In addition to the testimonials documenting contemporary midrash’s potential to facilitate women’s relationship with faith and the Torah, work produced in the 1999 Summer Training Intensive functions as a record of the attempts to connect to, understand, and engage with religious text. In her piece “Hunger,” Rosalind Glazer elucidates the possible relationship between Eve’s sexuality and her downfall; the speaker asserts:
We untangled, slid apart, grabbing wrists to hold each other up and we circled, eyes wide, astonished. He fell toward me, and I held him floating, rocking, humming and we danced. [...] Then I felt it. My hunger. It was all I could feel now. (Box 10, ICMR)
The writer’s attempt to inhabit Eve’s character, to speak from her voice, reveals an ability to connect to the text, to find meaning within what’s written. Similarly, the relationship between eating and sexuality, the relationship between bodily pleasure and dire consequence, invites the reader to rethink Eve as a both an individual character and an allegorical presence.
Gabrielle Suzanne Kaplan’s “Exile,” further reimagines the interplay between sexuality and allegorical significance in Eden when Eve tells Adam she will make a dress of “flowers and vines and leaves;” she then reminds Adam:
You will be overcome with desire. You will rip the dress off me at night. Blood will flow as I walk, blood running down my legs. (Box 10, ICMR)
Here, Eve not only understands Adam’s sexuality, she seems to actively control it, to be aware of her power over her partner. For women practicing midrash, the understanding of Eve and her role in text and allegory goes far beyond an interrogation of sexuality. In “A Work in Progressss,” Marion Yager Hamermesh makes the relationship between self and text even stronger when she notes (of Eden), “it was my great grandmother who started all this trouble” by marching up to Eve and handing her a fig (Box 10, ICMR). The consequences of Eve’s choice, influenced by the speaker’s great grandmother, ripple outward:
Well quick as lightning Even grabs the fig, takes a bite and feeds some to Adam. Then before you can say tohu va vohu, Eve’s hurting, he’s working, my great grandmamma is eating dust and me??? Me, I’m stuck here with a splitting headache (Box 10, ICMR).
Hamermesh’s punctuation deepens the relationship between characters (even across time) because commas, not end marks, separate the experiences of each figure. Moreover, even though her reference is in passing, Hamermesh allows for the possibility of the reader’s interaction with story when she notes, “before
you can say tohu va vohu” (italic emphasis added; Box 10, ICMR). Hence, not only do readers begin to rethink Eve’s motivations, we also see the relationship between past and present, between narrative and experience, as the speaker, in the present, has a “splitting headache.”
Works published in the first issue of
Living Text: The Journal of Contemporary Midrash also imbue female characters with more life, with more power, and reveal attempts to deepen the author’s relationship with the text. For example, in “The Rape of Dinah,” Debra Seltzer actually gives
Dinah a voice, in an attempt rethink Dinah’s (and Shechem’s narrative). Expanding on Genesis 34’s simple statement about Dinah visiting Canaanites, Seltzer’s Dinah explains her actions to her brother:
I went looking for the company of women. I only went because I was lonely. As the only daughter…there is no one else during the day when you are all out tending the flocks. (7)
Here, Dinah comes alive by virtue of actually speaking but also in her desire for community, particularly a community of women. Seltzer’s ellipses imply that there is even more to Dinah, more that we do not yet understand, more that could be imagined. Later, not only does Dinah beg her brothers to spare Shechem’s life, she indicates she may not have been raped. She asks Levi, “what if he didn’t rape me?” and, after he enquires whether she “chose to be with [Shechem],” Dinah responds with “Stop the killing” (Seltzer 10). Interestingly, Dinah never relinquishes control of the conversation to her brothers.
In fact, in her insistent ambiguity, Dinah calls traditional readings of her story into question without having to openly reveal her sexual desires. As a result, her brothers, and the readers, never know the truth, implying that there may be other narratives, other religious epiphanies, that we cannot yet comprehend. We do, however, come to understand that Dinah
does know the truth and so her power grows. In keeping with the midrashic practice of reading only into where the text leaves opening, Seltzer does not change Shechem’s fate. However, we witness her attempts to illuminate Dinah and, in these attempts, we see Dinah as substantially more powerful and more complex.
In “A Midrash on the Rock, Numbers 20: 1-13,” Rivkah Walton takes a different approach to empowering
Miriam; rather than give Miriam a voice, Walton empowers her through Moses’ understanding of her importance. In Walton’s interpretation, when Moses calls the congregation of Israel “rebels,” before obtaining water for them, “he almost said Godforbid ‘you Miriams’” (“A Midrash on the Rock” 22). Not only does Miriam preoccupy her brother’s thoughts, he almost calls the rebels “Miriams,” demonstrating not only his sister’s power but also his own awareness of it. Later, YHVM admonishes Moses:
You never saw Me in your sister’s face nor My work through her hands. Though you owe your very life to her—or is it because you owe your life to her?—you have never been able to acknowledge her leadership. (Walton, “A Midrash on the Rock” 22)
By illuminating the relationship between Miriam and YHVM, Walton elucidates Miriam’s capacity for influence and leadership. Walton also implies reasons why female figures may be dismissed in religious texts by indicating the possibility that Moses (consciously or subconsciously) ignores his sister’s legacy; as readers, then, we begin to wonder—what other legacies have been ignored by men in the Torah? Although Walton never grants Miriam a voice, she does reveal Miriam’s leadership, legacy, and power. Additionally, we witness both Walton’s individual engagement with the text and, with Walton’s implication of Miriam’s ignored leadership, begin to speculate about other forgotten, female leaders.
