Prayer and women

I thought I’d write my two proverbial cents about women, God, and prayer. I’ve read several blog posts and articles here on the Times of Israel website that some consider women’s prayers to be not-real-prayers or basically not adult prayers, so to speak. This is profoundly perplexing as I haven’t encountered many religions and beliefs that put women’s prayers as beneath that of men so explicitly.

It’s a problem because if you claim women don’t have such a powerful contact with God as men, that women are somewhat emasculated in their attempts to reach God, and such thinking can justify even domestic abuse and forced servitude. If God sees women as less worthy of communicating with Him, then surely the Creator wants women to be benath men? It explains having to sit back in the temples and so on. At the same time, while it sounds somewhat amusing, one wonders if eunuchs also have an impaired ability to reach God.

In many religions and esoteric beliefs across the ages, women were seen as having a stronger connection to the spiritual, and God in particular. Hence the oracles, female intuition and so on. Indeed, the fears of penis-stealing witches was one of the reasons behind the Inquisition.

Giving divine justifications to human concepts is dangerous because God is above the law, so people might be tempted to do all sorts of nasty things in God’s name or God looking the other way. We have plenty of examples of that today.

Perhaps that’s why a sort of a karmic punishment for the purveyors of such misogynistic views would be a rebirth as a woman – and having to sit in the back of the temple. It reminds me of a certain TV show where a woman helped create a theocratic regime where women were banned from writing – not realizing that she, too, was subjected to the very laws she had helped create. An avid article writer, having her finger cut off was a stark reminder of the foolishness she had gotten herself into.

Let’s not be too quick in putting others down because God has shown time and time again He humbles both men and nations and Machiavellian hutzpah can quickly turn into a lesson in humility.