Women of the Bible: Interview with Rabbi Rachel Bearman

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Rabbi Parr: So I want to welcome my friend Rabbi Rachel Beerman to our podcast tour for Christians. Rabbi Beerman is the associate rabbi of Congregation Charay Emeth. She came to that pulpit in 2020. She's also a native of Memphis, Tennessee, and I have to say where. She says that eight generations of her family have been part of the city's Jewish community. And a personal note, I know that well because I was at her parents'wedding and her father David, stood at our wedding as a groomsman, so our families go way back. My wife's family's from Memphis as well. Rabbi Berman attended Middlebury College, and she received her undergraduate degree in religious studies. Ordained in 2014 at Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. She received the Morris Youngerman Memorial Prize for her sermon, which was entitled Finding and Honoring Women's Voices and the Stephen M. Levinson Memorial Prize for Service to HEC and its student Body. And before coming to Shari Emmett in St. Louis, rabbi Beerman served as the sole rabbi of Temple Benichayim, which is a reform congregation in Georgetown, Connecticut. Rabbi Beerman is also the networking vice president of the Women's Rabbinic Network of part of the Central Conference of American Rabbis in the Reform movement and is a co creator and co author of Midrashic Monologues. And that's a project that strives to restore the voices of biblical figures who have been silenced by Jewish tradition. And that's really what we're going to talk about today, is the women of the Bible, particularly those whose voices we don't always hear. And so let's start with this. And again, welcome Rabbi Beerman. It's great to have you with us. And I just want to ask you first, what is your motivation for focusing so intently on female biblical figures?

Rabbi Bearman: First of all, thank you for having me. And that is a really deep question that goes all the way back through my life. I have always loved women's stories. I went to an all girls school for 14 years. I'm one of three sisters. My family has always been one that's dedicated to gender equity and raising strong women. So finding and honoring women's stories has always been something that I've been interested in and as a rabbi that's expanded and perhaps focused on biblical stories, so it seemed like a natural outgrowth of my entire life. In many ways, I find that the.

Rabbi Parr: Women's stories in the Bible are often overshadowed when men are principal characters. There are several obvious examples where women come to the forefront, such as Deborah or Esther, for example. But in other stories and I've discussed some of these in previous podcasts, for example, the story of Dina or Tamar or even the story of Sarah kind of gets overshadowed by the men that surround them. How are you and other female rabbis and scholars addressing this? What I see as an inequity in.

Rabbi Bearman: Biblical studies, many of us, people of all genders, but especially female rabbis, are interested in excavating, which is a word that I really like in these scenarios, women's stories. So I agree with you completely that in many of our stories, women are overshadowed when men are main characters, and often they're used as tools in order to further the male characters narratives. I don't think our biblical authors did that on purpose or with malice, necessarily to make sure that the women's stories weren't told. But our society in our Jewish world has valued men's narratives more than people of other genders for centuries and millennia. And so the work of finding women's stories, asking questions about women's stories, is relatively recently started within our Jewish story and history. And so it's sometimes painstaking and sometimes painful work to do, because sometimes what you find is even harder in some ways. But even the act of asking questions about some of our female characters, questions that don't point back toward their male co characters, we'll say, is a new thing within our tradition. And it's one of the things I like to do the most. Just asking the questions and then with midrash is providing the answers or an answer, perhaps not the answer to what those questions could ask.

Rabbi Parr: Okay, great. Well, let me do one quick definition before I ask you a follow up on that. For those of our listeners who do not know the term midrash, midrash are basically stories and explanations of the Bible that our rabbis of old told and put down to explain gaps or inconsistencies in the Bible. That process has continued even to the present day. Rabbi Bearman, as I said, is creating modern women's oriented midrash, which is just so important.

Rabbi Bearman: I was just going to clarify, my midrash is not necessarily women oriented, although certainly there are many women and people of different genders within my midrashim. But you're right that I'm often drawn to the women characters, but it's not necessarily the stated goal.

Rabbi Parr: Okay. No, I understand. Yeah. And I just want to be sure that our listeners know that this process is continuing even to the present day. In our tradition, every time a rabbi gets up to speak from the pulpit, for example, he, she, they may be creating some form of modern midrash. And you might think of a minister or priest doing the same thing in a Christian tradition whenever a clergy person is interpreting a biblical passage, let's excavate, to use your word. Yeah, I like that. One of the female characters in the Hebrew Bible that you feel needs to be reexamined and maybe lifted up in the sense that she was put to the background or degraded in the Bible itself or in the midrashim or other stories that grew up around her in subsequent millennia. I'll let you give me the example, and then we'll talk about it.

