 | | the merit of [performing] commandments. The merit of commandments can hardly protect to such an extent, for we have learned, ''So did Rabbi Menahem the son of Yossi expound:
For a commandment is a candle and the Torah is a light
[Proverbs 6:23]." Scripture compared the commandment to a candle and the Torah to a light, to say to you, just as a candle only protects for an hour, so does the commandment only protect for an hour [i.e., while it is actually being performed], but as light protects forever, so does the Torah protect forever. . . .
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| | Ravina said: Indeed it is the merit of Torah, and as for what you said that she is not commanded to do soindeed, she is not commanded, but by the merit of her taking her sons to study Torah and Mishna and waiting for her husband to come home from the study-house [she is protected].
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The Talmud is quite clearly here setting out its hierarchy of values. In spite of the fact that within the culture of the Rabbis, it is the study of Torah that is the most highly valued of all practices, the Babylonian Talmud refuses to interpret the Mishna's point as being that the merit of having studied will protect a wife in her moment of trialrefusing, as we have seen, a conclusion that would have been perfectly consistent (as the text itself remarks) with generally held opinion on the efficacy of Torah in protecting sinners. Had the Rabbis not refused to take this simple path, the entire tortuous effort to find an interpretation for the merit that mitigates would have been obviated. The upshot is that this Talmud is forced ultimately into displacing the merit of the daughter from her own study of Torah to merit accrued from supporting her husband and male children in their study.
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(footnote continued from the previous page)
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| | Similarly, the midrash quoted in both the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds that "Thou shalt teach thy sonssons and not daughters" means only that one is not obligated to teach daughters, not that it is forbidden (see Babylonian Talmud Kiddushin 29b and Palestinian Talmud Berakhot 2:3 and 3:3 and Eruvin 10:1).
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| | 7. For another possible interpretation of this last phrase, see below. It is this kind of text that provides the evidence for Judith Plaskow's statement: "Women are objects of the law but neither its creators nor agents. Halakhot concerning the religious sphere assume a world in which women are 'enablers'. Women create the preconditions for men and male children to worship and study Torah, but women cannot do these things themselves without becoming less effective in their relational role" (Plaskow 1990, 63).
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| | 8. It should be emphasized that the Babylonian Talmud
never
directly addresses Ben-Azzai at all, and this is a major premise of my argument. One could argue, therefore, that what the Rabbis have done is, first, interpreted Ben-Azzai to mean that there is merit for women in study of Torah, and then rejected his view; therefore, the only element of the Mishna that is being interpreted to mean that women have no merit in the study of Torah is the authoritative position (of the first speaker) that
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(footnote continued on the next page)
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