter, and only men enter the men's ‘ezra. Was this the way things were in the Temple? The answer, it turns out, is no.” She provided an extensive account, without citing sources or allowing for textual and historiographical debate on the matter, of the nature and evolution of occasional segregation in the women's court. Yet, it was crucial for Zipora to stress that the separation was temporary rather than routine. She said, “But it's important to note that women were upstairs on [one or two special celebrations], because these were large, one-time events and the women would come with the babies and their [milk] formula and the bamba [contemporary Israeli children's snack] and everything. But normally women were downstairs with the men. What would things be like in the Third Temple in terms of sex-segregation? We will have to wait and see.”
Describing Temple practice as more egalitarian and shared than the contemporary Orthodox synagogues the women attend, which activists stress in their various activities, helps to inculcate women's sense of ownership over the space of Temple Mount today. The activists participate in an observation that gender relations are not static but rather vary over space/time (Massey Reference Massey1994). They mobilize an alternate construction of these relations in this particular space but in a different time (the first and second Temple in the past, the re-built Temple of the future) to create particular opportunities for women in the present. This formulation enhances their claim to authority to guide and teach groups at the site, including mixed groups of men and women, in defiance of the opinion of some rabbis. It also strengthens their argument that the Temple issue is and should be a women's concern as much as it is men's. In this way, they make the site a less exclusive and divided space, and transform it into an indivisible place that has room for all members of the People of Israel, men and women. The mythical narrative about the Temple that they employ and the textual sources they use resonate with the scholarly feminist literature on this topic (Grossman Reference Grossman, Grossman and Huat1992). Moreover, their move to dismantle gender segregation as a strategy for communal unity is also reminiscent of feminist arguments (Hartman and Marmon Reference Hartman and Marmon2004; Israel-Cohen Reference Israel-Cohen2012). To give one example, in critiquing contemporary Orthodox rabbinical insistence on segregation in the synagogue, the feminist scholar Norma Baumel Joseph connects between sex segregation and divisions within the Jewish community. She writes, in reference to the mekhitza (partition barrier in the synagogue): “The great divide stands … Separating men from women, elite from ordinary and Orthodox Jews from Conservative and Reform Jews” (Joseph Reference Joseph, Grossman and Huat1992, 131). By emphasizing the absence of barrier between the sexes except for on one special occasion, Women for the Temple also hope to facilitate the removal of barriers between various Jewish communities that could prevent them from adopting in unison the cause of Temple Mount.
Division of the Body
Women who are Temple Mount ascent guides and advocates instruct the groups they lead that visits to the Mount require the purification of the body through ritual immersion in a mikveh (ritual bath) for both men and women. In this respect, the bodily purification requirement is put on both men and women, although men and women have variations in bodily states that are relevant for purity purposes (for example, menstruation, breastfeeding, the presence of semen, etc.) The mainstream Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox rabbinical establishment disagrees with the women's interpretation and asserts that today the Temple requirements of purity cannot be met and therefore ascent should be avoided.
But even among those religious authorities that permit ascent, women's ascent presents several problems and many of them therefore advise that women should not ascend. Even Rabbi Shlomo Goren, the Israel Defense Force's chief rabbi in 1967 and a pioneering advocate of Jewish prayer at Temple Mount writes in his monumental tome on the matter that women should pray at the Western Wall while men who have purified themselves can pray on the Mount. He argues that, “married and unmarried women's ascent to Temple Mt. entails complicated halachic problems [pertaining to ritual purity] and for them the Western Wall remains an uncontested place for prayer” (Goren Reference Goren2004, 28; Inbari Reference Inbari2007, 37). Rabbi Dov Lior, another prominent supporter of Jewish ascent, writes: “Immersion and purification for women are complicated, therefore today in my opinion there's no ichsher dara [wholesale permission] for women to ascend … Therefore, any woman who cares about the sanctity of the place for now should avoid ascending …”Footnote 11
Yet women's advocacy has helped persuade many rabbis to permit women's ascent on the condition of ritual immersion. Still, mikveh immersion presents a challenge to women.Footnote 12 In Israel the hegemonic opinion of the rabbinical establishment is that women who are not married should not be allowed ritual immersion in the mikveh. This is because such purification, they say, could lead to fornication (women must purify in the mikveh after menstruation before engaging in sexual relations with their husbands). Religious feminist organizations such as Kolech have led a campaign against this prohibition.Footnote 13 In a surprising alliance, some of the most stringent of settlement rabbis, including from the ultra-Orthodox Zionist camp (hardalim), and women activists for the Temple (many of whom generally opposed to feminist discourses) have endorsed this cause as well (the rabbis mostly privately and on an individual basis, while the women publicly and wholesale). They advocate an inclusive practice to lift Orthodox divisions in treatment of married and unmarried women in this case, because without ritual immersion religious women who are single cannot ascend to Temple Mount. Several of Women for the Temple offer detailed halachic advice on the matter of tevila (immersion in the mikveh), and some go even further. A few of my interlocutors have confided that they have lied to balaniyot (mikveh attendants), pretending to be married even if they were not, in order to be allowed to perform ritual immersion.
