By Toby Klein Greenwald
It is no surprise that Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks-Herenstein Center for Values and Leadership has recently awarded Gila Fine of Jerusalem the Rabbi Sacks Book Prize 2024 for her ground-breaking and fascinating book, The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic, Rereading the Women of the Talmud, published by Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and Maggid Books.
Gila’s public response was, “Every time we met, Rabbi Sacks would say to me, ’Stop editing my books, go and write your own.’ It took about five years of gentle prodding on his part until I finally listened, and though Rabbi Sacks saw an initial iteration of the book, he never lived to see the final product. I wish he would have. I hope he would have approved. Winning the Rabbi Sacks Book Prize is the greatest honor I could have imagined.”
And indeed, a quote by Rabbi Sacks graces the book’s cover, referring to Fine as: “One of the great Talmud teachers of our time. It’s vitally important the Jewish world hears what Gila Fine has to say.”
The first thing that will catch your eye is the title, especially if you are a student of both Jewish studies and English Literature, as are both the author of this book, and the author of this review. The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic, Rereading the Women of the Talmud is, of course, a riff on The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. First published in 1979, the Gilbert-Guber book is a work of feminist literary criticism, focusing on Victorian literature. The title is drawn from Charlotte Brontë’s classic, Jane Eyre, in which a woman is kept secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband.
But neither Gila Fine, nor (most of) the women of today, nor the women highlighted in Fine’s book, appear to be locked in anyone’s attic. Or are they?
Fine examines the lives of six extraordinary women whose stories are told and discussed in the Talmud. They are Yalta, Homa, Marta, Heruta, Beruria and Ima Shalom. Their stories are, implicitly, embedded in codenames she assigns them and make us all the more curious to explore their struggles, for struggle is one thing they all have in common.
Fine’s goal is to have us rediscover the women of the Talmud, to see them with free eyes, which will help us to learn, she writes in her introduction, about “…How to read a text, and about how to regard an Other.” As always with the Talmud, there are phrases that may surprise us, such as when Fine quotes the rabbis who say that women are “a people unto themselves.” (Shabbat 62a) She claims that each one of these women appears, at first reading, to be “an anti-feminine archetype,” yet “once the heroine’s story is reread…her archetype systematically breaks down, and in its place emerges the character of a complex, extraordinary woman.”
Like the renowned Torah scholar Avivah Gottleib Zornberg, Fine quotes generously from general sources, as well as from classical Jewish sources. Fine explained the reason for this at her book launch, hosted during the summer at the Pardes Institute, where she has been teaching for more than a decade. Talmudic stories, she said, “are written like plays, telling us what characters say and do, but not what they think or feel, so to tease out the stories’ emotional subtext, we must read other texts. It’s a way of getting into the heads and the hearts of the characters.”
Fine describes reading the Talmudic stories like a relationship, including sometimes how we respond to the Other, and offers four possible responses to them: Rejection, accommodation, subjection and negotiation. She points out that the Talmud is divided into the meta-genres of Halakha – legal debates – and Aggada – the narratives. She calls the attitude of the Talmudic rabbis “profound humanism” as nothing is too trivial to be included in the rabbinic stories, for every story has within it a lesson to be learned.
That last line is worth rereading: Every story in the Talmud has within it a lesson to be learned.
She suggests that we should “zoom in and zoom out.” Zooming-in is the close reading, in which one notes the structure, setting, characters, plots and themes. Zooming out is the contextual reading, which include historical context.
And now, for the archetypes. Where to begin?
At this point I survey the scores of little sticky notes I put in the pages of Fine’s book, as each chapter is replete with pearls. Several of the Talmudic women whose lives and behaviors are analyzed are better known than others. Who has not heard of Beruria, the wife of Rabbi Meir, for whom, not coincidentally, more than one school and midrasha is named, perhaps the most renowned being the one founded in 1976 by Rabbi Chaim Brovendar (as the woman’s component of Yeshivat Hamivtar), in Jerusalem, where I had the pleasure to teach. (In 1986 it merged with Rabbi Shlomo Riskin’s Ohr Torah network and was renamed “Midreshet Lindenbaum.”)
On the way to Fine’s chapter on Beruria, you will navigate stories from Greek mythology, Shakespeare and even a passing reference to the story (later a film) “Yentl,” by Isaac Batsheva Singer, among others. All this with an eye to arriving at the core of this discourse: “The curious incident of Beruria’s transgression.” There are forty pages on this iconic woman alone, and even those of us who have heard the story many times may be surprised to discover it does not even exist in the text of the Talmud; rather, Rashi, who lived about 400 years after the Babylonian Talmud was completed, is the one who cites the story in his commentary to Avoda Zara 18 b.
Fine begins her book with “Yalta the Shrew”; she declares her an archetype for “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Fine notes that Yalta (the Aramaic form of Yael) is mentioned seven times in the Talmud, more than any other Talmudic woman, and is “generally identified as the daughter of the exilarch (the leader of the Babylonian Jewish diaspora) and the wife of Rav Nahman, head of the Nehardea yeshiva.”
It is a story that, in its simplest reading, appears to be about a perceived insult by Yalta. Ulla, a family guest, does not offer her the wine cup of blessing to drink at the end of the meal, though her husband has instructed the guest to offer it to her.
“Ulla responded, ‘So said Rabbi Yohanan: The fruit of a woman’s body is blessed only by the fruit of a man’s body, as it is written, “He will bless the fruit of your body” (Deut. 7:13) It does not say the fruit of her body, but the fruit of your body’…” (Berakhot 51b)
Yalta heard and her response is to break 400 jars of wine in their own wine cellar.
