Sisterhood Interfaith Sabbath

Rabbi Hara Person

Friday, February 9, 2003

A line from the Book of Leviticus speaks to us both about wholeness and about holiness. This line reads: Adonai spoke to Moses saying, “Speak to the whole Israelite community, and say to them: You shall be holy, for I, Adonai your God, am holy.”

Speak to the whole community. There is an emphasis here on inclusiveness. Each person in the community had a responsibility to hear these words. And in hearing them, and heeding them, each person in the community had the potential for holiness. These weren't just words for priests, or for tribal heads, or for men. These were words for everyone.

In order to truly be a holy community standing together before God, we have to study and learn and know and question and take ownership of our texts. For that is the greatest injustice of all, when we ignore our own sacred texts and let others interpret them for us. How can we argue if we don't know the texts? How can we re-interpret if the texts aren't ours? How can we achieve true holiness when we ignore half the voices from our tradition and in our communities? When we do so, we leave ourselves to the mercy of those who would interpret our texts in the narrowest, most limiting ways possible. For so many years, in all of our traditions, serious study of our sacred texts was a male-only endeavor. But when I read lines like that of Leviticus 19, I am convinced that God did not intend for the study of our sacred texts to be closed to women. Each of us has the responsibility to hear and to learn, to listen and to know, and to ask questions.

Our texts needs all of us – the voices and perspectives of the whole community. As people of faith, we know that our texts aren't merely history and literature, though they are surely both of those things. But our sacred texts are also living texts – texts that continue to speak to us generation after generation, texts in which we encounter and wrestle with our God and ourselves again and again. And when half of the community is closed out of that encounter, not only do we suffer, but our texts suffer as well. Without our voices and perspectives, the texts themselves are not whole, the texts themselves are not complete.

When women study scripture, we take our rightful place in a sacred dialogue.

When women study scripture …

• We take a close look.
  
• The women in the text become not simply secondary characters, but primary. We look for evidence of their lives and listen for their voices in the silences between the words.
  
• We read carefully, closely, with an eye to detail. For when we find the women in the text and can hear their voices, we can find our own place within the text and find our own voices. We recover them as we locate ourselves.

When women study scripture …

• We maintain that gender matters and that there can be more than one way of reading a text or a story.
  
• We insist on reading not only the creation of man and then woman from his rib in Chapter 2 of Genesis, but also the creation of male and female together in Chapter 1 of Genesis.
  
• We argue that Vashti was perhaps not disobedient, but rather strong enough to say “No.”

When women study scripture …
... We bring women into the foreground.

• The story of Judah and Tamar becomes more than just one episode in the life of Judah, but rather a complete and rich tale about insights into broken promises, being a childless widow in biblical society, and the avenues of redress that were open to women.
  
• When we encounter a passing reference to Asher's daughter Serach in Genesis, we don't pass over her in a long list of male names, but rather we connect this text to another in Numbers and again in Chronicles, leading us to wonder about this mysterious woman and what important role she might have played to merit being singled out from all the daughters of this clan.
  
• When Reuven sleeps with his father's concubine Bilhah, we read the incident not only as a part of the larger Jacob and Joseph narratives, but also as a story about male and female power, and the nexus of sexuality, jealousy, anger, and revenge.
  
• The story of David and Batsheva becomes not only one chapter of the David narrative, but a rich and complicated story about desire, male power, marriage, trickery, and motherhood.
  
• We declare that the lives of these women matter in and of themselves, and that our lives and our concerns matter, too.

When women study scripture …

• We look at details related to women's lives and we don't shy away from references to biology.
  
• We notice that Sarah is said to be no longer having “the periods of women” [Gen 18:11];
  
• We notice that Sarah is weaning Isaac [Gen 21:8];
  
• We notice that Rachel is said to be experiencing the time of women [Gen 31:35])
  
• We read about infertility on the part of so many biblical women.
  
• We read about Dina's rape.

When women study scripture …

• We also take note of, and allow ourselves to talk about, the ways in which the texts treat our generic female body.
  
• We study the laws about what happens when we are taken by a man by force.
  
• We study the laws surrounding giving birth.
  
• We study the laws regarding menstruation.
  
• We study the laws about purity and contamination.

When women study scripture …

• We make ourselves confront the stories and references that make us angry.
  
• We read about Lot letting his daughters be raped by an angry mob.
  
• We read about Jeptha and his daughter.
  
• We read about Dina being taken by force.
  
• We read these texts and promise to help build a world in which women's lives matter and in which their bodies are their own.

When women study scripture …
... We take careful note of how the text describes women. We ask, “what is she in this text?” What words are used to describe her and what can we infer from these words?

• Rebekah is said to be a comfort to Isaac after the death of his mother and is loved by him, though we are told only of her love for her son [Gen 24:67; Gen 25:28].
  
• Michal is said to love David, the only women in the Bible to be said to love a man [1 Sam 18:20];
  
• Abigail is said to be intelligent and beautiful [1 Sam 25:3].
  
• Deborah is called “a mother in Israel” [Judges 5:7]

When women study scripture …
... We also ask, “Who is she?” How does the text label her? What is the language of relationship being used and when and how does it change? Is she “daughter of”, “mother of”, “wife of,”. And when does she stand on her own in the text?

• We notice that the only time Tamar is not referred to in relationship to a man is while she is seducing her father-in-law.
  
• We notice that as soon as Yael begins to interact with Sisera she is referred to as just Yael and not Heber's wife.
  
• We take note of these shifts in language and wonder what they may reveal about these women's identities or personal journeys, as we think about our own relationships and identities.

When women study scripture …

We ask, “How is her family identity expressed?” Is she an outsider or an insider? Does being one or the other give her more or less freedom to act?