Rabbi Bearman: My most recent midrash, or one of my most recent midrashim, was about Sarah and Hagar, and Sarah is the wife of abraham. And Hagar is the handmaiden of Sarah and the sometimes known as wife of Abraham, someone that he was sexually involved with and who is the mother of his son. The Torah does not give us any real insight into the women's relationship except for jealousy and competition. Whenever I've read this story, I have thought about the fact that even the people I dislike the most, we'll say, I don't walk around like a cartoon character where every interaction I have with them is some kind of conflict in some way. I felt really compelled and fascinated by the idea of writing a story where the two of them are not best friends. Right. I'm not rewriting the whole idea of their narrative, but could maybe interact with one another in a human way. The Torah, for characters of all genders is not necessarily focused on the humanity of the characters. Right. They're symbols of so many things. They're symbols of great peoples. They're symbols of what the narrative needs them to do. And that's especially true for the quote background characters or not the main characters. And so Hagar is not given a real opportunity to share what she was thinking. And Sarah, despite being I would call her one of the main characters of our story because she's one of our matriarchs, we seek her story out. She's not really given a chance to explain what she's feeling either. And so writing their just I wanted to give them a chance to breathe and to put down their kind of cartoonish or simplistic depiction of their rivalry and to really ask questions like, did you ever have to go to one another for help? Did you hate one another every single second of every single day? Or were there moments where you were allies even though you were still at a great power differential, at a great disadvantage in many ways, and to just ask the question even and then to propose one. We don't have a lot of breathing room in the Torah stories. Joseph is the one we get the most narrative about, even just landscape wise within Genesis. And so the Torah is always pushing us to move forward. And stopping and pausing and asking ourselves these questions about our characters really shows us so much about ourselves and about them. And I'm certainly not the first to do so, but I think of myself in a long line of Jewish scholars or Jewish leaders who ask these questions. And it's just interesting who we ask the questions about each generation and different perspectives are curious about different people and finding ourselves in them.

Rabbi Parr: I've always wondered what Hagar did know. Sarah gave Hagar to Abraham as kind of a surrogate, as we know from other studies, was somewhat common in the ancient Middle East. That was a custom. I know that there's archaeological evidence of that in other communities. And we also know that Rachel and Leah gave their handmaidens to Jacob as surrogates, so it's not surprising. What surprises me, I think, is the aftermath of that. There's nothing that I see in the Torah that says Hagar perhaps lorded her status over Sarah. I think she got jealous and maybe that's why she was expelled the first time. And then when she was expelled with Ishmael, there's some interpretations that it was Ishmael's fault that they were expelled. So going back to Hagar, I like the idea that we should try to rehabilitate her in some way, shape or form. It's not necessarily casting Sarah as the evil one.

Rabbi Bearman: There doesn't have to be an evil one. There could just be two human ones. And the Torah isn't great at this. It seems to be a narrative trope from the Hebrew Bible. And beyond that, if there's one good brother, right, then the other brother has to be bad. Or if there's one good wife, then the other wife can't just be another wife. She has to be the bad wife, right? And so I like exploring the idea that perhaps they were just both people and nobody was. There wasn't a black hat and a white hat or a mustache twirling villain in any of this. They could have just both been people who hurt one another and who were hurt by others. And that humanity is much more interesting to me.

