Chava Green: What Is Chabad’s Feminist Vision?

Transcripts are lightly edited. Please excuse any imperfections.

David Bashevkin:
Hi friends and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast where each month we explore different topics balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and this month we’re continuing our exploration about the Lubavitcher Rebbe and the philosophy of Chabad.

This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas, so be sure to check out 18forty.org. That’s 1-8-F-O-R-T-Y .org, where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails.

I am so excited about our guest today. Very often we have guests who they’ve made the rounds already, people know them, and we try to kind of introduce them in a new light. Today’s guest is somebody I had never heard of, I assume most of our guests in the wider audience have not heard of because it is a young, emerging scholar that was introduced to me by our dearest friend, former 18Forty guest and upcoming 18Forty guest with Eli Rubin.

And I was reaching out to him to kind of find the different angles of Chabad that I thought were very important to cover. He introduced me to an emerging scholar, a young woman named Chava Green. Chava Green just finished her PhD and it has a fascinating title. The subject of her PhD is, get ready for it, The Hasidic Face of Feminism: Gender Between Modernity and Mysticism in Chabad-Lubavitch.

And as you’ll hear in our interview, so much of her scholarship, which is really examining the Rebbe’s approach to gender, the differences between men and women. What was the vision for both? How are they treated within the movement, et cetera, et cetera. But her PhD is extraordinarily personal. It is anthropological. Her advisor is somebody who I know well, professor Don Seeman of Emory University, where of course she completed her PhD.

She also had on her dissertation committee, another fairly well-known author named Ayala Fader. Ayala Fader, you may know she was kind of the external reader. If you know how PhD dissertations go, she’s the author of Hidden Heretics, which Princeton University Press put an aside about how the internet is disrupting within the Orthodox community and also her earlier book, which is phenomenal. Why not mention it? It is called Mitzvah Girls. I have read this. I love this book. I’ve quoted it. Mitzvah Girls. Again, this is written by Ayala Fader who is on Chava Green’s dissertation committee. It’s called Mitzvah Girls: Bringing up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn. If you are interested in that, you should definitely read this dissertation.

But I want to share with you what her dissertation is about before we get into the conversation, because I think you’ll better understand why we approach this conversation the way that we did. Every PhD when it is published also includes something called an abstract. An abstract is kind of the cliff notes, the big idea. It’s basically one long paragraph that explains what is this study about. And in Chava Green study, The Hasidic Face of Feminism: Gender Between Modernity and Mysticism in Chabad-Lubavitch, her abstract says as follows, and I want to read it to you in its entirety because I think it’s important to framing what this conversation is going to cover.

She writes, “This study presents the lived experience of Chabad Hasidic women who can broadly be defined as shluchos, female emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe who transformed the world through his teachings in order to study gender in Chabad. In particular, the study addresses the Chabad notion of womanhood and the influences that serve to construct this definition. As modern subjects, the women in this study have competing and diverse desires. Some want to study the Talmud to present an intimate TED Talk or to step back from outreach to bolster their family life. Yet they subsumed these desires within their identities as Hasidim. Since the Rebbe’s passing in 1994, his teachings are open to multiple interpretations, and I argue this allows for a breadth of gender ideology to coexist within Chabad. Therefore, in order to present the rich theological worldview of this sect, I employ a methodology that combines ethnographic research with a textual analysis of the Lubavitcher Rebbe’s teaching about gender.”

Ethnographic research means, as she’ll explain this in a moment, she’s actually speaking to living Hasidim. “My ethnographic research is based on a year of field work and interviews with 45 Chabad women in the United States, as well as 10 years of being part of the Chabad community as an insider. I weave together personal reflections, ethnography and analysis of Hasidic texts to create a feminist theologically informed ethnography. I find that Chabad women are products of the Hasidic theory of gender that emerges from the Rebbe’s teachings and of the cultural milieu of the contemporary United States, in which broad changes to women’s roles have occurred in the past few decades.

I argue that when some Chabad Hasidim claim that the Rebbe is the true feminist, they are invoking the language of feminism to understand the changes taking place within their community for women. I suggest the term Hasidic feminism as a distinct way of conceptualizing how more equality, opportunity and agency for women is developing from Chabad theology and the contemporary sensibilities,” I love that she talks about that, “of women themselves. My work shows how contestations,” what a great word, “about the meaning of gender identity and its sociological repercussions are as much a part of the Jewish mystical tradition as they are part of broader American culture.”

That is the end of her dissertation. And what you can see throughout this dissertation, which is true and which is why I read it, because it’s true of Chabad more generally, and I frankly think mysticism more generally, and that is the importance of connecting the phenomenology. Meaning what does it feel like to grow up in a certain community? What does it feel like to have these experiences, to go through this communal life, to read Torah? That’s what phenomenology covers, but connecting phenomenology with ideology and philosophy.

Very often when we grow up in our communities, the phenomenology, what it feels like and the ideology are not always aligned. They do not always cohere. And what I admire so much about the mysticism of the Rebbe and something that is kind of repeated throughout is that the Rebbe was so committed to integrating and ensuring that ideology, philosophy, mysticism, all of the conceptual expressions of Jewish thought were deeply embedded and connected to the phenomenology of what it feels like to grow up within a mystical community, what it feels like to participate with this vision.

And that is why I am so excited for this conversation, which in some ways is more personal than philosophical. But as you’ll see, I think the greatest expression of mysticism is one that can be embodied in a particular phenomenology, a mysticism that can address even those who don’t fully grasp mysticism, a mysticism that gives birth to a worldview, to an experience, to a way of proceeding through this world. And that is why I am so excited for our conversation with Chava Green.

I am so excited to introduce Chava Green, who is really an incredible person. She wrote a PhD entitled “The Hasidic Face of Feminism: Gender Between Modernity and Mysticism in Chabad-Lubavitch.” One of her dissertation advisors was actually an old friend of mine, professor Don Seeman, the great anthropologist of Emory University. Chava, thank you so much for joining today.

I was really fascinated by your dissertation, not only by the ideas, but really the style of your dissertation. It is very personal in a way. It is interwoven with your own personal stories and includes a lot of personal stories. So maybe that is the appropriate place to begin to really ground and understand how you came to write about, specifically, The Hasidic Face of Feminism: Gender between Modernity and Mysticism in Chabad-Lubavitch.

And it’s not an apologetic work. You really go through some of the very real issues and opportunities in the way Chabad approaches the feminist idea. And it’s really the opening words of your dissertation, which I love. The first words right out of the gate is, the Rebbe is the biggest feminist, which is something we’ll obviously explore. But can you begin by telling your story of how did you get to the place where you’re writing a PhD on Chabad’s approach to feminism? Tell us where were you brought up, introduce yourself a little bit to our audience.

Chava Green:
Okay, great. Sure. So I grew up in South Jersey and I come from a very assimilated background. I actually didn’t identify as being Jewish for most of my young adulthood. My mother’s Jewish and my father’s not. So I was really raised in a very liberal secular milieu. I went to my state school. It’s a huge campus with all different kinds of subcommunities, I would say. So my freshman year, I just out of curiosity, took religion 101 and women’s studies 101, and little did I know that was going to be kind of the theme of the rest of my life.

David Bashevkin:
Took religion and women’s studies really combined. Okay.

Chava Green:
Yeah. So the religion 101, unfortunately was not much about Judaism. It was at eight in the morning and no one was awake during that class. But the women’s studies 101, the first class, the professor puts on the board a triangle pointing down, and she says, “This is the divine masculine bringing flow into the world.” And then on top of it, she overlays a triangle pointing up and says, “This is the divine feminine, receiving.” And it was a Jewish star. And I was blown away. I was like, “This is so fascinating.”

First of all, I became very interested over the course of that semester in women’s issues, historically, contemporary, both socially and also philosophically. And I ended up getting my bachelor’s in women’s studies. And then I also became interested in the spiritual element of being a woman. And as I went through the curriculum, let’s say at my University of the Women’s studies program, I saw-

David Bashevkin:
Which is a secular curriculum. It’s not …

Chava Green:
Yeah.

David Bashevkin:
Just to be clear, you were in a state school. It’s like you were in Michlalah or some seminary there. You were in a state school in a women’s studies program.

Chava Green:
Yeah. Yeah.

David Bashevkin:
Okay.

Chava Green:
And a very just typical liberal perspective of a university environment. And what ended up happening over those four years is that I saw the Women’s Studies Department split into two groups, the older traditional feminists of let’s say the ’80s and early ’90s, maybe a little bit earlier than that, and then the women who had become professors in the last 5, 10 years. And I saw that the older women had a very spiritual element to their feminism.

One of my favorite professors was a nun who had taken a vow silence for two years in a convent. And she spoke to us about the kind of power of contemplation, of meditation, of tapping into a divine feminine. And I was obsessed with all of that. And then I took women’s studies courses on Judith Butler, post-structuralism, queer theory, and I was fascinated by it, but I felt like it was just one option of the direction to take feminism in, and it was an option that the majority of the academy had chosen, but I didn’t think it was the only option. And I felt that the spiritual aspect of gender and womanhood had really been pressed pause on that whole realm as …

David Bashevkin:
Can I jump in? Can I push you a little bit just to explain to our audience? It happens to be, it’s so funny because I also find the different, I think they’re called waves, like first wave feminism, second wave feminism. Is there a third wave feminism? Is that what you would be describing?

