Women's Torah

Dear friends,

As promised, some words from Dr. Lizzie Berne Degear, our scholar in residence this year. Lizzie and I will be leading a special interfaith Shabbat service this evening at First Pres with some amazing guests from other faiths. I hope you can make it.
Rabbi Misha.

Happy Women’s History Month from Lizzie Berne DeGear, our esteemed Scholar in Residence!

I’m about half way through my year as scholar-in-residence with the New Shul, and I’ve been loving it. Engaging with many of you at services, celebrations, and chevrutahs has been  enriching and downright enjoyable. I hope to see you at our interfaith liberation Shabbat this evening at First Presbyterian Church at 6:30pm. Some women friends of mine will be joining us to share their powerful experiences of liberation within various faith traditions, including Catholic, Muslim, Hindu and Aboriginal. 

Today, as a self-described feminist of faith, I’m thrilled to be engaging you here as I reflect on the importance of Women’s History Month. 

“Women’s history” is not just about highlighting women in history, it’s about bringing women’s focus to our histories and revealing truths that have been obscured. This March can be a time to wake up to all the ways that “his-story” has shaped our limited understanding of our world. It’s an opportunity to expand our lens to include her story… and her story… and her story. 

I’m particularly fascinated by the impact of these expanded lenses on scholarship. From archaeology  to zoology, there is a paradigm shift underway. Over the past decades, as more and more women have had access to higher education in their chosen fields, slowly but surely women have been able to mentor the next generation of scholars.  Women have been working together as colleagues, and women’s ways of knowing are beginning to shape each discipline. The patriarchal assumptions that have had a grip on virtually every form of academic study are slowly (oh, so slowly) dissolving into new ways to understand and interpret our past and the world around us today. 

I get a thrill every time I come across these new ways of telling the stories that constitute scholarship.  I’m thinking of the work of archaeologist  Elizabeth Wayland Barber, author of Women’s Work: the first 20,000 years.  On excavation sites in the 1970’s,  she was the only one among her archaeology colleagues who had experience in weaving and sewing. She saw clear links between patterns that appeared on Bronze Age Mediterranean pottery and familiar weaving patterns.   After she was told that there was no way the technology for weaving could have existed that early, she spent the next seventeen years researching and making sense of data that had been ignored.  Thanks to her we now have a window onto the extensive technologies of prehistoric textile manufacturing. 

I’m thinking of the radical theoretical work of  physicist Karen Barad, author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. As a feminist thinker, Barad has introduced an approach to physics that is a game-changer, upending assumptions baked into Western scientific theory. 

So, here at the New Shul, how can we celebrate Women’s History Month? Well, for starters, we can revisit any of our favorite subjects and ask ourselves:  How are feminists and womanists looking at this subject these days?  We can follow that curiosity and see what new vistas open up when we revisit a favorite subject, prod it a little,  and take a closer look.  

And, of course, we can bring this new lens to the subject of our Jewish history. We can honor that there is a major stumbling block inherent in our Jewish authoritative texts. Most of our Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and our  torah (all of the written teachings and laws that hold a place of authority in Judaism) consist of men in our past writing about what men in their past wrote about. It can be a very limited lens on our vast Jewish story. 

Grammatical fact: the rarest verb form in the Hebrew Bible is the third person feminine plural. This is because the men who wrote those texts were not focusing on the wisdom that emerged from the female collective. And, quite frankly, they didn’t have access to that wisdom. But that doesn’t mean such wisdom didn’t emerge and thrive during every moment in our Jewish history. It did! It does!  Women’s collective experience and wisdom are absolutely part of our Jewish story, dating all the way back to its beginnings.  Discovering this wisdom and experience, listening to our female ancestors, and receiving the bounty they still hunger to share with us has become a passion that drives much of my scholarship. There is so much there to discover! I take seriously the admonition that opens the book of Proverbs: “Forsake not the torah of your mother” (Proverbs 1:8).

As we approach Passover, I have been taking a closer look at Miriam. Following the clues, I am beginning to discern a whole branch of ancient Jewish knowledge that invoked her leadership, bringing focus to plant medicine and healing. More than a sister with a tambourine, was Miriam our earliest Jewish doctor?

As Judy Minor, the head of our New Shul va’ad,  puts it: Every week of Torah study is an opportunity to tap into our Jewish herstory.  As we study, and as we are tasked with the responsibility to pass along our stories to future generations, how might we broaden our understanding so that we may give  future generations the gift of a more complete picture?

Women’s History Month is a reminder to probe deeper, an incentive not to take anyone’s account of history at face value. March might be coming to an end, but we can let it launch us into a year-round adventure of discovery. 

Shabbat shalom,
Lizzie Berne Degear