Rabbi Parr: Yeah, I think so. Mean, I think that good and evil dichotomy really shows itself in midrash and later rabbinic writings, not necessarily in the Torah. I think one of the things in the Sarah and Hagar story that comes to light, I think when we examine the women in that story in particular, is Abraham's Passivity. Both instances of Hagar being expelled, and he kind of allows Sarah to do what she wants with him, and it's just divine intervention that saves her life in both instances. And so, for our listeners, the first time Hagar is expelled by herself and God tells her to go back because she's going to be the mother of a great nation, which the Ishmaelites, who are the precursors, according to Islam, of the Arab nations and ultimately Islam itself. And then the second time, when she's expelled for good, that promise is again renewed and God provides water and shelter for her. And her then I guess would be about 15 or 16 year old boy, considering Isaac was being Weaned at the time that they were kicked out. That passivity also bothers me. It leads me to another question, and we can stay with this example, or there are others as well is how do the women? Or how do women not all the women in the Bible, of course, but how do some of the women in the Bible actually drive the story move it past what we might expect if, say, they were not mentioned at all. I mean, Sarah's a great example, I think, in terms of what she did with Hagar. And I would contrast that with Mrs. Noah, who's not even named in the Noah story. She has no role whatsoever, except we assume that she exists because she has three boys. And so that is just by inference that she's there. She plays no role in that story, which, of course, is so important in the prehistory of the Jewish people. So someone like Sarah or certainly Deborah, for example, I think, or Esther would be great examples of how the stories are moved forward by women, where if it were male oriented, perhaps at worst case, we wouldn't be talking today.

Rabbi Bearman: Well, that's fair enough. I think it's a really interesting question, because the idea of women moving a story forward in some ways implies that they're not at the center of it, although in other ways it does not. In true rabbinic fashion, there are many ways to interpret it. One of the stories that comes to mind immediately is the story of Moses, and I can never remember which commentary I read that described it this way, and I wish I could give them credit for it. But there was a description of the women around Moses as a conspiracy of women in the best possible of ways that allowed Moses to survive the first part of his life without yochevid his mother, birthing him and keeping him secret for as long as she could. Because there was the edict from Pharaoh that said that the baby boys from the Israelites had to be thrown into the Nile. So. Without Yochevid's action. He wouldn't have survived without Miriam watching over him after he is put in the Nile in his little basket. Without Batya's great empathy and courage to pull an Israelite baby out of the water and raise him as her own. Without Zipporah's. Quick action. When they are returning to Egypt, circumcising him and their children. All of these women are the reason that our hero is able to make it back to Egypt and to rescue the Israelite people. And they are the kind of bulwark behind the scenes of Moses's story ensuring that he is, first of all, he survives and that he's able to move forward. So that's an example that comes to mind right away.

Rabbi Parr: I think it's a great example. And Bhatya, correct me if I'm wrong, is daughter. Yes, and just to make that clear, but I would also add Shifra and Pua, the midwives, of course, to that story who actually go to Pharaoh and lie to him as to why they cannot kill those Israelite baby newborn boys. Kind of like, okay, the Israelite women birth too fast for us to even get there. I think that's anybody who understands birthing and I have two daughters, and my daughter has a son, and obviously we've been through the birthing process, and everyone is familiar with it today. To dupe Pharaoh in that situation, I think took a lot of chutzpah, so to speak.

Rabbi Bearman: Absolutely.

Rabbi Parr: And a lot of bravery. But I think that's really one of the best examples of how women actually in this case, save the Israelites. Yes. And their actions in every one of those instances that you mentioned, without that happening, there would have been no Moses. And so I see that. And just quickly, I mean, I see two other examples I mentioned before. One is Deborah taking the lead in the battle against the Canaanites, and the other, of course, is when Esther comes around to save the people in the Purim story. That's another example, I think. But your example, I think, is the best in the strongest case because it's.

Rabbi Bearman: A conspiracy and in the best possible Jordan, I just I want to apologize for Vashti's barking.

Rabbi Parr: That's okay. That's okay. I know you named your dog Vashti, and I think that's a nice segue, because I think Vashti I wish more Jewish parents were named their daughters Vashti than Esther. Esther's redeemed. I think she's redeemed. But Vashti, to me, hubby, you've been partying for over six months. There's been no women in the room, and you expect me to dance? I mean, I think she stands up for herself in a marvelous way. I don't know if you've done this, but I've always wondered what happened to her after she was banished. Have you ever thought about that?

Rabbi Bearman: Of course I have. I think about almost nothing else. No. So Vashti has been a lifelong favorite character of mine, even at temple Israel and Memphis. As a child, I'd dress up as a queen for every Purim, and then when people would say, oh, look, little queen Esther, I would say, no, I'm queen Vashti.

Rabbi Parr: Queen Vashti.

Rabbi Bearman: I'm queen Vashti, which was perfect. And my dog's name is Vashti, and she'll hopefully make fewer appearances as we go on, but that's okay.

Rabbi Parr: We like sound effects.