Chava Green:
Yeah, third wave and post waves. But yeah.

David Bashevkin:
Can you just spend a few more seconds explaining. I think I understand, you spend a little bit more time on that. Maybe it’s first or second wave feminism, the more spiritual, contemplative. From a secular perspective, more or less, but more philosophical, maybe even more spiritual, how does that latter wave, the one where you meant, is it post-structuralism, queer theory, Judith Butler? People hear these words, but they usually hear them on Fox News. Usually they don’t actually hear just the basic of what is the idea. You actually were a gender studies. Women’s studies is a part of that. So what exactly does that mean, and what exactly is that idea about?

Chava Green:
So interestingly, this is kind of woven into the moment where I approached Judaism. So basically from my understanding, the post-structuralist movement starts coming out of the study of semiotics and linguistics, which is the study of how words become to translate into the experience of reality. How do we understand why the word tree maps onto a physical tree and delineates that and separates it from other objects and its surroundings?

And so feminists took up the ideas of certain linguists who separated the symbol from the object, so to speak, and started asking questions about how this relates to gender. So when we say woman, there’s this whole body of scholarship of what is a woman, what is that term? What is it denote? What does it imply? What does it categorize people in the world as, or exclude?

And so we start getting into this whole realm of the idea that gender is socially constructed, but kind of at a little deeper level, is that it’s socially constructed through the language that we use to describe gendered reality. And so that’s why you have now such an emphasis on the language that is being used, especially in contemporary political issues that people are fighting over, a lot of people-

David Bashevkin:
Like in the culture wars. Exactly, that’s what people-

Chava Green:
Culture wars. Right now a lot of it goes back to the language because that’s kind of one of the foundational aspects of this. And so in my sophomore year of college, I was going through some personal upheaval in my life, and a lot of it was the normal young college situation of who am I? What do I do with my life? What social group should I be part of?

But then in the middle of that, my grandfather passed away and was very, very close to, and I knew he was sick, but it came a little bit as a surprise. And I remember getting the call from my dad right after my anthropology class, and I was sitting under a willow tree by this river, and I started as a 20-year-old having an existential crisis, thinking like, “Okay, one day I’m also going to die. And then what was the point of my life? What did I live for? What am I supposed to live for now?”

David Bashevkin:
You were asking the big cosmic existential questions, which we usually spend most of our lives distracting ourselves from. And there are brief periods, sometimes the adolescence, sometimes in your 20s, maybe a midlife crisis. And then at the very, very end, most people, even when they have those moments, do a good job of quickly finding a good distraction and not letting that question really alter the decisions that they make in their life. You it seems were not able to fully distract yourself from some of those larger cosmic questions why are we alive?

Chava Green:
There was no going back basically. Once I realized that that was the fundamental issue that I had really been grappling with for a while and why I was even attracted to women’s studies, because I was looking into critical theory, liberal philosophy as a way to answer some of those questions, and finally they rose up to the surface basically at that point, and I could not move forward. I was like, “I must find an answer.”

And that semester I’d been taking the semiotics course, and it was basically saying, “There is no reality under language. There is no essential truth. There is no mutable facts.” And I basically realized I do not believe that is true. I was like, “No, it can’t be because that’s not something I could live my life upon, and I need solid ground to stand on and to know how to make decisions and to know what’s true or what’s not.” And at the same time, I also become very disillusioned with the kind of feminist, liberal social justice community at my campus.

David Bashevkin:
Why? Why’d you become disillusioned?

Chava Green:
I felt like some of the things that people were doing were at odds with their beliefs, first of all. So they would talk about certain things they believe, but then their actions were not reflecting that. And then the other reason is I felt like sometimes the things people would do in terms of social justice organizing were at odds with other of my core beliefs or my core values. So for example, I really strongly felt that the objectification of women was a widespread problem that feminism had sought to address and then basically dropped as a core issue. And then women just started objectifying themselves and wearing no clothing. And I was horrified by the campus party culture. I felt that women have-

David Bashevkin:
It happens to be Chava, one of the most fascinating philosophical debates in my mind is the debate between, I think it’s second and third wave feminism in the way that they approach women’s sexuality, which is, is it oppressive or is it the greatest source of liberation? Now obviously, each side took a very far extreme, and we’ll talk about what, we’ll get as we tell your story more where you found yourself. But it’s a real debate, meaning is that type of desire and all of that stuff that is associated now on social media, it’s so much more, is that the ultimate liberation, which is kind of the way the world treats it now. It’s my body, my choice, which is, I don’t even mean to bring in abortion, but that sense of I want to put myself out there. And that is the ultimate expression is where most people landed in that question.

But there was a generation of feminist scholars and thinkers who felt that was the ultimate objectification of women taking away their innermost essential parts of themselves.

Chava Green:
Yeah, yeah, it fascinates me, and it was something that I was really personally struggling with and thinking about a lot in my early 20s. And there’s a few ways for me to answer this question. I mean, I think a lot of these issues I was dealing with when I was introduced to Judaism, they mapped on to so many aspects of traditional Judaism, Torah Judaism, and I just felt all of a sudden there was this light bulb of I was only hearing one side of story.

So you’re saying there was this big debate and kind of like you were saying, I saw between different feminist authors, but I felt like, “Okay, in society we’ve ended the debate, and now women’s liberation is like, I can do whatever I want. No one can tell me what to do.” I felt like that’s kind of where we ended up.

And I was confused because I thought, “I’m 20 years old and I do not know what the best thing is for me, or the best thing is for society. So if the answer is that my liberation, my freedom is I can do whatever I want, maybe I’m going to make the wrong choices.”

David Bashevkin:
You’re kind of like back to square one.

Chava Green:
I’m just going back and back and back thinking, “Okay, but if that’s true, then what comes before that? What comes before that?” And so I started thinking a lot about the collective versus the individual and how so much of feminism became this worship of the individual and even the breakdown of collective politics because if you say you’re working on the behalf of women, then Judith Butler, one of her famous arguments in gender trouble is, how can you define a woman? How can we gather together as women when the term itself is exclusionary?

So you have this kind of debate between the individual and the collective. And I feel like that was one of the underlying issues of this whole thing, which became, for me, the language of modesty. How does that function as something that is both an individual expression and supportive of a collective view of sexuality being something that is wholly and channeled and has its appropriate place in society and its inappropriate places in society.

David Bashevkin:
It’s directed.

Chava Green:
It’s directed.

David Bashevkin:
Exactly.

Chava Green:
And in college, I saw a place where sexuality was completely rampant, and I felt that women were getting the short end of the stick over and over again.

David Bashevkin:
Let’s talk a little bit, you said when you were introduced to Judaism. I was raised in an Orthodox home. I went to Yeshiva for many, many, many years. I’ve been in more Yeshivish places. I’ve been in more modern orthodox places. And I’ll be honest with you, I do sometimes have a sense, and it is probably my own lack of faith in my own tradition or the way that our more timeless tradition has been specifically expressed in this moment. There’s Judaism and then there’s Orthodox Judaism circa 2024, whatever it is, the moment that we’re in.

But my own struggle has been, I feel like I don’t know how confident I am that our ideas and the way that we view society could fully address the contemporary mind. It’s a big leap from a secular college student in gender studies to where you are now. I mean, I can see you now, our listeners cannot, but you certainly present as wholly Orthodox.

So I’m wondering if you could share with me how did you get introduced to Judaism and how did you get introduced to the notion that Judaism introduces itself, meaning what we call kiruv or outreach, or that you realize, Oh, I am now a part of some process that is bringing me in”? How did you come to have that introduction?

Chava Green:
Okay, so that semester my grandfather passed away, I was living in an honors dorm and by divine providence, it was right next to the Hillel. And I never thought to step in there, but I basically had a total shift in my social circle, and I started becoming friendly with some of the Jewish students in my dorm.

David Bashevkin:
Was that a conscious choice?

Chava Green:
No, not really. There was a few of them that were just outgoing and friendly, and I was hanging out with them and they said, “You want to come to this barbecue at Hillel?” So I actually remember walking up the steps of the Hillel building and thinking, “Are they going to ask me if I know any words in Hebrew?” And I was trying to remember the blessing for Hanukkah candles growing up. I was very nervous because I didn’t know if I was Jewish enough to go and be involved. I really knew almost zero about Judaism.

David Bashevkin:
For real?

Chava Green:
For real.

Chava Green:
… really knew almost zero about Judaism.

David Bashevkin:
For real?

Chava Green:
For real.

David Bashevkin:
Could you read… did you know the alef beis?

Chava Green:
I didn’t know alef beis. I think I probably had heard of Shabbat before, but I remember going from… I didn’t know about Tisha B’Av, I didn’t know about Shavuos, I didn’t know about Sukkot. That first year-

David Bashevkin:
You’re a legitimately, fully assimilated Jew.

Chava Green:
What do they call it? Like a child that was abducted by wolves or something?

David Bashevkin:
A tinok shenishbah.

