Kinship

What do the texts crucial to my dissertation teach about connection? Why, in these seasons and years and societal trends where outreach is at our fingertips but evades so many, should we continue to make the effort? How do our social networks gird us up, provide support, shift under our feet, and surprise us? How has the world changed from ancient narratives, and what has remained?

Tres Amigos en Greenpoint, Septiembre 2025

In my dissertation, enslaved women (the handmaids) relied upon social structures of kinship, presumably and most plausibly outside of their own family, for protection, sustenance, opportunities. In her book Sex Rewarded, Sex Punished: A Study of the Status “Female Slave” in Early Jewish Law, Diane Kriger z”l discussed how kinship structures were shifted by service provided, including sexual relations and bearing a child for the owner/master during different periods of Jewish society. Other works, such as those by Judith Baskin & Judith Wegner, also explored the topic of protection through kinship, inheritance, and community – how connectedness may buoy and bolster a person through societal safety.

This shift in reading, thinking, and interpreting has shifted my reading of historical literature and provided a new lens for ancient stories that still hold lessons for modern life. More and more over the course of the twenty-five years of this current millennia (and century), articles and thought pieces provide ideas, suggestions, ruminations, rants about the DISconnectedness experienced in a world and among societies that have more options than usual to reach out to each other. Proximity, awareness, creativity, vulnerability seem to evade more and more people each day. Aloneness, loneliness, isolation, separation are the loci of studies, talks, conversations. Familial and societal structures, whether immediate or extended, feel complicated at best and break apart in dramatic form at worst.

So what can we learn from the kinship structures of the past? Well, the way enslaved women found protection isn’t ideal – but the expectation of care and protection for those around us may be lauded. How do we enact greater connectedness and healthy community when we feel more and more divided and distracted? To these questions I don’t have perfect answers, but they are common topics of conversations for me, and I’d love to talk about them over coffee with you!