Welcome to the Smart Bitches Bat Mitzvah!
The site is 13 entire years old, so today, I’ll be sharing a summary of the Torah portion Yitro, along with some of the interpretations and threads I found very illuminating. Then, I’ll explain my own thoughts and reflections, which is a practice commonly known as a drash, or d’var torah (a word of Torah).
Typically on a Saturday morning at synagogue, we read the week’s Torah portion. The portion that corresponds to today’s date in the Hebrew calendar (the 18th of Sh’vat in the year 5778) is Exodus 18:1 – 20:23, known as “Yitro,” or “Jethro,” who is Moses’ father in law.
So here’s a very short, extremely irreverent summary.
Moses’ father in law, who is a Midianite (i.e. he’s not one of the Israelites), brings Moses’ wife and two sons to the wilderness at Mt. Sinai where they’re all gathered. Jethro hears of the miracles performed to bring the people of Israel out of Egypt (involving plagues, flood, death, parting the Red Sea – you might have heard something about it) and is pretty impressed. He proclaims the God of the Israelites to be the GOAT, makes a sacrifice, and rejoices.
Then, Jethro sees Moses busy all day with a nonstop line of people in front of him.
Does Moses run the Israelite DMV? Nope, he’s judging disputes and settling problems for every single person.
Jethro is like, “Dude, no. That makes zero sense.”
He advises that Moses tell everyone the law and appoint trustworthy men to serve as judges for the people, saving only the most hellacious problems for Moses.
Here’s a translation of that section, which I’ll be coming back to in a bit:
Moses’ father in law said to him, “The thing you are doing is not good.
You will surely wear yourself out both you and these people who are with you for the matter is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.”
And I have to include one gif. JUST ONE.
You know I couldn’t resist. Ok, back to the summary.
So after Jethro breaks down the basics of delegation for Moses, he heads off to his own lands. Later, Jethro!
Now it’s time for the big part: Commandments! Ten of them!
Moses et al head off into the desert of Sinai, and Moses goes up the mountain. God calls to Moses, delivers a brief recap of The Exodus, and says if all the Israelites will obey and keep God’s covenant, “You shall be to me a treasure out of all peoples.” Moses relays that back to the elders, who agree that sounds pretty good, so Moses goes back up the mountain to report on their agreement. God says that he will appear in the thickness of the cloud, that the Israelites should get ready, wash their garments, and prepare for the third day. Don’t go on the mountain, for much like crossing the streams, it would be bad.
Moses goes on back down the mountain and tells the people to get ready, wash their garments – and then adds this extra bit, which has caused, as you might imagine, Some Commentary:
“Be ready for three days; do not go near a woman.”
And the third day arrives with thunder and clouds, the shofar blast was heard, and Moses brings everyone to stand near the bottom of the mountain. The whole mountain seems like it’s on fire. God goes to the peak of the mountain, and summons Moses up there. Then, after a brief dispute as to who could go to the peak of the mountain with Moses, God speaks the ten commandments. The Israelites are collectively overwhelmed and ask Moses to receive the information from God and bring it to them.
If you’d like to read the portion in Hebrew or translated, there are many different options.
And Now: Commentary!
It’s only the ten commandments and Moses going up and down a mountain a bunch of times, interpreting the word of God, so hardly anyone has anything to say about that. Not.
I was very fortunate to catch Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s Twitter thread about Yitro, specifically the part where Moses adds on to God’s directions, telling the Israelites “do not go near a woman.” (Many thanks to Rabbi Ruttenberg for her permission to include her thread here.)
Ok, y’all. Would you like some #metoo Torah?
Thread.
The Torah portion we read this coming Shabbat starts with the story of Yitro, Moses’ father-in-law, giving him some tips about refining his leadership model, delegating, becoming more effective in his leadership.
— Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg (@TheRaDR) January 29, 2018
Rabbi Ruttenberg writes about the violence Moses does in naming and excluding women in this manner:
And then *record scratch* he keeps talking.
“Don’t go near a woman.”
God didn’t say that.
Suddenly, Moses is only addressing men. Women have gone from being subjects—part of the people—to objects. Who are sexual temptations who must be avoided.