Chava Green:
Yeah, exactly. That was me. Anyway, so I signed up for the hello website, for the Listserv and they sent me an email, “Do you want to go to Israel for free?” I’m like, “Of course, that sounds awesome.” My parents were horrified. They have wars there. That’s all they knew about Israel. And so I went on Birthright. And on Birthright there was a kiruv rabbi from a yeshivish, Litvish kiruv Organization. And he just had a smile on his face for an entire week. And I was like, “How are you so happy all the time?” He’s like, “I don’t know, I’m a happy person.” But I remember thinking, “I don’t interact with many people that just feel very comfortable with themselves.” He wasn’t putting on a show. He just was a really authentic person.

In a counterweight to that, I met a monorthodox Dathilami woman, and I remember she was wearing a beret with curly hair and I met her on Shabbos and we were walking together. And she told me she was the coordinator for OU for that year, for that winter program. And she was running 40 different programs and she was touching base with all of them. And her husband was home with her little kids so she could go away for Shabbos Erev. And I thought, “How does this orthodox woman have a position where she’s running all of these?” I literally thought Orthodox women just stay inside their house and I didn’t know that they could do anything.

And then she started telling me how empowered she was about different aspects of Judaism. And it was just one of those light bulb moments for me, where I was like, “I’m searching and searching for answers to these big questions and they have to be through a gendered lens because I’m such a feminist.” And her comments about the empowerment of the Niddah period, of a time of space, a time of separation, and then coming back with her husband. And then, just built into the marriage as a level of respect and boundaries. And as we were talking about it, I was debating between how does modesty and sexuality and all these things fit together. And she was saying, “We have answers to that. There’s something here in Judaism.”

And then we went to Tzfat for a day and I heard about Kabbalah. And I had a meditative practice for a few years already, and I was also fascinated that Judaism had meditation. So I came back from Birthright and I was like, “Okay, there’s something here about gender. There’s something here about meditation and an inner world, and there’s also something here about integrity and authenticity.” And for me, that was my opening into Judaism.

So it is very fascinating you’re asking me about how I came to be interfacing with Jewish outreach because I’m kind of the anti-story of this. I basically-

David Bashevkin:
No, I like that and I can tell it. I don’t usually ask my guests to tell their personal story. It’s not usually what we do unless the personal story is the essence of what they’re coming to transmit. But most scholars that I have on, and I’m having you on because you wrote a Ph.D on this subject, I don’t usually ask them this personal story. The reason why, specifically you, is number one, you talk about your personal story in your scholarship but it’s not sequential. And maybe I’ve missed a little holes here and there.

But also, the whole dissertation for me, reading it as an Orthodox Jew, and again, this is my own insecurities and I hate to insert, I do it too often, my own reaction and perception. But I think the entire time I was almost nervously reading it, “Are you going to become, at some point, disenchanted with this? Are you going to stumble upon the ugly truth, not the sublime, packaged outreach truth, but the ugly truth that some women aren’t happy and some women do struggle, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” So that’s why I found your journey and it’s so sophisticated and it’s so nuanced the way that you approach it. It’s not goo-goo eyes, it’s thoughtful and it’s grounded. That’s why I thought I can’t really talk about your scholarship without understanding you better.

Chava Green:
Thank you, I appreciate that. And I think my scholarship is personal because it is a deeply personal issue for me. And I also think that this is a topic, when people ask me to speak, I often get uncomfortable because I’m terrified of making generalizations. And I think that a lot of issues that come up about gender, about women’s roles, they can easily slide into generalizations that so many women will listen to and say, “Well, that’s not true because it doesn’t apply to me.” Or, “I know someone it doesn’t apply to.”

And so that’s why nuance for me, in this area in particular, is so essential and I much prefer speaking to people one-on-one. So my most powerful relationships where I… When I worked on campus as a Chabad Rebbetzin, actually before I was married, so I wasn’t really the Rebbetzin, but I was like a shlucha working on campus.

And there’s two women that, I’m not going to take credit for their journeys, but through my interactions with them, they just soared and it’s like a whole new aspect of their Yiddish guide and one of the new Aliyah. And they felt like for me that was more powerful than talking to a class of a hundred people. Those one-on-one interactions because it’s so essential in this particular area to go inside and be honest with yourself.

And so you’re saying, do some women struggle or they’re not happy? And I actually try to bring that out in my dissertation that I myself am constantly living with these questions. So sometimes I have felt like I found a very good answer for me, like Toras Emes. It’s true. I have issues. I just call my ra’ah, I call my mentor. For me, those have brought so much clarity and stability to my life. But now I have three little kids. I have my PhD and I’m like the Rebbe said I should have a big family. I want to have a successful career. Let’s go back to the collective versus the individual. I am still struggling with these questions. I’m still not sure. And I go back to the Rebbe’s talks. And so it’s interesting. I don’t want to lose track too much of the duty …
I want to answer that question. I want to answer the question, but I do want to say-

David Bashevkin:
You just got back from Birthright. But yeah, continue.

Chava Green:
I just do want to say that when you first started off saying, I love the style of my dissertation, that is so personal. For me also, there’s this interplay between the Rebbe’s texts and women’s experiences. And for me that’s the essential point, is that Yiddish guy, Judaism has the written word and then the lived experience.

David Bashevkin:
Exactly.

Chava Green:
And in there is where you find the nuance a lot of times.

David Bashevkin:
Exactly. Part of our tradition though, it is not canonized in the same way as the written Torah, is the phenomenology of Yiddishkeit itself. The experience, the lived experience of Judaism. One might actually say is the most essential part of Judaism itself, which you get to, and we will get to. But take us back. You just got back from Birthright. You met a Dati Leumi lovely woman whose husband was home. You had a more Litvish, typical kiruv professional. What happens when you get back to campus?

Chava Green:
So maybe you’ll guess by now that I’m very thorough. Also, I want to check out all the options. I want to use my kind of scholarly approach and do the research. So I made appointments with a Reconstructionist rabbi, my friend’s mother, the Reform rabbi, the Conservative rabbi, the Orthodox rabbi, and the Chabad rabbi.

David Bashevkin:
For real.

Chava Green:
For real. You came back, and you made appointments with each one?
Yes. And I went to them. I said, what is Judaism? I’m interested in learning. What is my first step?

David Bashevkin:
I need to hear if you remember, as best as you can remember what each answer was. I think I want to do that now. I think I’m going to set up meetings. That’s so brilliant.

Chava Green:
Well, I saw you were doing denominology as part of the denominations. So yeah, because I was a novice. I was like, okay, let’s find out. So the Reconstructionist rabbi, I remember thinking, not sure why this is Judaism still. It was community, it was social justice, it was returning to the tradition, but making it your own. And I was like, okay, that’s kind of cool. But I didn’t know the tradition. I’m like, well, how do I learn the tradition? That One for me was first of quickly. I know it’s not clear.

Reform rabbi, he was really nice. We talked a lot about really general concepts in Judaism, which for me at the time were new, so I was super interesting. And then I was like, “What do I do next?” And he kind of was talking about me becoming a reform rabbi and going to reform rabbinical school and stuff. I was thinking, well, I’m not interested in being a rabbi, so how else do you get involved with Reform Judaism? And he was like, “Well, Friday night we play guitar and we hang out.” I was thinking, okay, not really enough Judaism for me. I want Judaism.

So then I go to the conservative rabbi, and she was also nice, but it was kind of similar to reform. But the conservative community at my college was very vibrant. And so I was like, “Okay, that’s interesting.” They seemed very committed. They had a minion often. And so my mom for a while was like, “You should be the conservative woman rabbi. It’s a perfect balance.” And I was like, “Okay, I’m not making any decisions yet.”

And then I went to the Chabad rabbi, I liked him a lot. He invited me to a class on learning about the life of Maimonides. I was like, okay. But the Chabad community, I went for Shabbos and it was at my school was a lot of Persian Jews, lot of Modern Orthodox Jews. And I didn’t really feel comfortable there. I was like, “I don’t know anything. These people know a lot.” I was like, “Hmm.”

So then I met with the Litvish rebbetzin who was running the MORE program, and she said, “Let’s learn a Mishnah together from Pirkei Avos, and then I’m going to start teaching you alef beis.” And all of a sudden I was like, “Duh. Start with alef beis.” I don’t know anything about Judaism, but I’m an academic, so I knew that I want to read things in the original text. I don’t want people telling me what something means. I have to read it myself, but I don’t know Hebrew. So when she said, “Let’s learn the Olive base.” I was like, “Okay, you’re the one.” So she became my Rebbetzin for the next three years of college. And that more program was a lot of people like me. Completely assimilated Jews, just interested, want to have a community. Some people just wanted a cultural experience to go to Far Rockaway for Shabbos or something. And so for me, that became a comfortable social environment.

David Bashevkin:
I love that you mentioned Far Rockaway. I grew up about right over a three-minute walk-

Chava Green:
Okay, cool.

David Bashevkin:
… from Far Rockaway. I grew up in Lawrence. I’m sure I even know which homes people stayed at on whatever that Meor Shabbaton was.

Chava Green:
Yeah. We went to Lawrence one time too.

