“What is the purpose of Israel? What’s the reason for having a Jewish state?”
The answer to that question is much less obvious than it might seem. Whenever I pose the question, the most common answer is that Israel is a refuge, a place to which Jews from around the world could run if things ever got bad enough where they are: London, Paris or Buenos Aires, for example.
The answer isn’t wrong, of course, but it’s true only to an extent. Yes, things are already going bad in some of those places, and many of those Jews have begun to buy homes in Israel. Just in case.
The problem with that answer, though, is at least two-fold. First, what if Israel isn’t the safe haven that we once thought it would be? What if being here isn’t that much safer—or safer at all—than staying in London, Paris or Buenos Aires? What, then, would be the purpose?
And second, even if Israel is a safe haven, do we imagine that most of the people who toil daily to make Israel tick are doing so so that one day, if people need to flee here, there will be a place for them to come? Do we really imagine that the 350,000 reservists who recently risked life and limb in Gaza did so for the sake of Jews who live elsewhere, and who might or might not one day come here?
Obviously not.
So the question is more complex and nuanced than it might seem at first. We obviously can’t exhaust it here, but in short, one of the purposes of this country has long been to breathe new life into the Jewish people, to be the place where Jewish culture and creativity can flourish the way that they cannot in any other place.
In large measure, that has happened. As I note in Impossible Takes Longer (pp. 48-49):
Israel is home to some fifty-five theatrical companies that put on over 1,000 plays a year that are seen by some three million people (in a country of nine million). Israel has eighty-four recognized orchestras and ensembles that present tens of thousands of performances a year. There are 163 museums, visited by some seven million people a year. The Israeli film industry, long a rather sad and unproductive story, now releases some sixty films a year, some of them world-class. Israeli publishing houses release about 8,500 volumes a year—mostly in Hebrew, of course.
Especially in the midst of a year of war and much sadness, it’s particularly important for us to recall how successful Israel has been at that central goal, and in the coming weeks and months, we’ll be looking a bit at the explosion of creativity that characterizes this society.
One of the many ways in which Israel has truly transformed the Jewish world is in the field of women studying Talmud, and women and men studying the subject of women in the Talmud.
In today’s podcast conversation, we speak with Gila Fine, the author of the just-released The Madwoman in the Rabbi's Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud. Gila Fine has long been an enormously popular teacher and lecturer in Israel and throughout the Jewish world, and with the appearance of her book, her unique take on the Jewish world, enriched by Western literature, psychology, literary theory and more, is accessible to many more people.
We reached out to Gila and asked her to discuss her new, much-acclaimed book with us. This is a conversation about Gila and about her book, of course, but it is also a conversation about Israel— and the ways in some forms of Jewish flourishing are possible only here.
Gila Fine is a lecturer of rabbinic literature at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, exploring the tales of the Talmud through philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and pop-culture. She is the recipient of the Maimonides Award for Excellence in Jewish Education, and serves on the faculties of the Nachshon Project, Amudim Seminary, the Tikvah Scholars Program, the London School of Jewish Studies, and the Community Scholars Program, in addition to teaching thousands of students at conferences, campuses, and communities across the Jewish world.
As editor in chief of Maggid Books, Gila worked closely with such leading scholars as Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz and Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, publishing over a hundred titles of contemporary Jewish thought, including several bestsellers and eight National Jewish Book Award winners. She is also the former editor of Azure: Ideas for the Jewish Nation. Gila’s work has been featured in the BBC, Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Jerusalem Report, Tradition, Jewish News, and The Jewish Chronicle (which selected her as one of the ten most influential Brits in Israel). Haaretz has called her “a young woman on her way to becoming one of the more outstanding Jewish thinkers of the next generation.” Gila’s new book is The Madwomen in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, available specially for paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.
My guest today is a longtime colleague, friend who I haven't really seen in person in a very long time, and so I'm delighted to have an opportunity to sit with her once again. My guest is Gila Fine. Gila has written what I think is really an extraordinary book called “The Mad Woman in the Rabbi's Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud”, relatively recently published, has discussed and reviewed in lots of different places that you can find online. And we'll talk a little bit later in the conversation about why I was so very much looking forward to reading the book. And then once I read it, to having Gila join us.
But just as a brief word of introduction, those people who've been with Israel from the Inside for a very long time might recall that in 2021, 2022, when this was in its early stages, we said that what we did not want to do on Israel from the Inside was cover the conflict, was cover of politics. We wanted to talk about what I call the mosaic of Israeli life, the fascinating different colors that make up the extraordinary array of voices and interests and projects that Israelis have created and that they do to make Israel what it is.
And this book, it feels to me, comes perfectly in that setting. In other words, it's written by a woman who grew up here in Israel. It's very much, I think, shaped by the Israeli world of women's learning, although Gila will talk about that more. This fits perfectly into what we've been trying to do for a number of times now, years. Of course, now the judicial reform stuff, and then, of course, the war has forced us to get a little bit into politics, and tragically has forced us to get a little bit into the issue of the conflict, which is unavoidable these days. But sitting with Gila and talking about her brand-new book is an opportunity to really do what I've always wanted this to be about, which is the miraculous plurality of voices in Israel about all different kinds of subjects.
So, we're going to hear from Gila today about her book, what set her out to write a book about the women in the Talmud. We'll find out how many women really are even mentioned in the Talmud. It is not a long list, but we'll get there in just a second.
