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that is where the concept falls apart.
Ochs' answer to this is that it's still too
soon after the Holocaust to truly incor-
porate it into the Jewish story. We are.
still in a period of mourning, she writes.
She points to the fact that the
Mishnah, which contains early rab-
binic Torah commentary, though writ-
ten 130 years after the Second Temple's
destruction, fails to mention either the
destruction or the transformation of
the Jews. The rabbis knew that the dis-
aster was too fresh, too painful, that
generations needed to pass before it
could be placed in the larger context.
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The Torah, Through Her Eyes
Women rabbis offer insights and commentary.
SANDEE B RAWARS KY
Special to the Jewish News
F
The post-Holocaust generations are
only now beginning to rub their eyes,
look around and figure out where to
go from here.
"We have learned that there is room
within our faith for numerous ways of
understanding the losses and pains we
confront," she writes. "God is not
threatened, and neither is our faith."
This book makes the case that the
answer is not only in ancient text. We're
"writing" the story of the Jewish people
right now, in the way we live our lives,
go through time, and in how we can see
God in the spaces in between. 111
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or the first time, the voices of"
women rabbis are gathered in a
single volume that follows the cycle of
Torah readings. Using traditional
sources, the contributors delve into the
text, weaving original, textured com-
mentary with a feminist spin and, in
many cases, creating modern midrash.
"I wanted to stretch the rabbinic
imagination," Rabbi Elyse Goldstein,
the editor who conceptualized The
Women's Torah Commentary: New
Insights from Women Rabbis on the 54
Weekly Torah Portions (Jewish Lights;
$34.95), says in an inter- View.
Reading the book is like having many
wise guides to the text, often taking
unpredictable but worthwhile paths in
search of meaning. Contributors include
rabbis from the Reform, Conservative
and Reconstructionist movements.
Rabbi Goldstein explains that she
agonized over not including
Orthodox women's voices, but said
that her "first goal was to publish
ordained women." There are no
ordained Orthodox women rabbis.
Many of the 116 women interested in
contributing to the book wanted to
write about the same portions — partic-
ularly those about female figures like
Sarah or Tamar, or those dealing with
childbirth and rituals of purity.
So she negotiated assignments and
then selected the 54 essays to include.
She looked for writers who "would sing
the song of women — to speak in a
woman's voice," whatever the content of
the Torah portion.
The contributors include rabbis who
have congregational pulpits, as well as
Jewish communal professionals, cam-
pus rabbis, chaplains and academics,
from the United States, Canada, South
America and Israel. The majority of
them are from the Reform movement,
which also has the largest number of
women rabbis.
"I think there's a woman's way of see-
ing the world and the Torah, through
the lens of having experienced the world
as a woman," Rabbi Goldstein explains.
Most women rabbis, she says, would call
themselves revisionists — who neither
reject the Torah for what they see as
biases nor try to whitewash those biases.
They write with love and reverence
for the text, turning it around in light
of commentaries and midrash to find a
meaningful message.
Some of the homiletic pieces seem to
reflect the "profundity of change in Jewish
life that the women rabbi represents," as
Rabbi Amy Eilberg, the first Conservative
woman to be ordained, writes in the
book's foreword.
In her outstanding piece on Pekudei,
"The Birthing of the Mishkan"
(Tabernacle), Rabbi Elana Zaiman,
formerly of New York's Park Avenue
Synagogue and now in Seattle, likens
the building of the mishkan to the
birthing process, "an idea inherent in
the text itself," she writes.
The word pakad, "to take account" is
used in connection with the mishkan,
and although its root appears in many
other texts, she notes its use in refer-
ence to God taking account of Sarah
and Hannah, and both women subse-
quently giving birth.
Rabbi Zaiman goes on to show how
themes involved in physical birthing —
labor, identity and continuity — can be
applied to the building of the mishkan
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