Read this thread until the end.
The texts that must be grappled with are everywhere, even where you don’t think to look. Just in yesterday’s daf, the Talmud says we can’t rely on testimony of a person who experienced something as a child. Would the Sages believe Walder’s victims?
The texts that must be grappled with are everywhere, even where you don’t think to look. Just in yesterday’s daf, the Talmud says we can’t rely on testimony of a person who experienced something as a child. Would the Sages believe Walder’s victims?
https://twitter.com/doc_rps/status/1477587052648706051
Or what about the opinion of the Amora Shmuel’s father, that every married woman who is raped by another man is forbidden to her husband because we must assume she ultimately acquiesced (תחלתה באונס וסופה ברצון)? Would he believe Walder’s victims?
sefaria.org/Ketubot.51b.8
sefaria.org/Ketubot.51b.8
As Dr. RPS said, we need to start grappling with these questions *now*. That means creating new Torah that affords equal respect to the subjective experience of women. And children, and queer people, and disabled people, and every other group of people our tradition marginalizes.
https://twitter.com/wordpaley/status/1475891363828879360
As it happens, the Daf Yomi will soon be starting Seder Nashim, the section of Talmud that deals with marital and sexual relationships. We desperately need new perspectives on these texts from contemporary lenses of gender, sexuality, relationships and more.
Many people have already written on these texts from academic perspectives. Their voices must be amplified, as well as those of people who have not yet shared their Torah.
With that in mind, please DM me if you would be interested in being part of a rotation of writers to write a short thought or question on the daily daf to be sent out as a newsletter and on the Daf Yomi Facebook group I run (facebook.com/groups/5630809…) beginning March 9.
This project will be open to all, but will center the voices of cis and trans women, non-binary and other queer folks, and people with disabilities. The more voices we have, the more powerful they’ll be together (and the less often we’ll all have to write!)
@adinakarp_ and I will also make an additional effort to center these voices on our podcast @interleaved_pod, and focus specifically on texts that marginalize them, as well as issues affecting them (sexual abuse, agunah, discrimination etc.). If you want to be a guest, DM us!
Allowing cishet men to continue their monopoly on interpretation of Torah brought us to this horrible place. The only way forward is to empower everyone else to reclaim these texts by situating them in their historical context and by sharing their uniquely personal perspectives.
Orthobro anons: I can already predict your attacks that I’m not Orthodox. Guess what? I don’t care. I’m shomer Torah u’mitzvos and believe in Torah miSinai. If Orthodoxy means being in community with people who silence victims and leave them for dead, the label means squat to me.
And if your theology can’t accommodate the fact that some of the Sages’ beliefs and halachic decisions were explicitly dismissive of women’s subjectivity because you think everything they said was true, own it. Don’t call others unOrthodox because you can’t handle complexity.
The simplistic, unnuanced beliefs you hold are exactly what got us here. You’re free to believe whatever you want, but don’t expect us to care. You can be left in the dustbin of Jewish history like everyone else who put uncompromising adherence to “tradition” before human life.
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