• We see how the narrative goes out of its way to establish the family connection between Abraham and Rebekah.
  
• We see when Ruth stops being called a Moabite and becomes fully accepted as a member of the tribe.
  
• We see that Delilah is never referred to in relation to a certain tribe, people, or family members.
  
• We see that different rules of behavior apply to outsiders and insiders. Connection can be a good thing, but it can also take away freedom, while too much independence can be perceived as a threat.

When women study scripture …

We ask about the texture of relationships.

• We look at relationships between husbands and wives – at Abraham pretending that Sarah is his sister – and at the ritual for the jealous husband in numbers.
  
• We look at the relationship between mothers and children – at Rebekah siding with one son over the other – and at Hannah praying for Samuel only to give him up.
  
• We look at the relationships between women – between the mother-in-law Naomi and the daughter-in-law Ruth – between the sisters Leah and Rachel.
  
• And we see reflections of complicated relationships we know all too well, for better and for worse, in our lives – reminding ourselves to work hard to let the best that is in us come through in our relationships.

When women study scripture …

We ask, “Where is she – where is she placed?”

• Sarah is inside the tent while Abraham greets the strangers outside.
  
• Rebekah is inside while Esau is “out in the open”.
  
• Yael is placed at the entrance to the tent and then inside the tent
  
• Michal is inside looking out at David cavorting.
  
• We see that the women's sphere was the inside, the interior. It was from there that she was able to fulfill her role in the narrative. We can recognize that once it was normal for a woman to be confined to a limited stage, while we refuse to accept those constraints for ourselves.

When women study scripture …
…We ask, “Why here, why now?” Most of the central protagonists are men. So when a woman plays a central role we have to ask, Is there a connection to her gender or is it incidental? Is she serving a function that only a woman could do?

• We read that Sisera is killed by Yael
  
• We read that Samson is trapped by Delilah
  
• We read that David is saved by Michal

When women study scripture …
…We ask about names. So many women in scripture are unnamed. So we have to ask, why are these women named? And why are these other women not?

• Why is Esau's wife, Adah, named in Genesis, when so many other wives are nameless?
  
• Why are Noah's wife, Lot's wife, and Jeptha's daughter all unnamed, despite their important roles?
  
• Why are Job's daughters named, while his sons remain nameless?
  
• Why is Aaron's wife Elisheva, who plays absolutely no role in any story, given a name?

When women study scripture …
... We ask what tools women had to work with in order to become active participants in the narrative. What motifs are used as part of her story?

• Tamar used clothing to hide her identity and seduce her father-in-law in order to get what was rightfully hers. Rebekah too uses clothing to help Jacob trick Isaac.
  
• Yael used milk, the ultimate female symbol of nurturing, to make Sisera feel at home and let down his guard. Abigail also used food when she tricked her husband and got the attention of David.
  
• Yael used simple household items like tent pegs to kill Sisera. Michal used the easy-to-obtain items of goats hair, cloth, household idols to trick the guards into letting David escape from Saul's wrath.
  
• Delilah used her sexuality to entrap Samson, while Yael used a potent combination of both sexuality and maternal warmth to bring down Sisera.

When women study scripture …
…We ask about women's relationship with God.

• Rebekah receives direct prophecy from God.
  
• Hannah prays to God and her prayers are answered.
  
• Miriam leads the women in praising God.

When women study scripture …
... We ask about the God language of our sacred texts.

• We read that God can be a God of war
  
• We read that God can be a loving parent, holding us in our weakness
  
• We read that God can be stern and angry
  
• We read that God can be the still small voice
  
• And we read that God can feed us and clothe us and carry us to safety as an eagle carries her young.

When women study scripture …

• When women study scripture we ask questions, lots of questions. And we don't necessarily get answers, but we keep on asking.
  
• When women study scripture we learn, about our texts and about ourselves.
  
• When women study scripture we begin to see nuances and shades of gray and layers of meaning.
  
• When women study scripture we are able to say “no” to the oppression of women that relies on one-dimensional readings of sacred text.
  
• When women study scripture we become partners with God, who invites us in to this sacred dialogue of text study.

Today we have riches unimaginable in past generations. We have women's bible commentaries and feminist biblical criticism and gender sensitive texts and women's bible study groups. Yet our tents should be open on all sides, so that we can become enriched by all of the voices, both new and old, from our tradition. Limited as they were by the realities and worldviews of the times in which they lived, the sages of old still have much to teach and offer us. So perhaps there is another way we can read one of the commandments that follows the exhortation to be holy from Leviticus that I mentioned at the beginning of this talk: revere your mother and your father. In order to truly be a holy community standing together whole before God, we must revere both the mothers and the fathers of our tradition. We must struggle to make sense out of voices from long ago that don't always speak in the metaphors or societal norms of today, and at the same time, we must, as a community, learn from the new voices, for they are meant to teach all of us, not simply half of us. We must listen to a raucous spectrum of voices, not limit our own possibilities for holiness based solely on gender identification.

We can strive towards holiness by studying the Scripture of our mothers, and the Scripture of our fathers. Both have what to teach us. Our job is to find the right balance in the different voices available to us as teachers, not to silence any of the voices. Learning from the diversity of our voices brings us closer to holiness. It is our job to integrate those voices, the voices of women, the voices of our mothers, with the voices of men, the voices of our fathers, and to use those lessons gleaned from a full and complete cacophony of voices to inch ever closer towards wholeness, and thus to holiness.

In order to be whole, and thus to be holy, we need our sacred texts. In order to be whole and thus to be holy, the text needs to be studied and engaged with by all of us.

The study of scripture by women is a sacred obligation. For when women study Scripture we help to heal the text.

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