The following is a transcript of Episode 175 of the Identity/Crisis Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone, welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show about news and ideas from the Shalom Hartman Institute. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Tuesday, February 6th, 2024.

There’s a whole bunch of books in the classical Jewish canon that have the word Midrash in the title, so it would be forgivable if you assumed that a conversation like the one we’re going to have today about Midrash was about one of those books. But confusingly and delightfully, the word Midrash does not merely describe a genre of literature, it actually tries to capture an activity or a process that expands way beyond the bounds of even those books that are explicitly called books of Midrash. 

Midrash loosely means explication or exposition, but it actually tries to capture something more like seeking or inquiring. It’s a means of taking a text and using various inquisitive methods like using other texts as points of reference, in order to try to extract deeper meanings from a text than what’s obvious or plain. It’s oftentimes a playful activity, so we try to tease out coded meanings from loaded language. But most of all, I think Midrash is about layers, because when it’s done right, Midrash exposes layers of meaning within a text, but also adds new layers of meaning atop an existing text. 

Jewish tradition always wanted two things out of Torah at the same time. It wanted the original Torah to be the total repository of all of God’s revealed truth. But it also wanted us to be the kinds of seekers who would be finding new ways of thinking about God’s Torah all throughout the remainder of time. Midrash is basically the essential instrument in our hands in that paradoxical project. 

The first doers of Midrash, I don’t know what the right verb is, the first Midrashists of biblical books were the biblical authors themselves. There’s countless examples of how later biblical books riff off of earlier ones, teasing out what they think those books were supposed to mean, and sometimes completely reversing the earlier meaning with a kind of implicit, explicit commentary. The best example, I think, is the Book of Ruth, which is a kind of commentary on the lawlessness and in-betweenness of the era described in the earlier Book of Judges. And it thickens that story by layering this one on top of that one.

But the biggest and boldest interpretive move that the book of Ruth makes is that it takes an explicit Deuteronomic law, the multi-generational prohibition against marrying an Ammonite or a Moabite, and it flips it on its head. Ruth, the book’s protagonist, is a Moabite, and the heroic ending of the book tells us not only that an Israelite married her, but that she ultimately became the ancestor of our greatest king, King David.

If you read the book of Ruth as Midrash, it’s winking at us. You understood the book of Deuteronomy one way, and I’m gonna show you how you misunderstood it, or maybe how that very meaning was meant to evolve over time. And when you finally get to the layers of actual Midrash, the books called like Ruth Raba, the books properly external to the Bible, books that make no claim to be originally biblical, the rabbinic Midrash on Ruth goes even further. Not only was Ruth a Moabite who married an Israelite, she actually becomes the paradigmatic example for conversion in the Jewish tradition. 

Midrash does something amazing. It starts inside and it moves outside. And over time, Midrash moves from inside the biblical tradition to become books and books, Midrash on Midrash. And yet, over time, Midrash also sometimes becomes more self-conscious and maybe gradually less radical than its earlier strata.

Throughout Jewish history, as the rabbis moved further off the page from commentaries on the book itself to commentaries about commentaries, some ways Rabinah commentary on Bible became more conservative about its claims, maybe sometimes more interested in sustaining a culture of commentary than in forcing us to radically rethink the text itself. 

That is, until the last couple of decades. In the past few years, we’ve seen an explosion of new forms of modern midrash, dramatic forms and ways of rethinking and remaking the biblical text to serve new audiences, but I think more importantly to take into account the interpretive genius of the kinds of scholars who might never have been granted access to the Midrashic process in earlier eras of Jewish history. 

If Midrash is a verb, then in theory all of us who stood at Sinai, who inherited the Revelation, should be able to do it. But canons start open and get closed quickly, and midrash ossifies and it calcifies to become a fixed noun faster than we think. Even today, there’s plenty of purists who hold a very clear distinction between old midrash, which they consider to be good, and new midrash, which they don’t like. 

Sometimes this is fair. Maybe there should be some amount of rules for how midrash is supposed to operate. And yeah, there’s got to be some difference between when someone’s doing the rigorous work of using text to expound on text versus when someone’s just coming along as a novice and rewriting a story to serve their own ideological objectives. But sometimes the distinctions between new Midrash and old Midrash are unfair, and they misrepresent the dynamism of what Midrash was supposed to enable in us, the power of making the text of the Torah come alive for generations and generations to come, depending on the boldness of good readers and writers to find meanings in the text that seem new, but may in fact have been buried there all along, waiting for us to find it. 

