I've been thinking a lot recently about how I got into Talmud, and in particular how absolutely wacky my first introduction to it was. I was a Literature major in college with a concentration in French, and my senior year I became interested in taking a few Jewish Studies courses before I graduated. Two of my friends — both men, both involved in the undergraduate egalitarian prayer community, both destined for Ph.Ds in Jewish Studies — had been taking a graduate level Aramaic linguistics course, and they suggested I join them for semester two. I protested that this idea seemed completely absurd, since I did not know any Aramaic at all, much less enough for the second semester of a graduate course. My friends responded, “But it’s such a fun course, and the professor is nice to undergrads, and we’ll help you, and anyway you already know Hebrew so you’ll just be like any yeshiva boy who has to pick up Aramaic on the fly.”
It’s true that once you know Hebrew, Aramaic is not terribly hard to learn, since it uses the same alphabet and shares many linguistic features. The Talmud itself contains a medley of both languages. But unlike a young boy who learns Hebrew and then one day is abruptly thrown into the world of Jewish Babylonian Aramaic with his first page of Talmud, I was emailed a draft of my professor’s Aramaic grammar textbook on PDF once I (of course) wound up registering for the class. Also quite unlike most yeshiva students, I was immediately introduced to the idea that there are multiple conflicting medieval manuscripts of the Talmud floating around, which differ, sometimes substantially, from the current standard edition. This was my introduction to Talmud: each week, the class was given a side-by-side comparison chart of different medieval manuscripts’ versions of passages from the Talmud, and we had to compare them to determine which was the best one on the basis of our knowledge of Aramaic grammar.
It might seem surprising that after this incredibly dry and technical introduction to the text, I was hooked for life. As it turned out, I actually enjoy analyzing manuscript synopses. The kicker, though, was that the passages we were assigned to analyze were basically the Talmud’s greatest hits. The Talmud mostly consists of back-and-forth debates about the interpretation of Jewish law, but it also contains long narrative passages, such as the tragic story of the rabbinic study partners that I referred to a while ago. For reasons that are probably not worth getting into here, if you are looking for sections of Talmud that have only Aramaic and almost no Hebrew, those stories are generally your best bet. And so the first time I ever studied the story of Rabbi Yohanan and Resh Lakish — and many others that are just as weird and fascinating — was in a context where the only significance of gender in the story was whether or not it was a grammatical feature that could help you determine the most reliable medieval manuscript. Is it any wonder that I felt compelled to learn more?
I was obviously in over my head in the course, and I relied on my friends’ help a lot in doing the homework. The professor was also very nice to nice to me, including the fact that he let me into the class to begin with. And as I kept studying, I continued to get seemingly endless help and encouragement from other very smart, well-trained, kind Talmudist men. There were men who agreed to study with me even though their skills were better than mine; men who were encouraging when I consulted with them about applying to Ph.D programs even though I was anxious that I didn't know Greek and didn't have an MA; my YU-ordained and now ex-Orthodox graduate advisor who I've written about here before, who is another man who spent a lot of time studying with me even though his skills were better than mine; and most recently, the head of the search committee who hired me and has done a lot to encourage and support my career. Frankly, I've wondered how many of you have noticed the frequent occurrence of men, whether friends or exes, as important characters in my pieces here.
This is not to say I haven't also had help and encouragement from plenty of bad-ass Talmud women. My first yeshiva-setting Talmud teacher was an awesome and brilliant woman, and my first study partner in that yeshiva is now a Talmud professor herself. I got to spend some time doing research for one of the first women to ever do a Ph.D in Talmud before she retired a few years ago; my other doctoral advisor was basically the most impressive scholar I have ever met and also an extremely helpful and devoted advisor and also gifted me a full set of sha"s1 before she moved to California (it was a spare I guess? but still SO NICE).
Perhaps most strikingly, my two closest professional mentors right now are both women, one at each institution I work for. In fact, most of my close professional relationships these days are with women. To be honest, I’ve barely made any new male friends at all in a long time. And this has been a big shift for me given how important relationships with men have been for me in the past. It's not just my Talmud career. All my emotionally and intellectually significant teachers in high school were men, and — I hate to say it but it's true — all my friends in high school were men too. I am someone who succeeded in Talmud (and in such high school pursuits as being a mathlete and becoming captain of the Quiz Bowl team) in no small part because men told me that I could be part of their club, welcomed me in as one of the few women. I don't think I was being tokenized. But I also don't think it's a good or a sustainable model, certainly not in the world of Talmud, and not elsewhere in the academy either. There have been personal factors at play for me for sure, but I think my move away from this model has also been a response to Adrienne Rich's portrayal and critique of this phenomenon, which I’ll share here. Rich notes that in order to succeed in male dominated spheres, women often (even if subconsciously) accept that male domination as a given. And the fact that women are occasionally able to do this and succeed ultimately just enables the system's perpetuation as such:
As women have gradually and reluctantly been admitted into the mainstream of higher education, they have been made participants in a system that prepares men to take up roles of power in a man-centered society, that asks questions and teaches ‘facts’ generated by a male intellectual tradition, and that both subtly and openly confirms men as the leaders and shapers of human destiny both within and outside academia. The exceptional women who have emerged from this system and who hold distinguished positions in it are just that: the required exceptions used by every system to justify and maintain itself.2
Even worse, Rich notes that women who succeed in these environments frequently remove themselves from networks of solidarity with their own gender:
For reasons both complex and painful, the ‘exceptional’ woman who receives status and tenure in the university has often been less than supportive to young women beginning their own careers. She has for her own survival learned to vote against other women, absorb the masculine adversary style of discourse, and carefully avoid any style or method that could be condemned as ‘irrational’ or ‘emotionally charged.’ She chooses for investigation subjects as remote as possible from her self-interest as a woman, or if women are the objects of her investigation, she manages to write about them as if they belonged to a distant tribe.
I did not have status or tenure in the university when I first read these passages in my 20s (and guess what — I still don't!). Still, I really felt “personally attacked by this relatable content,” as they say. For too long, I think this was, at least in some ways, what I was like. It was often hard for me to relate to other women. I even consciously avoided doing “gender stuff” in grad school because I didn't want to be pigeonholed as one of “those” Talmud scholars.
These days I am trying to do better. Besides the fact that I have started teaching and writing a lot more about feminist issues, I've also spent the last few years investing a lot of energy in female friendships and professional relationships, and honestly, it has been amazing. But maybe it's also time for the pendulum to swing back in the other direction a bit. I don't need to spurn male friendship completely in order to not be someone who takes advantage of her status as "one of the guys." In fact, as I write this, I know I have a pending message from a male Internet friend who is wondering if we should try to be real-life friends, which is a thought that has occurred to me as well (and I know he reads these newsletters so hi Benjamin!). I think I’m ready to go for it.
The Hebrew acronym for a set of Talmud volumes. A large, nice, hardcover set like the one I was gifted is EXTREMELY expensive.
This and the second quote are from Adrienne Rich’s essay “Towards a Woman-Centered University,” which I read as part of the collection On Lies, Secrets, and Silence.
This was very interesting to read, shkoyach. As someone who mainly has female colleagues, I've wondered whether anyone has written about being a man making his way into a generally female community, and what he's learned from that experience?
On a related note, does Rich touch on the period before women were admitted as professors, when many wives assisted with their husbands' research (without any official credit)?