Gila Fine is a lecturer of rabbinic literature at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, a long-standing institution in Jerusalem that some of you may know of. She explores the tales of the Talmud through philosophy, literary criticism, psychoanalysis, and pop culture. If you read this book, you will see just how much literature she knows. It did not surprise me when I asked her, beginning our conversation, what do you study undergraduate? And one of the two answers was literature. She is widely read and deeply learned. She serves on the faculties of the Nachshon Project, Amudim Seminary, the Tikva Scholars Program, the London School of Jewish Studies. And she has taught thousands of students at conferences, campuses, and communities around the world as editor-in-chief of Maggid Books. And we did a podcast not all that long ago with Matthew Miller, who runs Maggid Books. Gila edited and then published over 100 titles of contemporary Jewish thought, including several best sellers and eight National Jewish Book Award winners.
Her work has been featured in the BBC, Haaretz Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem Report, Tradition, Jewish News, and the Jewish Chronicle, the last of which selected her as one of the 10 most influential Brits in Israel, and Haaretz, not always very positively predisposed to those who toil in the vineyards of traditional Jewish texts, has called her, quote, a young woman on her way to becoming one of the more outstanding Jewish thinkers of the next generation. I'm really delighted that you're here. It's wonderful to see you again in person. And Mazel Tov on the book.
Thank you very much.
Tell us a little bit, as you do in the introduction to the book, about the personal journey of Gila Fine, her own experiences in learning and so forth, what brings her decades later to writing this much discussed book.
So, thank you for having me on. It is very lovely to be here. And thank you for having me on. It is very lovely to be here and thank you for that generous introduction. I grew up in Israel, despite the accent. And I grew up in a rather right-wing community that firmly believed what Rabbi Eliezer says in the Mishnah, anyone who teaches his daughter Talmud teaches her licentiousness. Talmud was off limits to me growing up. It was firmly believed that women cannot, should not, ought not learn Talmud. It was a taboo text for me. And my real first encounter with the Talmud, which proved quite disastrous, was three days before my 12th birthday. I was visiting my grandparents in London. My whole family had gone out to the science museum for the day, and I was left behind with a pile of my grandfather's books and strict instructions to write my bat mitzvah speech. It was three days before my actual birthday. And so, I was already quite nervous. I was a very religiously earnest child, and I was nervous about what it meant to enter being obligated, the coming of age in Judaism.
And sitting there, kind of Rumpelstiltskin like, surrounded by these piles of books about which I knew nothing, I just picked up the first book at the top of one of the piles, which was Sefer Hagada, the Book of Legends, that monumental collection of the stories of the Talmud, arranged according to different subjects.
Put together by Bialik and Rawnitzky.
Correct. And I open to the subject isha, woman, because I've figured bat mitzvah.
That's a book that lends itself perfectly because they really are grouped according to topics.
Correct. I always recommend to my students, if you're going to have one good resource at home, let that be it because it's very user friendly. It's very browsable. It's not without its problems, but it's a very good first step if you are in any way interested in the world of rabbinic storytelling. And so, I started to read these stories. Three stories in, I felt a little bit uneasy. By the 10th, I was in tears.
By yourself in the house.
By myself in the house. I was sobbing as only a nearly 12-year-old can. It's not funny.
No, but it's funny that a 12-year-old does have that unique capacity for sobbing over principled matters. That's where young kids are at that stage. They're old enough to have the feelings and still young enough to let the puberty of the rage come out in that way. I think.
Yes, I was a seriously religious child, but I think anybody taking these texts seriously, as Jews, I believe should cannot but find this devastating. The rabbis were very much the heroes of my childhood. They were the architects of my religion. We all of us, rabbinic Jews, whatever denomination we belong to. That they had such a low opinion of me, and my kind was hard heartbreaking to me. The women in these stories, again and again, they're weak, they're irrational, they're greedy, and petty, and promiscuous, and vain.
One of the very first sources I remember read, “when woman was created, the devil was created with her.” So, woman was the mother of all vice. Three days before your bat mitzvah, not the best time to lose your religion, but that is more or less what happened. I cherry-picked some quotes in my speech. I ended up writing something. Really can't remember what. But nothing was ever the same after that.
Did your parents know that you'd gone through some sort of profound crisis?
No. I very much kept it to myself and very much tried on my own to find the answers. I was sent spiraling into this very serious religious crisis, which went on for years. And I spent so much of my teenhood searching for answers and reading anything I could get my hands on. After I graduated high school, I did my National Youth Service, which is what we do in this country. And then I went to seminary because I figured, let me go back to where the trouble all started for me. Let me study Talmud as I'd never been allowed to do.
A seminary would be in a women's setting.
Correct.
Which would theoretically be somewhat more, I don't know, embracing or acknowledging of the tensions that you felt in those texts, I'm guessing.
Yes, it certainly was that. It was very good, the particular seminary I went to, imposing the questions, and perhaps not as great in offering answers, at least maybe not the answers that I was after at the time.
I'm going to bet that at that time, that was true of every seminary out there in the best case. The ones that were less good didn't even pose the questions. But I'm going to bet, just because of my understanding of where Jewish learning was then, and my daughter's not that much younger than you, and she also went to a seminary like that, they were great at asking the questions, and the answers were still too frightening.