David Bashevkin:
I’m sure you did. And I could probably guess half the homes you stayed at. But that’s really, really remarkable. But you’re with or now that is not a Chabad organization. To be clear, right?

Chava Green:
Yeah.

David Bashevkin:
That is what’s known as the yeshiva are the more, yeshiva, Litvish, non-Hasidic arm of Jewish outreach.

Chava Green:
So what I liked about them was a very intellectual approach, a very fun approach. Their outreach was fun. They would have rabbis come who, I remember we had a Shabbaton and there was a balch of a guy who was working at Pixar, and he became frum. And he came and gave us a talk about Judaism and creativity and business. And I just enjoyed it so much. The Shabbatons people were warm and the food was great, and I had a lot of questions and I felt like they had the answer. But over time I started feeling like it was a little too polished for me. Things were kind of set up in a way that there’s not a lot of questions. They present the question and then they give you the answer.

And if you have questions in the middle, it’s just kind of fun or exploration or to get you involved, but you don’t come up with the answer yourself. And so I graduated college and I went to Eretz Yisroel for seminary. And my rebbetzin at the time was like, “You have to go to this one seminary, very academic.” And to her credit, it was not only a yeshivish seminary, because she knew that I was a little on the fence about the kind of hashkafa. I’m also an artist. I’m very creative, I’m a writer.

David Bashevkin:
At this point are you shomer Shabbos?

Chava Green:
Yes. Oh, so this is actually a very interesting part of my journey. I came back from Birthright and I went abroad for a semester and I came back in the winter my junior year, and I said, what I’m going to do? I had been pretty fascinated. I’ve been pretty hooked on Yiddishkeit, Torah Judaism. And I said, “I’m going to do an experiment for one year and I’m going to be religious for a year, and at the end we’ll see if my life has improved, if I’m happier, if I feel like this is giving me purpose and direction. And if not, it’s just an experiment. I don’t have to make a commitment. I’m just trying it.”

And so I decided for that year I would be Shomer Shabbos, I would be, shomer negiah and I will start keeping kosher, and dressing more modestly. So by the end of the year, I forgot that I even made that.

David Bashevkin:
Or near a bargain.

Chava Green:
I was like, okay, I keep Shabbos now. How could I imagine not keeping Shabbos? So that was by the end of my senior year, I had started those things. So looking back, my mindset hadn’t really changed completely. I was still very much in the questioning phase. My Jewish practice was a light years away from when I started college. So I came to seminary and I was like, okay, I’m going to be frum… But my real question was like, what is my community going to be? What is my hashkafa going to be?

First, I went to Tzfat for a fun summer program that was hiking, community service. It was with an organization in Tzfat that’s like Dati Leumi. And I fell in love with Tzfat heart and soul. I’m like, “This is my place.” But my rebbetzin obviously was not comfortable with me going to Chabad seminary. And so she had redirected me away from going to the Chabad Seminary in Tzfat.

David Bashevkin:
Did she explained to you why she was uncomfortable with Chabad?

Chava Green:
At that time no. But the next summer when I was going back to Chabad seminary, yes, she was very explicit about it. Honestly, it was unusual for me to find someone like her who’s actually a misnaged. I rarely encounter that, but she really-

David Bashevkin:
A misnaged is the term for people who opposed Chassidus. But nowadays, it’s usually directed a little bit more squarely at Chabad rather than the opposition of other Hasidic movements have blended much more into this typical Orthodox-yeshiva cholent that we have, and Chabad kind of maintained something very distinct that isn’t as integrated in what one could call the mainstream Orthodox community. Is that a fair?

Chava Green:
Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So she would even say, you’re not going to be mainstream. You’re going to be a little bit outside of mainstream Orthodoxy, and so it could limit you and things like that. I mean, I have so much love for this woman, so I really don’t want to speak anything negatively about her. And I think that everything was orchestrated by Hashem and that was what I was supposed to go through.

David Bashevkin:
Do you understand where she’s coming from now that you’re on the other side?

Chava Green:
Honestly, no. I still think it’s a total, not real concerns. She would tell me, for example, it’s a very clear example. She would say in Chabad, they only eat certain kinds of meat, and so your husband’s probably going to say, you can’t go eat at that other family’s house because they’re not Chabad. And now in my relationship, it’s the opposite. I’m like, we only eat Chabad shechita. And my husband’s like, come on. He has a client in Lakewood. He’s like, “We’ll, go to their house and we’ll just eat whatever they eat.” I’m like, “I don’t know.”

David Bashevkin:
Gotcha.

Chava Green:
I feel like her concerns were not… And it ties back into my dissertation. They were kind of these generalizations about what Chabad looks like from the outside. But when you’re within Chabad, we also have our cholent. There’s a million different perspectives and there’s so many different opinions about things. And I think a lot of her concerns were unfounded.

David Bashevkin:
Misplaced.

Chava Green:
Yeah.

David Bashevkin:
Was unfounded. Okay. But were you shocked by the concerns? Were you like, “What? I thought Chabad…”

Chava Green:
Yes. I was very confused that she was saying that, but it also explained a lot to me because I saw that the kiruv model in the Litvish community is like they had their track and then the Chabad model is Chabad on Campus to Mayanot or a men’s yeshiva, and they have their track. And at the time, I didn’t think I’m Chabad until I was religious for four or five years. So that whole time period, I was very skeptical of everybody’s truth, of everybody’s like, we have the right way. And I was tried out a little bit of everything, and I went to actually six or seven different seminaries, and I dip my toes in Neve. I went to Bat Ayin, I went to Nishmat for a few weeks.

David Bashevkin:
Wow.

Chava Green:
I really went everywhere because I was just like, I’m looking for my emes. Like, okay, I found Torah, I found Yiddishkeit. But now is the second hurdle of like, well, what’s my community? What is the truth that-

David Bashevkin:
The applied theory. Meaning how do I take this Yiddishkeit and what is going to be the receptacle, the communal receptacle for the lived experience to be housed in?

Chava Green:
Yes. Okay. So let’s go back a little bit to the gender component. So I felt in the Yeshivish community, you have a lot of women who are professionals. And I thought that was very interesting. A lot of women with master’s degrees, women in business, and they have mid-sized families and they’re very fashionable. And I was like, this is very cool. I think women have a lot of opportunities. But when it came to Torah study, I felt that there was still a tremendous imbalance, let’s say. I remember in college, the Ma’or had a Gemara class, a Talmud study class, and the rabbi’s like, “Sorry, it’s only for men.” And so I went to the rebbetzin, and I’m like, “Can I study Talmud with you?” And she’s like, “Oh, let’s learn Pirkei Avos again.” I’m like, “It’s the Mishnah part of the oral law.” And I’m like, I know enough by now to know it is not the same thing as at Talmud, because halacha has not derived from the Mishnah. You have to learn Shulchan Aruch, you have to learn Talmud.”

And I was starting to realize as I got deeper in that there was going to be things I was not going to be able to learn in this community. And then I went to Eretz Yisroel and I started meeting more people who were really Haredi, and I started feeling like their vision of womanhood did not align with mine, kind of this pinnacle of supporting their husbands in kollel for many years. And I felt it was, kind of like you’re agentive to the main thing that’s going on, and it’s a supporting role. And just me personally, I was like, this just isn’t sitting right. And so that was part of some of the things that were going on when I was thinking about leaving Neve and going to a different seminary, and I came to Tzfat and I was just there for a few months hanging out.

Like I lived in a cave. Someone had this apartment that they had dug out of the mountain, and it was just a bed with a microwave. I spent a few months living there, and I was like, how do I apply this when I’m not sure about this whole kiruv environment in the yeshivish community? But everyone, they said these things about Chabad, sounded like a little bit suspicious about Chabad, don’t know. And it was a very confusing time for me. So then what happened is I was wandering around Tzfat, I was working a little bit, I was like, “I really need to be learning.” So I went to a class at the Beis Chabad library. They had a little library, and it was not a seminary or it wasn’t Ascent which is more like outreach focused, like shlichus. This was just a class of actually older, divorced women that had moved to Tzfat to kind of restart their life, older Jewish, and they were Americans.
So I went to this class and it was right before Pesach, and the rabbi was going through each makkah, each plague, and explaining what sefirah, what divine emanation of God it was related to. And he went through all 10 plagues and all 10 sefirot, and I was blown away. I was like, “I love this. This is so interesting.” And I went to him after, I was like, “How did you figure this out?” And he just laughed. He’s like, “I didn’t figure this out. This is in Chabad Chassidus.” I was, like, “Okay, I need to learn this more.”

And so I went to Machon Alte. And that time at Machon Alte for me, was a time of really kind of challenging my preconceived notions about Chabad, allowing myself to just learn. And I also asked them a lot of questions about women’s roles. And they told me about this sicho that now is one of the sichos of my dissertation, Parshas Emor, where the Rebbe talks about women learning Gemara. And how in this time period, the reasons why in the original sources women are not allowed to learn the Oral Torah is because it’ll bring them to like licentiousness or cleverness.
There’s different words in Hebrew that are used from the Gemara and Rambam but the Rebbe takes that word, and he says, “Women in our generation, they must be learning the Oral Torah because they need to actually have that cleverness, that idea in order to challenge the views of the outside world. And also because if they don’t receive that deep understanding, that intellectual understanding in Yiddishkeit, they’re going to go looking for it outside of Judaism.” Which is a kind of classic view of this. But I think for me, that was a very important issue. And to see that the Rebbe spoke differently about it was one of many, many steps along my path towards becoming Chabad.

