Justice and the Red Queen Effect

There are some stories in Judaism that we never really finish telling. And the most famous of all, is the tale of the Daughters of Zelophehad.  

As the story goes, five women, Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah approach Moses with a problem. Their father Zelophehad has just passed away and according to the ancient laws of inheritance, their family’s land must pass to the nearest male relative. Being five sisters, this means that rather than own land that should be theirs, they are left to watch helpless as their patrimony falls into the hands of some distant male cousin or uncle. 

Thankfully, the sisters do not take this lying down. 

These five women organize. They go enmass to Moses and demand an audience. According to a Midrash, Moses is in the middle of teaching when they burst in. Seeing that Moses is talking about family law, they school the leader with their intellectual prowess and prove to him that they deserve to inherit the land as much as their male brethren (Bava Batra 119b). So smart, so crafty are the sisters that the rabbis call them “like the daughters of kings, fine and worthy” (Sifrei Zuta 15:32). 

Eventually Moses takes their request to God. Looking at their passion and hearing their pleas, God gives them what they ask saying, “The plea of Zelophehad’s daughters is just.” But God doesn’t just stop there. God changes the law for all Israelites. If a man dies without sons, his property can now go to his daughter.  

The end...or so we think 

If you have heard this story before, it has likely ended here. And when it does, we leave feeling great about it. 

The Daughters of Zelophehad are many things: proto-feminist voices in the Torah, paragons of  chutzpah, examples of how a few thoughtful voices can bring about radical change. And they deserve every accolade they get.  

But the story doesn’t actually stop there for these five sisters.  

No sooner do they win, than their progress is walked back. Less than ten chapters later, the men of the Tribe of Menashe fight back.  As I mentioned before, in the ancient world, land is passed down through the male line first. That means that if these daughters, who belong to the tribe of Menashe, were to marry someone from a different tribe, the land would belong to those tribes in perpetuity. Suddenly, from one simple marriage, there would be islands of the Gad, Asher, or Zebulun in the greater territory of Menashe.  

Realizing the men had identified a major loophole, Moses, with God’s blessing, walks back their ruling. Women can inherit but MUST marry someone of their own tribe. If they marry outside the tribe, they have to give back the land. Eventually, the Torah explains, the five daughters of Zelophehad do get married, all to men from the tribe of Menashe, though I wonder if this is actually the path they would have chosen for themselves had they not been shoehorned into it. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about the story of these five sisters this year, especially about why it is that we seem to always stop short of finishing their story. It’s likely because we love happy endings. It’s why in my household we choose hallmark over lifetime movies. We love to see the righteous win and their story gives us hope that we too can triumph in our battles. It just feels better to stop telling the tale when God rules their way, than to dwell on the fact that it gets taken away. 

But what happened to Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah happened to us this year. And if we aren’t careful, it will happen again. 

Like many of you, despite all the warning signs, I never thought Roe v Wade would be overturned. That battle was fought and won long before my birth. I had underestimated the forces pushing against women’s choice. It was matter of fact, a story concluded. Settled law. There could be no part two.  

Then, in what felt like a blink of an eye – though in hindsight was decades of steady erosion– that protection was gone. The hard-fought progress so many had sacrificed for was walked back. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized, I was to blame. 

Now before going on, I want to say that there are and have always been activists and voices working tirelessly to preserve reproductive rights. In the secular world we have Planned Parenthood, NARAL, and the Center for Reproductive Rights. In the Jewish world we have the National Council of Jewish Women and the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, among others. They were not blindsided by this. Their battle for women’s health is a daily endeavor. They knew that the story of Roe v Wade was forever in formation. 

But they are the exception. Most people who care about abortion access have a list of other social justice issues that also keep them up at night. And in a world where so much cries out for our attention, a story that seems settled and a battle that appears won, gives us permission to turn our attention to something else.  

Part of the reason many of us paid more attention to other issues over these years was because preserving the status quo can feel unexciting, even monotonous. When I used to take kids to lobbying with the Religious Action Center it was always so much more fun to march into the office of a congressperson who didn’t agree with our position and try to change their minds than to write a heartfelt thank you to someone who already did. When the latter happened, I always thought, “I drove four hours to Washington when a simple thank you card would have sufficed.”  

What I didn’t realize at the time, and what Roe v Wade taught me, is that you often have to push harder to keep things stable in part because your status quo is the other side’s fight. To return to the story we began with, Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah weren’t stewing in anger after God’s ruling, but their male contemporaries certainly were.  

In evolutionary biology this phenomenon has a name. It’s called the Red Queen Hypothesis and it’s named after a famous scene in Lewis Caroll’s Through the Looking Glass, his sequel to Alice in Wonderland. There, Alice meets the Red Queen. As they begin running, Alice notes her surprise that she’s growing tired from running but going nowhere:  

"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." 

"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!" 

This short scene was taken by evolutionary biologists Leigh Van Valen in 1973, to explain the idea species go extinct if they stop evolving. Since predator and prey are always trying to get an edge on one another their only way to stay in the same place is to keep changing. Standing still actually means going backward. Running forward keeps you in the same place, evolutionarily speaking. And only radical leaps forward, like humanity's growth in brain size or bipedal locomotion, actually puts one at an advantage.  

