GEN1111 In a treatise entitled “
Ornaments of Woman” one of the saints of the early Church, Tertullian, writes bitterly: “
O woman! Thou shouldst always wear mourning and rags, in order to show thy penitence and thy weeping and atoning for they great crime of having corrupted humanity soon after the Creation. For thou
are the one who first tasted of the forbidden fruit and who first transgressed the law of God. It was thou
who hast seduced man whom the devil himself did not dare to approach.” The Jew found it therefore hard to heed the claim of Christianity that it was the first to teach that “
God is love”. He preferred, though threatened by the inquisition and the torture-chamber to embrace the new creed, to remain a member of “
a stiff-necked people” ever ready to
die for Judaism than to live for Christianity. From the Gospels, especially from the Epistles to the ancient Greek and Roman communities sent by Paul, the real architect of Christianity, it is evident that it was Judaism that first liberated woman and converted marriage into an inviolable sacrament. [In Hebrew, the words for man and woman –
ish and
ishah – contain the same two letters (
aleph and
shin), sharing equally between them the two letters (
yod, he) which form one of the name of God. [This will be more closely seen from the Hebrew איש (man) and אשה (woman); the word for God is יה. Incidentally, R. Meir points out, if you leave out the two letters spelling the name of God, the word left, in both cases, is אש (
fire), indicative of the consuming nature of such a Godless relationship. Could the equality of the sexes have been more forcibly and picturesquely described?] the words
Kiddushin and
Nissuin [both describing marriage but literally meaning “holy” and “uplifting” – AJL] should be sufficient guarantee for the protection of woman in Judaism and should convince all but the bigot that marriage is a loving alliance of Godliness and happiness. In such an ideal union, the wife is
not the slave of the husband but his better self with whom her husband should always confer and whose good advice he should ever be ready to follow. “
Whatever Sarah shall tell thee to do, listen to her” was the behest God gave to Abraham when he felt disinclined to act on her advice of banishing Hagar from his home [this verse]. The Jew does not “
fall” in love; he
rises. Our religion never wearies in reminding its adherents that “
to be fruitful and to multiply” is the first command in the Torah. “
A man’s home is his wife”
Yoma 1:1. If he treats here as an inferior being, he will be responsible for the destruction of his home-life and of his general welfare. LEHRMAN 253-4
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