One can scarcely do justice to the topic of Jewish women and leadership without discussing Devorah, perhaps the most famous female leader of the Bible. The Book of Judges tells us that Devorah was a judge and a prophet.1 She led the Children of Israel during a time of war, and under her leadership, the Children of Israel were victorious over an enemy power. Clearly, Devorah was a strong and powerful leader. She is the only female judge ever mentioned in the Bible, and the Rabbis teach us that she is one of only seven female prophets.2 Surely we should look upon her as the paramount Jewish female leader. Yet, Devorah was also, in many ways, a total anomaly for her time—a woman who somehow made it in a man’s world and seemingly existed only in that male world. Was Devorah a female leader or simply a leader who happened to be female? Can her style of leadership inform us as Orthodox Jewish women striving for change in the mainstream Orthodox community?
The text does not tell us very much about Devorah. Aside from the fact that she was a prophet and a judge, we learn that she was a war strategist. She tells Barak Ben Avinoam that God commanded that he take an army and fight Sisera and his army, enemies of the Jews. When Barak tells Devorah he will not go without her, Devorah goes with Barak to fight Sisera. The Israelite forces defeat Sisera’s troops, and Sisera himself escapes on foot to the tent of Yael, the wife of Hever the Kennite. Yael murders Sisera by driving her tent pin through his temple, and thus ends the battle.
Given these bare facts, one could easily look at Devorah as the stereotype of a hardened career woman. Indeed, at first glance, the text seems to want us to have this impression. It gives us little to no detail regarding her personal life—only her professional one. We do not even know if she was married. The text tells us that she was eshet lappidot 3 a phrase whose meaning is unclear. Some commentators say that the phrase eshet lappidot means that she was married to a man named Lappidot,4 but others interpret the word lappidot to be a descriptive word about Devorah’s personality. The Hebrew word lappidot literally means torches, and some commentators have explained eshet lappidot to mean that Devorah was a woman of torches or a “fiery woman.”5 As her marital status is unclear, it is unsurprising that the text makes no mention of any children.
On the other hand, as noted above, the text is fairly detailed about Devorah’s professional accomplishments. For her time, Devorah seems quite unusual. To be a public figure, the leader of a nation, a war hero, and possibly unmarried and childless to boot flies in the face of everything we know (or think we know) about women of Devorah’s time. Perhaps, we think, the text is trying to tell us that Devorah’s femaleness is merely coincidental. Perhaps, like the first waves of women entering the upper echelons of corporate power in our own times, she was a woman forced to fit herself into a male mold. Indeed, when Barak tells Devorah that he will not go to war without her, she replies, seemingly with a sneer in her voice, “I shall surely go with you; you will not gain glory from your path, for into the hand of a woman will the Lord deliver Sisera.” Despite her own gender, she seems to intimate that delivery into the hands of a woman is the ultimate insult.
But, as we all know, stereotypes are dangerous because they narrow our thinking and prevent us from seeing others as three-dimensional human beings. Scratching the surface of the text of Chapters 4 and 5 of Judges shows us that to stereotype Devorah is to miss out on a complex woman who has much to teach us as Orthodox women and leaders in 5764.
Our first clue into Devorah’s unique persona is the text’s appellation of her as an isha neviah, a woman prophetess.6 At first glance, this phrase seems redundant. Why does the text need to tell us that she was an isha (woman) if it also tells us that she is a neviah (prophetess)? Neviah is a female term—a man cannot be a prophetess. I am convinced that the word isha tells us something crucial about Devorah’s character. First and foremost, the text is telling us, Devorah saw herself as a woman—and the fact that she was a woman influenced everything she did, whether it was prophesying, leading or judging.
As the story continues, we begin to see hints as to how Devorah injected an essence of femaleness into her actions. Perhaps the most poignant example is the place she chose as her headquarters. The text tells us that she “sat under the palm tree of Devorah.” Abravanel tells us that the Devorah referred to here is the matriarch Rebecca’s nurse who was buried under this palm tree. I find this interpretation incredibly touching because it speaks to Devorah’s connection to her foremothers and her intuitive ability to understand and incorporate their influence into her life and work. Perhaps she felt that by sitting atop the grave of Rebecca’s nurse, Devorah, she would be imbued with the spirit of that holy woman who did all her work behind the scenes, yet who influenced the very destiny of a nation by raising Rebecca to be the mother of Israel that she became.
In addition, Shirat Devorah, the song Devorah sings after the victory over Sisera and his army contains other examples of her female way of looking at the world. In describing the history of Israel before the war with Sisera, Devorah sings, “The open cities ceased, in Israel they ceased, until I Devorah arose; I arose as a mother in Israel.” 7 Rashi explains that “the open cities ceased” means that the Children of Israel were no longer able to inhabit cities without walls because of the threat of their enemies, so they retreated to walled cities for protection. The Me’am Lo’ez comments that like a mother, Devorah prayed for and worried about the Children of Israel. Like a mother, Abravanel writes, she had pity on them. Devorah’s view of her role vis-à-vis the Children of Israel was not only that of a political leader, but additionally a maternal role—with all the intimacy and nurturing that the mother-child relationship provides.
And, by the way, I personally don’t think Devorah meant to belittle Barak when she told him that Sisera would be delivered into the hands of a woman. I think she had a prophecy that Sisera would end up slain by Yael and not by him. She shared her prophecy with Barak at that moment in order to calm him down. “Don’t worry, Barak,” she was saying, “I see by the fact that you will not go to war without me that you are afraid of what is expected of you. I am here to tell you that you need only fight the battle you know how to fight. God will deliver Sisera into the hands of another, a woman as it happens. You do not have to be scared.”
In fact, far from being the pseudo necktie-wearing career woman of decades past, who virtually had to be a man in order to succeed, Devorah is an intensely female character, one who enters the realm of men and injects into that realm a woman’s sensibilities and a uniquely female way of looking at the world. While we do not know as much as we would like about how this special quality of Devorah influenced her leadership and judging of the Children of Israel, we do know that it did.
Devorah has much to teach us today. As in Devorah’s times, the public realm of today’s Orthodox Judaism is still controlled by men and by male sensibilities. We as women have much to add to that world with our voices. Devorah’s example shows us that our voices can, and should, be heard in the public realm, and that the unique female nature of our voices can transform the discourse in that realm. By internalizing the spirit of Devorah, may we be privileged to witness the growth of Orthodox Judaism into a more inclusive, nurturing and understanding spiritual and religious home for us all.