“The words of the Torah should be burned rather than entrusted to women.” This is the stinging opinion of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, a second-century Jewish scholar, as expressed in the Talmud, a 63-volume work of intricate Jewish legal debates, composed from the second to sixth centuries and redacted in Babylonia. Only a few women are mentioned in its 2,711 pages.
The very same sage elsewhere stated that a man who taught his daughter the Torah was teaching her frivolity, wasting his precious time. I take comfort in Ben Azzai, the sage who rejected Hyrcanus’s opinion and obligated fathers to teach their daughters. I think of my two very intelligent aunts, 18 centuries later, who were not allowed to go to college, because they were just going to get married anyway. Rabbi Hyrcanus wasn’t wasting his time. My grandfather wasn’t wasting his money. Neither aunt is married.
I wanted to study the Talmud because it is foundational to literate Jewish life. Knowledge is spiritual power. As a teenager, Ben Azzai’s encouragement mattered; I began parsing the Talmud’s difficult Aramaic passages—passages made even harder by their lack of punctuation and paragraph breaks. I studied it slowly, line by line, in high school, during a gap year in Jerusalem, and in university. I had trouble mastering a page, let alone a chapter, but I was in it for the depth.
Read more here.