Division between the Religious and the Secular
The women activists welcome Jewish visitors to Temple Mount that are not religious. Whether these are individuals or groups that request to join their guided visits, or whether the police adds a few individuals to the women's group to reduce the number of escorts, activists say they are happy to guide these secular visitors. Here another difference between the women activists’ approach and the approach of rabbis who permit ascent is evident. In a public letter of support for ascent, more than 50 religious Zionist rabbis assert: “We must strive to reduce the unfortunate phenomenon of Jews and non-Jews who ascend without observance of halachic requirements [of ritual purity through immersion] out of ignorance or God forbid out of disregard. And of course we must not encourage ascent when we know the ascenders have not met the halachic requirements pertaining to the holiness of Temple Mt.”Footnote 14 The women, however, have a different take on this matter.
In a lesson by Rabbanit Rivka Shimon, for example, she explained that she does not inquire about whether or not these secular participants have gone to the mikveh as is required before their ascent. Those who contact her beforehand receive detailed guidance on tevilah, but when secular persons join the visit, she says, “I am not going to ask them [the secular visitors] if they immersed or not. This is the first time I am meeting them and I am not going to impose my opinions on them … It might even be better that they ascend in ignorance. If they didn't ask you about tevilah they don't know, they sin out of ignorance rather than intentionally.” A woman in the lecture offered, “maybe it is better not to meticulously check the visitors, we have to first bring them closer to the issue [of Temple Mt.].” Rabbanit Rivka agreed, though explained that those who do inquire about this matter should receive the necessary guidance. She added, “When [secular] people join us we need to remember to be humble and accommodating. Whomever God occasioned to ascend with me, it doesn't matter, it is probably because God wants to teach me something [about humility] or teach her [the secular] something.”
By lifting halachic restrictions, or at least suspending them temporarily in this way, women activists work to expand the ranks of those concerned about Temple Mount from a religious fringe to mainstream Israeli society. They aim to break down the existing divisions between the religious and the secular, as well as between different strands of Judaism. The women I interviewed take pride in the fact that they lead and instruct a variety of audiences — Orthodox, traditional (masorti), secular, and even ultra-Orthodox. Enmeshing religion and nationalism, they strive to recruit the entire nation, including its secular community, to the cause of the sacred site. The main idea here is to expand coalitions, and one of the strategies is to remain to the extent possible politically ambiguous. As Yael Kaviliyo, the current director of Women for the Temple, explains, they “don't get into the politic. We don't want to be affiliated. We don't want to color ourselves or define ourselves. I feel this will alienate (yarkhik) people. It will not help us or advance us. That is why we do not identify with a particular political party.”
DOMESTICATING THE HOLY
Distance vs. Closeness and Intimacy
In an analysis of the historical evolution of Temple Mount activism, the religious studies scholar Tomer Persico has explained that alongside questions of purity and defilement, the Orthodox rabbinical establishment maintained a disposition of awe-inspired distance from the sacred site. He writes, “It is clear that on the level of principle, sacredness demands distance rather than closeness. The sacred object is the one that is forbidden to use, that is fenced off, excluded. Reverence (yir'at kodesh, literally ‘fear of the sacred’) instructs us to stop before trespass, bowing from afar, not touching and not entering.” The People were forbidden from ascending Mount Sinai, Persico offers an analogy, because it was sacred and therefore off limits to anyone but Moses.Footnote 15 It is exactly this kind of construction, however, that the women activists seek to complicate.