The Talmud in tractate Menachot famously depicts Moses traveling in time to the back of the study hall where Rabbi Akiva is teaching Torah, a thousand of years into the future and Rabbi Akiva is expounding on every jot and tittle in the Torah inducing meaning from not just words but from punctuation and Moses becomes fatigued and may be frustrated. How is it possible that Rabbi Akiva seems to be making stuff up? How is it possible that he, Moses, knows less Torah than Rabbi Akiva when he, Moses, stood at Sinai face to face with God? 

It’s only when Rabbi Akiva acknowledges that everything he knows was once embedded in this tradition at the site of the original revelation, that all of this was, in some weird way, Torah for Moses at Sinai, only then Moses can see his place in the story, the same Torah, alive for a new generation, with new eyes to see its majesty. 

At the cutting edge of the most radical work in the evolution of Midrash today is an absolutely audacious interpretive project called Toratah, an effort to rewrite the Torah by regendering all of its characters. This is harder than it looks. One does not merely press Ctrl-F on the Torah, locate masculine names and declensions. There’s an immense amount of creative work trying to represent the kinds of ideas that those names were meant to carry, which can’t simply be regendered by adding or subtracting a hey or a yud, finding new ways to express the Torah’s ideas, there are significant plot consequences. The Midrashic authors trying to help us make sure we can study and understand the Torah rather than trying to make it into something totally new. 

After all, if your objective was to write something new, don’t start with an old book. Most of all, I think, the hard work lies in making Toratah something that helps us see or understand or love the Torah for what it is, and even for where it falls short, the kind of stuff that becomes newly possible when you apply this kind of creative lens. 

I’m joined today by the two leaders of the Toratah project. Yael Kanarek is an artist from New York. Tamar Biala is an author and teacher in Jerusalem. As I understand it, Yael initiated the project, was later joined by Tamar to edit the second draft of Toratah. Tamar, of course, is not new to Midrash. She’s the leader of the Dirshuni project, also a moment in the history of Midrash, which consists of Midrashic commentaries authored by women. 

The Toratah project is growing with more and more biblical books being translated beyond the original five books, but also now expanding to include more commentaries on the translated Bible, Midrash on Midrash, as well as really interesting cultural outputs in the next couple of weeks. The Torah project will be debuting and releasing a first album in which musicians took Toratah language and set some of its verses to song. We’ll talk about that a little bit later in the show. Thank you both for coming on the show. 

And I guess I’ll start with you, Yael, we’ll start in the beginning as one does. What was the problem that you saw yourself wanting to solve by getting involved in this kind of?

Yael: Thank you, Yehuda. Thanks for having us on the show. I also, I just want to make a comment that you codified it as midrash, so we’re gonna talk about it through that lens, but there are multiple lenses also. For that, we find it as wide as Toratoh, his Torah, or Torah is commonly known. 

I studied Kabbalah for over 10 years, and it was actually in the studies of Kabbalah that I was reintroduced to the presence of the Nukba, the feminine, in a much more significant way that I ever met it in Torah. And also the study of Kabbalah taught me to read Torah as a book that talks about the inner powers. Not so much stories about, you know, people walking on the land, but each character represents a quality within me, and they are in a particular dynamics. And that dynamic has the quality of tikkun. That’s how I was introduced to it. 

But over the years, I don’t know why I gravitated towards that. For years I didn’t understand anything that was spoken to me. I heard thousands of hours, but it couldn’t stop. It was very strange. They use Hebrew in a completely different way. So I don’t know why I wanted that, but I really, really wanted that. 

So I had the fuel to take it in and over the years, what happens is that a kind of inner construction emerges through which I was able to understand the world in an applicable way. That was the great surprise. And that was the first time that I felt, okay, there is actually an applicable wisdom in this. Somebody figured out something. I wanted that. But I always felt that as a woman, I’m on the outskirts of where the center of dynamic happens where the energy, the direct energy is working through. 

