March is Women’s History Month in the U.S., a time to lift up and celebrate women in history. This week, we also read Ki Tissa and are again grappling with the questions of chet ha’egel/the sin of the (golden) calf. One such question comes up in Yoma 66b.
The question is posed in this way:
A wise woman asked Rabbi Eliezer: Since all bore equal responsibility for the incident of the Golden Calf, due to what factor were their deaths not equal? (See the end of Exodus 32 for the different deaths)
Rabbi Eliezer dismisses the question with some straightforward misogyny:
“The only wisdom in a woman is with a spindle, and so it states: ‘And any woman who was wise-hearted, spun with her hands (Ex. 35:25).’
He does not respond to her with kindness, curiosity, or any other middah tovah that we might hope to see from a sage of our tradition and instead refuses both her question and her worthiness in the beit midrash. But as a third generation Tanna, there were later generations who had the opportunity to pick up the conversation. And so they do.
The layers of the Talmud encourage us to listen to women from our tradition, to tell the truth about our histories of misogyny and exclusion, and to engage in the Torah that women have offered for thousands of years.
The sugya continues with a debate between two Amoraim, Rav and Levi who offer different possible explanations for why there were different punishments for the Israelites. At this moment, I’m not as interested in their specific opinions as much I am in the fact that they do take up the question asked by the unnamed wise woman from an earlier generation and debate it in earnest.
While R’ Eliezer’s approach to women (and Torah) is conservative across rabbinic sources, the redactors of the Talmud opted to include this interaction, preserving the woman’s question, the description of her as wise, and the later generation’s willingness to seriously engage with her insightful question. It is almost as if the redactors are saying, “Rabbi Eliezer got this wrong, but in order to get it right, we need to be honest about how Rabbi Eliezer got this wrong.” They could have cut R’ Eliezer all together, or put the wise woman’s words in the mouth of a man (an all too familiar practice!), or even cut the Amoraim to let R’ Eliezer have the final word, but instead, our redactors include it all.
In doing so, the layers of the Talmud encourage us to listen to women from our tradition, to tell the truth about our histories of misogyny and exclusion, and to engage in the Torah that women have offered for thousands of years.
Happy Women’s History Month and Shabbat shalom,