Lillian Reidman, for example, in her training for Temple Mount guides, explores the theme of desire (heshek) for the sacred. She explains that, “this longing and yearning (hishtokekut) for [Temple Mt.] is in fact a yearning for God and it is a yearning for something you cannot reach. But what matters,” she says, “is the journey, what we do, all the activities that Women for the Temple undertake, that is what's important, this is what brings us closer to the Temple.” She interprets for her listeners all the obstacles that stand in the way — the police restrictions, the negative reactions of the Muslim worshipers — as signs that reveal the enormity of the women's act. “The greater the thing we want to do is, so are the obstacles that present themselves. But the obstacle heightens and strengthens the desire (heshek).” She teaches that the obstacles are put there intentionally by God to enhance the worshiper's yearning.
Most of the women activists are careful not to disrespect the opinions of leading rabbis but to instead respectfully disagree with them. As Rabbanit Rivka puts it, “I believe that often the rabbis, because they are based in the world of halacha and rely on it, it is very difficult for them to change their opinion. [ascent] is very threatening to them … And I respect them because it stems from their need to protect the world they know.” Other activists, however, are less charitable and even invoke a gendered lens, which paradoxically while giving women more leeway, reproduces essentialist religious discourses about women's difference. Rachel, who is an activist in her 60s, for instance, told me that she believes women are more intuitively connected to the divine and feel its call to come to the Mount, while men and especially rabbis are too steeped in the intellectual exercises of the halacha that it obscures their sight, senses, and spiritual intuition. Rabbanit Idit Bartov, another activist, concurs to some extent that, “[t]he rabbis are afraid of intimacy. They are afraid of holiness (kdusha).”
Persico calls Temple activists “post-Orthodox” for their transgressions of halachic rules and established practice. This post-Orthodoxy, however, is explicitly gendered because it is precisely Orthodox women who are often excluded from issuing halachic opinions who find in this context legitimacy to defy the hegemonic pronouncements of male religious authorities (while, of course, constantly invoking the authority of those rabbis who do permit ascent).Footnote 16
While the women stress the unique intimacy and closeness to the site, in conversations the activists also discuss the affective toll of constant contact with the holy. Some say they try not to ascend too often in order not to take it for granted, or to make it too much of an unthinking and un-special routine. But as one participant in a guides’ course put it, “your wish is to leave the Temple Mt. distant, but … the understanding that if you or me or Rivka do not ascend, there might not be anyone there [compels you]. This is the price we pay, we ‘get our hands dirty,’ we have no choice. It is the negation of your wish to keep the Mt. there [i.e., away from you, distant].”Footnote 17 This balance or tension between the gravity of the holy, and the political impetus to show constant Jewish presence on Temple Mount finds expression in activism. As one participant in the same lecture explained, “documenting [your ascent] is very important. Sometimes you ascend alone but as soon as you then write about it on Facebook, six hundred other women also see it. As soon as you put it on the website, a thousand women see it. We all went through this stage, at the beginning you ascend with concentration on the sacred, but we must use these [publicity] tools, it creates an important new discourse.”Footnote 18
A large part of domesticating the holy, making the distant and awe-striking more intimate and accessible to a larger public, is achieved through a plethora of cultural activities that involve arts and craft, music, drama, recreational activities for children, and even business entrepreneurship. Women's initiatives to raise awareness to the Temple issue include: Taking school children to various parts of the country to collect the scale insect Kermes echinatus from oak trees, which they identify as the tola‘at hashani used to produce red dye for the priests clothes; organizing workshops for women on ancient musical instruments used in the Temple; on special methods of bread baking for Temple ritual; establishing a Parochet (Torah ark curtain) group for ancient weaving and embroidery; putting together a conference by the title of “Women Dream of the Temple,” which according to organizers drew 500 religious and secular women participants in 2014; and creating a theater play titled “Zion Song” which performs across Israel and addresses women's preoccupation with Redemption (ge'ula).
