Crying Out

The rabbis of the Talmud dictated that, when we read publicly from the Torah, we end on a nechemta, a comforting passage. In that spirit, tonight I read aloud verses that enjoin Israel to establish a just society—a society that holds dear the rights of the vulnerable: “You shall not subvert the rights of the stranger or the orphan; you shall not take a widow’s garment in pawn” (24:17). We learn in this week’s parasha that we must not withhold a laborer’s wages or refuse to protect a runaway slave or deceive others with dishonest weights and measures. Repeatedly, Moses links these guidelines for an ideal Israelite society with our collective experience of slavery and degradation: “Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt.” I certainly find comfort in this transformation of a dehumanizing experience of oppression into a cry for the pursuit of justice for all human beings.


In Tractate Megillah of the Talmud, the rabbis debate whether certain Torah verses that might be misunderstood by the average Jew ought even to be read aloud or translated in the synagogue. Passages that reflect negatively on King David, for example, are read but not translated, so that only those who understand the difficult, ancient Hebrew will understand the story. These passages are not comforting to the rabbis, and, while they accept them as part of the Torah to be read aloud, they worry about how the congregation will hear and interpret them.


This week, I worried, though my worries could not have been anticipated by the rabbis of the Talmud. I worried about some of the laws described in this week’s parasha, and I did not want to fill this sanctuary with the sound of my voice chanting those words in Hebrew, our sacred language. Instead, I read aloud verses that carry with them the charge to treat the vulnerable with chesed and with mishpat, with kindness and with justice. The stranger, the orphan, and the widow are to be taken under the protection of the community.

And yet many of the laws in this week’s parasha deal with another vulnerable class—vulnerable both in Israelite society and, too often, in our own: women. I try to read these laws with the knowledge that ancient Israelite society differed radically from our own. I try to read them with the knowledge that much of Jewish law acted, in its ancient context, to protect women from destitution and exploitation within a limited social order. Yet I still struggled, especially with one particular law.

This week’s parasha speaks of a woman who cries out, and another who does not: “In the case of a virgin who is engaged to a man – if a man comes upon her in the city and lies with her, you shall take the two of them out to the gate of that city and stone them to death: the girl because she did not cry for help in the city, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. Thus you will sweep away evil from your midst.” (22:23-24)

Reading this story with a modern sensibility and my own background in women’s rights organizing, I cringe at the Hebrew word inah, here translated as “violated” but elsewhere translated as “raped.” To hear the Torah condemn a rape victim to death for failing to cry out for help sounds like blaming the victim. The Hebrew, however, does not mirror our modern connotations. Rather, the Biblical Hebrew inah, violated, denotes humiliation or debasement in social standing that results from a sexual encounter—consensual or not. What mattered in ancient Israelite law was that another man’s property had been rendered less valuable; his betrothed sullied by a sexual encounter with another man. To “violate” a woman in ancient Israelite society meant rendering her unmarriageable, condemning her to an impossible life as a woman untethered to any man, with no claim to economic security. The Torah does not say much about how this engaged woman might have suffered emotionally or psychologically; indeed, the Torah rarely speaks of women with attention to their emotional or psychological perspectives.

Yet our Torah portion does pay attention to a woman’s consent:
“But if the man comes upon the engaged girl in the open country, and the man lies with her by force, only the man who lay with her shall die, but you shall do nothing to the girl. The girl did not incur the death penalty, for this case is like that of one party attacking and murdering another. He came upon her in the open; though the engaged girl cried for help, there was no one to save her” (22:25-27).
At first, reading this parasha, my entire focus remained with the girl in the city: the Torah assumed she must not have cried out, and the Torah blamed and punished her for the resulting rape. But then I considered the girl in the country: the Torah conversely assumes she must have cried out, but there was no one there to hear her cries.

My modern sensibilities balked at the way the Torah holds the engaged woman in the city responsible for sex that may or may not have been consensual. Yet the Torah identifies more responsible parties than the man and the engaged woman: the community is also responsible.

In a parasha filled with laws about protecting the vulnerable, welcoming the stranger into the community, and refusing to ignore the plight of our neighbors, the Torah tells of an ideal community—a city in which, when a woman cries out for help, someone will certainly respond.