So after about 10 years, I reached an impasse. I felt that I could not progress anymore in this spiritual quest because I was just not close enough to the source of the text in the way it’s constructed. So I was very frustrated and I looked around and I couldn’t find any books that codified lashon ishah, women’s tongue, in the sacred in a direct way.

And I did come across a book that was found with Gnostic text in Egypt called Thunder Perfect Mind. And it was the first time that I actually read text that speaks in sacred terms from the perspective of a woman deity. And I was like, wow, okay, all right. That’s the texture of this. But how do I find it in the language that is so deeply embedded in me from a very young age?

And so then I was like, you know, where, how do you write a book like that? How is it written? You know, what are the mechanisms? What’s the purpose of it? What drives it? All these kind of really abstract, meta-questions that just started to kind of bubble up. 

So then I just, you know, thought, what if we just swap the genders? How would that feel? So I went to Genesis and I just went to the Genesis 1:27. This is the moment that we actually in our minds create the God. Once you read it there is a construction, a relationship, that is formed that wasn’t there before.

And I did it in a more rudimentary way that what we have now since Tamar joined me really deepened it. But it was, you know, and Elohim created the Chava in her image and the image of Elohim, she created her. Female and male, she created them. And I looked up and the ceiling did not fall on my head. 

But I was really stunned by the difference of how that felt. It’s like I felt the volume of the text at like volume 10 versus volume 2. Suddenly I knew something about the Elohim that I never knew because now it’s likeness after image. This is an intimacy there. There’s a kind of direct relationship. There’s an agency there that I never ever experienced. I could tell you something about the Elohim because I’m like her. That was never ever available to me. 

So I was, you know, naturally, I was like, what else is there? You know, this is so delicious. What else is there? So it took four years and I finished the Chumash thanks to COVID. And then not too long after that, I met Tamar, my spiritual shidduch.

Yehuda: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’ll come to Tamar in a second, but I want to stay with you for one other question, which is, you know, you resisted the term of Midrash and I want to unpack why. And I guess the reason why it strikes me as Midrash is because the way you started your story is the way that interpreters of the Bible have always started their work, which is, I’m seeking something that represents personal and spiritual meaning, I go towards the source, the repository, and I don’t quite find it there. 

And that to me is like the birth of the Midrashic instinct. I know that there’s a truth here. I know there’s something I need. If I can’t find it directly in the text, I’m gonna find it indirectly in the text, or I will tell you, as the rabbis oftentimes do with classical Midrash, “al tikri,” one of my favorite lines. Don’t read that word to sound like this, make it sound like this, and then it’s a totally different word, and now I got whatever I needed. So that’s what it felt midrashic about it, but tell me why you bristled a little bit about the rendering of this work as midrashic.

Yael: I think that for me I just needed a core text that I can perceive as a source text. And I didn’t, you know, I don’t know how to find it. So I think and also the other thing that is happening in Toratah, which we discovered over time is that it opens our thought in a unique way that is not possible through Torahto. It goes beyond reading. 

It’s as if I have two spiritual legs, which I never had before. It builds me. At least that’s how I understand Midrash, as a commentary on, that the Makor Haneviah, the spring, or the well kind of springs from is in Torah. That’s our spiritual spring. Even though, you know, it’s perfectly fine with me that people understand it as Midrash or people understand it as a thought experiment. However, you know, you need to come to it. 

But the source from where I come from is wanting to get closer to that and that’s why I personally experience it, and it’s all about experience, it’s not an intellectual exercise. This is very, very visceral. That said, Toatah just opened a door. So I don’t even necessarily think of Toratah as a sealed book. I think of it as a door that just opened. What is Toratah 2.0? I don’t know. This is the first step that we understand to do. So hopefully we start to see the lashon ishah library grow beyond that.

Yehuda: Yeah. So Tamar, when you came into this project, actually using the metaphor I used at the beginning as like a midrash writer who’s coming into the text itself. So I’m curious what you saw in this project as something that made you want to latch onto and participate in and help it grow.

Tamar: Yes, so I also don’t see Toratah as a midrash. 

Yehuda: Great. 

Tamar: So I spent 20 years in a row trying to justify the place of the Bible in my world. Justified hearing it again and again in shul, talking about it in the Shabbos table, teaching my daughters that this is a holy scripture, that this is our sacred text. And the Midrash helped me justify, or I tried to find strategies to see the others as if sides that are hidden there that say moral things when it actually doesn’t say a moral thing. 

