Why Midrash? Scholars Weigh In
The relationship between Judaism and gender and, more specifically, how women engage in the Jewish faith, has preoccupied many Jewish scholars, particularly since the end of the Holocaust. Indeed, in “Notes Toward Finding the Right Question,” Cynthia Ozick posits that “…not that Jewish women want equality as women with men, but as Jews with Jews” (136). Triggering this desire is, among other things, the realization that Jewish women have been excluded from religious practice and, in some instances, from religious texts (Ozick 134-137). Despite coming to a different conclusion about how to address the role of women in the Jewish faith, Judith Plaskow echoes Ozick’s call for a re-examination of women’s roles:
Men are the actors in religious and communal life because they are the normative Jews. Women are ‘other than’ the norm; we are less than fully human. (“The Right Question is Theological” 57)
Rivkah Walton transitions this conversation to the practice of contemporary midrash. More specifically, she notes the manner in which midrash has traditionally functioned as a means to constantly situate religious texts into new, modern realities:
Unsurprisingly, a major impetus for contemporary midrashim over the past several decades has been the challenge of feminism, as Jewish women have struggled not to leave the patriarchal system, but to reform it from within. (Walton, “Lilith’s Daughters, Miriam’s Chorus” 5)
Midrash emerges as one (though certainly not the only) way to address questions and concerns over gender equality in Judaism.
Indeed, the practice of contemporary midrash is, for some women, a means of empowerment in faith and a vehicle to form a more personal connection to the Torah. In Living Text: The Journal of Contemporary Midrash, Marge Piercy notes, "if you’re other than a white, male Jew [midrash] can be your only route into the official text” (Washburn 8). Harold Schweizer identifies Alicia Ostriker’s midrashic literature as confronting gender inequality while preserving a relationship with the text. He notes in Ostriker’s “reading of the Bible,” a “radical critique of its patriarchal ideoleogy” and a “hope to ‘wrest a blessing’ from it—nevertheless" (15). Thus, midrash functions as a confrontation of and healing from gender inequality. Ostriker herself remarks:
…The outrageous rewritings of biblical narrative by women poets, far from destroying sacred Scripture, are designed to revitalize it and and make it sacred indeed to that half of the human population which has been degraded by it. (31)
In other words, producing literary midrash breathes new life into religious texts and, with this life, comes a feminine presence which may have previously been missing. Ostriker goes on to point out that this practice of centering on women is not a removal from Judaism but rather in keeping with historical practices:
[…] The rabbis have long told us, ‘there is always another interpretation.’ (31)
This interpretation, one with the potential to connect faith and feminism, also involves empowering the women within the Torah. Rivkah Walton finds this empowerment in Taking Fruit (a collection of midrashim, the second edition of which was published in 1989):
These biblical figures, previously larger than life but paperboard thin, become multi-dimension women, capable of agency and decision-making, with hopes and fears, passions, anger, and grief. (“Lilith’s Daughters, Miriam’s Chorus” 7)
Hence, midrash can portray Biblical women as agents while also creating a mechanism for the empowerment of the Jewish women who write and read it.