Reading Torah can sometimes be a risky business. Reading Torah means navigating ancient Hebrew language and customs, understanding the “original” meaning, as far as that can be understood. But reading Torah also means interpreting for our time. Too often, those who purport to be the gatekeepers of Torah become frozen by the ancient laws, mapping Israelite customs onto modern Jews. Too often, Jewish women become frozen in a hierarchical system that distances them from Torah.

Nowhere have I felt that distance more keenly than in the place where God’s Presence is said to most nearly approach us. I stood near the Western Wall, a tallit embroidered with the names of the four matriarchs wrapped around my neck, praying amidst dozens of women, many of them rabbis.

“Lo lashir!” they shouted. “Do not sing!” “Hitbayeshu lachen! You should be ashamed of yourselves!” A white-bearded man wrapped in a blue and white tallit hurled these words at us as pebbles pelted our heads from the men’s side of the divided Western Wall. Wads of spit showered us as we huddled together, wearing our tallitot as scarves for fear of being arrested. The fine for a woman donning a prayer shawl there is ten thousand shekels or seven years in prison.

Since 1988, a dedicated group of Israeli women have gathered to welcome each new month with psalms and prayer at the holiest site in Judaism. Like the men who gather to stand before the only physical remainder of the Temple, these women pray aloud with the words of the traditional siddur. Some of them wear a tallit. They lovingly carry among them a Torah scroll. And, after praying the morning service, they walk, as mandated by Israeli law, to a site far from the eyes of the offended Orthodox groups who deny women access to the Torah. Here, at Robinson’s arch, still beneath the shadow of the massive wall but far from the cracks where pilgrims leave their letters to God, Women of the Wall conduct a monthly Torah service, chanting aloud from the words of a tradition that is too often twisted to exclude them.
Each month, gathered before the holy site, these Jewish women suffer verbal and physical abuse. They are insulted and spat upon. Men throw chairs at them from over the separating wall. So-called observant Jews throw feces at them. Their attempts to reach out to God through prayer are viewed only as provocations to disorder, violence, and sin. Among the many laws and customs the ultra-Orthodox groups who oppose Women of the Wall cite is an injunction from this week’s Torah portion: “A woman must not put on man’s apparel, nor shall a man wear women’s clothing; for whoever does these things is abhorrent to your God the Eternal” (22:5). These men consider the tallit a man’s garment, following only one interpretation of Jewish law and ignoring rabbis who argue that, while women are not obligated to wear the tallit, neither are they expressly forbidden. Orthodox opponents to Women of the Wall also consider the sound of a woman’s voice to be a sexual temptation that distracts from prayer.

When women lift their voices to the God the traditional Jewish siddur calls haBocheir ba’shirei zimra, “the one who chooses songs of praise,” some Orthodox Jews hear not individuals communicating to God but a provocation to their own “baser” instincts. Praying at the Western Wall, I felt the sting of the disgust and disapproval of the Orthodox men and women who discounted our prayers and turned our beautiful songs of praise into ugly blasphemy. I felt like an object—not a person. Just a month ago, Women of the Wall’s Chairperson Anat Hoffman was arrested not for wearing a tallit or for reading publicly from the Torah—both of which are expressly forbidden in Israeli law. She was arrested simply for carrying a Torah scroll in her arms.

The rabbis of the Talmud at times found Torah challenging and difficult for the community. I continue to wrestle with our tradition’s sacred text, as I hope we will do as a community throughout the coming year. I struggle with laws written for a very different social structure, laws that treat women as the property of men even as they seek to protect women within that lopsided structure. I struggle with the unfair application of these ancient Israelite laws to the modern world in which we live and pray. But I find hope and comfort in the Torah’s depiction of an ideal society—a society in which we are each bound not to ignore the plight of others, each bound to safeguard the rights of the most vulnerable among us—whether they are Jews or not—each bound to heed the cry of those in need. In the city of Jerusalem, women are crying out for the chance to lift their voices at the Western Wall. Their humanity violated, their social standing among the Jewish people questioned, these women are not crying out in the empty countryside. In a modern world, with our complex and rich Reform relationship to interpreting Torah, these cries are among those we do not ignore.

[The above was given as a sermon for my student pulpit. The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the community I am honored to serve.]