Did ancient rabbis alter a seminal Jewish text in order to exclude women from public prayer roles and religious and communal leadership? The evidence is that they did.
As many of you know, Professor Marc B. Shapiro has a new book out called Changing The Immutable: How Orthodox Judaism Rewrites Its History (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization).
This post isn't meant to be a full review of the book. Instead, I'll just deal with one interesting topic Shapiro mentions and in the process of doing that, I'll very briefly point out an issue with Shapiro's mindset.
In dealing with ancient Jewish texts that have clearly been altered by later rabbis, Shapiro sometimes portrays those alterations as something that was likely done not out of the desire to censor the text per se, but instead to restore it to what they imagined it originally was. This was often done when the earlier text professed a belief or practice the later rabbis believed to be incorrect and/or which was against the practice they were familiar with.
Shapiro cites two examples given by Tal Ilan in her book, Mine and Yours Are Hers: Retrieving Women's History from Rabbinic Literature (Brill).
The first is a mishna that cites a halakha in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua. But the Tosefta which is earlier than the mishna cites the same halakha in the name of Beruriah, the wife of Rabbi Meir. In the Tosefta, she teaches the halakha to Rabbi Yehoshua.
Shapiro notes that Ilan also points out examples of the Tosefta sportively talking about women studying Torah and putting on tefillin (phylacteries). But when those passages are cited in the Babylonian Talmud, they have been censored to remove any idea that women are allowed to study Torah or put on tefillin.
In other words, the rabbis of the Mishna and the Talmud altered an earlier authoritative text to support their view and what was then the common practice of forbidding women from studying Torah, putting on tefillin, and filling rabbinic-like (or simply rabbinic) roles.Shapiro cites another scholar, Daniel Boyarin, who points out that the Tzitz Eliezer (Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, 1915-2006) specifically writes that this is the case.
I think to assume the rabbis who altered these texts did so only with the purest of motives is unsupported by history. All we need do is look around us today or even look back 100 or 200 years in history (or for that matter, 500 or 1,000), to find many rabbis behaving poorly and making decisions for reasons any objective observer would say are less than wholesome. Why should believe that every or even most of the rabbis who lived 1,800 years ago or 1,300 years ago were any more pure? After all, we know many of the characters in Tanakh (the Hebrew bible) were far from honest and good, including kings and priests and other leaders. Why should any rational person believe that suddenly, rabbis appeared on the scene and were honest, good and pure people almost without exception until sometime in Middle Ages or later? It makes no sense.
That doesn't mean that the rabbis of the Talmud hated women – although some, perhaps many or even most, clearly had at best ambivalent feelings about them.And that also doesn't mean that these rabbis were rank censors – although the case can clearly be made that many, if not most, were.
But whatever the motivation, what these supposedly near-infallible men did was shoot a proverbial arrow into a wall, draw a target around it, and then yell "bullseye!" They decided what the truth must be and then altered the facts to make that "truth" possible.How many times did they do this? What other halakhas were changed or scrapped or added in this way?
Likely many.
Most of know little about this because the Orthodox and haredi rabbis we deal with don't speak about it publicly.
But in at the very least this one case, in a time when women are being ordained and haredi and Orthodox rabbis are opposing them, isn't it time to scream from the rooftops that those rabbis are basing themselves on texts that were altered or censored in order to discriminate against women? Isn't it time?