Refiner’s Fire: Streisand and Women’s Ordination

Her Yentl offered only a black-and-white view of women moving into pastoral roles.

So what does Yentl, Barbra Streisand’s film about a turn-of-the-century Jewess who wants to study Torah and Talmud but can’t, have to do with today’s church? The story of a woman who impersonates a man in order to enter an all-male yeshiva (rabbinical seminary), Yentl speaks powerfully to many Christian women (and men) who are no longer willing to countenance the church’s long denial of ordination to women.

Streisand’s Yentl graphically unreels the male-chauvinist milieu of the 1900’s Polish shtetl, where women are forbidden to study the Law or its commentaries. Nevertheless, Yentl’s gentle, ailing rabbi father teaches her in secret as if she were a son, finding his daughter an apt pupil. Yentl eschews the traditional Jewish woman’s role; and when Papa dies, she dons his phylacteries and clothes, crops her braids into sidelocks, and strikes out for a yeshiva to find self-fulfillment as a rabbinical scholar.

Sensitive viewers of the film soon begin asking the same sort of questions that prompted Streisand to spend years negotiating for control of direction and production of Yentl: Would God bestow a gift upon a woman if he did not intend her to use it? It is almost inevitable that the Christian viewer will see here an emotive parallel to the current debate over women’s ordination. Streisand brings us to such a catharsis through the stunning subjective impact of her singing and acting that we can hardly help but feel outraged at the intolerant culture her film depicts. Do Christian women today need to be liberated from sexist restraints against their ordination in the same way Yentl needed to be liberated from narrow-minded strictures against her sacred studies?

The source of Streisand’s film plot is the short story “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” by Isaac Bashevis Singer. A reading of Singer, however, shows crucial nuances neglected in Streisand’s adaptation. True, Barbra’s hit song, “I Like the Way He Makes Me Feel,” captures the very feminine feelings of Yentl for Avigdor, the virile yeshiva upperclassman who knows her only as Anshel, his shy, young studymate. Yet there is no hint in the film version of any moral wrongness attached to Yentl’s transvestite masquerade—a point Singer makes:

“Only now did Yentl grasp the meaning of Torah’s prohibition against wearing the clothes of the other sex. By doing so one deceived not only others but also oneself. Even the soul was perplexed, finding itself incarnate in a strange body.”

Streisand retains Singer’s artful twist for bringing her story line to denouement: in order to retain Avigdor’s friendship, Yentl/Anshel must marry, in Avigdor’s place, the beautiful Hadass. Avigdor has been rejected by the parents of Hadass and their betrothal broken, so he believes it will be better for “Anshel” to have his sweetheart than some stranger. Streisand hams up this ultimate complication outrageously—in sharp divergence from Singer’s tragic treatment of the tale:

“Many times each day Anshel warned herself that what she was about to do was sinful, mad, an act of utter depravity. She was entangling both Hadass and herself in a chain of deception and committing so many transgressions that she would never be able to do penance. One lie followed another. Repeatedly, Anshel made up her mind to flee Bechev in time, to put an end to this weird comedy that was more the work of an imp than a human being. But she was in the grip of a power she could not resist.… Fooling the community had become a game, but how long could it go on? And in what way would the truth come to the surface? Inside, Anshel laughed and wept. She had turned into a sprite brought into the world to mock people and trick them. I’m wicked, a transgressor, a Jeroboam ben Nabet, she told herself. Her only justification was that she had taken all these burdens upon herself because her soul thirsted to study Torah.”

Streisand concludes her Yentl with a triumphant finale, à la Funny Girl, in which the heroine sails off to America, presumably to become the feminist, quasi-rabbi she is “meant to be.” Streisand rejects utterly, however, the pathos of Singer’s Yentl, who quietly disappears to “live out her time” in confused resignation at being neither female nor male—caught forever in a blurred netherworld between the sexes.

Singer’s “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy” could satirize sexist shtetl tradition with Yiddish wit, yet still point out, with biblical wisdom, certain undeniable distinctions between the sexes. Streisand’s Yentl fails to distinguish at all between fallible human customs concerning the roles of men and women and God’s infallible plan for human life as recorded in Scripture. Streisand offers us only a black and white view on the issue of women moving into pastoral roles: nobody but a shlemiel, fresh from pharisaical prayers thanking God he wasn’t born a woman, would ever oppose women’s ordination!

Luther wrote that those who attempt to understand the invisible things of God solely through their experience of natural things are not rightly called theologians (cf. Rom. 1:20). If we work simply with our distorted human perceptions and judgments, we are bound to end up calling bad “good” and good “bad.” It is only through God’s self-revelation in the Cross of Jesus Christ that the church can decide this or any issue aright. Christian women and men alike must continue to live by “the theology of the Cross,” no matter how compelling an experience we may enjoy in Barbra Streisand’s Yentl.

Mr. Wiest is a candidate for the M.Div. degree at Concordia Theological Seminary, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

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