In one sentence, Moses simultaneously cuts women out of Revelation and turns them into sexual objects.
Women aren’t the ones being told to prepare for Torah, here, after all. They’re just a problem….
Moses dumped his human stuff into his command from God. His ideas about gender and power and hierarchy and who matters and sex and whatever else. He twisted a command from the Holy One to suit his agenda.
Yeah, that part bothered me, too.
Rabbi Ruttenberg’s thread ends with the call to go back, undo all the interpretation and commentary that supports this marginalization of women, and return to the original directions before the receiving of the ten commandments, so that everyone can be united in holiness:
We need to do work that is no less to go back to the base of Sinai and re-receive Torah anew. This time with God’s intended meaning—in a way that sanctifies every single one of us.
All of us together. We shall be holy, for God is holy.
Judith Plaskow writes at MyJewishLearning about Women and Revelation that Moses’ initial exclusion of women is one problem, but the annual recitation of the portion compounds his exclusion exponentially:
Every time the portion is chanted, whether as part of the annual cycle of Torah readings or as a special reading for Shavuot, women are thrust aside once again, eavesdropping on a conversation among men, and between men and God. The text thus potentially evokes a continuing sense of exclusion and disorientation in women.
The whole Jewish people supposedly stood at Sinai. Were we there? Were we not there?
If we were there, what did we hear when the men heard “do not go near a woman”?
If we were not there originally, can we be there now?
Since we are certainly part of the community now, how could we not have been there at that founding moment?
The idea of women being excluded and defined as “other” resonated with me quite a bit, especially in that it was Moses’ editorial that excluded us. That editorial says a lot. As Rabbi Shimon Felix writes in Wisdom From the Margins,
Many post-modernists (Derrida, Foucault) see the marginal as being the place where the action really is. It is not at the center of a culture or a system where we will find its true nature or message, but, rather, at the margins, in the seemingly inconsequential. It is there that the system makes its most crucial statements about itself, its beliefs, and its concerns.
By reducing women to objects, as temptations to be avoided, Moses is revealing quite a bit – about himself. But his action isn’t surprising: in so many ways, large and small, multiple times an hour, women are rendered as “other,” as “less than,” encircled with stigma and shame.
But while I’d like to snarl at Moses for awhile, and every other decision and act that excludes and demeans women that’s happened since I last checked the headlines, it is Jethro’s advice to Moses that resonated with me most as I studied.
Another of my favorite rabbis writing online, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, aka the Velveteen Rabbi, wrote this dvar in 2012: Caring for others, caring for ourselves – a d’var Torah for parashat Yitro.
The same section she focuses on is the one that struck me as personally significant. In her dvar, Rabbi Barenblat writes:
As a “nation of priests,” we’re obligated to tend to the entire world. As a “holy nation,” we’re obligated to tend to our own selves. The Torah balances these two callings within the same verse. If we only tend to our own selves, we’re falling down on the job of caring for all creation; but if we don’t tend to our own selves, we can’t heal the world.
We as human beings in a community face that same balance: care for the world, and care for ourselves. Both of those acts are deeply political, intersected with challenges and painful consequences, and yet they are vital.
I transcribed that section in my notebook twice without realizing I’d done so:
“The thing you are doing is not good.
“You will surely wear yourself out both you and these people who are with you for the matter is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.”
We are so often marginalized, and we engage in marginalization at the same time. Grappling with that responsibility is very difficult.
And in thinking about the ways in which I have faced and also enforced shame and stigma, objectification and dismissal, and the ways in which I care for myself, the communities I reach out to when I find I cannot do it alone, you know my brain went directly to romance. (You had to see that coming, right?)
Reading romance and forming communities around the books we love is work we do over and over for myriad reasons. So much of the marginalization of romance is rooted in sexism and misogyny, fed by the stigma of being othered, of existing in the world identifying as female.
“Do not go near a woman” isn’t that far from, “Oh, I don’t read those books,” is it?
And within our community, there’s further marginalization and exclusion. Whose story is told? Whose isn’t? Who is welcome? Who isn’t welcome in the community? Who is left out? To whom does happiness belong? Whom do we see in happy ever afters, and whom do we not?
