Rabbi Dalia Marx, PhD, is the author of From Time to Time: Journeys in the Jewish Calendar, now available from CCAR Press. In this excerpt, she discusses the importance of acknowledging the crucial role that women play in the Passover story and elsewhere in Jewish tradition.
Many women sense that elements of Jewish tradition leave them mute and unrepresented. We cannot deny the exclusion of women from the public realm over the course of far too many generations, but if we take a close look at the events that form the basis of the Passover holiday, we will find that strong, active, and optimistic women occupy a central place in the narrative. This is an important precedent for women in our time who are looking for their place in Jewish tradition. The story of the redemption from Egypt began and was made possible by dint of the actions of dedicated women who refused to give in to despair.
The Hebrew women refused to knuckle under to Pharaoh’s murderous order and continued to bring life into this world. Jochebed, Moses’s mother, is one of them; she gave birth and protected her son from Pharaoh’s decree. Her daughter, Miriam, hid the newborn in a basket of reeds and set him floating on the Nile. The midwives who attended Jochebed also chose the path of rebellion and showed mercy to the Hebrew babies. Who were those midwives? Pharaoh called them “the Hebrew midwives” (Exodus 1:15). It is possible to read this and understand they are “Hebrew midwives,” but it is also possible to read the phrase as “the midwives of the Hebrews,” meaning that they themselves were not Hebrews but bravely cooperated with the women of the enslaved nation to keep the newborn boys alive.
Pharaoh’s daughter herself refused to take part in her father’s murderous plans. When she saw the helpless baby brought to her by the Nile, her human compassion overruled her social and class attachments. A midrash calls Pharaoh’s daughter “Bityah” (see Babylonian Talmud, M’gillah 13a), and she has been regarded by the Jewish tradition as a righteous woman and even a Jew-by-choice. Miriam then ensured that Jochebed, her mother, would be the one to nurse Moses in Pharaoh’s house, so that he would imbibe—both literally and figuratively—his first human experiences in the arms of the people Israel.
Reading Jewish sources with a fresh eye makes it possible for women to demand their rightful place. This is not a mere act of intellectual sophistication, nor is it bending the texts to one’s own will. Just the act of reading the sources anew is liberating. It gives expression to multiple pure voices that have been suppressed and silenced—and after all, liberation is one of the central themes of Passover. Many people are now attempting not only to make the place of women equal to that of men at the seder table, but also to find special ways to highlight their function and role in the story of the nation and the family.
Rabbi Dalia Marx, PhD, is the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Professor of Liturgy at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion (HUC-JIR) in Jerusalem. She is the chief editor of T’filat HaAdam, the Israeli Reform prayer book (MaRaM, 2020). From Time to Time: Journeys in the Jewish Calendar was first published in Israel in 2018 as Bazman and has been translated into German, Spanish, and now English.
