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Exceptions and Expectations

24 October 2013

By Ruth Wilson, October 2013

I grew up knowing that my life was an exception to the rules.

My friends prayed on Sunday, in churches that were landmarks in my small country town. My family prayed, on Saturday, at home. We had different rules for eating. In my friends’ homes, they shared ghost stories and English classics; in ours we entered the world of the shtetl and the ghetto, our stories about dreamers of the Jewish world.

My early experience bred the expectation that the Jewish world was itself different, exceptional. It did not occur to me that it, just like any other of my time, would be beset by gender and power games. My personal experience of service to the community in the 80s and 90s was mixed. As a provider of educational services I was fulfilled and rewarded; but I found it hard to accept that the synagogue Board on which I served regarded the issue of whether women in the Gallery could hear the sermons as an irrelevance.

I dream that the relevance of gender as an issue will evaporate in the next 25 years. When the nature of gender equality is transformed from struggle to expectation, and the gender of human beings becomes as unimportant as the colour of their eyes, my dream will be reality.

Ruth Wilson (b.1932)

 

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