Every time I choose a new book, a new place to look for a story, a new option, I have the opportunity to look for those who were left out, for those who are excluded, to pay attention to who is and isn’t welcome. As ornery as Moses’ commentary made me, I must also acknowledge when I have done the same to someone else.
The work we do as people, as humans with empathy, as readers who navigate intersections of marginalization and difficulty, as readers of a maligned genre that focuses on redemption, optimism, sexual fulfillment, and happiness… that work is hard. And we can’t do it alone.
Going alone at any task is difficult. As introverted as I am, I wouldn’t be who I am without all of you whom I’ve met here and in person. Without the community of romance, without the community of readers who learn the same language of hope, of optimism, of happiness and the value of our joyous experiences with love and acceptance, without romance, I woudn’t be who I am.
Reading individual books and judging them, deciding what we liked, what we didn’t, and talking to other readers, is work we do as a community. I have said before that no one person is the final word on a book. It’s impossible. But all of us together, discussing what we read and identifying, or in some cases naming, the things we like and abhor, that work can create changes and evolve the genre in so many directions.
The community of conversation about the genre is a major reason why I read romance. It’s not just to read a book and experience the emotional and narrative journey. Much like lighting candles on Friday nights, knowing I’m doing so with thousands of other people in their own homes, I read knowing I’m not the only person who loves a book, a trope, an author, or the experience of the narrative journey of romance fiction.
(Fun fact: “trope” is also the name for the markers that indicate the cantillation of chanting Torah. So there are tropes in romance, and tropes in Torah, and in a way they both guide the direction of the story being told, despite not being the same thing.)
Reading romance is work we do, over and over. Negotiating desire and sexuality is heavy work. Identifying where we’ve wronged others and seeking ways to make amends is work. Codifying our own individual likes and dislikes, our hard lines and our curious explorations, is work.
I’m glad I don’t do it alone.
What we do when we read, when we define our own desires, even picking the next book to read, when we defend romance, explain it again and again, try to reshape the narrative around it, when we try to make room for all the variations of love and courtship, when we fight and push to include everyone, when we push against reductive stereotypes and limiting portrayals, when we mess up (raises hand) and try again…that’s hard work.
Combining the idea of unifying everyone and including every person with the advice that the work is too much for one person is difficult but a valuable endeavor.
I find rest and solace in romance while I challenge and work in the genre to make it better, to wrestle with representations of toxic stereotypes, and my own internalized bigotry and prejudice. I are both reading a restorative novel that emphasizes pleasure, happiness, and physical and emotional satisfaction in a way that is rarely communicated fairly…and doing the work of embracing pleasure, happiness, and satisfaction when I are told I should not. Rest and work are sometimes in the same place for me, and I don’t do it alone.
Our existence as a community in romance forms around the books we read for pleasure, and the work we do in reading them is, I believe, part of the process of undoing the nonstop toxic messages of misogyny, bigotry, exclusion, and sexism that bombard us hourly.
We are vital and valid exactly as we are. We deserve rest and time for our own pleasures and joys.
The genre we select for that pleasure contains so much within it that restores and reflects us. Wrestling with the restoration and the reflection is not easy work. We cannot do it alone.
Reading is a solitary experience, and a group endeavor for me. Sometimes more of one, or more of the other, just as it’s sometimes restorative leisure and sometimes it’s work, and sometimes it’s soothing and other times a challenge. After 13 years with this website, and meeting so many romance readers, I know I’m not alone in that experience.
Like Jethro said, the matter is too heavy. Romance as a genre and a community matters, and we cannot do it alone.
I’m so glad we do this together. Thank you for that.
Thank you for joining me for a bit of Torah today. Shavua tov! Have a great week!
Wow. Just WOW!
Thank you for this article.
To many many more years together!
I’m afraid I don’t have anything witty or useful to add. Thank you for this beautiful post, Sarah. The romance community has become a place of comfort for me largely because of the dedication of people like you to broadening its horizons. Not to say that even in this community, people don’t make mistakes, people don’t cause harm (intentional and unintentional), that progress occurs in leaps and bounds rather than at a slow shuffle. But I see improvement, and I see honest goodwill, and I see a willingness to admit mistakes and work not to repeat them. Not from everyone. But from many. And that’s so important.