Small businesses selling hand-made priests’ outfits, women's dresses for Temple attendance, and Temple-themed decorative artifacts, as well as other for-profit artistic initiatives related to the Jerusalem Temple also constitute a part of these efforts.Footnote 19 A number of non-profits, some of which receive government funding, also participate in this work. For example, the Temple Institute in Jerusalem has state funded young women doing their national service (sherut leumi) leading educational activities on the theme of the Jerusalem Temple for school children. According to one report, the Temple Institute reaches between 50,000 to 60,000 students annually in its activities.Footnote 20 For Yael, this work of domestication is due to women's unique insight. Years before we started, she told me, “people did ascend, but it was individuals, men who go by themselves, like soldiers. They never thought about group ascents. We came and said, why don't we do family ascents? Children's ascents, this will give us a real hold on the place (akhiza amitit lamakom).”
Agitation vs. “Docility”
A disposition the activists teach that one must cultivate when ascending to Temple Mount is one of humility, calmness, acceptance, and tolerance of challenges, rivals and obstacles. As Rivka, Yonit, Rachel, and other activists explain, many things can cause a stirring of outrage during the visits. First, the police treatment, which limits the visiting hours, and meticulously searches visitors’ possessions for religious paraphernalia, sometimes even through pat-downs. Next, Israeli and foreign tourists who resent the ascenders due to ideological disagreement or because the added security escort that the police imposes on religious visitors holds up the entry line at times. Then, on the mount, Islamic waqf guards surround the visitors and complain over a node, blinking, whispering, looking at one's cellphone, or any behavior they suspect is a secret Jewish prayer. Finally, the murabitat, the Muslim female activists who have enlisted to defend Al-Aqsa from Jewish encroachment by shouting, banging on doors and gates, surrounding, filming and intimidating religious Jewish visitors.
While activists acknowledge that all of these are upsetting, they insist that when a woman ascends she must be patient and tolerant. She must understand the police's and the tourists’ frustration. She must ascend, as rabbanit Rivka instructs, pure and “clean, humble, and with a sort of self-negation.” In this way the women cultivate an image of respect for the site and project what they think is a non-threatening presence; one that is starkly different from the provocateur “fanatic” male zealots of the past, and of today. Being women, their performance of docility and humility is all the more effective. Yael explains that, “There were some brides that were arrested … but we are older, mostly 30 and above … the idea is not to be some kind of resistance (lo lehavot hitnagdut). Naturally, we are women with families, we are not in a place in our lives where we want to be arrested … And our work is different. That masculine font of winning, of fighting, that's not us … We want to raise awareness, to educate, to bring people closer. These are two [different] ways of looking at things.”
The women activists use docility to also mark the difference between themselves and the Muslim women defenders of the site. The Muslims’ screams, shouts, chants, and agitation, I was told on several instances by women activists, are a sign of their fanaticism and their desperation. They know, I was told, that this is not their place and that their reign is nearing its end, and so they cry out. The agitated affectivity of pious Muslim women is also portrayed as inauthentic at times, with Temple activists arguing that the women only perform for money from the Israeli Islamic Movement or Hamas, and not out of genuine connection to the site. The effectiveness of this strategy of docility is clearly apparent by the fact that the murabitat have been recently banned from the site by the Israeli Minister of Defense for disturbing the peace, many of them had been arrested, and their group was later outlawed, while Women for the Temple were not subjected to such measures.Footnote 21
Finally, the women's strategy is to formally advocate for “tolerance” and religious freedom, demanding that Jews should be allowed to worship at the site not at the expense of, but side by side with, Muslim worshipers. Unlike the previous generation of Temple activists who talked about and even meticulously planned the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, the women speak of, at most, a physical or temporal division to allow Jewish prayer. In this way they present themselves as the pluralist party that demands division, and the Muslims as the intolerant extremists who insist on inter-communal indivisibility. But of course this discourse is limited to this site, and Temple activists do not condone division of any predominantly Jewish site, such as the Western Wall, for example, to allow Muslim worship. Neither do they advocate division of space or Muslim access to Jewish-Muslim sites inside Israel proper. Moreover, what they in fact promote is what Hayden (Reference Hayden2002) has called “antagonistic tolerance,” meaning a temporary arrangement until supremacy and hegemony at the site could be achieved. This incremental approach has been well documented in the settlers’ advances in the Tomb of the Patriarchs or the Ibrahimi mosque in Hebron (Reiter Reference Reiter, Breger, Reiter and Hammer2009), and is fueling much of the fear expressed by the Muslim murabitat and the larger Palestinian Muslim community. Temple women activists are careful, however, not to explicitly speak of active destruction of Muslim structures on Temple Mount. They speak ambiguously of the fact that if Jews do their part of struggling for dominance and presence at the site, God will do His part in helping them remove Muslim obstacles and rebuild the longed for Temple.
