The Pedagogical Lessons of Dirshuni
Marjorie Lehman
June 2023
As I prepare my syllabi to begin a new semester of teaching, I mull over different ways to employ pedagogies of inclusion. I reflect on my teaching as a professor of Talmud and rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, thinking about my students who, no matter what I do, feel a sense of exclusion from both the rabbinic texts I teach them as well as from the world they inhabit. Whether they are male or female, queer or straight, old or young, religious or secular, white or people of color, undergraduates or rabbinical students, graduate students or Jewish educators, democrats or republicans, pro-Israel or not, students feel alienated, inasmuch as they are captivated by the allure of rabbinic sources and entranced by feelings of religious connection. The intersection of so many different identities present in the classroom overwhelms me as much as it does them. Sometimes, I feel like I have the answers. Sometimes, I find a way to create a safe space for them to discuss their views. Afterall, the humanist classroom has to be a space where we can all express what makes us feel human and, in the case of JTS, what makes us feel connected to Judaism and our rabbinic ancestors. But equally so, there are many times when we feel disconnected from the ancient rabbis and the texts we are studying, not to mention overlooked by those sharing our classroom spaces. Our struggles are all so personal and intimately tied to the project of finding meaning, asserting our identities, and figuring out how rabbinic texts speak to us. In what ways are these rabbinic texts teachable? Can and should we work to redeem them? What is the pathway to locating ourselves within them? What if I am a cisgender female in a classroom setting where not everyone identifies with me?
Recently, a search to find commentaries on Bavli Yevamot 65b-66aa – a sugya that presents a named woman (Yehudit) struggling with whether she is required to birth children – I came across a passage from Dirshuni II (Hebrew, ed.), the brainchild of Tamar Biala and Naomi Weingarten-Mintz. In encountering this project, created for the purpose of inspiring women to become part of the ancient rabbinic midrashic enterprise of creative interpretation, I was thrilled to find a midrashic text that I could share with my students written by the poet and scholar Ruth Kara-Ivanov Kaniel.1 It was freeing to hear Kaniel’s voice touch on all of the difficult pressures associated with childbearing in Jewish communities today, including the unpopular admission that some women prefer Torah study to family. Reverberating underneath the surface of Kaniel’s midrash one could hear the voice of the Talmudic rabbi Ben Azzai, who chose a life of Torah study over children (Bavli Yevamot 63b). In fact, it was this modern midrash by Kaniel that led me to read and study Dirshuni extensively and to think more deeply about what it means to adopt a pedagogy of inclusion.2
Through Dirshuni, I encountered present-day women who wrote past, or maybe in spite of, their feelings of exclusion. They engaged with rabbinic texts using the very same midrashic methods as their male predecessors in a process that gave them voices. They did not merely speak back to tradition or write essays articulating what they found to be unredeemable. Instead, they spoke with tradition. They claimed positions as insiders, finding themselves (both body and soul) in their own creative reconfigurations and textual connections. Specifically, their interpretive exercise went a step further than reading rabbinic sources in order to decode them and locate rabbinic messages. They saw themselves as inheritors of a method that gave them the agency, authority, and power to bring their own issues and struggles to the texts they encountered. Like their rabbinic predecessors, they too began with a textual difficulty found within a biblical or rabbinic text. Rather than allowing a textual difficulty to distance them from a text, the difficulty spurred them to react. At the same time, they were fueled by their own contemporary challenges, ones that existed outside the text. Something was happening to them or around them that they felt could not be overlooked and needed to be voiced. Expertly, they drew on the entire corpus of Jewish texts from biblical verses to modern Hebrew literature, introducing new linkages between words and phrases generating new meanings. Hidden within each association was a deeper message just waiting to be uncovered. The same creative license that was once used by the rabbis had become theirs. They found their voices in the exercise of turning themselves into darshanot (women who engage in midrashic interpretation), finding a sense of freedom and offering us new midrashim from which to learn.
Significantly, Dirshuni inspired me to think more about a pedagogy of inclusion and what that might mean in my classroom at JTS. I want to be more than a teacher who teaches students how to decode rabbinic texts and how to draw meaning out of the texts we have already inherited. I want to train my students at JTS how to become darshanim and darshanot (men and women who engage in midrashic interpretation) with the skills, the knowledge, and the confidence to write their own midrashim. I want to refine a pedagogical method that channels the students’ discomfort and feelings of exclusion into an exercise connecting them to the largest array of Jewish sources available, in order to close the distances they feel. Today, students also have incredible resources, such as rich search engines like Sefaria, Ma’agarim, the Bar Ilan Responsa project, and even Google. Choosing specific words and phrases from difficult texts and placing them into search engines yields entirely different contexts that can incite new interpretive creations without dismissing what we have already inherited. Using the same technique of midrash that freed our predecessors from the constraints of the texts they were studying long ago can work for us, if only we take on the challenge of doing the same. Holy texts become holier when we weave them into new tapestries. Texts become more meaningful when we write with them rather than merely about them.
When I think back to Yehudit in Yevamot 65b and the way that Kaniel put words into the mouth of Yehudit, not to mention into the mouths of so many women, Kaniel left me thinking about how she carved out a space while studying this Talmudic passage for the purpose of her own inclusion. She added her voice to a text that men used as the basis for excluding women from the very act that they were born to perform. She also transformed a text that was entirely focused on pregnancy and childbearing into one where a woman could identify as someone other than a vessel through whom her husband could perform his commandment to procreate. Dirshuni reminds us all that Torah study need not make us feel excluded. We need only to seize upon the texts we have inherited, not only to read and understand them, but also to engage in the age-old project of writing midrash.
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¹ Kara-Ivanov Kaniel, R. (2019). “כוס עקרין,” Dirshuni II: Israeli Women Writing Midrash (Weingarten-Mintz, N., Biala, T., Eds.). Yediot.
² I am grateful for the opportunity to have prepared a deeper exploration of Dirshuni with my friend and colleague Chaya Halberstam which we submitted to the Journal of Textual Reasoning (ed., Chumie Juni). Our essay, “Echoing Yehudit: Dirshuni as a Women’s Collective Enterprise,” is forthcoming.