David Bashevkin:
Now, how were you able to fully step into Chabad when the differences between gender are so strong? Meaning were you able… People talk about their separate roles. But at the end of the day, there are a lot of things that women simply don’t do. I don’t want to say cannot do because there are communities where they do. But certainly in most Orthodox communities, it is extraordinarily gendered. Most notably the participation in shul in synagogue services. Women are not typically… Again, we’re talking always in generalizations, but typically in the Orthodox community, women are not leading services. They’re not reading from the Torah.

Why, for you, given your background, where you’re not just an assimilated Jew who will take whatever they… You’re a gender studies major. Why is the traditional Jewish community, why is it just not a non-starter, a deal breaker, a red flag, look around, the misogyny is everywhere. How did you even acclimate yourself to it as a possibility when it doesn’t take five years to discover that women, let us be blunt, are not counted for a minion in the orthodox community? Why was that not a deal breaker for you?

Chava Green:
Okay, great question. So part of my journey, both as a feminist and as becoming religious, was to question everything. So when I read the original Jewish feminists concerns with traditional Judaism, I thought about, well, what is power, what is authority and what does it mean to be counted? Because I thought, one of the things I’m very, very passionate about is that there was a certain moment in feminism…

Chava Green:
… is that there was a certain moment in feminism that is part of radical feminism. And basically its viewpoint was the world is created by men, for men and all of the institutions, structures and theologies and philosophies, all of those things are there with the man as the neutral and anyone else is the marked category. So if the man is the A the woman is the A-minus.

David Bashevkin:
We’re the default.

Chava Green:
Yeah, the man is the default. We say mankind, now it’s polite to say humankind or peoplehood, whatever. But the man throughout history is the default. And so you have this moment in feminism where they said it doesn’t really do anything to have a woman president. Nothing will be accomplished. The only thing that will be accomplished is the representation of women. And maybe that woman will bring in more of women’s experiences, but the entire system is built for a man. And you have this also in the professional world. The office building is built for a man, a man’s body, a man’s experiences, for women who have children who have totally different experiences, the literal building is not built for them. Okay, so-

David Bashevkin:
It’s just so interesting. There’s a comedian named Rory Scovel who has a joke. I wish I remember the exact details, but there’s a bumper sticker that he makes fun of where the bumper sticker said: God made man and saw that he wouldn’t be so great. So then He made a woman. And Rory makes fun of that bumper sticker. That notion that trying to say that women are more exalted. It’s like a feminist bumper sticker. But Rory Scovel points out. Then He made a woman meaning in that very bumper sticker, if you listen closely, you’re still ascribing exclusive maleness to the God figure.

Chava Green:
Yeah. So you have this throughout history. You have just the man as the authority, the power and the neutral, all these things. And so there’s this moment in radical feminism where they’re like, “Let’s remake the world. Let’s make an entirely new world that is feminine, that is coming out of the female experience, and maybe we’re not going to change the world. Maybe we should make our own world.” And they made communes and all these things. So that was a big disaster.

But for me, what it really made me think about is do I want the thing that the man has and why? Do I want to wrap tefillin, and why? What is the inner desire coming from? And so for me, I felt like a lot of those feminist things were, I want it because the man has it and the man’s a more important person. Society cares more about what men do than what women do. So I want to be in the position the man is in, and now there’s a woman in that position. Now I have power, now I have authority, now I’m valued. And I felt like it is a total disregard to what it means to be a woman, to value and enjoy and gain authority and power through what it means to be a woman.

David Bashevkin:
Deliberately through your role, meaning through your, I don’t even like the word role, but through your unique experience, talents, outlook, rather than superimposing some other vision onto yourself, cultivating and finding your own space and taking ownership of it.

Chava Green:
Yeah. So to go back to your original question, that’s my answer. I was not interested really what’s going on in shul. I didn’t want to be doing what men wanted to do in shul. I wanted to understand why Judaism revolves around the home, why Shabbos is so essential, why Pesach is all about the food you’re eating in your house. Pesach Davening is not a huge thing. Pesach is what is your mother making to eat? There’s so much about Judaism that is-

David Bashevkin:
That’s such an interesting but it’s so simple, but I love when it’s hiding in plain sight that when you close your eyes and think about Pesach, do you think about who leined on Chol HaMoed or do you think about the Seder and what you ate and the home experience? And you’re basically saying what you found was that you found a very almost more essential area, which you do have deep authority over.

Chava Green:
Yeah. And it’s from God.

David Bashevkin:
And religious authority. Because I just want you to elaborate. In contrast, you began saying it, but I think it’s very important. How does the Chabad approach to feminism and women differ from the rest of the Orthodox community? You highlighted something that I thought was very important, where you said in the Litvish community, you do find, and I’ve noted this even I used to work for Mishpacha magazine, which is getting a great deal of criticism. They don’t even show pictures of women generally in the magazine. However, I always remind people, all the decision makers, the major people there were women, all of them, and they were business women. They were in charge. So how is the Chabad vision different than the other streams within the traditional Orthodox community?

Chava Green:
So for me, it all comes back to the Rebbe’s guiding teachings. His guiding principle throughout his leadership was that God wants a dirah betachtonim a dwelling place in the physical world. And a dirah is a home, right? I think in modern Hebrew, it’s like an apartment-

David Bashevkin:
Literally, yeah. A dirah is like your dorms. They call it like your dirah when you dorm in yeshiva they call it a dirah.

Chava Green:
Yeah. So what does God want? God wants you to make Him feel at home. He does not want to feel at shul. He wants to feel at home. And so the Rebbe is like, “Whole zeitgeist was like, bring God into the material physical world, doing mitzvos, like inspiring other Jews, building Chabad houses in your own thoughts. You’re in a challenging situation. Bring God into that place. Whether it’s-”

David Bashevkin:
Is that why they’re called Chabad houses? I’ve never even put that together. Fascinating. Okay. Keep going.

Chava Green:
I think it’s part of it. So what I argue in my dissertation is that the fact that this is the highest value, the highest goal of the creation of the world according to the Rebbe, is that it deeply democratizes Judaism because anybody can make a dirah betachtonim in any moment with any situation and with any knowledge of Judaism, it’s completely democratic. So what you have in Chabad I feel is that, so sure you step back a little bit and the Rebbe divided everybody’s roles. Obviously the woman is the akeret habayit the foundation of the home, and she’s a shlucha. And that looks different than being a Chabad rabbi and what men are responsible for. And even with children, the Rebbe spoke to children constantly, but what he did is he gave everybody the same marching orders. And like you were saying before, it’s religious authority. The term authority, I don’t love. I think that-

David Bashevkin:
Why?

Chava Green:
I don’t know why authority is so important. I think for me, my love of Chassidus comes from the fact that you’re just rejecting everything the world says is important. But you just want what Hashem wants. So unless Chassidus is saying you have to have authority, because let’s say you are the head rabbi of a country and you need to step into that position with authority, then that’s where Hashem put you. But in my life, do I need authority? No. I need compassion, need bittul. Sometimes I need to nullify my own desires for my children’s desires. So for me there, I like challenging a lot what the world says is important.

So I go through this in my dissertation, in my research, trying to go back deeper and deeper. What is really important? And if the world says something is so important and feminists have fought for that, how do Chabad women maybe conceptualize that differently? How does the Rebbe conceptualize that differently? So I see a lot of differences there. And then you go through Rebbe’s sichos, and for me, he creates this constellation of a woman’s role. It is not one thing. It is many different pieces. And I feel there is a lot of personal choice in which aspect of being a woman in Chabad do you want to dive into and make your thing.

David Bashevkin:
Can you share some of the pieces in that constellation? I love that language, the constellation and choice, but what is the landscape of that constellation?

Chava Green:
So what I did in order to kind of ground this is I picked out maybe 10 different talks from the Rebbe. And I drew out what his kind of directive was in that particular talk for women. And then I compare and contrast them. So I’ll give you two examples. So one, he has a sicho about Dinah being abducted by Shechem and the horrible things that happened to her. And he goes to look at the Rashi and Rashi says, “Dinah is called an outgoing woman just like her mother Leah was.” And Rashi brings that point for the pasuk of when she’s abducted. And so all the mefarshim say the reason she’s abducted, because she went out-

David Bashevkin:
The commentaries.

Chava Green:
All the commentaries say she went out, a woman’s supposed to be home where she’s protected, but she went out into the fields and so she was vulnerable. And the Rebbe reads that. And he says there’s a general principle of the Torah that only speaks positively and especially about tzadikim like a daughter of Ya’akov, of Jacob, so Dinah must be a righteous woman. And he says that we learned from this that when a woman has a particular talent in influencing and inspiring people, she must go out of her home and use that power and use that talent. And by doing that, she’ll find Jewish women who are “on the outside” of Judaism, meaning they don’t find themselves within Judaism. And she will bring Judaism to them, because they’re not coming to Judaism. She will bring it to them and she will inspire them. And he says, “But she does this within the bounds of modesty.”

