Bringing her food from afar.
In the Torah, a clear distinction is made with regards to food preparation: men make meat, women make bread. We thus read that when the angels visited Avraham in Mamre, Avraham told Sarah “Quick, three seahs of choice flour! Knead and make cakes!” (Gen. 18:6), whereas he then “ran to the herd, took a calf, tender and choice, and gave it to a servant-boy, who hastened to prepare it” (ibid. 7). Sarah prepares the bread, and Avraham, with the help of his male servant, prepares the meat.
When discussing the separation of Hallah, however—the main ritual that accompanies bread-preparation—the Torah does not speak in gendered terms (Numbers 15:17-21):
(17) יהוה spoke to Moses, saying: (18) Speak to the Israelite people and say to them: When you enter the land to which I am taking you (19) and you eat of the bread of the land, you shall set some aside as a gift to יהוה: (20) as the first yield of your baking, you shall set aside a loaf as a gift; you shall set it aside as a gift like the gift from the threshing floor. (21) You shall make a gift to יהוה from the first yield of your baking, throughout the ages.
Yet in the Mishnah, there is a clear assumption that the person preparing bread is female. This can be seen quite simply in that the Mishnah uses feminine verbs when describing the person preparing dough, as for example in m. Hallah 3:1:
...גִּלְגְּלָהּ בַּחִטִּים וְטִמְטְמָהּ בַּשְּׂעוֹרִים, הָאוֹכֵל מִמֶּנָּה חַיָּב מִיתָה. כֵּיוָן שֶׁהִיא נוֹתֶנֶת אֶת הַמַּיִם, מַגְבַּהַת חַלָּתָהּ, וּבִלְבַד שֶׁלֹּא יְהֵא שָׁם חֲמִשָּׁה רִבְעֵי קֶמַח:
…Once she rolled the wheat and mixed the barley – one who eats from it is punishable by death. Once she puts in water she must remove the hallah, as long as there are five quarters of flour.
For the rabbis, this division of labor is a fact of life. But it is also a source of anxiety: the Mishnah in the second chapter of Shabbat famously mentions the “three sins for which women die in childbirth”—for not being careful with the commandments of niddah, hallah, or the lighting the Sabbath candles (m. Shabbat 2.6). Each of these home-bound commandments are incumbent upon the household or the married couple, regardless of gender, but it is women who are responsible for making sure that they are fulfilled. This Mishnah (and its expansion in Avot de-Rabbi Natan [(Schechter ed. pg. 13)]) thus betrays the male rabbis’ deep anxieties around having to rely on women in their religious lives; it also speaks to their related fears of losing their female spouse in childbirth, a phenomenon all-too common in pre-modern times, and one which people were mostly helpless to prevent and at a loss to explain.
These anxieties take the rabbis to an unsettling place of blame and shame. And yet, with that, these commandments have also been the object of creative reinterpretation and have served as meaningful spiritual practices for Jews throughout history. The commandments of niddah and candle lighting are not bound to the Land of Israel—they are to be practiced everywhere. In contrast, as we saw above, the Torah described the commandment of Hallah as taking place “when you enter the land,” and the Mishnah assumes that only produce from the Land of Israel is obligated in hallah (m. Hallah 2:1[2]). But to this day, Jews throughout the world separate hallah when preparing bread. Medieval rabbis struggled to explain why hallah was still separated, even outside of the Land of Israel (Tosafot, Qidushin, 36b):
...והיינו טעמא דגזרו על החלה בכל מקום טפי מתרומה ומעשר לפי שהחלה דומה יותר לחובת הגוף שהרי החיוב בא ע"י גלגול עיסה שהאדם עושה והלכך דין הוא שינהוג בכ"מ אפילו בח"ל...
...And the reason why they decreed on hallah in every place more than terumah and ma'aser is because hallah is more like a person's obligation since the obligation comes with the rolling of the dough that a person does, and therefore it makes sense that it will be practiced everywhere, even outside of the Land…
Tosafot’s explanation here reads very much like an after-the-fact attempt to rationalize a practice that they find surprising. But I think there is some truth to it—at the very least, people may not experience bread preparation and hallah separation as intrinsically tied to the Land: it is a commandment, after all, that often takes place at home in the kitchen, and certainly not outside in the field. And yet I think there is more to say about why this commandment survived, for its survival has to with how Jewish women understood the practice of separating hallah and imbued it with meaning. One such text that allows us to glimpse at this is the following tkhine for the separation of hallah (trans. A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book, ed. Lavie):
יהי רצון מלפניך ה' אלוקינו ואלוקי אבותינו שהמצווה של הפרשת חלה תחשב כאילו קיימתיה בכל פרטיה ודקדוקיה, ותחשב הרמת החלה שאנו מרימים כמו הקרבן שהוקרב על המזבח שהתקבל ברצון, וכמו שלפנים הייתה החלה נתונה לכהן והייתה זו לכפרת עוונות, כך תהיה לכפרת עוונותיי ואז אהיה כאילו נולדתי מחדש נקייה מחטא ועוון ואוכל לקיים מצוות שבת קודש והימים הטובים עם בעלי (וילדינו) להיות ניזונים מקדושת הימים האלה ומהשפעתה של מצוות חלה כאילו נתתי מעשר, וכשם שהנני מקיימת מצוות חלה בכל הלב, כך יתעוררו רחמיו של הקב"ה לשומרני מצער וממכאובים כל הימים. אמן.
May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our forefathers, that the commandment of separating hallah be regarded as having been fulfilled in all its details and requirements, and that the hallah, which I now hold, be considered like the sacrifice offered upon the altar, which was accepted with favor. And just as in former times, the hallah was given to the kohen and that was an atonement for one’s sins, so may it be an atonement for my sins, that I may be as one born anew, clean of transgression and sin, that I might fulfill the commandment of the holy Shabbat and these holy days, with my husband (and our children), to be nourished by the sanctity of these days. Through the commandment of hallah may our children always be nourished from the hand of the Holy One, blessed be He, in his great mercy and kindness, and with great love, and may the commandment of hallah be accepted as though I had given a tithe. And just as I hereby fulfill the commandment of hallah with all my heart, so may the mercy of the Holy One, blessed be He, be aroused to protect me from sorry and from suffering for all time. Amen.
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I have taught this history of the ritual of hallah separation on several occasions, and I have struggled each time. I still ask myself, is this overly apologetic? Am I trying to put a positive take on an unfortunate division of labor, reifying a power dynamic that I should be seeking to dismantle? As an historian, I think that there is a truth in what I am describing here—that is, I do believe that the ritual survived because Jewish women reimagined it—and I think that is both fascinating and inspiring. And while this reconstruction is difficult to prove, an extra ounce of imagination is necessary when uncovering the histories of peoples who mostly did not write nor explicitly partake in the hegemonic discourse. The question may then become, how do we lift up these histories, the histories of creative ritual imagination, given that, for good reasons, we hope that these rituals are no longer gendered in the same way? Or better, what do we do with women’s rituals as we try and reimagine the ways in which aspects of gender influence our religious lives today?