I cannot remember exactly when my family began singing Eshet Hayil at the Friday night table. I do know that it was we, the kids, who brought this custom into the house. When I was five years old, my family moved to Toronto from Sarnia, a small town in Western Ontario where my father had owned a furniture store that was founded by his father, an immigrant from Galicia. “Who had time in Sarnia,” recalls my father, “for a leisurely Friday night dinner? You had to rush home, eat quickly and get back to the store.” When my family moved to Toronto, however, all this changed. My father ceased working on Shabbat. We began attending Jewish schools and camps where we learned tefillot and Hebrew songs.
When we first introduced the singing of Eshet Hayil at the Shabbat table, my father, who had received but a rudimentary Jewish education growing up in Sarnia, struggled with the complex Hebrew words, yet persisted in going through it every week. For our family, singing Eshet Hayil symbolized a renewed commitment to Jewish observance and the authentic calm of a leisurely Shabbat meal shared with the whole family. It stood for the realization of a Jewish Canadian/ American dream, completely elusive to my grandfather’s generation: the possibility of earning a living while living as a fully observant Jew.
Scholars say that the custom of singing Eshet Hayil at the Friday night table was initiated by kabbalists in the 17th century, who viewed Shabbat as an occasion of mystical union with the Divine. They understood Eshet Hayil allegorically as a representation of the Shekhina, the feminine presence of God.1 In a sense, we were living out our own contemporary allegorical interpretation of Proverbs 31, with the Woman of Valor being the Sabbath, whom we had welcomed, with renewed energy, into our midst.
There is allegory, and then there is literal reading. Singing Eshet Hayil was also an occasion to offer appreciation for my mother, who cooked, baked and sewed, and had now prepared the Shabbat dinner that we so much enjoyed. The valorous woman in Proverbs 31 never sits still, let alone rests. Her light never goes out and she rises from her bed when it is still dark. Was that not just like my own mother, who teemed with nervous energy, walked more quickly than anyone else in the family, and had this uncanny ability to wake up in the middle of the night in response to the sound of my footsteps approaching my parents’ room?
Years later, as a mother, scholar, and feminist, I find myself returning to Eshet Hayil, wondering where I see myself in relation to this biblical uber–frau, who singlehandedly feeds her entire household, works her hands in wool and flax, clothes her children in crimson, all the while managing a business and various philanthropic endeavors. To what extent do any of us see ourselves in this aleph-to-tav list of what was valued in a woman in the biblical period? Are we amused by it or alienated? In the context of our own times, when so many of us work outside as well as inside the home, negotiating on a daily basis a heroic set of professional as well as domestic duties, does Proverbs 31 provide inspiration or does it enshrine a set of unrealistic expectations? Nowadays, when husbands are more involved in child rearing, domestic chores, and Shabbat preparation, should they still sing this paean to their wives while wives sing nothing to their husbands? Given our awareness of the number of single women in our midst as well as couples and families who do not confirm to this heterosexual norm, are we not concerned about trumpeting this image as an ideal?
In asking these questions, we exit the experiential mode in which the song wafts over us unthinkingly and begin a more critical set of deliberations that can lead to disgruntlement as well as rediscovery. What do we find when we look into the ways in which Jews read and understood this poem/song in the past? And what new readings can we offer as moderns and as feminists?
In poring over midrashic interpretations of Eshet Hayil, I find that my family was not unique in combining an allegorical and a literal approach to the poem. The rabbis engaged in a similar set of interpretive tendencies and tensions, more typically favoring the allegorical over the literal. Well before the kabbalistic reading of Eshet Hayil as the Shekhina, Pesikta Rabbati 35 (9th century) insisted that the Eshet Hayil of Proverbs 31 was a feminized figure of Knesset Yisrael (the Congregation of Israel). In a similar vein, Midrash Mishlei (9th century) offered the following allegorical interpretation of the Eshet Hayil as the Torah:
אשת חיל מי ימצא. [זו היא התורה. ורחוק מפינים מכרה]. שהיתה לפני לפנים, וזכה משה והורידה למטה לארץ. בטח בה לב בעלה ושלל לא יחסר. שלא חסר בה דבר.
What a rare find is a capable wife! This is the Torah, whose price is far above rubies. For she [the Torah] had been kept in the innermost [chamber] Moses merited to bring her down to earth [to Israel]. Her husband puts his confidence in her and he has no lack of gain. That she [the Torah] lacks nothing.
What leads the rabbis to insist on this allegorical reading? On the most basic level, these interpretations imply a certain skepticism, supported by the biblical words “mi yimtzah?” (who will find?), that any woman can be so valorous or impeccable. By turning the Eshet Hayil into the (infallible) Torah, the litany of positive attributes becomes more credible. Real-life women lack or fail in some way or another, but the Torah, the rabbis say, does not.
This tension between literal and allegorical interpretation is perhaps best seen in the writings of Gersonides (Ralbag, 13th–14th century France). In his commentary on Genesis 47:6, Gersonides forges an exegetic link between the Eshet Hayil as seen in Ruth 3:11 and the Anshei Hayil that Pharaoh asks Joseph to identify from among his kin:
אנשי חיל – ראויים לגבורה ולשררה, כמו אשת חיל את.