But I have a whole discussion about modesty. The Rebbe, when he talks about modesty, he is not talking about clothing. He’s not talking necessarily even about being in public because obviously he’s telling women to go to public. What he’s talking about is the modality. The way that you accomplish something must be through a pnimius way, an inner way. And so this ties back into what I was saying about authority and power. So the Chabad woman does not necessarily need to run around and make a big stir and be on TV or try to be super, super public. But she goes out in a way of innerness by speaking to people one-on-one, by speaking to people where they’re at, by doing things that are beautiful programming and things like that. And so this is one facet of being a Chabad woman, is that we have an imperative to go out into the world and use our talents.

So now I’m going to contrast this to another very famous sicho in Chabad that The Rebbe spoke about the prophetess Chana. And in the Prophets there’s a section where it talks about Chana going up to Shiloh with her husband Elkanah. And they were a very famous couple, and people looked up to them and they would go to the Mishkan, where Hashem’s presence was, where God’s presence was. And they would have these super powerful spiritual experiences connecting to God. And one thing that Chana always prayed for was have a child. And the Rebbe says when she had her child, when God blessed her with a child, she stayed home for three years until he was weaned. She did not go to the Mishkan. She did not go to this place. And she knew what she was missing out on because she was a prophetess. So she knew she was going to have crazy, powerful spiritual experiences, but her son was more important.
And so she stayed home for three years and he says, “This is a directive to all the Jewish women that their most powerful experience of God is in their home. And that is where they had the most impact on the world is by raising children and showing the children that they are the most important thing. And through this, they will create generations of Jews who are connected to God.”
And so this Chana sicho is raised a lot by women who say, let’s say a woman is like, I miss going to shul so much. And a woman will say, “But Chana stayed home.” This sicho is part of kind of the Chabad lexicon of the importance of being a mother, the importance of staying home, the importance of creating a certain vibe in your home that’s welcoming and warm. And so I bring this to show that the Rebbe felt very strongly about the value of the home and the value of a woman’s role in the home of creating how it feels for everybody there. But he also made it very clear that women are not confined to the home. They have a very important public role in Chabad as well.

David Bashevkin:
Meaning they can go out. Meaning the reason why you specifically are contrasting these two is because they really are in dialogue with each other whereby you did not read the Rebbe’s Torah and get the impression that the woman’s role, so to speak is in the kitchen. Did any of your sensors ever go off and say, getting that stay in the kitchen vibe?

Chava Green:
So to be honest, sometimes I do feel like the Rebbe was trying to change our mentality that the home is a really important place. And sometimes for me, that kind of does go into these older feminist speakers who are like, “The home is a traditional prison of women, and it prevents them from impacting society,” and all these things. But I feel like when the Rebbe says that, it’s always within a context of this is where your power is, so we’re not putting you there. You’re not being pushed there. You have the choice to recognize your power in your home. And it’s like an ongoing struggle.
And I think one of the things the Rebbe was doing when he said this is he recognized this is a struggle for women now, this is not a taken for granted thing that you’re super happy to be a stay-at-home mom. We’re in the day and age where it is much more exciting and alluring and sometimes personally satisfying to go out into the world and have a career. And I think sometimes why is the Rebbe telling? He’s not talking to secular women. Oh, it’s so important to go home and raise your kids. He’s talking to a bunch of Chassidic women out of farbrengen.

David Bashevkin:
That’s an important point.

Chava Green:
Why does he have to tell all these Chassidic women, it’s so valuable that you’re in your house? Aren’t they already doing that? But the point is-

David Bashevkin:
Why is he? Yeah.

Chava Green:
… it’s a contested value. Chabad women are also American citizens. They go shopping at the supermarket, they’re online, at the time not online, but maybe they’re hearing the radio, they’re watching TV. They want to be super fashionable and with it and all these things. And at the same time, the Rebbe is saying: Don’t forget you’re a Chassidic woman, and I want you to understand why it’s so important that you’re going to raise the next generation, even when all these other things are super alluring. Then the Rebbe says the next step, which is: And I also want you to do all of those things, but with the foundation and the fact that you have to do it l’shem shamayim, for Hashem. Not just for fun, for yourself.” I have a whole section in my research about sheitels, about wigs because this was an area where the Rebbe was so passionate that women should have expensive, expensive wigs.

David Bashevkin:
So I was going to get to that, and I want to hear this so badly because the question I was going to ask you is, whenever somebody chooses to be a part of a community, their experience in that community is always going to be anchored and animated by that initial choice. Now, I never had an initial choice. And when you’re raised within a community, usually your second choice might be when you go to yeshiva or seminary, it’s later in life, but you had an initial choice. It was very ideological.

How did you avoid, or how do you process the contemporary lived experience of Chabad women, where, I’ll be honest, their reputation in the Orthodox world, it’s like almost a running joke, is that Chabad women are the most beautiful, the most fashionable, the most on Instagram, do it everywhere. And I’m wondering if the way you process that was by saying, okay, every movement eventually becomes a little bit more cultural and has break-offs and needs to reassert ideology. Or were you able to look at the contemporary state and almost see the echoes in some ways of the Rebbe’s prioritization of what women should be focused on and feel proud about?

Chava Green:
Yeah, so this is a tension that I really explore and I really think about personally and also my academic work. I’m playing with the idea of calling it a modern sensibility in Chabad, but then I think about it-

David Bashevkin:
I’m smiling because the intro to 18Forty is balancing traditional sensitivities with modern sensibility.

Chava Green:
Oh, wow, that’s amazing. I knew I was not the first one to come up with it, but very cool. Exactly, exactly. And this is something that first of all is a principle throughout Judaism that Judaism has always evolved and adapted in its contemporary culture that it’s within. I don’t think that’s a failing or a downside. I think that’s one of the ways that Judaism has survived. And one of its inner power that we have as a Jewish people to maintain our faith and our values within that changing culture by not being stuck in one particular way.

If you’re stuck in 1840 and you’re like, “I can’t move past it,” you’re going to die out. So I really think about the ways that Chabad women pull in aspects of contemporary American culture, whether it’s fashion, whether it’s home decor, mental health is a big one, and you’ve seen that across orthodoxy as a whole. But what I see amongst Chabad women is that there’s a lot of internal narratives about how this fits into the Rebbe’s Chassidus, so I didn’t necessarily feel like I was looking for that or making the connection. Chabad women make that connection themselves.

David Bashevkin:
They’re grappling with it.

Chava Green:
Yeah, they’re really thinking about it. So a woman was saying that she’s a shlucha, and she grew up with a mother who was the outgoing shlucha, the so to speak, the Dinah who was like every night making programs, every Shabbos hosting a hundred people, every day on campus meeting with professors. And she grew up thinking back camp, I can’t be like that. My mother was never around. It was so hard. And so she’s a shlucha. And she said for the first few years, that was her shlichus. And she became depressed, clinically depressed, and she felt like her children didn’t have her. And she shifted her whole shlichus to being really focused on her kids and her whole experience with self-care, which is a very self-care social media Instagram sort of concept, but she filtered it through the Rebbe’s teachings. She told me about her experience all through things she had learned from the Rebbe’s sichos, from teachers, all these things.

So I feel like for me, on the inside, it’s very clear why Chabad is moving in certain directions. I think that the Rebbe instigated these things. He has a sicho about Chof-Beis Shevat, the Rebbetzin’s birthday, and it’s all about making your home beautiful, bringing beauty into Hashem’s world because it’s not enough to just make a dirah betachtonim. The actual dirah should be beautiful. In the language of Judaism, it’s a hiddur mitzvah. You beautify the mitzvah, you spend more money on your esrog you’re more money on your menorah. But the Rebbe took that and applied it to everything. So you have an entryway-

David Bashevkin:
The living room.

Chava Green:
Yeah, your living room, you are going to get curtains. Don’t put $5 curtains, buy $500 curtains. Those curtains are going to be there when you’re sitting at your Shabbos table and you’re going to be looking at them, and you should feel like Shabbos is beautiful, and there’s so much pleasure and enjoyment, and the Rebbe spoke so much about, and also just one little side point because I love Chassidus, but the highest levels of Hashem’s emanations in the world is Keser is the Crown. And within Keser, you have two levels, pleasure and desire. And that is the point within ourselves where we reach Hashem when we tap into pleasure in Hashem’s world and we follow our inner desires. And so much of the Rebbe’s Chassidus is bringing moshiach by integrating all of these high lofty things in Kabbalah and Chassidus into like, okay, you’re building your Chabad house and you have this amount of money. And then you realize, yeah, but we don’t need regular stairs. We need a beautiful floating staircase that goes up. And it’s not just materiality, it’s not gashmius, it’s making a dirah betachtonim.

David Bashevkin:
I just find your story and your outlook to be so deeply inspiring. I am awoken right now, but I wanted to ask you, I interrupted you when the Rebbe spoke about expensive sheitels, usually in the Orthodox community, when rabbis talk about sheitels, it’s usually in the opposite direction. They’re usually criticizing and saying, “It’s too long, it’s too lace, it’s too this, it’s too that.” I didn’t know this. What did the Rebbe say about sheitels?