Yes. Just yes.
This is amazing! Thank you so much for writing and sharing it. 🙂
Thank you.
“Our existence as a community in romance forms around the books we read for pleasure, and the work we do in reading them is, I believe, part of the process of undoing the nonstop toxic messages of misogyny, bigotry, exclusion, and sexism that bombard us hourly.”
100% yes to this. To all of this. I feel that the romance community regularly opens my eyes to things that I might not have seen before and *should* see. These books have helped shaped who I am as a person, and that person changes a little every day, as I learn more and see more and hear more, and I genuinely do believe that romance authors and readers are making into a person I myself like more as time goes on. Which, coming from someone who has a history of self-DISlike in all its various forms and outlets, is no small thing.
Thank you, Sarah!
Amazing how YOU’RE the one giving out gifts to us, in celebration of your anniversary, instead of the other way round 🙂 I love the Rabbi’s interpretation of Yithro and how it renews the inclusion of all in the account. I get the feeling she would’ve been sitting outside the principal/Rev. Mother’s office with a certain someone who was always in trouble for calling bullshit on some of the details of the lessons from the Old Testament *cough* 😀
Happy Saturday!
Mazel tov!!!!! May learning (and reading) always be sweet and may you always find love in this community!
Wow. Thank you Sarah.
Thank you for this wonderful post—beautifully and thoughtfully-written—even if the only Jewish thing about me (other than my completely assimilated East European great-great-grandparents) is my Hebrew name (“Deborah”). I’m a regular churchgoer and consider myself a Christian (most definitely NOT of the Evangelical Trump-supporting type!) and there’s a similar issue with interpretations and readings of the New Testament: Jesus did not exclude women (in fact, a woman was the first person the resurrected Jesus revealed himself to); it’s in the Epistles of St. Paul that we see how early Christianity—within a few years of Jesus’s ascension—starts marginalizing, demonizing, and denying agency to women. The irony is, of course, that most places of worship would cease to flourish without the “women’s work” that keeps them going.
Thank you so much for this beautiful and illuminating post. It’s a mitvah!
When I was a little girl, I was enamored (not suer if that’s the right word) with my religion. And then one fateful day, I was doing some research and fouund out the during morning prayers when men wrap themselves with the tfellin, part of the prayer states, “And I thank god that I was not born a woman.” With that one sentence, my view on the religion I grew up in completely changed.
Thank you for this post, and blessed Bat Mitzvah SBTB!
I follow a number of blogs, and they generally fall into a couple of categories: book blogs, religion blogs, and food blogs. And then, on very special days, the boundaries separating these categories collapse and I get to read a post like this.
(Have you come across Womanist Midrash by Wilda Gafney? I’m half-way through it now and she takes a similar approach to, as the subtitle states, “Women of the Torah and Throne.”)
Lovely!
I have nothing to add. My brain and heart are happy to have stopped by this morning. Thank you for all of it, Sarah.
Also, perfect gif.
Thank you.
That is just brilliant! Thanks for sharing.
How lovely to find this today! Thank you. There are lessons to learn, and lessons to teach. I am so happy to have found this community of wise and witty reading women!
Mind-opening. Thank you.
Thank you for a beautiful post. And thank you for the work you do.
Agree with everyone above – that was beautiful and mind-expanding. I love this community and the new horizons it provides. Thank you, Sarah!!
Sarah, thank you for your words and your work, and for providing a place for romance readers to gather. I’ve learned a lot about the genre I love and my own prejudices and baggage from the conversations here. I’m proud of and grateful for all of it.
Bless you and all the Bitchery on this anniversary!
Despite having heard that story many times before, I had never thought of it that way. Probably because my father is as misogynistic as Moses, so it wouldn’t have occurred to him that there was anything wrong with it.
Thank you so much for sharing this with us, making me think, and reminding me that together as a community, we are so much stronger than as individuals.
I loved this — thank you for the thought and time you put into writing such an insightful, inspiring post and thank you for all the work you do, every day, to keep this site running and our community flourishing.