I think so. I also think the teachers perhaps were not as aware of where we, the students, were coming from. And the truth is, and part of the reason I wrote this book was that I could not find answers. And I read very, very widely, and there was nothing there that really that I felt I could hang on to. And in a very strange roundabout, and ultimately, I believe, predetermined, pre-ordained way, because I am a believing person, I do believe this journey is one that I had to go through and had to go through in my particular way. I ended up going to universities to study literature. And that's where the answers started coming because…
Where did you study?
Hebrew U. I learned how to read literature in general and rabbinic literature, specifically. And in learning how to read these stories correctly, I discovered that they were not at all what they first appeared to be, that there was a great deal more to the women of the Talmud than initially met the eye, and that the rabbis actually had some surprising, so it's not to say surprisingly, proto-feminist ideas of marriage, sex, childbirth, and what it meant to be a woman in the world.
And so, it took me upwards of 10 years of really intense religious struggle, but the stories of the Talmud, which had so upset me, had sent me spiraling at 12, ended up becoming my constant study and my greatest joy. And this book is very much a result of that journey.
Wow, okay. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think people will learn from your book that has nothing to do with women or otherness or any of the other issues that you raised is that these seemingly simple, almost simplistic stories, whether they have women in them or not, and the vast majority the stories in the Talmud don't have women in them, they are much, much, much more sophisticated than the simplicity of their structure or their language would give us reason to believe. I remember when I was in Rabbinical school, a thousand years ago, Yonah Frankel and others were doing their work on Midrash and Agada. And he actually came to JTS, where I was studying, and taught us for a summer or two, I forget already. I remember also having my eyes open. Wow, these little stories were when you were studying Talmud, seriously, you skipped over that because that wasn't really serious. What you wanted to get to was the next part that was about Jewish law and the intricacies of the legal argument. Here's a cute little story. We'll read it and we'll move on. And it wasn't until Yonah Frankel showed up in the corner of 121st Street and Broadway when he taught us, wow, it's only three lines. It's five lines. It's the simplest thing in the world, but we're going to spend actually weeks on it because there's so much more depth.
So, I think when people read your book, in addition to everything that they're going to learn women, femininity, whatever you call the devil, promiscuity, you name it, all of that stuff that's thrown in there, they're also, I think, in understand the literature of the Talmud differently. I don't know what percentage of the Talmud is Agada. Do you know that?
The Babylonian Talmud, by last, it’s very difficult. The line is very blurred. You're talking, just for listeners who might not know, there are two meta-genres in the Talmud. There's Halakha, which are the legal conversations of the Talmud. And then there's Agada, which is scientifically defined as everything else, but generally used to refer to the narratives of the Talmud. It is said to comprise about one -third of the Talmud.
That's more than I would have guessed.
Correct. It's more than most people would have guessed. And that is because historically, these stories were always marginalized and sometimes ignored entirely for the reasons that you just described. These stories seem very trivial. They seem short, quite foolish, quite mundane, unimportant, or they're just weird, and sometimes uncomfortably so. And so it was for most readers, most interpreters throughout Jewish history, it was easy to simply gloss over it, sometimes provide a very apologetic explanation for it, and carry on. And what I say in the book is that one of the hallmarks of these stories is what I call the false front. What these stories seem to be saying and what they are actually saying often diametrically opposite to one another. The rabbis deliberately construct these stories so as to be misleading, such that if you only read them once, you will come away with the wrong idea. They read like very simple folktale. They are, in fact, worlds and worlds of drama and conflict and passion and emotion that are held together in three short lines, as you say. And to really understand the deeper meaning, which will always be hidden between the lines, it is never enough to just read the story.
You must always reread the story, hence the book's subtitled, “Rereading the Women of the Talmud”, because you always have to go back and unpack and look at it more closely, more carefully.
Which is what you do in each of the chapters, right? So, in each of the chapters, how many women are mentioned in the Talmud altogether?
So, women are not absent…
Right, but I mean, women's names, specific individuals, personalities.
Correct. So, women are not absent, they are, however, nameless. Women appear in the Talmud as often as you would find a non-rabbinic man, which is to say not terribly often because the Talmud, fundamentally, is a text written by rabbis.
Well, if you're anywhere in Gittin, if anywhere in the order of women, they're going to appear a lot more.
Correct. They do appear a lot more. However, when they do appear, almost always they will be anonymous.
They're a category.
Well, if they're mentioned within a halakhic discussion, they are an abstract category, as most men are as well. When they appear as characters in the narrative, they are generally nameless, and they take on the name of the important rabbi in their life. So, we have the mother of rabbi X or the daughter of rabbi Y or the wife of rabbi Z. And it is very rare for a woman to have her own name. The count is somewhere around 50 named women in all of rabbinic literature, which is negligibly small. There are over 1100 named men. And of this number, only six, and I know because I went through them one by one…
And there's a chapter on each one…
Well, no. I went through all named women in all of rabbinic literature.
No, no, no. I was saying, coincidentally, there's…
Correct. Of all these women, they're really only six who are heroines of their own rich literary narrative. And so that became the conceit for the book is looking at these six really rather unique women.
Which you do, I think, in a fascinating way. Each chapter starts with the typical read, the way we would have read it back in our yeshiva days. You read the story, you say, oh, okay, that's cute. I get that. She passed the cup here, whatever the case may be. And then you, one, we, the learners would then move on to something, quote, unquote, and I say this obviously very ironically, more serious.
But what you're showing us is, wait, wait, wait. Before you move on, let's go back and read it again, and let's look at it much more carefully. And you're going to see that in the story, you're in serious stuff. The Talmud stuff, the halakhic stuff that's going to follow is no more serious or less serious. They are both unbelievably profound, and they need to be taken at their, they need to be appreciated for all their richness.
