With the publication of Dirshuni: Contemporary Women’s Midrash, editor Tamar Biala opens the world of women’s midrashic interpretation to a wide range of readers. Midrashim are an important aspect of early rabbinic literature; they are creative renderings of foundational Jewish texts. They interpret biblical narratives, verses, words, and sometimes even letters, thereby filling contextual or philological gaps and expanding on the text of the bible—making it more accessible and meaningful to readers and learners. Midrashim, assembled in various ancient collections such as Bereshit/Genesis Rabbah and interspersed in the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmud, have since the Early Middle Ages been further developed. Even today, Midrashim form a central part in explaining biblical and rabbinical stories. A closer look at the genre of Midrashim reveals a perplexing diversity of textual interpretation, but also highlights several common notions and structures that are displayed repeatedly.
Until recently, almost all midrashim were written by men. This is linked to women’s representation in the Hebrew Bible. While women feature throughout the Bible, they most often appear as sisters, mothers, and wives of heroes and are only sometimes spotlighted. Although their actions and decisions are at times central to the development of the biblical narrative, many of them only appear on the margins. Nevertheless, Dirshuni argues that these stories invite readers and writers to look at women’s stories in the Bible from feminist perspectives. The authors offer a wide array of such interpretations in Dirshuni, which, paraphrasing the anthology’s editor, aims to complete the Jewish bookshelf with its other, female half (xxxvi). As the first anthology of Midrashim written by women in English, Dirshuni offers valuable insights into midrashic feminist interpretation.
This type of interpretation has become particularly popular among feminist orthodox circles in Israel. Such texts written by Israeli women in the late 20th and 21st centuries have been circulated privately and read in small circles interested in new midrashim. These midrashim highlight women’s experiences in biblical narratives and offer compelling psychological and analytical readings that are relevant today. Motivated to bring new midrashim to a broader Israeli audience, Tamar Biala and Nechama Weingarten-Mintz published two Hebrew anthologies in 2009 and 2018 under the name Dirshuni: Midrashei Nashim (Yediot Acharonot). This English version of Dirshuni is their adapted version, presenting select texts from the original Hebrew publications.
Making space for women’s narratives and female authors of midrashim, the texts presented in Dirshuni center around Jewish women’s experiences in the Hebrew Bible, but also go beyond that. They critically, and at times unconventionally, reinterpret messages of the Hebrew Bible (for example Noah’s drunkenness after the flood in “The Father’s Scream” by Oshrat Shoham, chapter 8.2), rewrite holiday liturgy (a woman’s “Prayer for Rain” by Ruth Gan Kagan, chapter 11.1), and frequently concern (in)fertility and the challenge of raising children. Some authors, like Rivka Lubitch in “Moses Visits Beruriah’s Beit Midrash” (chapter 9.3), combine stories from the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud, showing how biblical interpretation and halachic reasoning are interlinked.
The Midrashim in the English version of Dirshuni are preceded by a concise and exciting introduction to the Midrash genre and the renewed interest in midrashim in the 20th century. Biala then outlines how this development led some of these women to write their own midrashim and other texts for the “other half of the Jewish bookshelf” (xxxvi-xxxvii). She critically reflects on her role as the editor of these at times deeply personal midrashim, calling this chapter “The Sin of Writing Commentary” (xli–xlii). There she shares insights into her commentary on these texts and how she contextualized them in English. The topical organization and skilled translation of these midrashim make this volume an exciting and page-turning read.
Biala’s commentaries to each of the midrashim need to be highlighted. She helps readers understand the contexts in which the biblical sources and interpretations are located. The midrashim in Dirshuni have been published previously in Hebrew, but, for this volume, were translated and contextualized for the English-speaking audience. So, the original Hebrew texts are excluded from the volume. A bilingual edition would have made linguistic and comparative analyses with the languages so central to the Hebrew Bible and Talmud—Hebrew and Aramaic—clearer. Biala’s commentary, though, is a great addition to the text and sparks further questions and insights. Her remarks are a testament to the effort, thought, consideration, and time that not only went into writing the commentary, but also into the midrashim themselves.
One of these midrashim, “A Woman of Valor” written by Adi Blut (chapter 5.3), is particularly striking and representative of the aims of Dirshuni. It is a reinterpretation of Proverbs 31:10–31 (commonly called “Eshet Chayil” or “Woman of Valor”), which is traditionally sung for the Jewish housewife on Friday night. Blut’s midrash views the actions of the woman of valor—who works hard, is wise, and is, towards the end of the text, praised by her family—as a gradual movement towards the appreciation of women’s Jewish scholarship. Her text is a microcosm of Dirshuni, which contributes to the appreciation and reading of these creative, critical, and feminist interpretations of Jewish stories and tradition.
Katharina Hadassah Wendl is a PhD researcher at the Free University Berlin.
Katharina Hadassah Wendl
Date Of Review:
April 24, 2023