Although it’s not used in politics, I feel like the Red Queen Hypothesis is just as applicable. Most of the time, if we want things to stay the same we have to run fast. If we take our attention away from those things that matter to us, we will go backward. It may be exhausting but we can never stop moving.  

I worry that as it relates to Roe v Wade, our collective mistake was that we stopped running. 

And I worry, that if I don’t take to heart what I’ve learned here, some other hard-fought battles that also feel settled will go the same way. 

There is little questions LGBTQ rights could be next. Although I got to New Jersey well after same sex marriage became legal in 2013, I’ve heard stories about how galvanized the TNT community was about it. Cantor Greenberg has told me with pride what it meant to her to travel down to Trenton, often multiple times a month, to lobby and give testimony. We were the daughters of Zelophehad, marching into the halls of power and demanding change. We were organized, thoughtful, passionate. And then we won. 

And although we have had no shortage of LBGTQ themed events, services, and speakers, whenever I have been in a room brainstorming about what issues we should add to our social justice agenda, which topics need our finger on the scale in order to effect change, no one has suggested getting involved in LGBTQ advocacy. It feels like a finished fight.  

But like reproductive rights, it is not. After Roe v Wade fell, many in this country made it clear that their next battle would be walking back wins by the LGBTQ community. And I promise, they are organizing with the fervor and passion that we did a decade ago.  

The same is true for countless other issues. Whether it’s voting rights, which seemed settled in the 1960s or the clean air act of the 1970s, or even Holocaust education which is mandated in school but enforced less today than when it first passed, there are plenty of examples of times where it is at our peril to stand still.  

Even segregation is beginning to creep back in. In recent years, New Jersey has quietly found itself with the 6th most segregated schools in the nation. In 1989, 4.8% of schools were considered highly segregated meaning 90% white or conversely 90% non-white. By 2010 that number was 8%. Now some estimates put it upwards of 20%. In some locales this change is an accident of demographic changes but in others it is a product of deliberate decisions on the part of the leadership to split towns into smaller units keeping their locales as homogeneous as possible.  

It is easy for long past advances to slip away. But I want to suggest a few tools to protect those things that matter most to you, whatever they are. If we are deliberate in our actions, we won’t lose sight today of how to protect the status quo. 

First, if there is an issue that matters to you and you do not want to see it change, you have to find a way to keep it fresh in the minds of others. There is something fun about being involved in change. Marches, rallies, phone banking are galvanizing. So why not keep doing them even after achieving your goal. But now instead of marches and rallies being about what you want to win, they become reminders of what it might mean to lose your gains. 

In the time of the Temple two thousand years, no priest was motivated to clean up the ashes from the night before. Everyone wanted to be involved in the big ritual moments. And everyone thought this job was beneath them.  

So what did they do? The leaders at the time not only proclaimed the cleaning of ashes to be the holiest job in the Temple but created a ritualized race each morning to determine who could be the one to sweep the ashes. The set all the young priests up at the bottom of the ramp, leading to the altar and let them run up it. The first person to the top would get the honor. Soon, everyone wanted in. In fact, people got so competitive about it, the Temple leadership they had to stop the races since people were getting hurt from the ensuing shoving.  

What this teaches is that people can be moved to do even the most mundane things if we show them why they matter. The goal is to figure out what motivates you and others. I’ve always admired Pride Month, in part because it’s not only a vision of where we want to go, but a celebration of how far we’ve come. Amidst the parades and carnivals, people are galvanized each year and in a fun way, and are forced to reckon with what is at stake if we stop telling the story of how far we've come. Many come to pride for the energy, the fun, the community, but what they get from it, if done well, is the narrative, the message, and the fortitude to keep protecting LGBTQ rights. 

The Jewish holiday cycle reinforces this idea.  To use one example, I was never a slave in Egypt, but in celebrating Passover each year, I am transported back to a time when I was. The tastes, the prayers, the rituals of the Passover Seder force me into a time machine. They fulfil the command by our rabbis that “In every generation, we are meant to see ourselves as if we personally left Egypt.” Passover shows us  what is at stake if I see the struggle for freedom as a thing of the past.  

For this reason, if something matters to you, it’s important to keep revisiting it and educating people. If a story feels finished, then all the more so, it needs retelling. We have to tell it in creative, provocative, galvanizing ways that shakes us from our torpor and move us past complacency.  

I want us to reframe how we think about progress. When we tutor B’nei Mitzvah students we wouldn’t dream of moving on before we’ve run though the old material to ensure that our students have not forgotten it. Only once we know they still have their previous verses of Torah can we move on to the next part of the chapter.  

This is the way we have to frame our battles, whatever they are. Like the Red Queen says, we have run really fast, just to stay in place, even if that means spending most of our energy on going seemingly nowhere. 

I don’t know if any of this would have worked for the daughters of Zelophehad. They lived in a world that just did not value their voices. But that’s not our world. Our voices matter. And united, people listen.  

Our story remains only half told. That’s the beauty of living in this world; there will always be a future to be painted, a new path to be forged. And if we take this to heart, there is no end to what we can do together.