Rabbi Gabriel Kanter-Webber
Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue
Saturday 5 September 2026¹

• Gloria Steinem died this week. Reading her obituaries² was a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. The tone would kind of alternate between praise for the Gloria Steinem who identified unequal pay for women as a form of workplace harassment,³ and incredulity at the Gloria Steinem who defended Bill Clinton’s treatment of an intern half his age as nothing more than “dumb”.⁴ She was lauded as Gloria Steinem, the brave campaigner for abortion rights,⁵ and critiqued as the Gloria Steinem who sneered at trans women for “mutilat[ing]” themselves.⁶
• If Gloria Steinem herself had an opportunity to look back over her 92 years on earth, what assessment would she make? Hold that thought.
• We’re approaching the end of our year’s cycle of Torah readings. This time next week, we’ll be in the year 5787. It’s a good time to look back.
• One of the most remarkable pieces of Torah wisdom I’ve ever read came from Rav Simcha Bunim of Peshischa. He said:⁷

• All the biblical characters about whom we’ve spent a whole year reading – Abraham and Sarah, Moses and Miriam, the sons of Aaron and the daughters of Zelophechad – they were just living their lives. Their marriages and bereavements, their moments of joy and their family squabbles. Remarkable lives, true (none of us have ever been assailed by a talking donkey or dressed up in furs to impersonate an hairy sibling), but they weren’t performing for the cameras or trying to portray a particular image of themselves. They were just living. Bumbling through their days on this mortal coil as best they could, much as we all do.
• Then, suddenly, the later generations among them found: they were in the Torah. The tablets of stone brought down from Mount Sinai – the tablets containing the text that God had promised would bind and inspire their descendants, in equal measure, for millennia to come – the tablets were about them!
• How would that revelation have made them feel? Proud, maybe, in part. There are passages in which the Israelites behaved at a level worthy of emulation. But also, it must have been embarrassing. Miriam surely didn’t expect her one-off racist gibe at her sister-in-law to be recorded for posterity. Moses may not have wanted his moments of anger and insecurity to be transcribed for people like us to read and judge from thousands of miles away.
• But above all, I suspect, the Israelites who found that the Torah was made out of their lives would have felt bemused. “Us?!” they’d have muttered. “We spent 40 years in the wilderness waiting for an edifying, ennobling, book to show us the way forward, and it’s just telling us about us?!”
• And that’s where Gloria Steinem comes back in. When she fought for equal pay and abortion rights, she was fighting for equal pay and abortion rights, nothing more. When she made ridiculous remarks about Bill Clinton and trans women, she was making ridiculous remarks – and when she retracted them decades later,⁸ she was retracting them.
• Gloria Steinem made the most extraordinary contribution to the advancement of women’s rights. Yet what she assuredly was not doing, or at least not knowingly and intentionally doing, was becoming a historical bellwether. She was simply going through her life, following her values and, as times changed, adjusting and refining her values. Gloria Steinem had no idea that her 92 years on Planet Earth would be treated as defining a near-century of feminist thought and progress.
• I cringe to read over some of the things I wrote, some of the opinions I expressed, twenty years ago.⁹ Goodness me, I even found a typo in my book and that was only published last month! Our past selves can be deeply humiliating. Our past views can shock us. Our past deeds can appal us.
• And, painful as that phenomenon is, it’s a good thing. Because it means we’ve changed. Even if historians try to treat us as icons for our age – for the multiple ages we’ve lived through – they’re wrong. We’re people. We’re bumbling. And we bumble on and learn.
• To conclude with the words of, of course, Gloria Steinem:¹⁰

Time is all there is. Let us use the coming period of introspection, the יָמִים נוֹרָאִים, to grow as people, so that our lives will be worthy of having a Torah made out of them.

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Shavua tov!

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Notes

1. Deuteronomy 31:1-13 ↩︎
2. See eg Sian Cain, “Gloria Steinem, groundbreaking feminist campaigner, dies aged 92“, The Guardian (3 September 2026). ↩︎
3. Margaret Sutherlin, “Gloria Steinem wants sexual harassment discussion to extend to equal pay“, Variety (31 October 2017). ↩︎
4. Molly Redden, “Gloria Steinem on her Bill Clinton essay: ‘I wouldn’t write the same thing now’“, The Guardian (30 November 2017). ↩︎
5. See eg Anna Vagianos, “Gloria Steinem on getting an illegal abortion at 22“, The Huffington Post (27 October 2015). ↩︎
6. Veronica Esposito, “On 1970s feminism and watching Mrs America as a trans woman“, Literary Hub (19 May 2020). ↩︎
7. S’fat Emet, Ki Tavo, 5635 ↩︎
8. See eg Gloria Steinem, “On working together over time“, Advocate (2 October 2013). ↩︎
9. No, I’m not going to tell you. ↩︎
10. Gloria Steinem, The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off!: thoughts on life, love and rebellion (New York: Random House, 2019) @p112. ↩︎