Androgynous Judaism: Masculine and Feminine in the Dual Torah

America’s foremost scholar on formative Judaism examines the issue of gender as it appears in the corpus of rabbinic literature and arrives at some provocative conclusions. While the structure of Judaism based on the dual Torah is clearly masculine in orientation, the substructure–the religious system that shapes its values and perception–is androgynous, an individual conjunction of genders. In fact, the higher values, as defined by the relevant writings, prove to be feminine.