THE BOOK OF PROVERBS, a collection of wisdom texts ascribed to King Solomon, instructs its audience: “Keep your father’s commandments, / And do not forsake your mother’s torah (teaching, wisdom)” (6:20; similarly 1:8). From the biblical period onward, women have played important roles in transmitting Jewish teachings, values, and practices; however, until recently, little of this wisdom has been preserved in written form. The Torah: A Women’s Commentary collects and showcases the teachings of Jewish women in the first comprehensive commentary on the Torah written entirely by women.
This Commentary examines the entirety of the Torah, yet it focuses most sharply on women in the Torah and on texts particularly relevant to women’s lives. In this volume, biblical scholars illustrate what the Torah probably meant in its own cultural milieu and literary context. Then, scholars of rabbinic Judaism, Jewish thought, and other academic disciplines, along with clergy and other Jewish professionals, augment the exegesis (interpretation) of the biblical text to show how the Torah continues to have new meanings for later generations.
Our Guiding Principles
From its inception, The Torah: A Women’s Commentary was envisioned as a contemporary Torah commentary written by Jewish women. Three words reflect our guiding principles: contemporary, Jewish, and women.
Contemporary: In this Commentary, distinguished women scholars, clergy, and poets illumine the meanings of the Torah by using both traditional tools and innovative approaches. Our authors bring new insights and new questions to our sacred tradition, all the while placing their words within the ongoing stream of Jewish interpretation. Our scholars apply contemporary scholarly approaches—such as literary analysis, historical criticism, comparative linguistics, philology, archeology, anthropology, and sociology—to clarify and interpret the Torah, thus helping to show what the text meant to its own early audience and what it can teach us today. Particularly in the “Contemporary Reflection” and “Voices” sections, our contributors regularly address issues of concern in the 21st century and explore how this ancient text connects to our modern lives.
"Do not forsake your mother’s torah. —Proverbs 6:20
Jewish: Judaism can be seen as an ongoing dialogue between ever-changing circumstances and Jewish texts invested with enduring authority. This is especially true with respect to our most sacred text, the Torah. The Torah has always been central to the life of the Jewish people. It is embedded within a wide web of interpretations, written and oral, that provided guidance for how to understand it in new contexts. As the Rabbis of the Talmud wisely note, each generation produces its own interpreters (BT Avodah Zarah 5a). We have brought together interpreters for the 21st century, so that the voices of the entire Jewish people at last would be fully represented.
One of the many things that make this book a distinctly Jewish commentary is that it follows the centuries-old liturgical division of the Torah into 54 portions. Long before computers and the Internet, Jews were connected through a World Wide Web of sorts, based on the division of the Torah into weekly readings so that the complete Torah—Genesis through Deuteronomy—is read sequentially each year. To this day, Jews in Melbourne, Manhattan, or Marrakech share the same story by reading the same weekly Torah portion (parashah in Hebrew) in the synagogue. Jewish communities may differ as to which sections of the parashah they read or discuss, what they say about it, or how they apply the Torah to their lives, but this sacred text unites us.
One of the hallmarks of Jewish interpretation is that it embraces a range of approaches and viewpoints, preserving a diversity of voices. Our Commentary emulates the style of the Mikraot G’dolot (also called the Rabbinic Bible), a popular format for Jewish Bible commentary since the 16th century. In such a work, the text of the entire Torah is accompanied by a translation and by running commentaries from a variety of sages who interpreted the text for their own generation. In our Commentary, however, we have replaced the classic Aramaic translation with an English translation (described below), and the sages are all women.
Another feature that makes this a Jewish commentary is that our contributors represent the full spectrum of the Jewish community: in addition to Reform, we include Conservative, Orthodox, and Reconstructionist scholars as well as unaffiliated and secular ones. We invited clergy and academics from diverse streams of Jewish life so that the work can speak on behalf of klal Israel, “the entirety of the Jewish people.” Our writers span the globe, hailing from North America, South America, Europe, and Israel.
Women: The distinguishing feature of this commentary is that it is written entirely by women. In the past, commentaries by learned men spoke on behalf of our people, even when they did not represent the insights of women. By providing commentary authored by women, we expect to represent the wider community, with qualified women interpreters who illuminate much that has been overlooked. In doing so, we are bringing women out of the shadows—the women in the text as well as the women in the Jewish world.
We deliberately sought to cast as wide a net as possible to show how women trained in various aspects of Bible and Jewish studies are thinking about the Torah on the basis of their professional training. Our commentators include academics, rabbis, cantors, educators, and poets, all of whom offer different lenses though which to view the biblical text. Their commentaries show how women’s experiences can shed light both on the text of the Torah and the torah of our lives.
This book could not have been written fifty or even twenty years ago. We are fortunate to have in the present generation, at last, hundreds of qualified women whose teaching and insights are having a profound influence on our evolving understanding of the Torah. While we bring together the work of one hundred writers (not including the Voices sections), we are fully aware of the many gifted women who are not included in this volume.