And I still am investing a lot of energy in Midrash. I’m working now on new volumes of Dirshuni, both in English and in Hebrew. This is a strategy that keeps the Bible, the traditional Bible, in the center. But Toratah adds another Bible to the shelf of the Jewish Bibles. And it’s a different original core text.

I’ve been writing midrashim on Toratah recently, so I know the difference. The Bible itself is given already, so Toratah, we’re changing the genders, and it changes everything, but we don’t change the stories or the laws, and we have to struggle with many dilemmas that we have in the original Torah. 

But the experience is totally different. As Yael said, I don’t need “ezer k’negdo.” I don’t need, I’m not the helper of the male when he stands directly in front of God. Now it’s me in front of a Goddess and weird enough, sometimes it’s very heavy. You know, as a religious woman, I was frustrated most of my life, how come I’m not being ordered to do this and that? And now after we ended many books after the Chamishah Chomshei Torah, after the five books of Moshe, but when we finished the first round of five books of Moshe, I was exhausted to be in the main place in front of God. God chases humanity or the Jewish people, the B’not Tisraelah, the daughters of Tisraelah, non-stop. This is very exhausting, this is very heavy. It was a weird experience. 

But I have to say, you know, honestly, the challenges that Toratah raises are different from the set that I grew up on. Of course, there are always the moral dilemmas about you know, the racism or power structures, whatever. 

But it’s also, Toratah deals with, it imagines a non-patriarchal world, that I’ve never experienced. Even if I write midrashim from the Torah, it will be from my patriarchal experience. But Torah is non-patriarchal, it’s very weird. And I’m trying to feel a little bit what it means, how it feels in the body, in the mind, I can tell you that after the few first days working with Yael, when I was walking downstairs on Derech Hevron, it’s a main road under our building, and I was, you know, crossing the street and I felt that it’s like I just learned how to walk in the world. I was a different person.

You know, years of therapy didn’t do what few hours spending, you know, in Toratah, dwelling in Toratah can do to a woman. It’s you in the center and it’s legitimate. And the goddess is similar to you and wants you. So this is a new Torah, really, another Torah. 

Yehuda: Yeah, no, it is. Yeah, I mean, and I love that you said the word weird because for you to admit the weirdness is also empathetic to your readers or maybe to our listeners, who on one hand, you said it felt weird and then you felt in essence liberated by it or transformed by it. Can you talk about the weirdness a little bit? About the strangeness or the uncomfortableness that you both experience as writers and readers of what you’re doing and what you have heard or anticipate hearing from people outside of the project?

Tamar: Yes. So the weirdness. I can describe the, Yael is usually doing the writing and we’re struggling with every letter, not just every word, and we’re having very fire-like conversations. And one day she didn’t have time and I had to work on a certain book by myself. It was a chapter that I’m very attached to. It’s a certain nevuah. 

And I was working, and that was the first time I, in my bare hands, was rewriting the Bible. That’s a great sin for a girl like me, that grew up like me. I was physically shivering, even though I did it with Yael many, many times before. So first of all, it’s the, it’s the physical experience of doing something dangerous or, I understand the weight of what I’m doing. The shift is huge. 

Then there are new feelings that the content is creating in me. To see myself in a different way than I used to see myself, to see my body, I’ll just give one example. Yael loves, in Toratah, the stories and many, you know, especially Genesis, of course, with all the Kabbalistic weight that has there. I actually love the book of Vatikra. It used to be Leviticus. Now it’s the Kohanot, it’s the priestesses, that run the kodesh, the sanctity. 

And what defines kodesh, we understand it more by what defines tum’ah, defilement. So there are several things that cause defilement, we all know, but the main one of them is the woman’s blood and the man’s sperm. These things cause tum’ah. And we walk with these feelings all our lives. And it has different halakhic weight because the semen’s defilement was lost over the years. It was canceled. But women’s bleeding still has its weight. And it has a lot of subconscious guilt or heavy feelings that come with it.

And Toratah changes everything. The niddah, the women’s bleeding, has no halakhic status anymore. It’s men’s bleeding that unable them to come close. If they have urine infection and their bleeding, they can’t sacrifice, et cetera. And since the sperm doesn’t play a role anymore, it’s the woman’s, something that has to do with her sexuality that has the weight that the semen had before. 

