Rather than speak directly about this week's parashah, I'd like to tell you something about each of my last two Shabbatot:
1) I was in Berlin last week for a conference that began Sunday evening. I thus had the privilege of spending the Shabbat beforehand, Shabbat Hayyei Sarah (Friday night Oct. 29th and Saturday Oct. 30th), at the Oranienburger Strasse Synagogue. While with the community for Shabbat lunch, I was invited to lead Birkat haMazon, the blessings after a meal. My colleague Rabbi Gesa Ederberg, who is the spiritual leader of this congregation, assured me that I should include the names of the matriarchs if that is my usual practice. And so I said as follows:
May the Merciful One bless all the members of this community, and all who have dined here, as well as us and all that is ours, as our foremothers Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah were blessed, "dealt well," "goodly," "good," "good"; and as our forefathers were blessed, "in all," "from all," "all"...
Afterwards, a Reform rabbinic (and academic) colleague who was also visiting for the conference came up to me to ask me about the liturgy I had used, and more specifically the way in which I had included our foremothers to the traditional mention of the forefathers in the prayer. "I've heard that version before," she said, "but do you know where it comes from?"
In fact, I do. I helped write it. Let me be clear that I do not take full credit for this innovation, and in the long-run I care much more about advancing the egalitarian, inclusive impulse in Judaism than about how any particular innovation, including my own, came about. There's even something quite intriguing about seeing the process of a specific suggestion from a specific source become "normative," become just "the way we do it when we include the matriarchs." That being said, my colleague encouraged me to write about the process of creating this liturgical innovation, and so, since there are at least some connections to this week's parashah that I will note below, here goes...
This innovation is part of a birkon (or bencher, if you prefer the Yiddish...), a book that contains the meal-related prayers and songs for Shabbat, holidays, and other celebrations, that I helped produce with a group of fellow rabbinic students and significant others, almost twenty years ago. My husband and I were already married at the time, but many of the others in the group were in the process of planning weddings. They wanted a birkon to distribute at their celebrations that at least in its translations did not presume that God or the typical human being must be male. Being all in favor of such a project, if not in immediate need of it (though we have since used the birkonin our family for my brother and sister-in-law's wedding and the b'nai mitzvah celebrations of both my children), I volunteered myself to join in; the birkon "Mizmor Shir," published by the Ktav Publishing House, would be the eventual fruit of our labors. Among the tasks I took upon myself as a member of the committee was drafting an appropriate form for adding the matriarchs.
Guiding me in my exploration of the best way to do this was an article by Harry P. Solomon, "Including the Matriarchs: A Proposal for Birkat ha-Mazon," published in Reconstructionist in March of 1988. Solomon points out that there is a scriptural, midrashic basis for the way in which the patriarchs have always been mentioned in this prayer. We do not say just that the patriarchs were blessed (and ask that God similarly bless us), but note that they were blessed "in all," "from all," "all" (in Hebrew, bakol, mikol, kol). Each word refers to a different verse and a different patriarch:
"Abraham was now old, advanced in years, and the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things." (Gen. 24:1)
"...and I ate of all of it before you came and I blessed him..." (Gen. 27:33; Isaac speaking to Esau after blessing Jacob)
"...for God has favored me and I have all..." (Gen. 33:11; Jacob speaking to Esau on their reunion)
The first and third (Abraham and Jacob) clearly indicate blessing from God to the patriarch in question. And although the middle verse (Isaac) seems a bit of a stretch - in context, Isaac would appear to be saying that he ate all the meat that Jacob brought him while disguised as Esau - the rabbis read it too as a broad blessing:
RR. Yehudah said: "from all" that was created during the six days of creation. R. Nehemiah said: "from all" the good that is prepared for the righteous in the time to come. (Genesis Rabbah 67:2)
Solomon argues that in light of these scriptural allusions in the prayer, "simply inserting a reference to the matriarchs presents problems. It detracts from the individual nature of the patriarch's blessings...and ignores any unique blessings of the matriarchs."