GENDER AND THE PRODUCTION OF INDIVISIBILITY
To make a contested sacred place indivisible, women activists for the Temple work to dismantle various Jewish intra-community, largely Orthodox-motivated divisions. Divisions between men and women through roles and spatial segregation, divisions between married and unmarried women in access to ritual immersion, divisions between private and public life, and perhaps most importantly, divisions between the religious and the secular in emotional attachment and preoccupation with the site. These efforts aim to elevate the centrality of Temple Mount in the consciousness of Israelis, making the potential of ceding it to Palestinians increasingly more difficult. The work of domestication furthers this cause of enhanced centrality through attachment by transforming the controversy over Temple Mount from one dominated by “extremists,” “fundamentalists” and “fanatics,” to an arena characterized by women's intimacy, handicraft and art, docility and inclusion. As put in a women's magazine article on the subject, they work to change the issue from “a marginal and crazy issue (sugiya hazuya)” to an issue that is “mainstream, mainstream, mainstream.”Footnote 22 And indeed the coverage of the women's activism in both the religious-Zionist and secular media has been different from the menacing or militaristic profile of the earlier generations of male activists. The same women's magazine article states, “If you are looking for an original and experiential outing with your children, Women for the Temple say that Temple Mt. is a good option … [one activists relates] ‘we have recently arranged for a children's ascent, with a team of kindergarten teachers, prizes, lessons, popsicles, and even a puppet show that explains the issue.’”Footnote 23 Media coverage in Artuz Sheva, women's magazines, Haaretz, Times of Israel, and Israeli national television channels, among others, present profiles of women's activism that span from favorable and innocuous to ambivalent. The coverage often conveys, explicitly or implicitly, how mainstream, unthreatening, and approachable the women are, making the reader feel like these could be his/her own aunts or family members.Footnote 24
While this article outlines the strategies women employ to remove intra-community divisions and to domesticate the struggle over the site, the question remains of whether or not these strategies are indeed effective. Do they impact the conflict by making the site more indivisible? And to what an extent can such a shift be credited to women's work? I want to offer a few preliminary pieces of evidence that show that their course of action does indeed have effect. First, in terms of media coverage an examination of the secular left leaning Haaretz newspaper's archiveFootnote 25 retrieves 112 articles since 1994 to the present where male Temple Mount activists are mentioned. In all of these the words “extremist” or “extreme right” (yamin kitsoni) also appear. Clearly, the male activists have been associated with extremism in this newspaper's coverage. The two magazine articles in the newspaper devoted to women activists, however, do not identify them as “extremists” or as “extreme right.”Footnote 26
An even more telling example of the gendered effect on coverage is from the popular feminist magazine Politicallycorret. An op-ed in the magazine covered the mourning practice of Rina Ariel, a Women for the Temple activist whose daughter was stabbed to death by a Palestinian youth in 2016. The secular feminist author of the piece takes note of the unusual number of media interviews that Rina offered following the death, in which she had again and again raised the issue of Temple Mount ascent. The author notes that while she is not on the same page with Rina politically, the fact that Rina has said, “maybe it's not nice that a mother speaks of such great things in such moments, but this is part of our role …” reflects a great courage. She writes, “Ariel is aware of the role she was given, not out of her own choice, with her daughter's death — she must be a mourning mother but not mix between the personal and the political, she must be ‘nice.’ But why should she comply with the media's dictates on how she must behave in the saddest and most difficult moment of her life?” The author writes that while mourning men, mourning fathers, are allowed to speak about politics, mourning mothers face different pressures. But, she says, Ariel “goes beyond the role of a ‘mother’ who is not supposed to speak of great things, especially not in this moment, and does not erase her private identity … I guess that [the Temple issue] is an important element in her home, in her motherhood … It is impossible for me not to appreciate her courage and her commitment to her identity, even when there's external pressure from within and without to play the role of someone else.”Footnote 27 What is so telling about this piece is the way in which a secular left-wing feminist writer is able to appreciate Rina's activism as a feminist act. The fight for Temple Mount historically associated in the secular psyche with regressive religious fanatics, is interpreted here as not necessarily contradicting a feminist agenda because women have become its agents.