So I won’t go deeper into this, but we had to think a lot how to replace the semen in something that has to be in the women’s body. And I will just invite anyone who hears the podcast to get into our website beittoratah.org. The Toratah has an H in it in the end. And I have a blog there that describes those depths that we find as we’re working and how we invented new term that has to do with women’s sexuality, that makes them come closer or further from the kodesh, and it explains what kodesh is in a new way too.

Yehuda: Yeah, Yael, coming to you, I mean, the very way in which you framed the opening described almost, I don’t think you used this exact phrase, but almost a search for self and a search for comfort. So I don’t know that you would use the term the weirdness, but I’m curious whether you’ve had moments of being turned around by this project or how it’s been, how you’ve been visibly identified with this project for a number of years now, especially in the New York area, the kinds of reactions that you’ve found that elicited in others.

Yael: I just want to say something about the weirdness that actually comes back to Torahto, the second chapter has the in Torah the creation of the woman out of the side of the man. In Toratah the man is coming out of the woman and once you read that, suddenly Torahto starts to look very weird, because how that ever turned around.

 

And also we have in Torahto creation stories that don’t have a birth. But in Toratah, we can understand the third chapter in the garden as a celestial womb, where the serpent is a metaphor for the umbilical cord. And that starts that creates a completely different reading for the whole story. Now we’re talking about the gestation and birth and the birth is inevitable, and how does that separation happen? So we get to talk about other things. 

So it’s really interesting how Toratah starts to change the reading of Torahto as well. It becomes a very dynamic experience of the texts.

Regarding critique or pushback. So I think the pushback, at least for me, has kind of, I would say, maybe four different categories. I just want to say in general that we got a lot less pushback so far than what I initially anticipated, which is amazing to us..

Yehuda: Yeah, it is amazing.

Yael: So I got a few random emails from, I think, Orthodox men hiding behind fake emails, and they used kind of magical language to reprimand me. So that’s expected. The other email, I got one very angry email from an Israeli feminist, because Toratah is not a feminist book. But what it does do is that it has a feminist desired effect on us. And that’s a very strange thing. But that, so we have, you know, that kind of feedback. 

I did get pushback from non-binary rabbinic students who felt that, why are we doing the binary all over again? Why not go straight to gender-neutral form? So in Hebrew it’s not possible because the language is completely binary. I am aware of the non-binary Hebrew project, but when I was trying to apply it, the language just fell apart, so maybe that’s something for the future in Hebrew. In English, I was able to create an example of what a gender-neutral form would look like by translating the meanings of the names. So Avraham or Em-Ra’amah, high parent, took their child “They will laugh” to sacrifice them. So now we have you know, the structure of the story, gender fluid. But again, this is a project for someone else to pick up and run with, which I hope will happen. So that was pushback. 

And I got an interesting pushback. And I think I hear that, and that’s from an Israeli woman who was in her seventies. And for her, centering the story on women felt like a security concern. And the only way I understand that was, maybe because, you know, I was raised in Israel and went to the secular public school system and the way we studied Tanakh was very, very much part of the Zionist philosophy. And I feel that part of its purpose was to prove our right to the land. So by changing that and now also the geography changes. So, Mitzrayim becomes Mitzirot and Cana’an becomes Cen’onah. Suddenly that ground has kind of fell from under her. So these are the kind of four category moralists of pushback that I got. And Tamar would you like to expand on that?

Tamar: Yeah, most people, again, because we’ve been teaching the last three years every Sunday, many, hundreds of people arrive to the classes over the years, really from all over the world. So most people that are coming enjoy it tremendously and give a wonderful, wonderful feedback. But I’ll mention two bad stories. 

One was by an Orthodox woman, psychologist, actually, that studied with me a certain course in women’s yeshiva in Jerusalem last year. I didn’t want to say what I’m doing. Eventually she understood what I’m doing and her first respond was, I want to kill you. Now. Yeah, thank God, thank Goddess she didn’t do that. 

But there was another respond by a friend of mine in shul that joined the class we did for Purim two years ago by Zoom. We read the scroll of Mordechai. Fascinating, fascinating scroll. And in the middle of reading it, she stopped the lesson of everyone. And she said, I can’t go on doing it. You have ruined my like defense mechanism that I had. 