His approach, therefore, was to seek out a word or idea that could similarly link the matriarchs both to God's blessings and to each other. He concluded that he could only find a root to link three of the four, each a variant on the Hebrew word tov, good:
"And it went well (hetiv) with Abram because of her [Sarah]..." (Gen. 12:16)
"The young woman [Rebecca] was of goodly (tovat) appearance..." (Gen. 24:16)
"Better (tov) that I give her [Rachel] to you than that I give her to another man..." (Gen. 29:15)
For Leah, he proposed a verse that used the word malei, full (of) (Gen. 29:27), so as to produce this phrasing for the blessing: "As our foremothers were blessed...'he dealt well' 'with the goodness' 'full of' 'goodness.'" (Note that the verses about Rachel and Leah both come from this week's parashah, in which the two matriarchs figure prominently).
I found it an intriguing, compelling suggestion, but something about it also felt not quite right. In context, for example, the word malei regarding Leah was actually a directive to Jacob: "Wait until (or more literally: Fulfill) the bridal week of this one..." I went searching through the stories of the matriarchs for more clues towards something that linked them, and came across another verse, also from this week's parashah, that seemed to me to be the strongest use of tov to refer to a matriarch, one that actually encapsulated a sense of blessing from God. It comes as Leah names her sixth son, Zevulun:
"God has given me a good (tov) dowry..." (Gen. 30:20)
And so we had a "tov" reference for each matriarch. There is no prior midrashic tradition that links them, or tries to expand them (as did the midrash on Gen. 27:33) from their initial contexts into broad blessings of God, ways in which God did good for the matriarchs. But we did not necessarily expect to find such a midrash; part of the work of creating a more egalitarian Judaism is for us to create such midrash. We put our newly formulated prayer into our birkon as an option, with a note about its sources in the back, and sent our innovation out into the world. It doesn't need to have our names on it for me to be any more pleased about how far it has gone since.
2) As I have mentioned before in at least one of my drashot here, I am currently involved in studying "daf yomi," a process of learning one page of the Talmud every day until one has learned the entire work at least once. I am currently in the tractate Horayot, and last Shabbat (after returning from Germany, and with all the thoughts about the matriarchs and Birkat ha-Mazon in my head), I came across a short passage on 10b that gave me a whole new insight/idea on a midrashic link between the matriarchs and God's blessing - one that already exists in the tradition, and one rich in connections to strong female figures in Jewish history even beyond just the matriarchs. Under discussion is a verse from the book of Judges. It is part of the song of victory sung by the prophet Devora, and praises Yael, the woman who killed the enemy general, Sisera:
"Most blessed of women be Yael...Most blessed of women in tents." (Judges 5:24)
This is, if I may say so, a somewhat cryptic blessing. And I'm not alone in thinking so. "Who are the 'women in tents'," the Talmud asks; what have they to do with the blessing of Yael? They are, the Talmud says in answer to its own question, the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. And in fact, each is associated with a tent in the biblical text:
"They said to him, 'Where is your wife Sarah?' And he replied, 'There, in the tent.'" (Gen. 18:9)
"Isaac then brought her into the tent of his mother Sarah, and he took Rebecca as his wife..." (Gen. 24:67)
"So ban went into Jacob's tent and Leah's tent...Leaving Leah's tent, he entered Rachel's tent." (Gen. 31:33 - our parashah once more!)
The highest praise Devora can offer Yael is to say that she is as blessed before God and the community of Israel as were the women of the tents, our Matriarchs.
I'm still considering the possible liturgical implications. I remain proud of what we suggested twenty or so years ago and how it has begun to permeate egalitarian Jewish practice, but the midrashic links between the verses we drew on, as noted above, are not as strong as I might like them to be. In the last few days, I have been considering new variations for the Birkat ha-Mazon, perhaps something like: "may we be blessed by the Merciful One like the women in tents, like our matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah; like our patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were blessed..."
Liturgy has always been an on-going, developing conversation between us and God in the Jewish tradition. May we speedily see the day in which the inclusion of all our ancestors, male and female, in our liturgy and our history and our connection with the Holy One, however we express it, is not an innovation, but just "the way we do it."
Shabbat shalom.