If Scripture is a “relational concept” and the Torah and Talmud are Jewish scriptures, do Jewish men and women have the same relationship to the Torah?
After watching the video The Torah and the Scholar today, it’s hard not to wonder whether Jewish women have any relationship with the Torah at all. In the video we saw only males engaged with one another studying Torah (even when Rabbi Steinsaltz was teaching a class to non-religious Jews), and women only as brides, or praying and celebrating separately from the men. At the Wailing Wall, the men and women were separated by a barrier, the mehitzah (though in an older photo, men and women were praying together at the wall with no barrier). On the other hand, Rabbi Steinsaltz commented that his wife would like doing his type of work much more than he does. Didn’t you wonder why Mrs. Steinsaltz didn’t do his work -promoting and teaching the study of Talmud? And in the next movie we see, Half the Kingdom, we’ll observe Jewish women intentionally breaking down the barriers that have kept them from studying Torah and worshipping like Jewish men. It’s possible that the picture we get of Jewish women’s relationships to the Torah is skewed by the cultural and ideological biases of the filmmakers. Inspired by a romanticized ideal of male Torah learning, it probably didn’t even occur to the director of the Talmud and The Scholar to film women studying with women or at the women’s yeshivot that Vanessa Ochs describes in Words on Fire, or women engaged in Torah in other venues or in other ways. Aren’t making challah, cooking kosher meals, or teaching children Bible stories and domestic traditions other ways of relating to Torah? Is indeed study the only or most appropriate way for Jews to relate to their scriptures? That seems to be the ideological bias underlying the focus on Jewish women’s Torah study in Half the Kingdom. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I’m inclined to agree. But didn’t we all sort of gasp as the yeshivah boys who knew more about the Talmud than current movies and pop music, or the rabbi who studied Talmud maybe 12+ hours a day? Isn’t such devotion to Torah study, whether by men or women, a little out of touch with reality?!
What I’d like you to think about and reflect upon this week is
1) Do Jewish women and men indeed have the same or different relationships to the Torah (based on what you see in the videos and in the readings)?
2) What historical and cultural factors do you see that make Jewish men and Jewish women hold up Torah study as the ideal relationship of Jews to the Torah (as opposed to other ways of relating to the Torah, or of not really relating to it all)?
In other words. why Torah study, and why men and/or women stressing the importance of Torah study now (in 20th-21st century America, Israel, Russia)?
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Professor JBK made good comments on my post and this helped me understand better the reason why Jewish women were kept from studying the Torah. Also, I would like to respond to the part of JBK’s question “why study Torah, and why Jewish men and/ or women are stressing the importance of Torah study now (in 20th-21st century America, Israel, Russia?” Most of the things the Torah teaches have developed over the years to be the part of the creation of Jewish life and identity. My understanding is that the Torah is the foundation of the history, society and religion of the Jews and their origin. God gave the Torah to His chosen people. I thought Ochs makes a very good point that “the exclusion of women from the intellectual life the religious community was and is a major cause of the alienation from Judaism that so many contemporary Jewish women have experienced” (Ochs 38). When God gave the laws to Moses He commanded to tell to study and observe the laws. The study of Torah also brings Jewish people an awareness of God. I think Jewish people see the Torah and other Jewish texts as a way of understanding and finding out Judaism, their tradition. The Torah has the potential to bring Jews together to enrich their sacred text and tradition.
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