Sisterhood in Literature
Work published in the ICM-produced Living Text reflects a similar emphasis on community (and even sisterhood) in contemporary midrash.
In an interview of Marge Piercy for the second issue of the journal, Kelly Tzvia Washburn asks the writer about collectivity and community:
I’m wondering if you see a collective project of tikkun olam [repairing the world], particularly among women who are now writing midrash? (Washburn 8).
Piercy replies:
It is a collective project because they feed off each other. The remarkable interpretations stay with you, change how you experience the story thereafter. (Washburn 8)
Thus, like Judith Plaskow anticipates, contemporary midrash not only functions as a collective project, it becomes a mechanism for writers (particularly women, as Washburn asks about women specifically) to affect, maybe permanently, each other’s interpretations of religious texts. These effects indicate empowerment and connection. Similarly, when discussing Sarah and Hagar, Linda Hirschborn notes, “we must tell each others’ stories” (24). In order for stories to be told, a community must be built. In her poem “Leah at the Altar,” Lori Lefkowitz demonstrates a similar inclination to women telling the story of other women while re-imagining a particular form of sisterhood.
While Leah prepares to be married, she speaks to her sister:
Rachel, I stand at our altar. (Lefkovitz 23)
A community forms just with Leah’s address of her sister and this community deepens when Leah acknowledges it is the sisters, not the sisters and their husband, who posses the altar, “our altar.” Later, the speaker asks:
Is it you or I or we who are being sacrificed? (Lefkovitz 23)
The speaker’s use of the pronoun “you,” in addressing Rachel, almost brings the reader into this complicated network because it is the reader who seems to be addressed by the second-person by encountering the word “you.” Additionally, we wonder, in this community of sisters, where the ontological boundaries are; even Rachel cannot distinguish between herself, her sister, and a combination of the two. Lefkovitz’s poem creates a community by imagining Leah’s address to her sister; she deepens this community by engaging the reader in this address.