She knew all along that the Bible is very patriarchal, but she managed to teach herself, she found this illusionary way, I don’t know, to come to shul every Shabbos and not to see what she sees and to think of other things and, you know, all the strategies that we have in order not to be hurt, not to hurt so much, facing the fact that our tradition is so patriarchal. So she said that while studying Torah, it like tore that little shawl that she had over her heart, and now she’ll have to face it all again.

Yehuda: Yeah, I was gonna ask about the non-binary critique because to me, less from a standpoint of like, who’s being included and excluded, but more from the kind of ideological perspective that Torah essentially preserves one of the ultimate modern critiques of what Hebrew has left with us, which is the inability to get outside of the binary framework of gender. 

You addressed that a little bit, and I, I guess what you’re saying is you’re going to leave to someone else to come along and maybe de-gender the Torah. Is that right?

Yael: Yes, but I have a little more to add to this. So once we build in ourselves the points of reference and the way of thinking that Toratah offers, we can bring the two sides together to what we call Torah Shleimah. And this is really the bigger vision here.

So once we’re bringing together, there are several things that become possible. One, attention becomes on the action and less the characters, because now the characters can shift in your mind, so the action becomes center. The other thing that becomes possible is we can take characters from Toratah and from Torahto and build new families. So we can have Em-Ra’amah, who was Abraham, and Sarah from Torahto, and now they’re the mothers of the nation, or Avraham and Sar, and they’re the fathers of the nation. And we can start seeing the stories from that perspective. 

Also, Toratah and Torahto, for example, in the case of the laws, expand or cancel each other, so that becomes like another tool of way of looking at the stories. How do they affirm or tear apart certain aspects of this? So we basically gain many more tools of looking at the story. I feel that without building Toratah, women’s lens, what happens if we just go to gender neutral is we are expanding the familiar, which is the current construction? We know what it is. 

So without Toratah, we’re missing a bookend. We don’t know where it ends because there’s just not enough points of reference in our mind and our heart to work with. And that’s the reason that we can’t not take that particular step. I think it’s absolutely essential.

Yehuda: Yeah. So let me ask a technical question about one of the translation choices that you make. And I really do encourage our listeners not just to read Toratah, but to read it aloud. It makes a very big difference to read it aloud and to hear it aloud.

 One basic question, when you translate the primary created human. You use the word Chova as opposed to “Chava.” Can you talk about that a little bit? That was surprising to me, because it felt like one of those places where you might simply have swapped the names, but you chose to modify the punctuation of the name of Chava. Can you talk about that choice?

Yael: Sure, okay, let me just backtrack. In most of the cases, we regender the name itself. So Yitzhak becomes Titzhak, Yaakov, Taakov. There are two cases where we swap the characters. One is the creation stories, because Adam to Adama just fell apart, basically. Adama means soil. And in the story of Megillat Mordechai where we swap the characters. 

But we know that the punctuation arrived by the Masorah in the 8th century and we also know that it’s a form of commentary. So when we looked at the name Chava, its origin, even though the Torah itself does a midrash on it, its origin is unclear. The meaning of the name Chava is unclear. 

But when we moved from Chava to Chova, suddenly that really opens up enormous amount of meaning. So basically what Chova means is “she is experiencing” or “chova de’ah” means she’s opinionating. So now we have the first creation as an entity that can feel and can express. Maybe it’s not even a woman yet. Maybe it’s just that capacity. And maybe that’s the capacity that is in likeness after image, the capacity to feel and the capacity to express.

Yehuda: Tamar, what’s another example that our listeners might be able to identify with as a kind of surprising decision that emerged from the process of trying to do what, what, Yael, I heard you doing, which is, you can’t simply swap this word for this word. You have to really probe what the consequences are for language more generally, what is colloquially understood as the language, but also to help our learners and readers of this tradition really understand what it’s trying to do. 

So maybe Tamar, you have any other kind of examples that were surprising to you throughout this process?

