While scholarly claims of midrash’s potential are valuable, the Institute for Contemporary Midrash’s records, housed in the Post-Holocaust American Judaism Collections at the University of Colorado Boulder, provide important insight into the actual impact of midrash on Jewish women’s lives. Officially started in 1997, the ICM offered, according to Rivkah Walton (one of its founders) a “multidisciplinary approach to midrash,” with the goal of “bringing the arts to bear on the text” (Walton, Personal Interview).  The ICM provided, among other things, a summer training in midrash, interfaith bibliodrama courses, resources and referrals for other midrash endeavors, and published Living Text: The Journal of Contemporary Midrash (The Institute for Contemporary Midrash). Though the ICM supported the practice of midrash across the gender spectrum, Ms. Walton notes in a phone interview:

This desire, echoed by scholars mentioned in the previous section, seems to manifest in ICM participants. For example, at the 1997 Summer Training Intensive, of the 79 listed participants, 16 are men and 63 are women (Box 9, ICMR).

Ms. Walton explains this disparity when she speculates that the creative aspect of contemporary midrash attracts women: “wherever something is creative, it is the women who are engaging” (Walton, Personal Interview).  The ICM certainly provided outlets for creativity by offering resources for midrashim through bibliodrama, art, mask-making, dance, and literature; perhaps, as Walton indicates, it is this potential for a creative connection to religious texts that appealed to women.

           Testimonials from the ICMR collection speak to the powerful ways that midrash allowed women to explore and expand their relationship with the Torah. In an interview about the Summer Training Institute, Debra Baer Moses claims midrash provides new avenues for understanding:

Referencing the common midrashic metaphor of white fire within the black letters of the Torah, Baer Moses’ claim not only demonstrates the potential for spiritual engagement, she demonstrates the actual engagement with the text that happened through participating in ICM trainings. She later claims of the work at the STI, that her “soul doesn’t come through until [she’s] been able to go into the text” (Box 9, ICMR).  We infer, as a result, that midrash has the potential to not just make the Torah more personal, it also has the potential to deepen one’s relationship with one’s self. A participant in the 1997 STI told Rivkah Walton she wished she had learned the midrashic method as a child, speculating that she may not have “taken as long to come back to [Judaism]” had she learned the process earlier (Box 9, ICMR). Enid Dame, one of the institute’s instructors, said that midrashic writing taught her “…about being a Jew, about being a woman (Box 9, ICMR). Another STI interviewee claims that she experienced an appreciation for the text (the Torah) coming alive for the first time after practicing contemporary midrash (Box 10, ICMR).Esther Willison notes in her questionnaire that her experience with contemporary midrash allowed her to let go of her fight with God as she learned more about herself and became more connected to Judaism (Box 10, ICMR). Midrash emerges as a both a means to understand religious texts, religion, and, for women, the relationship between self and faith. Demonstrating midrash’s potential to move beyond simply affecting faith to affecting existence, Jan Salzman remarks that the 1997 STI “changed [her] life” (Box 10, ICMR). In a letter of endorsement for the Institute for Contemporary Midrash (written after participating in the STI), Rosalind Glazer claims, simply: 

           Interviews in the ICM records indicate that part of why “midrash matters” for women is its potential to provide insight into female Biblical figures. In her interview, Alicia Ostriker describes the Torah as “the tree of life,” going on to claim that the text provides permission to respond, through practices like midrash (Box 9, ICMR). Debra Baer Moses says, of the work produced at the STI, “For me, as a woman, this is extremely important, to give voice to voices who have been silent” (Box 9, ICMR). Through midrash, women who remain silent in the Torah have the potential to come alive, to be heard. Baer Moses goes on to discuss how midrash work at the summer training involved looking at gaps in the text, trying to find voices, and, finally, giving voices to these “ancient mothers” (Box 9, ICMR). Enid Dame references some of the work of her STI participants: they produced poetry about Lilith and even used the voices of Eve and Lilith to makes these women into rounder figures and to better understand their legacy. In video transcripts from the 1997 STI, participants discuss how this emergence of living women in the texts extends to the figures of Laya and Rachel. Through midrashim, individuals created possible conversations between the two women, allowing both of them (and specifically Rachel) to emerge as “less shallow” (Box 9, ICMR). Hence, the ICMR collection indicates that midrash empowers women in the Torah and the women who create midrash about these figures.