Parshah Commentary

This week’s parshah, Yitro, tells the story of the final stage in the Israelites’ exodus from bondage—the revelation and acceptance of the Torah at Mount Sinai. The preparation for receiving the Torah is complex: Moses goes up and down the mountain several times, relaying God’s instructions to the Israelites and the Israelites’ messages back to God. In one famous exchange, God tells Moses to warn the people that they should wash their clothing and remain in a state of purity for the next three days so they’ll be ready to receive the Torah through a direct divine encounter. When repeating this message to the Israelites, Moses adds one more detail: “Be prepared for the third day,” he tells them, “you shall not go near a woman.” This raises a core problem for a feminist interpretation of the Torah, even beyond the apparent framing of women as facilitators of impurity: It seems that Israelite women are not included in this address; they are therefore absent from revelation itself.

Some contemporary translators and commentators have tried to address this issue by modifying the text itself. The 2008 The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, for example, adds “[the men among]” prior to the gendered prohibition, so that the verse reads “[the men among] you shall not go near a woman.” This bracketed addition, the editors explain in a note, indicates “that although the inclusion of women is generally assumed, in this particular verse the imperative must be addressed to men.” There is a classical basis to their emendation: The medieval commentator Rashi, for example, argues that these instructions were offered not to prevent women from participating in revelation, but to ensure their presence. The mandate, he explains, enables “the women to immerse themselves on the third day and be pure to receive the Torah,” for if they were to have intercourse within this three-day period, they might become impure.

But Judith Plaskow, a founder of Jewish feminist theology, reads the stipulation against approaching women as an unequivocal indication that the revelation was exclusively addressed to men. For Plaskow, this is a supreme stain on revelation and an example of “the profound injustice of Torah itself.” It is in this passage, she writes, that “the Otherness of women finds its way into the very center of Jewish experience.” Plaskow notes that the Jewish tradition views the revelation at Sinai not as a one-time historical event but as a mythic narrative we relive every day through the process of learning, and thus continuing to acquire, Torah. Because of this, the foundational exclusion of women did not simply happen once, but is rather a recurring event baked into the fibers of Judaism. Nevertheless, Plaskow implores her readers to demand inclusion in the Jewish collective—“to start with the certainty of our membership in our own people,” which entails the necessity “to re-member and recreate its history, to reshape Torah.”

This call for women to reconstitute the collective reminds us that the original sin of gender-exclusive revelation is likewise not a reflection of divine will, but a human creation: Although Moses often conveys God’s will, the rabbis tell us that his instruction here was added at his own volition. Had Moses not intervened, the stipulation to “not approach women” would never have existed. Today, too, many of us are being pushed out of the Jewish collective. But it behooves us to remember that, like Moses’s addition, this exclusion is not divinely decreed. Similarly, the systems of domination that underlie it are not transcendent; they are within our power to undo.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.