I would say as a caveat to that, yes both meta-genres, halakha and agada, the laws and the narratives are equally serious and equally significant to rabbinic Judaism. The stories, they have various things that define them. One of them is they're actually more radical than the laws ever allow themselves to be, because in the laws, the rabbis really have to lay down the rules for the people, and they have to be quite authoritative about it. The narratives are where the rabbis play. It's where they allow themselves to work out ideas in an abstract, more free form way. And so, in many ways, the narratives are a far more direct window into the rabbinic mindset in what the rabbis thought about different issues and how they saw the world, which, again, is one of the reasons I find this particular genre is so fascinating.
So, there are six chapters in the book that talk about each one about one of these women. There's the introduction that exposes us to your own journey, the beginning of your grandmother's books and all that that you shared with us. And then we'll come back to something in the conclusion a little bit later.
I'll also say the introduction does include a blow-by-blow program of how to read rabbinic stories. So, if you've never learned rabbinic stories before, it gives you a very short, this is how to read a agada, which I thought would be helpful, seeing as we don't have a lot of that out there.
Yeah, I should have mentioned that, and I'm glad you did. I should also say, by the way, that even the technical parts of the book, like things like, here's how you should read an agada, it is such an inviting read. There's nothing ponderous or technical or academic sounding about it. It really is an unbelievably inviting read. And so, I'm sure you worked on it very, very hard, but it comes across as if it just flowed from your soul onto the page. But in any event, let's turn to one of the middle chapters. Who's the person that you'd like to talk about today?
So, as you say, there's one chapter dedicated to each of the named heroines. These are Yalta (The Shrew), Homa (The Femme Fatale), Marta (The Prima Donna), Heruta (The Madonna/Whore), Beruria (The Overreacherix), and Ima Shalom (The Angel in the House).
I thought overreacherix, by the way, was a very clever word, but okay.
Thank you very much.
You made it up, right?
It was coined specifically because I had such trouble trying to understand Beruria and finding an archetype that actually helped explain her character. I found an archetype, which I will dig my heels in, is a thing. I go to some length to show how this is a character that comes up again and again in stories in history, but it's never been coined before. It hasn't got its own name. And so I named this particular type of woman, the overreacherix, the female equivalent of the Overreacher. It's a very well-known male archetype. And once I did that, it blew open the character of Beruria for me and allowed me to really try and make sense of her story. I know that for many readers, Beruria is probably the most complicated and most difficult story of the women of the Talmud, and so, I paid particular attention to her. I really wanted to get it right.
She's also, I think, the most famous of all of these.
Correct. She's the one most people know.
Right, and there's more institutions or schools, programs, wards, et cetera, named for her.
And many diatribes written against her. She's very much a hot button issue. Depending on how you see women and Talmud, you are going to have a value judgment with regards to Beruria. And what I try to do is put all that to one side and say, okay, but what does the text tell? Let's try and strip the agendas away and just read her story.
Right. And what I thought was great about the word, just as an aside because I don't know if we're doing her, but you could have called her an over reacher, and it would not have in any way been incorrect. And the word over reacher can clearly apply to women as well as can apply to men. But in inventing this term overreacherix, it captured for me the essence of the book, which is that there is something uniquely female, feminine, womanly about all of these characters and their qualities that over reacher would have been fine, but overreacherix reminds you what a book you're reading. You're reading a book that's talking about these specifically womanly categories in a sea in which the current is masses of male worldview and so forth. So, you've gone through them. And which one are we going to do?
I'll just perhaps say a word to frame how the chapter looks, how each chapter looks. I use these different archetypes, as you say, these anti-feminine archetypes, to explore each of the six women. I begin by exploring the archetype. I look at how it manifests in different stories, mythologies, folk tales, fiction, film across Western literature. I then do a first reading of the story, and it seems, again, this is the false front, that the woman in question is a perfect embodiment of this anti-feminine archetype. So, Yalta, perfect shrew, Homa, classic Femme Fatale, Marta, paradigmatic prima donna.
And then I do a rereading where I take the rules that I had formulated in the introduction of how to read these stories, and I apply them to the particular story. And in doing so, the false front generally falls away. The archetype is deconstructed. And in this place, there emerges a character of a complex, extraordinary woman who is far more interesting than the one-dimensional archetype we thought she was initially. I was very much inspired by your very beautiful reading of Marta, which you did in one of your Tisha B’Av related episodes, and I thought we could discuss her.
Okay. I think yours was much more sophisticated than my throwaway comment, but that's fine. That's partly what makes this literature so amazing is that two people, and you've thought about it much more deeply than I have, but two people can read it, think that they've come up with their new thing about it, and they don't necessarily contradict each other, but they're just very, you hold the diamond up to the light and you see very, very different kinds of refractions.
So, it's appropriate, I think, to talk about Marta bat Baitos. You'll tell us a little bit about the history of her, why she has that kind of strange name. And then tell us, again, of what the simple part of the story is, what the more sophisticated reading of the story is. And I really loved in that chapter how she's situated in a very, very, very long series of narratives about why Jerusalem was destroyed. And she's one small part of it. And as you point out, which I've never noticed before, the structure of that little story about her, you say, mirrors the structure of the much larger story in which she's situated, which a lot was fascinating, and I'd never realized.