Rabbi Bearman: Oh, great. Well, she's always happy to help with so I've definitely wondered. And when I was the rabbi in Connecticut and I was putting together our children's Purim spiels, the kids all knew about my dog Vashti. So the joke was that after she was banished, she came to live a life of luxury in Connecticut, wanting for nothing. But the story seems to suggest that she's executed after she's banished because of the king's need to make a lesson out of her punishment so that the story says explicitly so that other women don't get any ideas about rising up against their husbands. But I assume that that's what happened. But the stories that I've written about Vashti are about how she is beloved among the harem because she stood up for herself and for the other women of the harem. And one of the favorites that I wrote with Rabbi  Kipnis Midrashic Monologues is this Vashti story of her preparing to go to see her husband and tell him no, and all of the kind of weight of knowledge that that would bring. And then the way that Esther once she comes into the harem, she is told the story of Vashti and how Vashti stood up for Was. I was walking my dog, as I do in my apartment building in Connecticut, and I met someone, and they asked me what her name was, which is always a spiel because people aren't always familiar with the name. So I said, oh, her name is Vashti. She's named after a queen in the Bible who didn't listen to anybody. And then this person said, oh, I know Vashti. She's the bad queen. And I just said, okay. And we walked away, but it stuck in my brain that it's one of those again, those like, there has to be a good queen and a bad queen. But in my mind, when Esther came into the harem, the story of Vashti would have been well known, even if it was just a cautionary tale, even if this imagining that the harem loved her didn't happen. So she would have been told that story and had to live through the ramifications of that action from the king. So I like to think of them both as heroines and people to admire.

Rabbi Parr: Yeah, I'm with you. When I was a kid, and that was well, before you were a kid. I'm of your parents generation. It was unthinkable for the little girls to dress as Vashti.

Rabbi Bearman: Oh, really? Okay.

Rabbi Parr: She was vilified in an age appropriate way, of course, in the **** story that all the girls wanted to dress as Queen Esther, and they all marched across the stage in the **** parade as Queen Esther, and everybody clapped. And it was also rather sexist because it was just the little girls who walked across like it was a beauty pageant.

Rabbi Bearman: Okay.

Rabbi Parr: And I'm glad we kind of got away from that these days.

Rabbi Bearman: Yeah. Everyone should be in the costume parade. Costume parade for everybody. Yeah.

Rabbi Parr: I think nowadays all the kids and the Star Wars characters and whatever is popular in the movies that particular year. But I think in the sense the way you frame this, I think you've made Esther into a bit of a renegade as well, because when the king says, this is the way wives should behave, well, she risked her life to behave differently.

Rabbi Bearman: Absolutely.

Rabbi Parr: And you're making me feel a lot better about Esther.

Rabbi Bearman: Oh, I'm so glad my mission is accomplished, then.

Rabbi Parr: Yeah. No, I've done some pretty nasty things with her the last few years, but I'm going to stop because of this. And I think you've done a great job in rehabilitating her as well, or maybe shifting the focus on her into a different light than we had considered her previously. We'd always thought highly of her, but some of the thornier issues of that story, which we typically bury, we can examine in greater detail with this in mind, I guess I see how long we're going. So let me ask you, is there anybody woman in the bible who you find really problematic, perhaps in a negative way that really needs some work or we're not able to do much rehabilitation or excavate her. True story.

Rabbi Bearman: Absolutely. There are a lot of problematic women in the Bible and my interest in them doesn't necessarily mean that I consider them to be blameless in some way. I think Sarah I come back to Sarah. Right. Sarah is both a really broken character in my mind. Like, she experiences so much trauma and so much pain in her life that she wields that against hagar in ways that are really terrible and painful. There's no excusing that in my mind and there's also opportunities for understanding it. The power differential between Leia and Rachel and the handmaidens Bilcha and Zilpa are really tough and problematic as well. And I'm not excusing the men of the story either. Right. The society that all of them lived in was not one that valued the autonomy of individuals and that allowed for the marginalization of people in ways that created even more trauma and pain moving forward. So for me, it's not necessarily that none of them are problematic that it's interesting to me to kind of build a story around their whole humanity. Panina and Hannah is another example. For me, panina is so cruel to her co wife Hannah, who is experiencing trouble having children. And one of the ways to read that is that Panina is problematic and doesn't deserve any expiration. And another way is to ask what could have made Panina so desperate to lift up her own status at the expense of Hanas? And what about the society led that to happen? And how can we avoid furthering that in our own society?