The story is, in fact, far more complex, and what at first reading appears to be an extreme reaction of a madwoman, reveals itself in the end to be her desire to illustrate a much more principled debate about the power of procreation. Yalta freely admits that she is a vessel; she takes on the conception of her time, but she argues that she is parallel to the vessels that hold wine, she has a role in procreation that is shared with the male, and that is why she is important.
Fine highlights the theatricality of the Talmudic stories of the six women, and even describes the internal progressions of the stories, through Acts, as in a play. In addition, she concludes each chapter by noting the morals of the stories beyond the realm of the Talmud. For example, near the end of her chapter on Yalta she writes, “Men, in their depictions of the shrew [and she is referring here to depictions also in general literature, described in details in each chapter], often dismiss women; adults dismiss children all the time; we dismiss people from the wrong culture, political camp, religious affiliation – anyone, really, who doesn’t see things exactly as we do.”
Another archetype Fine explores is that of “the Prima Donna” which is how she describes Marta, adding the tag line, “There is nothing more intolerable than a wealthy woman.” The concept of “prima donna,” according to Fine quoting the Oxford English Dictionary, originated with the leading ladies of the Italian opera and commedia dell’arte, and “the prima donna is as grandiose off stage as she is on.” As a theater director, I’ve fortunately been blessed to work with very few of these, but on the rare occasion that they appeared, they was indeed something comedic about them.
Fine begins by noting women, though not by name, whose behaviour could be described as prima donna-like in the pages of the prophet Amos, and in the Talmud during the Second Temple period, followed by an entertaining survey of prima donnas in literature and history, including, but not limited to, Marie Antoinette, Emma Bovary and Norma Desmond.
And then we arrive at “Marta the Prima Donna.”
Like Yalta, her name is an Aramaic version, this time of Miriam. Her story appears in the tractate Gittin, and part of the description of the events leading to the Destruction of the temple (70CE). The inhabitants of the city, besieged by the Romans, are living in famine. “People are dying in the streets,” writes Fine. “Enter Marta.”
We are then treated to a story that sounds almost like a Grimm fairy tale. Marta sends her servant out to search for — in this order — fine flour, white flour, dark flour, barley flour, and all of them are sold out by the time he arrives (presumably) at the market.
The frustrated lady goes out herself, barefoot, to find flour, dung sticks to her foot, and she dies. Apparently, since she lived in a palatial home with servants, she was not accustomed to leaving the house and didn’t think to put shoes on. (We said comedic, right?)
Rabbi Yohanan describes her, writes Fine, as “the tender and delicate woman who would not set her foot upon the ground.” Fine adds, “With her dying breath, Marta takes her now worthless gold and silver – the gold and silver that couldn’t save her from her fate – and casts them out in the market, crying, ‘What good are these to me?’”
But does the Talmud want to tell us something deeper?
Fine gives examples of the fact that in history women were usually not the masters of the wealth in their home. Marta herself was of the Boethius clan, “a family of high priests descending from Shimon ben Boethius….they were notorious for their tyrannical and nepotistic nature…”
The tractate Ketubot describes Marta as one who receives a generous allowance, but post-Destruction of the Temple, she is poverty-stricken. In a different version of her death, Marta ate a fig left by Rabbi Zadok, and became ill and died. (Gittin 56a)
Fine strives for intellectual honesty. Marta, unlike the other five women about whom she writes, “cannot be revisioned…This is an important lesson to be learned. We should not…reject the Talmud for failing to conform to our sensibilities – but we should not subject it to them either. If we are to read the Talmud on its terms, rather than our own, we must be prepared to listen even when it doesn’t say exactly what we want to hear.”
Later in the chapter, Fine refers to Marta’s casting out of her gold and silver “a moment of tikkun.”
In a fascinating continuation to the Marta story, Fine brings in the story of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai and his courage to try to “save a little,” on the eve of the Destruction of Jerusalem, with Yavneh. Fine illustrates that it is Marta’s inspiration and courage in going out and trying to save herself that inspires Rabbi Yohanan to break out of the siege of Jerusalem and try to save a little.
Fine concludes the Marta chapter, “This is the lesson of the Destruction story cycle in general, and of the legend of Marta in particular: We must act, even if it means we make a mistake…We can sit around, paralyzed…or, like Marta, we can take matters into our own hands…and try, each in our own way, to save a little.”
Fine gives the chapter on “Beruria, the Overreacherix” the subtitle “The Archetype: A Woman with the Soul of a Man.”
There is so much that can be quoted from Fine’s Beruria chapter, that I prefer to leave it to the reader who will hopefully acquire the book. But I will offer these words by Fine: “This is not so much a description of Beruria’s scholarly excellence as it is of her unbelievable grit, the supreme effort she put into her learning…A woman who knows that to merit a place in the beit midrash she can’t just be as good as her male peers – she has to be better.”
In her Conclusion, Fine posits that one of the explanations for the rabbis’ “proto-feminist empathy” is that “women, as mentioned, were the ultimate Other, and it is through their stories that the rabbis articulated their ethics of otherness. If the rabbis were able to see women as fully fledged human beings who ought to be regarded as such, it is because they wished for all Others to be treated this way…Aggada doesn’t just teach us to be more moral; the very act of reading it makes us so.”
The very act of reading The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic will make one wiser and more compassionate to everyone. And that, it appears, is one of Gila Fine’s ultimate goals.
The author is an award-winning journalist, theater director, a teacher of Torah and English Literature, and editor-in-chief of WholeFamily.com.