Another evidence for the effectiveness of the women's strategy is the recruitment of high profile non-religious supporters they have enlisted among the ruling Likud party's secular Members of Knesset (Israeli Parliament). Most prominently Culture Minister Miri Regev — with whom the women's lobby has worked closely — who in her previous position as chair of the Knesset's internal affairs committee has lead numerous discussions on the subject that included representatives from Women for the Temple. In addition, the appointment of the well-known Temple activist Yehuda Glick to the position of a Likud MK reflects the advantage of a so-called “feminine approach.” Glick has adopted the women's “feminine” discourse of inclusiveness, egalitarianism, and tolerance toward the secular in his advocacy for Temple Mount (he doesn't, for instance call for the destruction of the Dome of the Rock, but rather claims that Jews and Muslims could pray together at the site). It is unlikely that a male Temple activist with a more militant discourse would have received the kind of mainstream acceptance that Glick enjoys.
In conclusion, as several studies have argued, contemporary Temple Mount activism arises from the ranks of religious settlers but is considered a break with traditional Gush Emunim Kookist ideology. Not only did both senior and junior Rabbis Kook oppose ascent on halachic grounds, the Temple issue remained for a long time too distant from the Israeli secular mainstream, in a way that settlement expansion was not. Settler activists were careful to remain a few steps ahead, in their formulation, of Israeli public opinion, pulling it in their direction, but never pushing too far so as to lose all connection to this larger public. Scholars have pointed to the crisis that the Oslo Accords in 1993 and the Gaza Disengagement in 2005 caused among settlers, who saw these as a betrayal by mainstream Israel.Footnote 28 As a result, Persico writes, “mainstream statism (mamlachtiyut) is abandoned, as is the patience required for an incremental progress toward Redemption. Their place is taken by partisan messianism and fearless efforts to hasten the End, for Apocalypse Now.”
However, by examining women's activism for the Temple and its gender politics, this chapter identifies a continuation rather than a break with traditional mainstream settler activism. As scholars of gender and the settler movement have demonstrated, the domestication of the harsh military act of occupation of Palestinian territories since 1967 was achieved through the very presence and activism of women in the settlements. Without women and children moving to the occupied territories, establishing kindergartens, schools, and community life, the settlements would have remained in the Israeli psyche simply military outposts, populated by soldiers and armed male civilians. Women make the settlement into a village, a site of normalcy and family life, an intimate warm place whose civilian legitimacy is facilitated largely through their presence (El-Or and Aran Reference El-Or and Aran1995; Feige Reference Feige2013; Neuman Reference Neuman2004; Ben Shitrit Reference Ben Shitrit2015). This same strategy is now masterfully deployed in the cause of the Temple, generating a similar domesticating and mainstreaming effect.
What I have attempted to do through the case study of women's activism for the Temple is to shed light on the unique roles that gender and women actors play in inter-communal contestations over sacred sites. But to what extent is this case generalizable? The difficulty in answering this question is the lack of data. Most of the literature that seeks to unpack the problem of indivisibility and the processes by which certain sites become indivisible to parties in the conflict has not examined the work done by women, and by gender politics, gendered metaphors, symbols, and arrangements of space, to act on and even dismantle divisions internal to each community in order to render certain sacred spaces increasingly indivisible in the inter-communal context. This article is a first step in opening a wider field that would examine this question comparatively. This future inquiry will allow us to first catalog women and gender's role in inter-communal contestation of sacred space, assess generalizable and unique patterns, and measure their impact on conflict in a more comparative manner.