So, she's very complicated. We're not going to get to all the depth of what you put in the book. People are going to have to go on Amazon and buy the book and then have the really great pleasure of reading it. But let's start out. Who is she? Why does she have this weird name? She sounds so Roman with this name Marta. What's her deal? What happens in the story? And then what's the deeper meaning of the story?
Okay, so I will start, if you will allow me, with the archetype, which is how I start every chapter. And I explore the prima donna by looking at the notable prima donnas of Western literature. So, we have the selfish women of Samaria in the Bible, and then the very spoiled women of Jerusalem in the Talmud. We've got the folktale of the greedy Fisherman's Wife, Marie Antoinette with her infamous “let them eat cake”, Madame Bovary, who lives in her own little fantasy world, the overbearing carrying Lady Catherine de Burg from Pride and Prejudice, who might just be my favorite, the deranged Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard, and then the iconic and spectacularly self-absorbed Miss Piggy.
And in doing all of that, we come to define this particular archetype. The prima donna is always going to be rich and high-born, extremely pampered, and privileged, entirely oblivious to the world around her. She really lives in her own little bubble. She is terrifying to her subordinates because she's quite tyrannical. She's very fussy and fastidious. She's incapable of compromise. And more often than not, she's going to be the subject of a morality tale, a riches to rags morality tale, where even if she does try and seclude herself in this little pampered and privileged bubble, at some point the bubble will burst and she will have a fall from grace. And so that's the archetype.
And then in light of this archetype, I propose a primary reading of the story of Marta, who, as you say, appears as part of the destruction story cycle in the Talmud in tractate Gittin. The days are the days of the Roman siege on Jerusalem, the city has descended into famine. Jerusalemites are reduced to all manner of foraging, even cannibalism. People are dying in the streets. And then we come to Marta, and I'm going to quote, “Marta bat Baitos was one of the richest women in Jerusalem. She sent her servant out saying, 'Go and bring me some fine flour’”.
So, with the Romans surrounding the city and famine raging through the streets, the fabulously wealthy Marta sent her servant out to buy fine flour, which is essentially an expensive luxury food. So very much like Marie-Antoinette's “let them eat cake”, she has no clue. She's completely oblivious to the world outside of her palace walls. “By the time he went, it was sold out.”
So, the siege has resulted in extreme food shortage, products rapidly disappearing from the market. There is no more fine flour to be had. And the servant is now in a quandary. He can't buy the flour that he's been ordered to buy, but he's clearly so terrified of his overbearing, fussy, fastidious mistress, he dares not cross her. So, what does he do? He goes back and asks her permission. “There is no fine flour, but there is white flower. She said to him, 'Go and bring me some. ' By the time he went, it was sold out. He came and told her, 'There is no white flower, but there is dark flower. ' She said to him, 'Go and bring me some.' By the time he went, it was sold out. He returned and said to her, 'There is no dark flower, but there is barley flower.' She said, 'Go and bring me some.' By the time he went, this also was sold out.”
Another thing to know about rabbinic stories is that they're very terse, usually, very compact. The Talmud doesn't often repeat things unless there's a reason. And in this case, it repeats it's the same sequence over and over again, four times, which is a lot in Talmudic economy. And the reason for this, I believe, is to highlight just how absurd the situation is, where you have, on the one hand, this extremely particular, spoiled, uncompromising prima donna who doesn't just say to a servant, look, just get me whatever you can find. And on the other hand, you've got a servant who's so scared of her that he dares not deviate from her orders without asking permission. And I'm going to quote again, “She was barefoot, but she said, ‘I will go out and see if I can find anything to eat’.”
So, Marta, at some point, becomes impatient with her servant's incompetence and decides she's going to go out herself and try and find some food. And we're told she was barefoot, and she doesn't think to put shoes on before leaving the house. Now, the reason for this is that she is generally shut up in her palatial home. She's got servants to come for her and go for her. She doesn't leave the house very often. She has no need. And moreover, on the occasions that she does leave the house, we know that she would have servants spread carpets out for her, which was the norm amongst the fabulously wealthy at the time. And so being completely out of touch with the reality outside, she probably just expects for the carpets to be there waiting for her when she goes outside. She really has no sense of the depths of devastation that are waiting for her outside her door.
Do we know about these carpets from Talmudic sources or just for general Roman sources?
No, from Talmudic sources. We have a number of anecdotes about people in the late Second Temple period, the rich people in Jerusalem, that would have either carpets or pillows, or all manner of things just spread out for them, so they don't actually have to walk on the ground.
So, they actually put carpets outside the house?
Yes. You would leave the house and a servant would run before you and just spread out the carpet. And we're told that if you were particularly generous, you then left the carpet so that the poor people could bunch it up and sell it for a profit.
Which tells you something about the level of wealth.
Correct. And also, the economic disparity because the rich were incredibly rich, and the poor were extremely poor. And that's part of the social tensions that lead to the destruction.
And I'm going to just finish up the story. “Some dung stuck to her foot, and she died”. Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai applied to her the verse, the tender and delicate woman among you who would not venture to set her foot on the ground. So, the encounter with the outside world proves fatal to Marta. Rather than that red carpet and an entourage of servants, Marta is greeted with the cold, hard ground, with all that rot and filth of a city under siege. That laying of her foot directly in the dirt is symbolic of her first unmediated contact with reality. And the shock, the disgust is too much for her delicate soul to bear, and she dies.