Able men – Capable of courage and leadership, as in “You are an Eshet Hayil (an able woman) (Ruth 3:11).
In both the masculine and feminine cases cited above, the word hayil is understood as capable or leaderly. Lest one assume that Gersonides is promoting a proto-egalitarian position, we turn to his commentary on the words “Eshet Hayil” as they appear in Proverbs 12:4:
אשת חיל – הנה האשה הזריזה במעשיה היא עטרת בעלה ואולם האשה המתעצלת במעשיה היא משחתת אותו והיא לו כמו הרקב בעצמטתיו שיבלו אותם והנה רמז בזה אל האשה המשרתת השכל בשתכין לו מהמוחשות מה שיצטרך לו בחקירותיו ואם לא תהיה נשמעת לו אך תתרשל מזה והיא מתאחרת ובוששת הנה היא לו כרקב בעצמותיו כי היא תמנע ממנו השלימות.
A capable woman – is she who is swift in her deeds. She is a crown to her husband. However, the lazy woman corrupts him and is like rot that will wither his bones. And behold, there is another [allegorical] meaning to this referring to the feminine [matter] that serves the [masculine] intellect and prepares for him from the tangible realm what he needs for his investigations and if she is not subject to him, if she is negligent, tardy, or absent, behold it is like rot in his bones and she will prevent him from reaching [intellectual] perfection.
In the second part of his interpretation, Gersonides adopts an allegorical approach that is based on a classical binary opposition between the masculine principle of the intellect or mind and the feminine (subservient) principle of matter. Like a good wife, it is the role of feminine matter to serve the masculine mind and enable its perfection.
If one considers the poem within its biblical context, Gersonides’ reading emerges as the least convincing of the allegorical lot. Here is Proverbs, a book in which wisdom and intellect are repeatedly figured in feminine terms (see Chapters 1, 8, and 9), so much so that many contemporary biblical scholars have often viewed the representation of the Eshet Hayil as an extended praise of this same feminine figure of Hokhma, and yet Gersonides insists on reading the feminine here not as Dame Wisdom, but as the material principle that serves the masculine intellect!
Then there are those classical exegetes who eschew the allegorical tack, insisting that Proverbs 31 eulogizes actual women. In one famous story quoted in Midrash Mishlei, the Eshet Hayil is associated with the (here unnamed) wife of Rabbi Meir (Beruria in other sources), who, when her two sons die on the same Shabbat, waits until after Shabbat when Rabbi Meir returns from the academy and makes havdalah, serves him his Motzei Shabbat meal, and only then tells him the tragic news by way of a halakhic question; namely, if you borrow something, do you need to return it when its owner comes to claim it? Only when Rabbi Meir affirms that one needs indeed to return it, does she show him the dead bodies of their sons. She is deemed an Eshet Hayil because of the way in which she comforts her grieving husband. The bravery and strength of this woman inhere in her (conventionally masculine) ability to suppress completely her own feelings of grief and loss for the sake of consoling her husband. I confess I do not believe this story: what mother can cover her own grief so thoroughly and why should she be expected to do so? Are she and her husband not allowed and expected to cry and mourn together?
Elsewhere in Midrash Mishlei (and in Midrash Hagadol, 14th century), the Eshet Hayil is associated not with one particular woman, but with a string of 23 biblical women: each separate verse of the poem matches with a different biblical woman (with the exception of one verse that is attached to two). Feminist writers such as Penina Adelman (Praise her Works, 2005) have used this midrash in their own effort to recover the stories of biblical women, including some lesser known or hitherto uncelebrated figures such as the wife of Noah, the wife of Ovadiah, or even Vashti. 2 The unexpected consequence of this approach, however, is that the idea of the woman of valor becomes an ancient rather than a contemporary notion, limited to particular women of the past; by implication, only our ancestors were truly meritorious and exemplary while we occupy a less holy, spiritually denuded realm.
Many of us are acquainted with remarkable men and women, though, who possess amazing and numerous virtues that inspire us and even arrest our imaginations. As feminists, we may not thrill to the list of tasks and traits enumerated in the biblical acrostic that is Proverbs 31. Yet, I still cling to the scholarly mission of searching out outstanding women of the past as well as to the belief in the real possibility of contemporary women of valor, however we define the term. Once again, I refer to the issue of context. We typically ignore the fact that the Eshet Hayil poem is preceded in Proverbs 31 by nine verses of instruction offered by an unnamed Queen Mother to her son King Lemuel, in which she warns him against drunkenness and debauchery (with women), encouraging him instead to judge righteously and be an advocate for the needy. One way to read the Eshet Hayil, poem, then, is as King Lemuel’s eulogy for his valorous and wise mother, bearing in mind the genre of the eulogy, which often includes hyperbole and sacralization of the lost loved one. 3
We all know, of course, that it is best not to reserve one’s appreciation for that ultimate occasion. Instead, why not sing it each week to others as well as ourselves? This past Friday night, after completing a draft of this essay as well as a dizzying array of other home-related tasks, I giddily joined in the singing of Eshet Hayil, adding in my own extemporaneous musical list of my accomplishments and those of the people around me—my kids had been remarkably cooperative that Friday, my husband survived another week on Wall Street and had managed to get home just in time for candle lighting—to the praised attainments of yesteryear.
A better way to begin my Shabbat, who can find?