IN THE SECTION FOR EACH PARASHAH titled “Contemporary Reflection,” Jewish thinkers, rabbis, cantors, educators, and other Jewish interpreters respond to the Torah through a personal or professional lens in order to articulate an ongoing encounter with God. In Hebrew, there is no single word for revelation. Rather, revelation is described as both matan Torah (the giving of Torah) and kabbalat Torah (the receiving of Torah). Revelation occurs when these two intersect and the voice of God is heard, directly or indirectly. Drawing on Deuteronomy 30:12 (in which Moses states that the Torah is “not in the heavens that you should say: ‘Who among us can go up can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it for us…”’), later rabbinic sages asserted that the will of God, as represented in the Torah, was no longer in Heaven but is entrusted to human interpreters (BT Bava M’tzia 59b). In the rabbinic context this meant that the community could discern God’s voice by wrestling with the text, that is, by intensely engaging with Torah. Thus, Torah study replaced prophecy as the source of revelation.
Even when women were exempt (or excluded) from Torah study, the Rabbis did not exclude women as bearers of revelation. They acknowledged that in ancient Israel, God spoke to female prophets as well as male prophets, who consequently served as divine messengers. Indeed, whereas the Bible identifies by name only four female prophets (see at Deuteronomy 13:2), the Rabbis expand this list considerably. According to one source, seven women were prophets. Acknowledging Miriam (Exodus 15:20), Deborah (Judges 4:4), and Huldah (II Kings 22:14), but ignoring Noadiah (Nehemiah 6:14), rabbinic sages add Sarah (Genesis 11–25), Hannah (I Samuel 1–2), Abigail (I Samuel 25), and Esther (BT M’gillah 14a). The Midrash also emphasizes the prophetic qualities of all four matriarchs (Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah; B’reishit Rabbah 67.9; 72.6) and maintains that “just as sixty myriads of male prophets arose for Israel, so there arose for them sixty myriads of female prophets” (Shir HaShirim Rabbah 4.11).
God continues to speak to each generation; in this one, we hear women’s voices.
Who hears the divine voice? The rabbinic sages did not understand one’s relationship to God as connected primarily to gender, but rather, as Barry Holtz notes, to “talent, inclination and strength” (Finding Our Way, 1990, p. 102). For example, one midrash enjoins its readers, “Come and see how the voice [of God] went forth [at Sinai]—coming to each Israelite according to his individual strength— to the old, according to their strength; to the young according to their strength; to the children according to their strength; to the infants according to their strength; and to the women according to their strength” (Sh’mot Rabbah 5.9, emphasis added).
New and challenging scholarly theories in the 19th century about the historical formation of the Bible led Reform Jews, and later Conservative and Reconstructionist Jews, to rethink the concept of divine revelation and to reevaluate women’s religious roles. This created new opportunities for women to see themselves as bearers of revelation. Reform Judaism’s notion of progressive revelation particularly encouraged women and men to recognize the many ways in which one could hear God’s voice. In a sermon delivered in 1918, Lily Montagu, founder of the Liberal Jewish movement in England and of the World Union for Progressive Judaism, maintained that “we [Liberal Jews] are no longer worried by the claims of tradition when these clash with our conception of truth. We have boldly enunciated our belief in progressive revelation, and this faith has quickened our hope for the future and intensified our reverence for the past” (“Kinship With God,” in Ellen M. Umansky, ed., Lily H. Montagu, 1985, p. 113).
In line with this new understanding, Reform Judaism made religious education equally available to girls and boys, and the ceremony of confirmation, which initially replaced bar mitzvah, marked the end of one’s formal Jewish studies. Unlike the celebration of one’s becoming a bar or bat mitzvah, which is usually held on or soon after one’s 13th birthday, confirmation is held on Shavuot, the holiday traditionally marking the revelation at Sinai. Confirmation was at first an individual or small group ceremony, with girls confirmed at a temple in Berlin as early as 1817. In the U.S., confirmation became a group or class celebration, taking place at the end of 10th grade. Becoming a confirmand on Shavuot serves as a reminder of the centrality of the Torah (whether equated with God’s moral teachings or including ritual observance as well); it also reenacts symbolically for each person the receiving of the Torah and living in covenantal relationship with God. By the 20th century, the notion of continuing revelation—the idea that God continues to speak to each and every generation—was largely accepted. Indeed, for many if not most Jews today, the concept of Torah has expanded to mean Jewish learning or learning in general.
