Feminist Interpretations of Rabbinic Literature: Two Views

FEMINIST INTERPRETATIONS OF RABBINIC LITERATURE: TWO VIEWS THE BEIT MIDRASH WHICH IS NOT YET Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert Feminist interpretation of the Talmud takes its beginning in two interrelated but different kinds of recognition. The first is the recognition ofwomen's overwhelming silence in the Talmud itself, as well as in the last one thousand years of talmudic scholarship. The second is rooted in reflection on how the Talmud functions in our own cultural imagination, how it contributes to making meaning out of our Jewish identity today. As a feminist, one is compelled to ask this question in a gender-specific way, not merely in terms of a generic "Jewish" identity. How does talmudic literature contribute to what it means to be Jewish as a woman, or a woman as a Jew, today? Both recognitions have to be addressed separately. As to the first recognition, one classic approach, learned from historical disciplines, has been to defy the silence and trace women's presence and even voices within talmudic literature, within our collective literary memory. Women's voices can be teased out from the multivocality of the Talmud as a collective text. For example, attention is focused on the few women in talmudic literature known by name: Beruriah,1 Imma Shalom and Yalta,2 to name but the three most important. Their historicity and the reasons for their prominence in rabbinic imagination are examined. At the very least, the stories about them raise the question of whether women did indeed participate in rabbinic discussions. Moreover, women's voices can be discovered not only in the narrative material, but in talmudic discussions. For example, the Talmud attributes several items of medical advice to Abaye's mother, particularly regarding midwifery.3 Galit HasanRokem has collected such statements, including some that remained anonymous, in an anthology ofHebrew feminist poetry:4 Nashim: A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 4. ß 2001 Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Tal Han How does the unborn lie in its mother? Folded like a writing tablet, head between knees, hands at the sides of the forehead, heels on the buttocks, mouth closed, navel open. It eats what its mother eats, drinks what its mother drinks and does not excrete so as not to kill her. When it leaves her for the air of the world what is open closes, what is closed opens."5 The more or less implicit overall goal of this important approach has essentially been to insist that women were in some way part of the talmudic project, rather than merely its object - that Jewish women have, indeed, a history. The promise of this approach, only partially fulfilled, has been that women can find themselves in talmudic texts and appropriate these texts as their own, "finding friends amongst history's women"6 rather than remaining in the role of spectators. However, even where this approach may prove successful, in spite of its tremendous methodological difficulties, it will remain condemned to marginality. Individual women's voices threaten to drown in the sea of talmudic scholarship, and the contemporary reader is left with the nagging question of what the gain of reconstructing such a voice ultimately might be. Another approach is to investigate the cultural and textual or literary mechanisms that contribute to producing and maintaining Jewish women's silence in talmudic literature till the twentieth century. By necessity, this investigation has to be conducted unapologetically in order to understand how rabbinic texts work and strive to constitute reality, rather than merely reflecting it. Like the previous approach, this one privileges gender as a category for analyzing rabbinic culture and for studying talmudic texts. However, it extends its investigation beyond the archaeological task of uncovering the presence of women and their voices. It studies the ways in which rabbinic culture constitutes imaginary gendered spaces, primarily the belt midrash and the home, framed by the larger context of diaspora culture and its institutions and spaces, such as the synagogue, the shuk (market-place), and the Roman and Sassanian empires. It further studies the discursive and rhetorical means by which masculinity and femininity are constituted in rabbinic texts, in relation to the central value of rabbinic culture, talmud torah (the study...