Velveteen Rabbi! *dies*
Thank you for this very thoughtful post and all you do. I found SBTB during a very difficult time about 8 years ago and my daily visit here provided much needed respite from all the negative emotions that accompany a life changing diagnosis. Thanks for the laughs and camaraderie!
I was raised by a new age hippie who was forever seeking enlightenment and never quite able to find it, so I know a little about a lot of religions but nothing in depth about most. Due to a few of the personal effects I found after my paternal grandmother passed I think her family was Jewish, but that was lost/changed after they fled Hungary when she was a child during WWII. There’s no one left to ask so I’ll probably never know for sure, but I can’t help but wonder.
Thank you.
Intelligent, inclusive, kind, and funny, like everything else at SBTB. Thank you.
Mazel Tov to all! I love love love your site.
Wow! The romance community has been my saving grace many times. Mazal tov!
I found this piece both very moving and very thought-provoking.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write this, and for everything Smart Bitches, Trashy Books provides.
Shkoyah, Sarah! Also, I’m so glad you love the Velveteen Rabbi – she is my FAVORITE rad rabbi/poet on the internets.
Mazel Tovah on Smart Bitches bat mitzvah.
I’m sure you’ve probably read it but might I offer up Judith Plaskow’s phenomenal book “Standing Again At Sinai”. For a prospective of how we move forward.
Love that you provide a bit of Judaica into this genre. Helps to ease the “I don’t fit in” feelings I sometimes get.
It’s always interesting to hear the story told in a different way. Thanks for the post. Mazel Tov!
Thank you! You have made so many valuable points. Your article should be required reading for every critic, pundit, journalist, English teacher and librarians everywhere. Beautifully put. Thank you again!
Love this! So glad you’re here! So glad we’re all here! <3
Kol HaKavod! I enjoyed reading your D’var Torah and your insights into Yitro. Thanks for sharing, and Mazel Tov on the site’s “Bat Mitzvah” year.
Yasher koach, Sarah. I love the connection you made between ‘“Do not go near a woman” isn’t that far from, “Oh, I don’t read those books,” is it?’ A milder interpretation (from The Women’s Commentary) is that all sexual commandments are addressed to the men, supposing women to be passive. Myself, I like to think that the prohibition on sexual intercourse is so that everybody will keep their mind on what is coming and not be distracted. It’s only for three days, then business as normal.
This is wonderful, thank you.
Reading your commentary, I found myself wishing that “do not go near the women” really meant “men, do not interrupt the women’s important work by asking them for a glass of water or where you left your sandals – use your senses that I gave you to find them for yourselves, and do not interrupt the women in their important work, for your request is trivial to them.” Perhaps we could reclaim it.
y’asher kochachech – may you go from strength to strength. what a wonderful d’var torah. I want to send it along to my own rabbis and friends so I can share with them an entirely new way of approaching the revelation and women’s role in the story (and to give them new sources to research as they develop their own divrei torah). thank you.
Thank you for this insightful post, Sarah. It is true, the work of undoing millennia of male privilege is too heavy for one person, or one genre, to accomplish or even attempt. We must all be united in calling out chauvinism, privilege, misogyny, and divisiveness wherever and whenever we see it — including recognizing its unrealized internalization and subconscious effects on ourselves (guilty.)
As for Moses’ extra interjection, the tendency of the Man In Charge, whether Rabbi, Priest, Preacher or secular authority, to manipulate God’s word to further his own agenda was what drove me from organized religion entirely. (@DiscoDollyDeb, it’s more like “Let the women handle all the messy jobs like tending the babies and running the bake sales while we men deal with the important stuff like who gets excommunicated and who is worthy, and oh yes, also count the money.”) I have my own personal relationship with my Abba/Father now, and it is a much better one than the tyrant I was taught to fear in Catholicism. In turn He has been merciful and loving and has provided in myriad ways, large and small, over these five years since my husband’s illness and death.
Mazel Tov, and may you continue to fight the good fight with both snark and wisdom for many years to come!
Yasher koach on your great d’var. I loved your in depth view of a very meaty Torah portion.