Queering Sacred Texts: Reclamation and Resistance Through Midrash Making
March 4, 2021
By Aliyah Blattner
I remember reading midrash as a child at my Schechter day school. While we explored the stories of the Tanakh through the eyes and words of the rabbis, my teachers emphasized the power of midrash as a testament to the dynamic, ever-evolving nature of the Jewish tradition. If the foundations of our culture were built upon centuries of thoughtful debate and discussion, then anyone could find meaning and personal power in the sacred texts we studied, even us as modern, American children. However, the midrash we read and studied was mostly a Rabbinic period's "greatest hits" list. Instead of portraying the liveliness of Jewish storytelling practice, the midrash we were exposed to was predominantly based in perspectives that were as removed from our lives as the biblical stories they were intended to make accessible.
Additionally, like many of the most essential aspects of Judaism, the influence of patriarchy impeded upon my ability as a young girl to feel connected to the interpretations and explanations of the stories that we elevated in the classroom. I found myself pushing back against many of the rabbis' writings, unable to help myself from noticing the glaring absence of women from the tradition of midrash making. How could I celebrate the power in questioning and reimagining ancient texts if the innovative interpretations we glorified felt equally inaccessible to me as the biblical stories they were meant to unpack? I found myself seeking out new ways to find myself in the textual legacy of the Jewish tradition.
I largely came across midrashei nashim, or women's midrash, by accident. As a poet, I often write on biblical themes, and am fascinated by the relationship between divinity, queerness, and womanhood as it appears in the Tanakh. I also am an prolific reader of Jewish feminist poetry, much of which focuses on elevating the stories of women in the Torah. But I never saw my work or the work of these poets as "midrash making." We were just women who happened to reimagine Jewish texts in our creative works. In my mind, this was distinctly different from the ancient rabbis of the 6th century who penned the midrashim I read as a child. This disconnect is not random.
As someone who did not see Jewish women in leadership roles (religious or otherwise) until much later in life, I understand why I never conceived of women being capable of shaping Judaism in the same ways as the male rabbis of the past. It was not until this summer, through my work as a Gilda Slifka intern, that I began to perceive what I (and the inspirational women rabbis, scholars, and artists) had cultivated from the 1960s to present day as a legitimate form of midrash.
I would describe the experience of reading feminist midrash as the moment when one learns that their favorite book has been missing its most important pages. While you can enjoy the story without all its chapters, that incomplete experience can never compare to reading the novel in its entirety. Feminist midrash makers strive to reinterpret the Tankah through a feminist lens to fill in the gaps left behind by Jewish misogyny. These women recognize the danger of allowing men alone to debate the meaning of the Torah without engaging with other perspectives and they champion the importance of female interpretations of religious texts to expand upon and complicate the ways that women related to their Judaism.
Feminist midrash aims to enhance and build off the Tanakh by providing readers with access to a different perspective that serves to enrich the text and make a more whole Judaism. It’s about giving women a voice in a centuries-old conversation from which we've largely been excluded and as an avid reader (and aspiring maker) of midrash, I have discovered an entirely new way to relate to my Judaism through queerness and womanhood.
One of my favorite evolutions of midrashei nashim has been the proliferation of midrash that roots itself in LGBTQ+ perspectives and experiences. Unlike the writings of cisgender, straight women in the 1970s and 1980s who centered their own voices and lenses as the "truest" forms of feminist midrash, queer Jews aspire to re-envision the ways that we understood and related to Judaism by both queering biblical characters and unpacking the Tanakh in radical ways. While early women's midrash works toward uplifting the stories of biblical women by giving them voice and agency, queer midrash draws into question the fundamental categories and norms that underpin ancient texts, challenging the ways that Jewish tradition reinforces arbitrary standards, binaries and understandings of human existence.
One of the first pieces of queer midrash I ever read was acclaimed poet and professor Joy Ladin's quintessential "Wrestling Till Dawn," which reinterprets the classic tale of Jacob wrestling with the angel through a transgender lens. She depicts Jacob's struggle as a battle with both a higher power and his own gender identity. When Jacob ties with the messenger in Parashat Vayishlach, dawn breaks, and Jacob is renamed Israel, or "the one who wrestles with God." From this struggle, Israel emerges with a renewed understanding of both himself and the way that he fits within the world as a Jewish person. Additionally, Ladin draws from the biblical Hebrew to advocate for a trans context for Jacob's actions, citing the description of him "limping on his hip" as a coded reference to his body's physical relationship with gender.
While Ladin's interpretation of this story functions to reveal the way that trans experiences and perspectives enrich the ways that we interact with sacred texts, her words also serve to achieve a greater goal. She reveals that while queer midrash, on a surface level, can be written to portray biblical characters as queer themselves, she celebrates how a queer lens can reveal hidden meanings within the text and provide contemporary queer Jews with both a voice in the canon and a path toward liberation through biblical narratives.
In a way, I would characterize the process of writing midrash as a distinctly queer act. When the rabbis were presented with a normative and seemingly irrefutable text, they chose to read between the lines, ask questions and challenge the assumptions that underpinned the words of God. By expanding upon and going beyond the text through innovative interpretations, Torah scholars relied upon the text itself to reveal answers to the questions that bothered them. As a queer woman, navigating the nuances of my identity, in many ways, reminds me of the methods that the first midrash makers utilized to understand and interpret the Tanakh. We both understand the danger in blindly accepting the truths we are given and seek meaning in the act of questioning as a form of resistance and an expression of love for the complexity of the human experience.
I believe that queer midrash provides us with an incredibly important lens through which to better understand the Jewish tradition. If women's midrash pushed to fill the proverbial second half of the shelf, queer midrash is an extension of that legacy, adding more voices into the conversation to achieve a more whole tradition. When we treat rabbinic midrash as irrefutable truth, we undermine its value and compromise the ability of midrash to provide modern readers with the insights and questions necessary to learn from and grow through the study of the Tanakh.
Furthermore, we limit the scope of Jewish tradition because only certain members of our community can find themselves in traditional texts or feel entitled to critique our culture. To that end, to bring queer Jews into the conversation, it is essential to treat midrash as the tool of reclamation and resistance that it has been for generations of queer Jews. If the radical act of questioning is foundational in Jewish culture, then we must also embrace queerness and the diverse experiences and perspectives of queer Jews into our religious traditions as a celebration of our collective ability to wrestle with sacred texts in our everyday lives.
Aliyah Blattner is a sophomore at Brown University and was HBI 2020 Gilda Slifka summer intern.