In the course of compiling and editing this Commentary, we were repeatedly asked why we include only women commentators. Even after much deliberation, we could not see a way of inviting male colleagues without having their voices be mere tokens. We concluded that this would not adequately represent men’s scholarship, and also it would detract from giving women a full representation. Although we invited only women contributors, we draw upon the work of all scholars—women and men, Jewish and non-Jewish—many of whom do not appear in these pages by name but who are indispensable to any study of the Torah.
Gender and the Translation of the Torah
One issue about which there was unanimous agreement from the start was the importance of including both the complete Hebrew text of the Torah and an English translation. But which translation would we use? The endeavor of translating the Bible into one’s everyday language began centuries before the Common Era. Jewish communities of the time used and transmitted versions of the Torah in Greek (referred to as the Septuagint) and in Aramaic (referred to as Targum), which are still studied today. The best known early English translation of the Bible (the King James Version), which relied at times upon rabbinic commentaries, dates to the 17th century and in turn it has influenced a variety of Jewish translations. Today the most widely used translation in liberal circles is the New Jewish Publication Society (NJPS) version.
The art of translation has always been challenging. For us, gendered language posed yet an additional challenge. Although some Christian “gender sensitive” or “gender neutral” Bibles have been published since the mid-1980s, the only comparable Jewish translation first appeared in 2005, when the URJ Press published a revised edition of The Torah: A Modern Commentary (edited by W. Gunther Plaut). We have incorporated the 2006 version of that URJ translation, with some minor modifications, in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary.
The URJ translation combines the work of two translators. The late Rabbi Chaim Stern prepared a fresh translation of Genesis. Following his death in 2001, Rabbi David Stein stepped in as revising translator for Exodus through Deuteronomy, creating an updated and “gender-accurate” version of the NJPS translation.
The most innovative aspect of Stern’s translation is its gender-neutral treatment of language for God. Consider first the divine name composed of four Hebrew consonants (י–ה–ו–ה) and referred to as the tetragrammaton (see at Genesis 2:4 and Exodus 3:15). It has been typically translated since antiquity as forms of the word “Lord” (becoming “the LORD” in the King James Version and elsewhere, such as NJPS). In Jewish circles, God’s name has been read aloud in the synagogue using the substitution Adonai, the Hebrew word for “Lord” or “Lords”; some Jewish translations substitute the word “Hashem” (meaning “the Name”) instead. However, Stern rendered God’s name as “the Eternal,” a choice that dates back to Moses Mendelssohn’s 1783 translation of the Torah into German, and one that reflects a biblical understanding of this divine name as related to the Hebrew verb “to be.”
In the present translation, we decided not to translate God’s name at all, but to preserve it the way the Torah itself does, using the same four Hebrew letters. Every instance of the ineffable name thus poses a challenge; in this way, we encourage our readers to share in the struggle with how we address the Divine.
The Hebrew Bible typically uses masculine verb forms, adjectives, and pronouns when referring to God; and customarily such language is mechanically reproduced in English. Therefore, speaking about God in a gender-neutral way requires making adjustments not only to God’s name, but also to all related wording. In his translation, Stern resorted to a variety of techniques, such as recasting sentences to avoid the need for pronouns, replacing “He” with “[God]” and “His” with “[God’s],” and the like. Like German and French—but unlike English—Hebrew is a gender-inflected language. That is, all Hebrew nouns grammatically are either masculine or feminine; no neutral form exists. Even inanimate objects (like a chair or a table) are assigned a grammatical gender; however, there is no fixed correlation between the grammatical gender of a noun and its social gender (or biological reality). In the Bible, God is referred to in masculine language. This raises the question: Does this grammatically masculine language mean that the Torah depicts God as a male deity? While some scholars answer this question in the affirmative, others argue that the God of the Torah is implicitly beyond the biological categories that distinguish female and male; God is “beyond gender” (see at Deuteronomy 33:5).
Even if ancient Israelites imagined Israel’s God primarily as male, the Torah and the rest of the Hebrew Bible do enable readers to understand God in gender-inclusive terms. Support for thinking about God not only in masculine terms comes in part from the metaphors that depict Israel’s God. The biblical writers sometimes refer to God using male imagery: for example, as a warrior (see at Exodus 15:3), father (see at Deuteronomy 32:6), or king (see at Deuteronomy 33:5). But biblical texts also portray God with female imagery, as one who gives birth (see at Numbers 11:12; Deuteronomy 32:13, 18; Exodus 15:22–17:16; 15:26). In addition, they utilize animals and inanimate objects to characterize God as, for instance, an eagle (see at Exodus 19:4; Deuteronomy 32:11) or a rock (see at Deuteronomy 32:4)—none of which is to be taken literally. We find an even greater array of divine metaphors outside of the Torah, which suggests that the gender of a particular image does not correlate to the perceptions of Israel’s God.
