Does Her Word Count?

The learning women came to the passage, "Should a man take a vow," and once again were sad at heart.

They said, "Could it be that a woman's word is worth less than a man's? For a man must keep his vow, while a woman, her husband and her father annul her vows." The women sanger- sages answered them, "Could you really have thought that a woman's word is inferior to a man's? Rather, the Torah got to the bottom of what people who make pledges are thinking, and knew that a male would take a vow with a mind that it be kept, and a woman would take a vow with a mind that her father or husband would consent, or if they would not, they have the right to annul it.

And in a place where all know that a woman doesn't need her husband's or her father's consent, her word is graven in stone.

Her husband and father can't annul her vo- vow." And this is what the wisest of men meant when he said, "When you make a vow to God, don't delay in fulfilling it, for there is no pleasure in fools.

What you vow, fulfill.

Better not to vow at all than to vow and not fulfill." This contemporary midrash was written by the Israeli feminist thinker Rivka Lubitch and published in Dirshoni, an extraordinary collection of midrashim written by Israeli women.

The title Dirshoni comes from the Hebrew root meaning to seek, to inquire, to interpret.

It might be translated interpret me, or perhaps even demand meaning from me.

Rivka Lubitch's midrash imagines a beit midrash, a house of learning, in which women have always been present, not merely sitting quietly at the edge of the room receiving the interpretations of others, but asking questions, challenging inherited assumptions, and creating Torah.

Lubitch paints a picture for us of the women entering that beit midrash carrying their sadness.