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Friday April 18, 2003

Torah scholar inspects absence of women in Exodus

DAN PINE
Bulletin Staff

Growing up in Glasgow, Scotland, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg became accustomed to freezing rain and howling winds. Maybe that partly explains why Zornberg pursued a warmer, interior life of the mind.

Today she is one of the world's leading Torah scholars.

The revered teacher, author and lecturer will share some of her insights at an upcoming lecture titled "Through the Looking Glass: Women in the Exodus Narrative." The event takes place Wednesday, May 7 at Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon.

In the aftermath of Passover, her timing couldn't be better.

Zornberg's talk centers on redemption as viewed through an ancient midrash about Exodus, the second book of the Bible. It tells the symbolic story of a husband and wife and a mirror they hold up between them.

"They each say to the other, 'I am more beautiful than you,'" relates Zornberg. "The meaning has to do with a central transformation in the relationship. The mirror is more than a device: the mirror is a looking glass of imagination and distortion."

As only a beautiful mind can do, Zornberg will link this midrash to the Book of Exodus and why women seem so conspicuously absent from most of the text.

"Women fade out very quickly after the first parashah," or Torah portion, she says. "I think [women] stood for some other set of values not described in the Torah at all. I read it psychoanalytically, in that women are repressed, but not any less important. In fact, they represent a profound reality. But one needs sharp ears to hear their voices."

Having earned a doctorate in English literature at Cambridge, Zornberg brings a literary approach to Torah study, employing terms like "foreshadowing," "irony" and "climax" as she illuminates the text.

But Zornberg is no stuffy British academic. A fervently religious Jew who immigrated to Israel more than 30 years ago, she is something of an anomaly. Until recently, Orthodox tradition has not often produced female scholars of Zornberg's stature. Like the title heroine of I.B. Singer's "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," Zornberg was born to study Torah.

Her late father, Dayyan (Judge) Wolf Gottlieb, headed the Rabbinical Court of Glasgow and was himself a renowned scholar. He encouraged and mentored his daughter in her Torah and Talmud studies, something rare in the hardy Scottish city.

"When I was growing up, women were not getting a good religious education," she recalls. "I was very privileged, in that my father devoted a great deal of time teaching me. But I was fairly alone in this."

Happily, she notes, times have changed, and today girls raised in the Orthodox tradition have many more educational opportunities than before. In Zornberg's case, she distinguished herself right away with her scholarship on both secular and sacred texts.

She has taught both English literature and Torah at Hebrew University, Jerusalem College for Adults, Matan, the Sadie Rennert Women's Institute for Torah Study and at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies.

But she is perhaps best known -- and best loved -- for her weekly Torah study, something that began as a kitchen-table-style enterprise and has since gone on to attract regulars from all over Israel.

Zornberg is also a prolific author. Her first book, "Genesis: The Beginning of Desire," won the 1995 National Jewish Book Award for nonfiction. She's also published scholarly essays on the Book of Ruth and the matriarch Sarah. She participated in Bill Moyers' PBS program "Genesis: A Living Conversation," and her newest book, "The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus," is drawing raves from around the world (the title is derived from a Wallace Stevens poem).

Up next, an in-depth exploration of the Book of Leviticus, though Zornberg can't predict how long that project will take.

Zornberg and her Canadian-born husband have three grown children, so she has plenty of time to continue her intellectual pursuits. She lectures around the world several weeks out of the year, and has included Harvard, Yale and the University of London among her ports of call.

Of course, given her passion for Judaism, it isn't all about intellect.

Says Zornberg: "The feeling I have is that the texts I study express, almost like poetry, some of the deepest feelings I have about life and relationships, including my relationship to God."

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