So, that's the story of Marta. And ostensibly, we have before us a classic prima donna narrative. We have a fantastically wealthy woman who is her selfish, solipsistic, and tyrannical late nature leads to her inevitable downfall. And then I ask, as I do with every chapter, is this really the story the Talmud is telling?
At which point I propose a rereading of the story. I begin by looking at the broad context or the other appearances of Marta in rabbinic literature. And again and again, there emerges this portrait of a woman who is rich and high born. You mentioned her name. The Baitos were a very powerful and privileged clan, very entitled, very used to getting her own way, quite corrupt. So, still very much a prima donna. I then look at the immediate context when Marta's story is framed by stories of men who are acutely aware of the impending destruction and are doing whatever they can to try and forestall it, which really just highlights how oblivious Marta is being in her story. And so, at this point, and I hope it's not giving the game away too much, I admit defeat. As opposed to the other women whose stories are discussed, Marta cannot, in fact, be reread. What seems to be a story of a selfish, spoiled prima donna is, in fact, a story of a selfish, spoiled prima donna. I think that's an important lesson to be learned. If we're going to read the Talmud on its terms rather than our own, we have to be prepared to listen. Even when the Talmud doesn't say what we want to hear, not every story is going to read the way we'd like for it to read, and not every character can be redeemed.
Which is true in life, by the way.
Which is true in life. But I think we have to be more careful when it comes to Talmud, because there's a great temptation to impose our own agendas onto the Talmud, to impose our own ideology, to read ourselves into the text. And the only thing to stop us from doing that is us. So, we have to be very aware and very careful when we read. But then I do one more thing before I end the chapter, and this thing is actually the bulk of the chapter. As you say there is an even greater context here, and that is the very long destruction story cycle in tractate Gittin. It's an extremely long story cycle. It spans three pages, which is a lot of Talmud, and eight acts. And it tells of the…
Just for our readers, listeners, three pages is really six pages.
Correct.
Because the Talmud has got a two-sided thing…
Correct. The Talmud rarely has a cycle that is that extensive. It begins with a very famous story, which I imagine most of us have been taught in kindergarten. It ends with a slightly less famous, although fairly well-known story of Rabbi ben Zakkai asking for their own permission to rebuild Judaism out of the beit midrash of Yavneh.
And being snuck out of Jerusalem in a coffin, which a lot of people do know that story.
Correct. Those bookends of the cycle, those are better known. And not for nothing, because the story is in many ways the foundational story of rabbinic culture, of the rabbinic world. The rabbinic world was born out of the destruction of Jerusalem. It's this this cataclysmic moment in Jewish history that the center of Judaism shifts from the temple to the beit midrash, from the priest to the sage, from sacrifice to study. And so, the story has been the focus of a great deal of scholarship, a great deal of study.
Marta's story is this tiny cameo, which almost everyone, present company, obviously excluded, ignores. Although the cameo appears very much at the epicenter of this narrative, and I claim it's critical turning point. And so, I suggest that to really understand what Marta is about, we have to go all the way back to the beginning. And without going into too much detail, because it is a very long, very involved story. Basically, it details the disastrous and entirely avoidable circumstances that lead to the destruction of the temple and the fall of Jerusalem. With every act, again and again, the rabbis are presented with a particular course of action that could have prevented the fall of Jerusalem.
Yes, they were not perfect. Yes, their results are uncertain, but any one of them would have saved the city. But the rabbis are so afraid of making a mistake. They are paralyzed time and again into inaction. John Stuart Mill famously said, “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is a good people good men, do nothing”. And this destruction story cycle is precisely that. It's a story of good men repeatedly doing nothing, this ongoing failure of leadership that ultimately leads to the destruction. And the Talmudic storyteller acknowledges as much when he says, they say, “the humility of Zechariah ben Abkilus destroyed our Temple”. The true reason for the destruction, according to this story, is not based on hatred, which is what we were all taught in kindergarten. It is rather humility, which is really interesting because humility in Jewish sources, generally, is presented as a virtue. But the Talmudic storytellers recognize that humility at times can go wrong. Humility goes wrong when it undermines our confidence, when it paralyzes us, when the fear of making a mistake prevents us from doing anything, which is often the greatest mistake of all. Humility goes wrong when it makes good men do nothing.
And so, reading the story act by act, seeing the rabbis again and again fail to do the one thing that they could do to save Jerusalem, we return and reread the story of Marta. And at this point, I think, with the larger context in place, we do see it in a slightly different light. So, we begin with, again, the servant going backwards and forwards between the home and market and constantly missing the opportunity to buy the right kind of flour. And I want to point out in the analogy, there were several types of flour that the servant could have bought. Yes, they weren't perfect. Yes, he couldn't be certain that Marta would approve, but any one of them would have saved her life. And yet the servant, in constantly returning to ask for Marta's permission, he displays the same paralysis, the same fear of getting it wrong, the same humility as the rabbis.
And so, the implication of this analogy, I think, is quite radical, where if the servant in his fear of deviating from his mistress's orders ends up causing her death, then the rabbis, in their fear of deviating from their Master's command, master with a capital M, because this is God, end up destroying him. And in rabbinic literature, the destruction of the Temple is often likened to the downfall of the shekhinah, the divine presence.
