Morning blessings are a great way to start one’s day. Before we leave the house, we have already expressed gratitude for our sight, clothing, ability to walk, freedom and dignity. If you are using an Orthodox siddur there is a 50% chance you would have also recited a blessing on not being made a woman.

Orthodoxy has invested a lot in figuring out the meaning of this text in modern society. Amongst the most pervasive, relates to the recognition that women are exempt from a number of religious obligations or ‘mitzvot’ because women ‘occupy a higher spiritual plain’ and are not in need of spiritual rejuvenation through these ‘supplementary’ rituals. Men therefore are acknowledging their inferior (?) status, which nonetheless provides them with the opportunity to perform these mitzvot and strengthen their connection with God and community.

The Reform, Conservative and Orthodox siddurim have more similarities than differences. However, one of the notable points of distinctions is to be found in these morning blessings. In both the Reform and Conservative siddurim; in place of ‘shelo asani esha’ the text reads ‘she’asani betzelem elohim’; who has created me in the image of God’. This approach tackles the dilemma through omission and substitution. This mechanism allows the core principle of gratitude for the ‘creation of self’, to be applied in an egalitarian and universalist fashion.

Reinterpretation and substitution are both powerful tools. They can blunt the sharpness of texts that prick our ethical fabric and re-present us with a Judaism that pleases. But for some of us, we fail to be reassured by these tactics, and continue to carry around with us the texts with all its rawness, only to find that our mouths are too sore to utter blessings.

With my own sore jaw, I started to reflect on the contextual origin of the traditional morning blessings. The blessing that precedes the one in question, expresses gratitude for not being made a slave. With certainty, I can pronounce that I am thankful for being free of enslavement, but concomitantly, I do not appreciate its full relevance. The type of slave the liturgy refers to is not the abhorrent phenomenon of child trafficking in today’s third world, but rather a common place practice throughout antiquity, more akin to serfdom. These slaves were nonetheless at the periphery of society, and would not have had the same rights as a fully fledged Jewish citizen. By extension they would have had fewer religious obligations.

In the discourse of Jewish law, the categories of slave and women are often grouped together. For instance they are both exempt from the obligation to recite the shema for it is a ‘positive time bound mitzvah’ (Mishna Kiddushin 1:7). This grouping happens because in antiquity both slaves and women had a similar status; they were part of the community, but were not at the centre of it. In this context it makes sense that the blessing on ‘not being slave’ sits right next to ‘not being woman’ on the page in the siddur.

With my antiquity hat on (perhaps this would be an off-white coloured turban?), I can say that I am quite thankful that I am not a slave of antiquity, but a free citizen, with the same hat on, I want to express gratitude that I am neither a woman of antiquity, but has been graced with opportunities for education and capabilities to effect change.

When I take off my hat to the communities around me, I see neither the slaves of antiquity nor the women of antiquity. I see women who are the movers and shakers of our communities, integral to both the day to day running and the long term vision. I see women who study and teach torah, who deliberate on matters of Jewish law, who mobilise charitable action, and who sing out their prayers. How can these be the women about whom it is said ‘thank you for not making me like them’?

My proposal that it is not the text that needs revaluating but the very category at which the text is referring. To refer to slaves as having a set of civil rights in today’s society is oxymoronic, evidenced by the fact that there is no practical application today for laws pertaining to slaves in Jewish society. By the same token, consider the possibility that when we invoke the legal term ‘eisha’ = woman, we are referring to a category of woman that also has little practical application to our communities. The Jewish women that I have met are far similar to men than they are to antiquated slaves.

Following this line of thinking, would it be too radical or absurd to suggest that women too can recite the blessing ‘shelo asani esha’? Suppose women held the conviction that they are not the women of antiquity and used the liturgy to verbally affirm this? Could this approach manage to both preserve the texts that are dear to us and make a radical change through reappropriating the very subject of the text? Could this be a viable way of articulating a nuanced identity within a rich tradition?

The application of category shifts is as established in the rabbinic toolbox as reinterpretation. To exemplify, the legal status of deaf-mutes is compared with the mentally incompetent (Talmud Bavli Hagiga 2b). When sign language was developed in the modern period, contemporary rabbis decreed that the deaf-mute no longer fell into this category (Tziz Eliezer and Yochavei Da’at). The breach with tradition therefore would be to continue to conflate contemporary with antiquated women in Jewish tradition, when the halachic discourse calls for a revaluation of categories when befitting.

A limitation of this approach lies in the use of language. The term ‘nashim’ is used both in rabinnic Hebrew but also in modern Ivrit. In appropriating the term ‘nashim’ to mean ‘antiquated woman’ one taints the term for its use in contemporary Israeli society.  This use of language may leave women feeling compelled to ‘denounce’ their gender identity in a Jewish context, which sits in contradistinction to comfortably identifying as a woman in general society.

Whether by substituting with alternative texts, reconciling the meaning, or reappropriating the subject, it is clear that the blessing in question has been a important landscape for mapping out the relationship that Judaism has with modern gender categories.  I hope the approach that I have set out in this article illustrates how critical thinking can open up possibilities for innovation in synergy with tradition.