Beruriah - A Woman Like No Other: Teaching [About] Ourselves: Limits & Possibilities

Talk to a chevruta (learning partner/the person next to you) about a time you felt marginal in a space. What was the space like? Why did you feel marginal? What effect did this have on your experience?

Do you have an experience of advocating for yourself? How did it feel?

Once there was a woman named Beruriah, and she was a great Talmudic scholar. She was the daughter of the great Palestinian rabbi Hananyah ben Teradyon, who was martyred by the Romans. Even as a young girl, she far outstripped her brother as a scholar. It was said she had learned three hundred laws from three hundred teachers in one day. She married Rabbi Meir, the miracle worker and great Mishnaic sage.

What can we infer about Bruriah's social status (especially compared to other women) from this short introduction to her life?

1. What is R' Meir's thinking? What assumptions might he be making about the "hooligans" and how does that motivate his thinking?

2. What makes Bruria's response effective?

1. Why did you laugh when you read this story?

2. Is Bruria's response effective? Why or why not? What are the limits of its effectiveness?

3. What role does Bruriah's position/identity as a woman play in her critique of the Sages' dictum?

1. Content question: what is happening in this story? / Get someone to explain the conflict.

2. How do we treat the uncertainty about whether or not this story happened? Does it matter whether or not it happened? What are some possibilities for how this story proliferated and why? How does it impact our reading of Bruriah as a whole?

3. Is self-advocacy or advocacy for our own marginal groups effective? Why or why not? (Consider the previous story from Eruvin)

4. Can you imagine a world in which Bruriah's advocacy for women was more effective? Less effective? What does it look like? What is R' Meir's role as Bruriah's husband in her ability to exist as a marginal person?

5. Prompt - General discussion about forced self-advocacy, which is often unpaid, and the dynamics of it, etc.

Those who teach us inevitably teach us themselves, since all learning flows through the medium of the relationship. Our teachers bind us to them with their stories. We take into ourselves their Torah sealed inextricably in narrative and with it their blunders, their blindness, their brutalities. God may heal the brokenhearted, but it is our teachers who break those hearts. Our teachers break our hearts when they do not see how their Torah is bounded by their context.

Often women of color active in feminist movement are anti-intellectual. Many of us have not had access to university education and do not hold advanced degrees. We may equate white female hegemonic dominance of feminist theory and practice with educational status. We may not attack that hegemony (which stems from class and race hierarchies) but instead "put down" intellectual work. By dismissing theory and privileging organization work, some women of color are able to see themselves as more politically engaged where it really counts. Yet by buying into this dichotomy between theory and practice, we place ourselves always on the side of the experiential, and in doing so support the notion (too often fostered by white women) that their role is to do the "brain" work, developing ideas, theories, etc., while our role is to do either the "dirty" work or to contribute the experience to validate and document their analysis.