FRAMING
This session is being held midway through a week-long seminar Feminist Thought, Theology, and Practice in Judaism. All of us have been learning new frameworks and grappling with intense questions of power and privilege, inclusivity and vision for our community. We began by reviewing what feminism is and has been in order to place ourselves and our current struggles against the backdrop of history. We explore the very personal question of how our feminist frameworks change our image of God, as well as the communal question of how we pray together in a way that goes beyond the largely? male language and imagery of the traditional siddur. We looked at our traditional texts in order to articulate how these texts are changed when read through a feminist lens. And, perhaps most importantly, how we bring our feminist values to life in our work and family life.
As a community we have been asking many questions: What's beyond egalitarianism? How do we find ourselves in a tradition when our sacred texts and rituals don't reflect our lived experience? How do we balance family, work, and societal expectations? How do we serve as allies to those in our communities are marginalized? How do we experience marginalization ourselves?
The goal of this Movement Minayn session is to explore these questions and experiences through the body to see what new insight we can gain through an embodied experience. Specifically, this session focuses on what it feels like to be on the margins versus being at the center and what it feels like to reach out to include those on the margins. This framing stems from the understanding that we all experience marginalization at some point in our lives, and we will all, at some time, have to be the one to reach out to those who are on the periphery.
In the first part of this session we will split into two groups. The first group will be asked to take a scarf/tie from the pile, the other half will not. Earlier in the week, theologian Judith Plaskow pointed out that we all exist within categories, some of these are marked (maleness/femaleness) while others are hidden. Playing on this idea, those with scarves will be in the marked category and will receive different instructions from those without.
In the second half of the session we will split into groups of 6. Each group will stand in a small circle, facing inward. One person decides to leave the group, walking somewhere else in the room and then waiting with eyes closed. Without speaking, one member of the group will go and retrieve this person, gently guiding them by the shoulders to bring them back into the group. We will repeat this exercise so that every person has chance to both leave the group and to welcome someone back in.
DISCUSSION
The discussion that followed this session was powerful. There were many strong responses to the exercise exploring marked categories. One student shared that she was resentful of not having been in the group to receive a scarf and was jealous watching everyone who did have this item. After the groups were formed, I cued those with scarves to move in the center of the room while those without could move along the outside of the room. Upon reflection, this student described how those with scarves were taking up a great deal of space in the center of the room, and kept expanding outward. She felt like they were going beyond what was theirs and impinging out the space she and others without scarves had to move in. Further, she noticed that those in the center were able to move as a group while those on the periphery did not have enough space to congregate. These reflections speak powerfully to the experience of many who live in the margins: no space to move, the dominate group continues to take up more and more space, and there is no ability to organize as a group.
On the other side, another student shared that she felt challenged by having a scarf. She did not want to be in a marked category and had no idea what to do with the scarf. As a person who identifies as being gender-queer, she was relieved when I gave the instruction for those with scarves to put them in the center so that anyone could pick one up. She appreciated being able to leave a category and then to play with it. As a group we noticed just how playful this part of the movement experience was. People were wrapping scarves around each other and playing tug of war with the props. It was liberating to feel what play and light-heartedness can bring to categories that can feel so heavy and fixed.
In response to the "Leaving the Village" exercise, participants commented on how often they feel outside of a particular group and how much they were looking forward to being brought back in to the circle. We discussed how this was in part designed to address the fact that some men were feeling outside of the feminist theme of winter seminar. While some people experience outsiderness more than others, we discussed how even those in the dominant group feel outside of the community at some time. Participants really embellished and played with this exercise. When going to retrieve their group member, people danced, coaxed, lured, and played with the person outside the group in order to bring them in.
Beyond the specific exercises, we noticed the changes in the group as a whole that the movement experience brought out. One participant shared that, as a cantorial student, she spends a great deal of time in the room we were using for movement, as a performer. She noted the relief she felt in being able to move freely and un-selfconsciously and saw this experience as a tikkun for her relationship to the space. Everyone moved with everyone else, and it was encouraging to see people who have little to no relationship outside of this space interact in such tender, silly, and vulnerable ways. This movement experience shifted the energy of the group as a whole and carried over into the rest of the day's programming in significant ways.
SESSION
Warm Up (10 min)
Lead with a part of your body
Goal: come into your body, connect with your breath, allow yourself to be led to explore new movements
- Framing
(5 min)
Center and the margins
Marked categories
Limitations of language, moving beyond that
Access to experience of Divine beyond language – what does your
body want to do, sensation, connection, release, pay attention to what feels
good
Margins and center, moving between the two, marked and
unmarked categories
Part I: Marked and Unmarked
o Periphery vs center of the space
o Move to the corners of the room
o Only move near people with bandanas / reverse
o Everyone with scarf find somewhere to put it
down, everyone without one pick it up
o
Find someone without a scarf – pair find 2
other pairs, group of 6
- Part II: Leaving the Village
o Form groups of 6, stand in circle together
o First person leaves the group, goes to stand somewhere in the room with eyes closed
o Without speaking, 1 member of the group goes to retrieve them, gently taking them by the shoulders and placing them back in the group
Discussion and hand closing (10 min)