In his 1955 book God in Search of Man, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel asked, “How did Israel know that what their eye and ear perceived in the desert of Sinai was not a phantom?” Was it truly a moment of revelation, or was such a perception only an illusion? “What we see,” he concluded, “may be an illusion; that we see can never be questioned” (p. 196). Speaking before members of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1986, Reform rabbi Laura Geller similarly emphasized the importance of lived experience. Describing revelation as a moment of connection with God, she, like Heschel, emphasized the transformative nature of this moment. Yet moving beyond what he identified as Torah, she came to realize that although she had not noticed, God is always present. She asserted:
I wasn’t looking, or perhaps I was looking in the wrong places.…I needed to listen to the gentle whisper, the still small voice, the Presence one encounters by diving deep and surfacing.…I suddenly realized that my experience is Jewish experience. There is a Torah of our lives as well as the Torah that was written down. Both need to be listened to and wrestled with: both unfold through interactive commentary (Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook, 1992, pp. 244–45).
Like Geller, Judith Plaskow advocates expanding our understanding of Torah to include not just the first five books of the Hebrew Bible and traditional Jewish learning, “but women’s words, teachings, and actions hitherto unseen.” Plaskow asserts that Jewish feminists must “reclaim Torah as our own” in order to make visible the “presence, experience, and deeds of women erased in traditional sources,” telling the “stories of women’s encounters with God and captur[ing] the texture of their religious experience.” She also insists upon reconstructing history to include women’s history, not by changing the past, but by altering the shape of Jewish memory (Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, 1990, p. 28).
Rachel Adler has identified such efforts as “engendering Judaism.” She also calls for models of thinking about and practicing Judaism in a way that enables both women and men to “recreate and renew together as equals” (Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics, 1998, p. xiv). In so doing, Adler draws heavily on narrative as a tool of critique and vision, while advocating among liberal or progressive Jews the re-appropriation of halachah (the traditional authoritative legal tradition) as a source of meaning, rather than one of power. This means, among other things, retaining those laws that remain grounded in the practice of the progressive Jewish community while adding new laws, grounded in new stories, that reflect new communal practices.
In “We All Stood Together,” poet Merle Feld reenvisions both women and men at Mt. Sinai, ready to receive the words of God. In her creative remembering, her brother kept a journal of what he saw and heard while she, always holding a baby, was never able to write anything down. Consequently, she came to forget the particulars of this revelatory moment, until she was left with nothing but the feeling that something important had occurred. At the poem’s conclusion, she writes that if Jews could somehow remember that moment at Sinai as it was experienced by men and women, that sacred moment could be recreated (see Yitro, Voices).
In this Commentary, the section called Contemporary Reflection contains responses by women who, in a variety of ways, explore the continuing meanings of the revelation of Torah. Written by Jewish professionals from a variety of fields, these pieces represent new, individual wrestlings with the biblical text. Explicitly or implicitly revealing an awareness of both biblical and post-biblical interpretations, the brief essays reflect a contemporary, often feminist, perspective. They not only focus on women’s roles and concerns, but also attempt to draw on women’s lived experiences (what Geller describes as “the Torah of our lives”) in order to create to recreate Jewish memory (as articulated by Plaskow and Feld) and, in the process, engender Judaism (as suggested by Adler).
Many of the topics explored in these reflections are identical to those found in other sections of this Commentary, including notions of covenant, peoplehood, religious leadership, free will, social justice, purity, pollution, sacrifice, forgiveness, and mercy. Yet instead of reading the text within a post-biblical or early rabbinic context, these reflections offer readings that are clearly in the present and have implications for the future. Some underscore the contemporary relevance of the Torah’s teachings, like Noa Kushner’s reflection on parashat P’kudei and God’s earthly presence, and Alice Shalvi’s on parashat Ki Tavo and the Israelites’ settling in the land of Israel. Others, like Suzanne Singer’s reflection on the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in parashat Bo, suggest reading against the text—creating counter-narratives that provoke new theological questions and problems. Many of the pieces move beyond the text altogether, using words, phrases, or concepts within a particular parashah as a means of exploring issues and ideas that are of particular interest to contemporary readers, including women. Judith Plaskow, for example, draws on the priestly evaluation of sexual behavior in parashat Acharei Mot to discuss the persistence of homophobia as well as sexual and family violence in today’s society; in my reflection on parashat Haazinu, I reject the text’s imagery of God as Rock and Warrior, and instead offer new images that, in my view, better convey the love and justice of God. Writing more personally, Zoë Klein, in her reflection on parashat Ki Tisa, draws upon similarities to her husband’s proposing marriage to her at Mount Sinai and God’s continual revelation to Israel there, using one to view the other as moments of “eternal, loving joining,” while Blu Greenberg explores the impact of sudden loss, as she grapples with parashat Sh’mini.
The importance of the Contemporary Reflection sections of this Commentary is that they enable us to hear women’s voices that reckon with divine revelation. The reflections in this Commentary represent different attitudes toward the Torah and the many ways in which its teachings can be appropriated into our lives. While some authors defend its teachings, others challenge them. Yet each essay shows the significance of Torah as a record of God’s revelation to Israel: it is a repository of Jewish memory, however incomplete, from which we, as individuals and as members of contemporary Jewish communities, can attempt to hear and understand the voice of God.
—Ellen M. Umansky