Rabbi Parr: On that note, I've done a podcast before and in my university class that I taught on the Hebrew Bible, I devoted a significant amount of time to the motif of infertility. It runs through the whole Bible, from Sarah all the way to Hannah and probably beyond. Women who have trouble bearing children become the mothers of some truly great and important people. Samson's mother, who also is not named, is another example of the infertility. And I think there's kind of a redemption story that runs parallel to that infertility motif where the women perhaps are redeemed because in my opinion, at least worth of a woman in biblical times is her ability to bear children. And when that is compromised and the only recourse is to pray to God. There's obviously no reproductive technology, no infertility doctors in those days. It's only prayer and herbs and roots. This theme. Know if you have trouble with Rachel, rachel, Rebecca, others as well. They seem to be rewarded ultimately. And I think that's a powerful motif and something that we also want to consider.

Rabbi Bearman: I think it's both powerful and incredibly painful as the motif and the idea of God granting or taking away people's ability to have children. And also the idea that motherhood is a gift or a punishment, because the rabbis also give the motherhood of terrible characters to female characters when they want to punish them. For example, Orpa who is the sister in law of Ruth and the daughter in law of Naomi who leaves right. Who goes back to her own homeland at the beginning of the Book of Ruth. And that's a very understandable and normal behavior. Right. She's not done anything wrong. But the rabbis decide that in order to make sure that she is not good in contrast to Ruth, they make her the mother of Goliath, and so they make her the mother of a monster in their stories because that's a way to punish her. So one of the things that I think that contemporary rabbis of all genders, and especially female rabbis, are bringing to conversations around these stories of these biblical stories of fertility and infertility is the sensitivity to say that these are not neutral stories and that the idea of fertility and infertility is something that can cause great pain and hopefully great joy if it's wanted. And that it's important to use these stories in the context of the ancient Near Eastern tropes and also to use them carefully so that we avoid hurting our own people. And not to say that we put them away, but that we teach them and we preach about them in ways that are careful and aware of the pain that they can cause.

Rabbi Parr: I think that's a great closing thought in terms of the complexities of how read and interpret stories that on the surface, we've known these stories since we were children. We're taught in a certain way, and now it's time to reexamine them. Let me ask you as a last question, what do you see as the future of women's biblical studies? Let me rephrase the studies of biblical women, both by men, women, people of other genders as well, because we haven't talked about, for example, if there's an LGBTQ aspect to this or anything else. So where do you see the future in this field of study?

Rabbi Bearman: Well, I can say what I hope the future is, and I think that it's based in reality, so I'm hopeful of it. I think that the amount of perspectives being allowed to increase and being allowed to expand in so many ways can only bring more knowledge and wisdom and depth to our biblical studies. I think that the more perspectives that we have as we're turning over these stories that we've inherited and kept sacred and held sacred for so long can only bring depth of meaning and richness. So I'm very optimistic and excited about the kind of meaning that can be pulled from our text year after year as more and more people and more and more perspectives are added to the conversation. I think the last 50 years of women rabbis and the last couple of hundred years of academic scholarship about the Bible, as opposed to kind of rigorous, only Jewish Torah study has brought us more things to consider and only added to our tapestry. And I think it can only grow more colorful and deeper in so many ways.

Rabbi Parr: Well, I agree with you, and I sure hope that we take into account everyone's perspective and everyone's story, no matter the gender. But looking specifically at these stories of incredible women, I'm really inspired by it. And that motivated me to do this series that we're concluding with this podcast, that I hope we can revisit it and hopefully you'll come back and join us and we can talk further about this or other topics.

Rabbi Bearman: I would be so honored. I would be so honored and I'm so grateful that you've dedicated so much of your podcast to the women of the Bible, and I think they're incredible characters to explore.

Rabbi Parr: Yeah, I appreciate those thoughts. And let's all go from strength to strength. And again, Rabbi Beerman, I do want to thank you for joining us, and I also want to thank you, the listener, for tuning in today for Tour for Christians. As I say in every ending, behold how good and how pleasant it is for us to dwell together as one. We're going to go to the high holiday sequence in our next couple of podcasts with Rosh Hashanah Yom Kippur coming up so quickly. Again, I'll say, till we meet again. And I'm Rabi Jordan Parr, and this has been Torah for Christians.

Rabbi Bearman: Shalom, Shalom.