And then we have Marta saying, let me go outside and try and find some food for myself. This, I suggest, is a critical turning point, not just in Marta’s story, but of the entire story cycle of the destruction. The fastidious Prima Donna Marta decides to come down off her high horse and go outside. She doesn't care that is beneath her. She doesn't care that what she finds will not be perfect. She tries to save herself. And in this, she creates a major shift in the narrative. She's the very first character who confronts her difficult situation and doesn't shy away from a hard choice. She's the first character who's not afraid to act. Now, it doesn't save her, she still dies, but in her death, she irrevocably altars the course of events that follow, because directly after her death enters Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai.
Now, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai was there when Marta dies. We're told that he witnesses her death firsthand. And directly after that, he turns to his nephew and says, “see if there's a way for me to go out, in other words, leave Jerusalem, and save a little”. So, he uses the very same verbs, go out and see, that Marta uses, implying that it was probably the inspiration of Marta that jolts him out of his rabbinic paralysis. Her heroic ability to take stock of her situation and try and do something about it, emboldens him to do the same. And so, as you say, he is smuggled out of the besieged Jerusalem in a coffin. He goes over to the Roman camp, presents himself to Vespasian, the commander, and he has granted one wish. And in a decision that spells the end of Jerusalem and the dawn of the rabbinic era, he says, “Give me Yavne and its sages”. Judaism, as I know, it is over. Let me try and rebuild a new Judaism from the beit midrash of Yavne. It's a very bold and controversial choice that Rabbi Yohanan makes. And some rabbis in the town would criticize him as foolish.
Well, why don't you ask him not to destroy Jerusalem, they say?
Correct. Just ask him to leave Jerusalem alone this time. But Rabbi Yohanan gets the final word in the story, and he says, the Vespasian would never have agreed to that. And Rabbi Yohanan, having witnessed the disastrous effects of the refusal to compromise, of preferring the perfect and the unattainable to the imperfect and the plausible, he's determined to not make the same mistake. He decides that saving something, however small, however imperfect, is still better to saving nothing at all. And so, as you say, once the story is mapped out, which is what I do in the book, you see just how pivotal Marta's little cameo is in it. Her decision to, quote, go out and from the home to the market foreshadows Rabbi Yohanan’s decision to try and leave Jerusalem. The initiative that she shows in attempting to save herself inspires him to try and, quote, save a little. And her move from purism to pragmatism encapsulates that same turn in the rabbinic mindset, from the humility of Rabbi Zechariah ben Abkilus to the courage of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai. Marta's story is a perfect microcosm of the destruction story cycle. And Marta, although she still is very much a prima donna, is its tragic heroine.
And the light to Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai in a certain way, the inspiration to him, that one moment when she's not the prima donna, when she comes off her high horse, as you said, steps outside, sparking in him, perhaps, well, she did that. What can I save?
Exactly. She tried against all odds. She took stock of the reality. She decided there were no perfect courses of action. I'm going to have to try and do something, at least. And he is the first rabbi in the story who actually acts, and in a way, sets the foundational tone for all of rabbinic culture, because the rabbis were characterized by their boldness, by their really quite forward-thinking decision-making when it came to halakha. They realized that Judaism now has to be adapted to a post-Temple reality, and they're not scared to make some really difficult choices, very much by the example of their founding father, Rabbi Yohanan.
And I think that ultimately is the lesson of this entire story cycle, and specifically of Marta’s tale. The rabbis are trying to teach us that we have to ask act, even if it means making a mistake. We have to choose, even if it means we choose incorrectly. We have to get past our own humility because this world isn't perfect.
Uncertainty is the fundamental human condition. And we can sit around paralyzed, waiting for conditions to be just right, waiting for perfect certainty, and then we will do nothing at all. Or like Marta, ultimately the heroine of this story, we can take matters into our own hands. We can go out into the world, and we can try each in our own way to save a little.
Had we had this conversation three years ago, that would have been a perfect place to stop because it's just a profound reading of an amazing text. And we learned a tremendous amount about human beings and about inspiration and about our ability to step out of the modus operandi that we've been in for our whole life. And we learned a tremendous amount and we're inspired. And everybody who listens wants to go back, either on a Sefaria or from their big dusty tomes, pull out tractate Gittin and go in.
But this is not three years ago. And I feel a need to ask you a two-part question, which you’ll answer however you see fit, but beginning to bring our conversation to a close. I wanted two sides of the same coin. One of them is that you have this elegant British accent and this mellifluous English vocabulary, and a book that is so rich with English literature and others that one could forget very easily that you're Israeli, raised here from the time that you're two until now. So, this is really a book by an Israeli woman, largely educated in Israel, who did a lot of the writing in Israel, tragically during COVID, but did a lot of the writing in Israel, COVID and post-COVID. So, my first question is, in what way is this a distinctly Israeli project? Your British accent and the English language of the book, perfectly legit, obviously, notwithstanding. In what way do you, Gila, just see this as, this book is Israeli in the following ways.
And then the second half of the same question, and you'll mix or match or choose to say what you want to say about whatever, is this notion of Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai saying, well, let me see if I can save a little. We're at a moment in Israeli life when many people, like you and me, but certainly not only, begin our conversations when we're about to talk about whatever the case may be, saving a little. We have a sense that we're in a very bad place, and that the Israel that we knew three years ago doesn't really exist anymore. We're probably not going to go down militarily and get overrun by foreign forces, but we are in a very broken reality a very broken country, a very saddened and broken-hearted populace, desperate for let's save a little. And so, my two questions related, and take whichever one you want or both or whatever, is to what extent does this book, “The Madwoman in the Rabbi's Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud”, strike you as a distinctly Israeli Project? Had you grown up in London, let's just say, would this book have come out or come out the same way? And second of all, given what we're living through collectively as an Israeli people right now, in what way do some of these stories speak to you differently than they might otherwise have?
