My class formed unexpectedly, a few years into my brand-new tenure as the first woman to hold a rabbinic pulpit in my large, historic synagogue. I was struggling to find a rabbinic persona that wasn’t only defined by my gender, while my community was struggling to understand just how a woman rabbi could serve them.
A small group of women approached me, asking if I could offer weekly classes on the parasha, with meaningful and accessible takeaways for their modern lives and roles as women, daughters, sisters, mothers, and wives. I wondered if this would hinder my endeavor to come across as everyone’s rabbi, not just the women’s rabbi.
Ultimately, the sacred space that emerged over five years is one in which I can be most authentically myself—as a spiritual leader and as a human.
Our learning community spans the generations and Jewish educational experience. We contain multiple perspectives on the political spectrum. Over the years, we have built a foundation of depth and questioning, awe and curiosity, creativity and sisterhood. The kinds of conversations and challenges that we can bring to this space are unprecedented in my shul.
My first goal in forming my class was to make sure that we were not just a group who studied together, but a mutually supportive community. We begin each session with the bracha for torah study (laasok bedivrei torah) and then each person dedicates her learning. We hear who is worried about a sick friend, who is celebrating a birthday or anniversary, who is marking the yartzeit of a loved one. As a result, our learning is elevated and sanctified; our students hold one another in the safe and loving space.
It was also important to me to determine and teach a shared lexicon so that we could all draw from a deep and authentic engagement with the material. For many of my students, this was their first time participating in regular torah study, much less feminist torah study. As we journeyed through each parasha, we learned not only about the stories of biblical women, but also responded to the text’s gendered framework. I began to ask questions that eroded the fundamental assumptions that my students brought to the text. Soon, my students began to ask those questions.
At times, our conversation was painful, as we studied passages that reduced women to their wombs—that their only source of worth was their ability to bear the next generation. Many of my students and/or their daughters and loved ones struggled with infertility and miscarriage and it was difficult to come across the same motif over and over again: that once the woman prayed, God opened her womb. It was painful to see women like Eve and Sarah disempowered, to learn of their fates as they hovered on the periphery. It was painful to learn of the sotah ritual, and to know that the biblical editor thought it was appropriate for our sacred canon.
Opening conversations about these trigger points in our Torah allowed my students to reflect upon moments when they, too, felt ostracized by our tradition. Many of them shared the oppression they felt when relegated behind the mechitzah, told that they were prohibited from reciting Kaddish to mourn a parent. One of my students relayed the turnkey moment when decades ago, our congregation began to permit women up to the bimah to open the ark. When the first women to receive this honor returned home, she found that her dog had died, and many people interpreted that loss as a punishment from God.
At other times, our conversation was profoundly empowering. My students delighted at the subversive “winks” from the text that indicated protest against the patriarchal power dynamic. They loved when Rebecca had to give her verbal consent to go with Isaac, they loved how Tamar took her life into her own hands, they cheered for the brave women Yocheved, Miriam, Shifra, and Puah, without whom we would still be in Egypt.
And these victorious moments also brought out personal triumphs. Some of my students began to insist on wearing kippot during torah study and prayer, personalizing and owning a traditionally male symbol and practice. One student created art to celebrate our foremothers’ strength. Others reached out to their friends to invite them, knowing that our learning would be as essential to their spiritual journey as it was becoming to their own. Often, my students’ curiosity would spark a detour from our central text, inspiring a deep dive into the Temple and history of the mechitzah, for example.
After three years of learning the parasha cycle, I wanted to introduce my students to rabbinic literature—both aggadah and halacha—to examine the ongoing legacy of the Tanakh’s treatment of gender. How does our continuing textual tradition, as refracted through the generations and through the mouths of men, characterize the social and religious role of women? How do we contend with their frameworks, and how do we write ourselves in?
To conclude each year of study, we celebrate with a siyyum, during which my students present their group projects: creative responses to the material that we learned that year (in the style of my teacher Dr. Anne Lapidus Lerner). We have amassed a striking, honest, funny collection of modern midrashim that imagine our scenes taking place in a context with different foundational assumptions. This year, I asked my students to reimagine particular sugyot featured in Dr. Hauptman’s book that were essential in setting laws that govern our lives. How would the conversations and their conclusions change if women had been in the room, or perhaps, had been the only participants?
Finally, I have tweaked the siyyum liturgy for our purposes: we’re always studying Nashim. And in the place of the “bar Papas,” I call the Hebrew names of my students, with their mother’s names. It is personally quite emotional, particularly when I call out my mother’s name (who joins us over Zoom), and then my own, echoing hers and solidifying our family legacy of torah study, our holy inheritance.
Year 1: Pshat and Iyyun (2017-2018)
What are the Torah’s messages regarding the place of women in society and religious culture? What are the “positive” and “negative” traits of women that are explicitly and implicitly telegraphed through the text? How do we process these messages and reclaim our value if we don’t identify with or embody the Torah’s conception of who we “ought” to be as we long to create lives of holiness?
Main sources: weekly parasha, medieval parshanut
Year 2: Modern Midrash (2018-2019)
How do contemporary feminist writers help us understand and respond to ancient conceptions of gender that have framed our modern belief and practice?
Main sources: weekly parasha, Dirshuni Vols. 1 and 2, Dr. Avivah Zornberg
Year 3: Lifting up Women’s Voices (2019-2020)
How do we insert our voices into the millennia-long conversations that have been taking place without us?
Main sources: weekly parasha; The Five Books of Miriam, Dr. Ellen Frankel
Year 4: Aggadah, Gender, and the Rabbinic Playground (2020-2021, over Zoom)
How do the rabbis explore the Tanakh’s messages about gender in the aggadic imagination? How can we become empowered to respond?
Source: A Bride for One Night, Dr. Ruth Calderon
Year 5: Applied Halakha (2021-2022, over Zoom/hybrid)
How do the Tanakh’s precedents lead the rabbis to legislate cases of women’s marital status, bodily agency, legal power, and ritual power? How do these issues continue to develop in modern day?
Sources: Rereading the Rabbis, Dr. Judith Hauptman; various CJLS teshuvot
Year 6 and Beyond: What’s Next?
I’m not sure yet! I know my students are eager to return to Tanakh; perhaps an in-depth character study of our favorite biblical heroines. We’ve also discussed a trip to Israel. All I know is that our group continues to grow and grow together. We still have much to explore, particularly in our ability to expand our conversation about gender beyond the binary.