Chava Green:
Okay, so there’s a lot of more personal commentary-

David Bashevkin:
A sheitel just for our listeners, is the Yiddish term for the wig that traditionally married Orthodox women wear.

Chava Green:
Yeah. Okay. So this came up in my field work when I was doing research for my dissertation, lace sheitels had become really, really popular a number of years ago. And I wasn’t sure the legal halachic ramifications of lace sheitels, I saw everyone was wearing them. But I was like, “But what’s the deal?” They look like really, really natural. You sometimes can’t tell if woman’s wearing a sheitel or not. And so there was a lot of discussion among people in Chabad that the Rebbe, when women were coming to America, when Orthodox women were coming to America after the war, it was not a common custom to wear a wig-

David Bashevkin:
No, it was not?

Chava Green:
… to cover their hair at all. And then for sure, not a wig. And so the Rebbe, when people would come to him, he would sometimes ask the man in the private audience, does your wife wear a wig, and he would say, “I don’t know,” or, “It’s too much money,” or something like that. And many times, the Rebbe took from his own money and gave it to the husband and said, “Go to Manhattan to Broadway and find out who makes wigs for the theater and buy the most expensive wig for your wife.” And so this was the Rebbe’s view. He wanted women to wear wigs.

One of the reasons is a very famous letter he wrote to somebody that if you’re at a fancy function and the President of the United States walks in and you’re wearing a little scarf on your head, you’re going to quickly take it off because you won’t want to be embarrassed that you’re sticking out. If you’re wearing a wig, first of all, you’re not going to be embarrassed, because it should look beautiful and it should look like your hair. It should look natural, and you also won’t be able to just take off a wig in public very easily. And so the Rebbe, I think, wanted to encourage mitzvah observance that women should cover their hair. And he wanted to do it in a way that was in line with the sensibilities of women at the time.

David Bashevkin:
The Rebbe was so acutely aware of those American sensibilities and how they still could be integrated into what on the 1840 podcast we call traditional sensitivities. But I think that the Rebbe would call it almost like mystical ideas and integrating that mysticism into the sensibilities.

Chava Green:
Yeah, yeah. Because the wig becomes an object of a mitzvah, it becomes elevated to something of kedushah, of holiness. And why not also have a beautiful wig, just like you have a beautiful menorah, or a beautiful … beautify this mitzvah, and also you enjoy it more-

Chava Green:
… beautiful set. Beautify this mitzvah and also you enjoy it more, and then you have more of a desire to do it. So, for sure, over the years, I met many women who absolutely hate wearing a sheitel. No matter how beautiful it is. It’s uncomfortable. It’s super expensive. The sheitel industry, not throwing shade on anyone, but it’s a little bit manipulative. People charge exorbitant amounts.

But I think that, like you said, it ties back into this question of the Rebbe’s outlook and the material world. The importance of aesthetics in the Rebbe’s vision is that everything should be beautiful. Part of it is for outreach, obviously, I think, it’s to show secular Jews that Judaism is not something of the past. It is a living religion. It is a living connection to God. The kind of aesthetics and the materiality and fashion and decor become an entryway into understanding that.

David Bashevkin:
You have been so generous with your time, and I really hope either you’ll give us permission to share your dissertation or hopefully we’ll see it as a book. Before I get to our rapid fire questions, one thing, and this has been the theme of everything, but I want to ask it as its own distinct question. You have been exposed to so much more than your average Orthodox Jew, more than your average secular Jew, because you really emerge from the center of secular thought and of the academia, and the center of gender studies where all the culture wars were coming. And then, you moved. Again, you did the interviews with each sect. And then you moved and you did this dissertation, which you’re really interacting with the full spectrum of the female experience in Chabad, in Judaism, and in the world, meaning you didn’t only speak and only quote people who had a wonderful experience, and no doubt and no issues.

How do you avoid the nagging doubt that when you are exposed to so many different ways of life, how do I know that I really got it right? Most of the Jewish world, most of the Orthodox world is not Chabad, and yet there is this very unique approach. But even for me, how do you avoid the whispers of all of the past experiences, philosophies, culture, who would roll their eyes with cynicism and say, “Oh, Chava was this promising emerging Jew, and I don’t know when it happened, I don’t know who to blame, but she is brainwashed.”

Chava Green:
Okay. Well, I was going to say I bought it hook, line and sinker, that Chabad Chassidus … for me, I’ll say it, I really, really deeply believe that in Yiddishkeit, we have 70 faces of the Torah. I remember being in seminary and I went to Tzfat, I started becoming Chabad and I was like, I feel like my Yiddishkeit is becoming alive. This is what I was looking for.

And I had a very, very close friend, very deep spiritual person who was also floating around trying to find her place. And I was like, you got to come to Chabad with me, you got to be Lubavitcher. This is it. And she was like, “I don’t know, it doesn’t speak to me. I don’t know, it’s not the right thing for me.” And she became like Hardal in Israel, a kind of mix of Dati Leumi and Haredi.

And I remember for a few years I was upset. I was like, come on. She’s like missing out on this.

I’m answering your question through the opposite. But I’ve definitely come to realize that everyone has a community that speaks to them and that is their pathway to reach Hashem. And I totally accept that.

On the other hand, I think Chabad Chassidus, for me, it touches on all aspects of a person; emotional, mental, physical, practical, social, professional. Everything’s found for me within the Rebbe’s teachings. And I see the ways that it has slowly seeped out and affected the Orthodox world as a whole.

David Bashevkin:
Undoubtedly.

Chava Green:
And I think you see so many people that are not Lubavitchers, but they respect the Rebbe, they’re connected to the Rebbe. And we’re here on 30 years after Gimmel Tammuz and the Rebbe’s influence is just exponential because of all the people he’s touched. And they may be talking about ideas from the Rebbe and they don’t even know that they’re from the Rebbe because they’re three steps removed.

And so I am not big on the boxes. You have to be Lubavitcher, you have to have a beard or not, or this or that, or sheitel, whatever. I found my home in Judaism and other people have a different home in Judaism, but I do deeply believe in the Rebbe’s teachings and that they’re universal.

David Bashevkin:
It is really, really incredible. I apologize, I know I’m taking advantage of your time and you have a young child who someone is babysitting for, but that’s exactly what I wanted to ask about. I want to come back to the personal, and that is, I just need to ask, how did your parents deal with this?

Chava Green:
Everyone asks this question. Okay, so I’ll give you the short answer. Long answer is many phases. But the short answer is that my parents saw that from a young age I was a very idealistic person and very stubborn. And so when I became a radical feminist in college, they were like, “Oh boy, okay, we kind of saw this coming. You found your thing that you’re obsessed with.”

And then after a year of that, I quickly switched and became an Orthodox Jew and they’re like, “Oh boy, here’s the next thing.” But then that has lasted for about 15 years. So over the years, they’re like, okay, not so much a phase. And I think what’s been really important is that I was very intense for many years. Very, very ideological, black and white. This is right, this is wrong. And I think over the years as a ba’al teshuvah, especially going through my PhD and bringing something that was very important from my past into my present and integrating it into my Judaism, that was a process that I think brought my parents around to see the ways that I’m still the same person and I am also achieving these goals that I have. And Judaism has not, God forbid, prevented me from achieving them, but in fact created even broader way for me to achieve those goals. And at the same time having a PhD having three kids. So I think my parents, thank God, are very proud of me.

David Bashevkin:
Really incredible, and it really is an incredible PhD. Again, the title is: The Hasidic Face of Feminism, Gender Between Modernity and Mysticism in Chabad-Lubavitch. Which are there plans to make it into a book?

Chava Green:
Yes, God willing. Actually, one of the things I have a question for your listeners is if I should make it an academic book that would be used in universities and classes or I’m very on the fence if I should make it a popular book and just have a wider audience.

David Bashevkin:
I feel very strongly, and we don’t know each other, but I am a very big believer that the answer must be both. I have published, not super academic, I have a more serious academic chapter coming out with some Brill book that’ll cost $400, and it’s a chapter on sin in world religions and some fancy academic book they’re putting out. But most of what I do is—

I know you’re asking our listeners, and I’m answering, but I believe in building that bridge between popular and academic is actually part of… It’s almost on a microcosm like building that dira betachtonim for these elevated ideas, but bringing them down to the common popular masses I think is part of the mission of Chasiddus, part of the mission of Kisheyafutzu Mayonosecho Chutza is not to have your ideas just in the academy, though I think the academy pushes us to articulate things very precisely, and I’m grateful to the academy for that, but chutza means everybody and taking the loftiest ideas, even with the fanciest titles and bring them to as many people as possible.

