The Miriam Tradition: Teaching Embodied Torah (review)

In the opening line to this modest-sized book, Cia Sautter declares: "This is a tale about women's leadership of important Jewish rituals that conveyed Torah truth." This statement is the key to the work as a whole. Though it may appear to be scholarly, this is Sautter's tale, her own personal version of a story she has made up to trace a history of dancing women, beginning in the Jewish community of Spain and influencing other women ever since the 1492 expulsion and dispersal of that community.

Sautter refers to her women subjects using the Hebrew word Sephardiyot, which, she explains, "mean[s] that they were of Spanish Jewish origin" (Preface, p. i). I wish she had expanded on this definition to explain further the differences that developed within Sephardic culture in different periods, and between the descendants of Spanish Jewry who lived, respectively, on the northern rim of the Mediterranean (e.g., in Bosnia and Greece) and on its southern rim (across the North African coast). There are references to many different Sephardic cultural components, but they are freely mixed together, along with references to the customs of Mizraḥim—Jews from North African and Middle Eastern countries—though many of these communities, such as the Kurdish Jews, had nothing to do with the exiles from Spain. Nowhere does she explain how her Sephardiyot might differ in either their dancing or their leadership from Ashkenazi (central European Jewish) or Mizraḥi women dancers.

Referring to the "inaccuracy" of Judaism and other Western religions in failing to recognize or appreciate ritual and symbolic movement, Sautter takes up the "forgotten" story of the Sephardiyot dancing through the ages. Intriguingly, she declares that embodied movement creates Judaism's deepest values, "which cannot be expressed through words alone: they must be performed" (Preface, p. viii). Her tale turns on the biblical figure of Miriam, who led the Hebrew women in dance after the miraculous parting of the sea (Ex. 15:20-21), and, as Sautter says, "not only danced, but she danced a Torah lesson." (p. 2). The tradition that Sautter feels she has discovered, the Miriam Tradition, is described in the book's five chapters: "Women and Sacred Power," "Movement Matters," "Miriam's Dance," "Miriam at the Wedding Celebration" and "The Rachel Tradition: Dancing Death."

The book develops the findings of Sautter's doctoral thesis, first published in her chapter "The Dance of Miriam" in the volume All the Women Followed Her, edited by Rebecca Schwartz (Rikudei Miriam Press, 2001). In that chapter, Sautter interpreted the illuminations found in several medieval Spanish hagadot to expound her thesis that there has been a history of women's leadership in Jewish celebration through dance. Her interpretations, which also appear in the present book, are cogent and make good reading. In the present book, however, as she endeavors to show how the Sephardiyot teach Torah through dance at life-cycle events, I miss the clear line drawn by Sautter from the hagadot through modern times.

Quoting from Jewish feminist thinkers Tirzah Firestone (p. 27), Rachel Adler and Judith Plaskow, Sautter explains the need for a wide definition of women's modes of Torah teaching, to include words, teachings and actions "hitherto unseen . . . to also be part of Torah tradition" (p. 25). Later, she quotes liberally from Jewish theologians such as Franz Rosenzweig, who "recognized that 'revelation' or new interpretation comes through the body; realized that there is a relationship between dance, ritual, and belief; and understood Jewish theology as a lived reality that occurs in the body" (p. 35). Throughout her Chapter 2, "Movement Matters," she also peppers her work with interesting references to the Zohar, midrash and Scripture.

To fill out what she deems to be women's missing performance and examples of their independent thought, Sautter also draws on a mélange of philosophical writings, references to ethnic dance, historical examples and sacred writings from other religions. From postmodern thinkers, she reminds us that, in a societal context, performance...