Different questions emerge when translating the Torah’s references to human beings. When a verse uses masculine language, is it exclusively addressing or speaking about men? When does that grammatical form refer to women and men alike? Furthermore, when do Hebrew personal nouns like ish or adam, often rendered as “man” in older translations, refer specifically to men, or to both men and women?
As Stein set about adapting the NJPS translation of Exodus through Deuteronomy, he needed to interpret how certain grammatical forms and vocabulary were operating in each instance. Stein examined the text methodically in light of the most up-to-date conclusions about the way the Hebrew language operates in the Torah, and about the roles that women and men played in ancient Israel. He did so by drawing on published research as well as by conducting extensive correspondence with leading biblical scholars. Readers of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary will become more familiar with how the resulting translation functions when they read the Central Commentary, for numerous comments explain—and sometimes challenge—Stein’s impressive achievement in biblical translation and biblical scholarship.
The URJ calls its translation a “gender accurate” translation, not a “gender neutral” or “gender sensitive” version. In other words, it does not render all grammatically masculine language in gender-inclusive terms but instead attempts to convey what was meant in a given context. For example, it sometimes translates the word avot as “fathers” and sometimes as “ancestors,” depending whether that Hebrew noun functions inclusively or not in that particular passage (for instance, see at Deuteronomy 7:12). Likewise in regard to personal nouns such as ish: sometimes the translation construes this noun in a gender-inclusive sense (see at Exodus 21:7), but elsewhere as referring specifically to a man (see at Deuteronomy 8:5).
For more on the URJ’s Torah translation, see Stein, “Preface to the Revised Edition,” in The Torah: A Modern Commentary, 2005, p. xxv-xxxi; and “Preface,” The Contemporary Torah, 2006, pp. v-xxxv.
The Five Components of the Commentary
In selecting the more than one hundred contributors for the Commentary, the Editorial Board resisted the temptation to let a single type of voice dominate the interpretation of the Torah. The editors, in turn, aimed to achieve consistency only insofar as it would facilitate readers’ use of the commentary; the particular ideas and styles remain those of the individual authors. On occasion, the editors have inserted a note in square brackets (like this: [—Ed.]) either to supplement the commentator’s work or to juxtapose a different opinion. We consider the act of preserving a multiplicity of voices not only a defining feature of the Jewish interpretive tradition, but also an explicit feminist endeavor.
The multi-vocal nature of this commentary is also evident from the five elements that address each Torah portion in turn:
Central Commentary. Written by a scholar of Bible, this section begins with an introduction and outline that provide an overview of the Torah portion. The commentary then accompanies the Hebrew text and the English translation, providing a running exegesis (explanation) of the parashah. Its main objective is to help readers understand the plain sense of the text in its own cultural context as well as in ours.
Another View. This short essay, also by a biblical scholar, focuses on a specific aspect of the parashah, in a way that supplements or challenges the Central Commentary.
Post-biblical Interpretations. In this section, a scholar of rabbinic literature discusses a selection of past responses to the Torah—typically, rabbinic teachings and classical commentaries. (See Women and Post-biblical Commentary.)
Contemporary Reflection. In this section, an author—a scholar of contemporary Jewish thought and life, rabbi, cantor, or educator—reflects on the parashah and what meanings it holds for Jews today. (See Women and Contemporary Revelation.)
Voices. This section contains creative responses to the parashah, mainly in the form of poetry. (See The Poetry of Torah and the Torah of Poetry.)
At times different parts of the Commentary treat similar topics, or they approach the same topic from divergent standpoints—just as various biblical verses interrelate. Therefore the commentary frequently includes cross-references that enable the reader to engage more deeply in the study of the Torah. By looking up a cross-reference, a reader can examine how related biblical passages compare and contrast, and explore texts in other parts of the Bible. The reader can also trace the evidence that leads an interpreter to draw a certain conclusion, and weigh the author’s opinion against divergent views elsewhere in the book. When the notation “see” precedes a biblical citation, it points to a passage in the text itself, whereas the notation “see at” refers to the commentary on that cited passage.
Another convention in the commentary similarly reflects the many levels on which it treats the text: the occasional use of a vertical line (|) between sentences. This indicates the start of a new thought that is still based on the same lemma (the biblical passage being commented upon).
For more about this book, see its Web page online via www.ccarpress.org.
Space constraints required our contributors and editors to be highly selective. In general, the Commentary focuses on three aspects of the text: that which relates to women, that which is obscure to contemporary readers (at least at first glance), and that which remains particularly significant for Jews today. Inevitably this means that not everything that flows from the inexhaustible fountain of wisdom we call Torah is included in this Commentary. We trust that what we have included will guide new as well as seasoned readers of the Torah as they explore the sacred texts of our tradition.
—Tamara Cohn Eskenazi
Andrea L. Weiss