So, I'll go backwards a little bit in order to go forwards. Before writing the book, I spent many years teaching these texts. And one question that I was confronted with again and again was people saying, I like your reading very much, but it's a bit too convenient that it's such a feminist reading today in the 21st century. I don't buy it. How are the rabbis really that? They couldn't have been that feminist. And my answer generally is, don't suspect the reading just because it happens to be consistent with contemporary sensibilities. If you think it doesn't work, show me where in the text or the context you think it doesn't work. And generally, that would be the end of the conversation. But the question was fair, and it stayed with me, and I thought about a lot, especially once I started writing and really doing a deep dive into rabbinic attitudes towards women, because it's a fair question. If what I'm saying is true in the book, how was it that the rabbis were really that proto-feminist, or if not proto-feminist, at least acutely sensitive to what it meant to be a woman in the world?
How is it the rabbis who live in a time that is so pervaded by patriarchal thought, where women are considered so inferior, how is it that they're able to treat women with such humanity, such dignity, as they do in these stories?
And I discuss this at the very end of the book, where I say that the rabbinic attitude towards women is something of the paradox. On the one hand, women for the rabbis are the paradigmatic other. The Talmud says, “they are a people onto themselves”. They're practically a different species. And it's through the stories of women that the rabbis work out their ethics of otherness. They impart these moral messages about how to treat the others in our midst. How do I treat somebody who is both me but not me? And it's these moral messages that I try and tease out in most of the chapters of the book. But on the other hand, women for the rabbis were also the symbolic self. The rabbis were able to deeply empathize with women because they saw themselves as essentially feminized. The Talmud says, “Torah scholars are similar to women”, and this is a sentiment that comes up again and again in various passages throughout rabbinic literature. We have this sentiment that rabbis are physically weak, just like women. Rabbis spend all their time indoors, just like women. Rabbis are politically disempowered, just like women.
And in fact, it's not just themselves that the rabbis see as feminized, it is all Jews, which is, I think, quite remarkable that this rabbinic Judaism, which was created by men in a deeply patriarchal world, was nevertheless created in the image and likeness of women. The world of the rabbis, as we said, was born out of the destruction. So, it's a world of subordination and statelessness.
Without any type of national sovereignty, Jews, these vis-a-vis the other nations, were what women were to men, dominated, defenseless, politically disempowered, sometimes even physically persecuted. The Midrash beautifully says of the Jewish people, “The pains of Israel are like the pain of a female at childbirth. Just as a female bears a burden and discharges it, bears a burden and discharges it, so Israel are enslaved and redeemed, enslaved and redeemed.”
The rabbis acknowledge that being a woman is hard, just like being a Jew. But just as women necessarily learn to carry their burden, so Israel has to learn to bear its burden, which is why I think the rabbis tell so many stories in the Talmud of women who do precisely that. The women that I discuss in the book, they're not perfect, and their stories are not happy ones for the most part. But again and again, these women rise to the challenge. They confront their difficult circumstances, and they bear their burden with dignity and with grace. And I think it's because the rabbis wanted us to know that no matter how downtrodden or oppressed we as a people might be, we can always bear that burden.
And so, this final piece of the book, you're right, I did start writing the book during COVID and the lockdown, but I finished writing the book during the first weeks of the October 7th war. And this piece took on a very special resonance for me. Just like the women I discussed in the book, we Jews are not perfect, and our story is not always a happy one. But again and again, just like these women, we bear our burden. We rise to the challenge, and we confront our difficult reality with a great deal of courage and resilience and grace. And as the midrash says, enslaved and redeemed, enslaved and redeemed. We've been enslaved and redeemed so many times. And you're right, we are enslaved at this moment in time. But I have no doubt, I really do believe that we will be redeemed once more.
That is such a beautiful way of summarizing both your work about women in the Talmud and our situation here that I will try not in any way to defile it, except to say thank you for teaching us. Mazal Tov on the appearance of the book. I wish you tremendous success with it, and I’m very grateful to you for sharing with our listeners a small, small, small piece of the richness of what you've shared with us. Thank you so much.
Thank you.
For a book project I may be undertaking, position of Research Assistant.
Position is full time, would likely begin in next month or two—start date slightly negotiable. Work can be done largely remotely (but some in-person meetings will be necessary), but RA needs to be physically located in Israel for the duration of the project, and needs to work standard Israeli hours.
Requirements: BA from a high quality institution with a record of excellence. Self-motivated and also anxious to work in partnership. People filling this role have typically been immediately post-college or a few years post-BA, but many other profiles certainly fine.
Area of academic major not critical. Excellent research skills and analytic skills critical. Native language English required. Some Hebrew necessary, good or excellent Hebrew an added value.
Role will include:
Working with me to brainstorm ideas for the book, its basic claims and the flow of the argument
Research for all sections of the book, from a wide array of sources, including print, online, archive and interviews.
Interface with publisher on all administrative matters related to the book.
Aquiring permissions for quotes, photos and other copyrighted material.
For those interested:
Greater detail and salary/benefits upon request.
Interested candidates should send a cover note and CV as PDF to israelfromtheinside@gmail.com.
Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:
The Madwoman in the Rabbi's Attic—What the Women of the Talmud Have to Teach Us