Tamar: So, I never noticed, even though for the last 54 years, I read Torah every year, I never noticed that there are hundreds and hundreds of names of places of people in the Chumash. So we had to change each and every name, and we had to understand what’s the meaning of the name and then change it to the feminine version of it. So that was an experience. And I will just give a few examples. One is for the name of the country, that is what Israel now and it used to be Cana’an. So we just added the hei in the end that usually, kamatz hey turns many names into female. And we played with it and we change it to Cen’onah. She answers. Yes, yes she answers. This is a country that the daughters of Tisraelah, it’s their dream to get there and dwell there. And this is a place that you say yes to life. 

Over the years when we taught it, people said it was extremely meaningful for them. And it’s just a little present in the way. It wasn’t even, you know, regendering a person. I do want to relate to something we spoke before about the binary genders of the Bible and how limiting it is. 

So there, the big surprise for me, working on regendering the people and we also regendered animals, is that all the women gained characteristics and behaviors of men. It’s not a feminist book the way I studied women’s studies and we studied women’s ethics, women’s psychology, women’s theology. I worked for years in women’s theology. It’s not a feminist book that way. It doesn’t offer us a different way to run the world. 

It just teaches you that if you had the power that men had, you may behave like this. And this is very challenging for every woman. It’s terrifying to see herself as the one who is raping, is conquering, has to decide who to keep alive and who not. So we asked ourselves a lot, is this a feminist action? What are we doing? 

And I personally think that this is the next stage of feminism. See ourselves not only as victims and not to try to do everything in a different way, which is still important, but also to have enough confidence to face our human side that may behave aggressively when we will have power in our hands, as we see in the politics of these women in Israel.

Yehuda: As we see today. Yeah. Let me ask you one. So let me ask you one last question, which is, you know, the next era of this work moved from being text on a page to manifesting Toratah in the world, and that has included public readings in ritual context. So I don’t think, if I’m not mistaken, I don’t think there’s a scroll yet. I saw a rabbi post on Facebook that they have Toratah Tefillin. So there are scribes who are taking Toratah and turning it into the same ritual use. 

And then in the next couple of weeks at Central Synagogue, there’s a concert where you’re releasing these songs into the world. I can tell you on a personal level, I was in the home of Rabbi Angela Buchdal and she played us a song from the album of Osah Shalom. And it was, it was, it felt like simultaneously totally normal and natural and then also like wild, like exciting in a way that text comes alive when you’ve heard it differently. 

I’m curious for both of you, what has changed for you about this project as the work that you’ve done has moved from an art project of the mind to a project of ritual? 

Tamar: My heart is not, I’m not there yet on the ritual level, but I can say that I had a shift in me moving from working on Toratah, the endless, endless, endless hours that we were working on Toratah, into moving and writing midrashim on Toratah. That was a shift in me. 

When I realized that it’s the Toratah, I don’t know whether to say sacred enough, but it’s strong enough to have lively fruits. It has enough secrets to blow your mind through a midrash, revealing it through a midrash. So this is what I’m doing in life and I found myself there too. I found it there too.

Yael: I’m an artist. That’s what I do and I work in various media and I work I’ve been working for the last 25 years in the area of language and form. So for me, it’s very natural to want to see the text find its way into different forms. We also, as humans, we receive and we receive information in different ways. So some of us are more sensitive to text. Some of us are moved by music. Some of us are moved by image. And I feel that for Toratah to move into the world, it needs to move through all these channels. So for me, it’s very, very natural to explore it in this way. 

In tandem with the concert, we’re also opening an exhibition of visual midrashim that I’ve created. These are visual works of text that are going to be on view for three months at Central and after the concert, we’re going to do a reception and it will be the official opening of that exhibition. 

I just want to say that recently I started doing experiments with AI, imaging generation, to create images, visual images for Toratah. And I do have images of now an older woman sending the dove from the ark and we’re looking at it and it’s really challenging our perception of how we see, you know, older women and putting that image in Nocha, is really quite striking. So we’re using all the tools that are available to us to manifest the text and allow people to enter in it or allow them to allow to enter them. It’s really exciting.

Yehuda: Well, thank you all so much for listening to our show this week and special thanks to our guests this week, Yael Kanarek and Tamar Biala. 

Identity/Crisis is produced by Tessa Zitter. Our executive producer is Maital Friedman. This episode was produced with assistance from Sarina Shohet and Gabrielle Finestone and edited by Gareth Hobbs at Silver Sound NYC, with music provided by So Called. 

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