I cannot thank you enough, Chava, and I wanted to conclude with my more rapid fire questions. I’m so grateful to you. My first question specifically, not specifically women, but specifically on the issue of women and Chabad, you mentioned two of the Rebbe’s talks that we will hopefully link to. What introductory sources or what introductory texts, books would you offer to men and women who want to explore the themes that you have discussed more aside from, God willing, your own forthcoming books—

Chava Green:
Oh, good question. This is hard. I think that this is what’s kind of missing, like a general overview and also something updated. You have an academic book called Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers by Stephanie Wellen Levine, and that’s a fascinating look inside women’s lives in Crown Heights, young girls, and I think she presents a pretty fair spectrum of women’s experiences. You have Elliot Wolfson’s book, which is very opaque, very hard to read, but I think he touches on a lot of core concepts.

David Bashevkin:
Oh yeah, Elliot Wolfson’s book, which I’ve been talking about in all my interviews on Chabad, turned my Judaism upside down, inside out. You kind of have to roll it up and smoke it. You can’t really read the book, it’s-

Chava Green:
You’ve just got to intuit what he means because it’s not clear. But there is a very clear book called Social Vision.

David Bashevkin:
Eli Rubin, my favorite. And he’s the one who connected us.

Chava Green:
Oh, yes, exactly. So we should thank him publicly. That was great. Yeah, I mean, I think with gender you have a lot of insider Chabad books that I feel need to be updated. They’re from the ’80s, the ’90s and I’m hoping to come out with some more updated things. But the Rebbe’s talks, especially ones that are accessible, translated into English, go on chabad.org. That for me is like you will type in Jewish women on chabad.org. I actually have a number of articles if people are interested in reading more of my writing. I have a lot of articles on thejewishwoman.org.

David Bashevkin:
Wow. My next question, if somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take another sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever to go back and get a second PhD, I know, which is the most horrifying question. I also did the dissertation. No one wants a second.

Chava Green:
I would never do that again. I’m just kidding.

David Bashevkin:
But if there was another topic that could merit your full attention and exploration, what would that topic of that dissertation be?

Chava Green:
Okay, so we touched on a number of issues over our conversation that I want to go back to the idea of what is something that is important in a woman’s life that is not considered of value or of importance academically. And for me, this whole idea of sheitels, of the wigs, now they’re being produced in China, and you have this kind of global supply chain happening where you have these Chinese women making wigs for Jewish women, and you have a lot of issues of aesthetics, of market value, all these things changing, it’s tied in with a lot of shifts in the world. So I would want to do a deep study of the relationship between the Chinese women that make wigs with the Jewish women that wear them, and how you have the sheitelmachers who are the middle people, and kind of the religious undertones of all of these aspects, the commercial, religious and personal undertones. And then obviously kind of these bigger picture questions of how does a woman’s role tie into the material world?

David Bashevkin:
That is a super brilliant… I hope you get to do it. My final question, I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules, especially young mothers. What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Chava Green:
My nighttime cutoff is 10:30, ideally 8:45 I’m in pajamas and getting ready for bed. And then we just moved recently, so my kids have been up at 5:30 every morning. But for your listeners, there is a magic alarm clock. It’s a sheep that the eyes open when the kids are allowed to leave their room. So now I get to sleep till 6:30.

David Bashevkin:
Chava Green. I am so grateful for you joining, sharing your wisdom, your scholarship, your experience. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Chava Green:
Thank you so much for having me.

David Bashevkin:
I was so fascinated by this conversation and how it highlighted once again, the integration of phenomenology and philosophy, which I think stands at the heart of how Chabad and the Rebbe in particular approached Hasidic thought and Jewish thought and Jewish life. Of wedding together, even the lowest form and experience of a child, of just a regular man or woman on the street, and to ensure that their experiences were informed by even the most transcendent, mystical ideology, even if those very people who are participating in the experience don’t necessarily have the capacity or the educational background to fully comprehend the mysticism on which their experiences are grounded.

And I think this is something that the Rebbe was doing in general for American Jewry. The Rebbe in many ways was translating the world of Chassidus, the vision of the Baal Shem Tov, the vision of Chabad and the Baal HaTanya and all of the Rebbe through the generations. And he was translating their conceptual philosophy to an American phenomenology, to an American experience and learning how to wed the two that America is no different. And even here we can have transcendent Hasidic and mystical experiences.

And I think one of the most beautiful ways where you see this and it relates specifically to gender is actually how careful and how much the Rebbe was involved in the publication of Chabad’s children’s magazine, which is actually fittingly called Moshiach Times.

And there’s a wonderful article and there was a thread on social media by my friend. He’s really a wonderful person. I got to see him recently. His name is Rabbi Mordechai Lightstone, AKA you may know him as Mottel and he’s kind of the Chabad shliach to the internet. Everything that he does, so much of what he does is focused on the online culture and technology and all this stuff.

And he wrote this amazing article as well as a thread that talks about the role of Al Jaffee, who you may not know who that is. I believe he was 102 when he passed, but Al Jaffee was the artist behind Mad magazine, alav ha-shalom. I don’t think they publish anymore of blessed memory. Mad Magazine, which if you remember always had this goofy child on the cover. His name was Alfred E. Neuman. And Al Jaffee was the one who pioneered that, I think the Spy vs. Spy, he pioneered in the back of Mad magazine. You would be able to fold the two pages together and create a third image.

I’m sorry. For our listeners who have no idea what I’m talking about, that saddens me that we have a generation who does not know what Mad magazine is, but it was a major magazine. I mean everybody, all the kids used to read this. It was a little gross. It was very often inappropriate, but we all read it. And the artist behind it was somebody named Al Jaffee. And Al Jaffee was the artist who then went on to be the primary illustrator for Chabad’s Children’s Magazine, known as Moshiach Times. He even developed this column instead of Spy vs. Spy, he had this thing called The Shpy, like with a little bit of a Yiddish pronunciation who had the Shpymobile. It was really, really wonderful.

But one thing that I found so fascinating was how involved the Rebbe was and what his notes were for the magazine. And one thing that the Rebbe wanted to make sure of is that every cover of this children’s magazine had a girl and a boy on the cover. And the Rebbe actually wrote a personal note at one point to one of the cover illustrators and said “This cover just as a boy, we have to make sure that they both are included.”

In a different note to editors the Rebbe once wrote, and it’s just fascinating how involved he was, the illustrations of a children’s magazine, he wrote, “It’s not fitting that people should be drawn with unnaturally oversized bodies and cartoonishly large noses, even though that style is common. It’s a huge educational mistake.” The Rebbe didn’t want children to laugh at how other people looked. That is not the right way to educate children.

And my takeaway from all this as fascinating as the story of Al Jaffee is, and you definitely should go online and read the story, it’s called “How Cartoonist Al Jaffee Found his Inner Jewish Superhero.” And this was written in his lifetime when he was still 99 years old. I believe he passed away three years later.
I’m bringing this up, not so I could wax nostalgic about Mad magazine and the artwork of Al Jaffee, though I certainly am. I’m bringing this up to show that the mystical outlook of the Rebbe was always laser focused on wedding and integrating mystical philosophy and ideology with phenomenology, with the experience.

And you can’t have a mystical philosophy that just addresses those who understand mysticism that’s very deep. It has to lead and be able to translate into an actual lived experience where even a children’s magazine has to cohere and align with a certain outlook. And I think in many ways that’s something very instructive for the Jewish community at large and even specifically for the non-Chabad Orthodox community.

Do we have a specific ideology that can clearly translate to the lived experience of growing up in the Orthodox community? And I think this question is most important when we think about children. I think it’s extraordinarily important when we think about the experience of women growing up in the Jewish community and any part of the population which isn’t seen, and I’m using air quotes, that’s kind of the central population of the bnei hayeshiva or people who are spending their time day and night in the most traditional sense studying. We have to understand that we need an ideology that can encompass our entire community and ensure that that ideology is integrated and informed in that lived experience.

Because I think the greatest expression of mysticism is not the mysticism that is told supernally and transcendently at gatherings with great scholars who understand all of the terminology and the language in the world. But the greatest expression of mysticism is that vision of the Rebbe, of creating a dira betachtonim, a lived experience in this world, no matter the population, no matter the background, no matter the educational prowess or acumen, but a lived experience, a dira betachtonim, a dwelling place for divinity in the very ordinary-ness of our lives that in fact is the greatest expression of mystical thought. A mysticism that can include, guide, and encompass the entirety of the Jewish people and through the Jewish people of the world.

That is the vision of the Rebbe. That is everything that Chava Green talks about in her dissertation. That is everything that every note that the Rebbe sent to Al Jaffee, the old artist from Mad magazine and his guidance for The Moshiach Times was an act of translation and taking mysticism and the most transcendent ideas and translating them for this generation in America in their own personal lives.

So thank you so much for listening. This episode was actually episode not by our friend Denah Emerson who’s away for the summer, but our dearest friend, Rob. Thank you, Rob. If you enjoyed this episode or any of our episodes, please subscribe, rate, review, tell your friends about it. You could also donate at 18Forty.org/donate. It really helps us reach new listeners and continue putting out great content. You could also leave us a voicemail with feedback or questions that we may play on a future episode. That number of course is 516-519-3308 or of course, you can email us at info@eighteenforty.org. If you’d like to learn more about this topic or some of the other great ones we’ve covered in the past, be sure to check out 18Forty.org. That’s the number one eight, followed by the word 40, F-O-R-T-Y .org, where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails. Thank you so much for listening and stay curious. My friends.