At a recent Jewish educators’ conference, I was sitting with two other women and two men waiting for a session to begin.
An older man peered into the room.
“Is this the session on teaching Gemara?” he asked, looking confused.
We told him it was.
“Then why are there so many women here?”
A few women are currently teaching Gemara in high schools in the New York area, and a handful in other communities in the United States. Some people find it surprising that there are so few women in these positions; others are surprised that there are any at all. It is exciting for women to be in this new role; it is also interesting to see how the role of the high school Gemara teacher will change now that women are in it. As a woman teaching in high school, I found that while the challenges of my job were mostly what I had expected – a mix of classroom management, making learning exciting, and the overall constant challenge of rendering an ancient legal text written in two foreign languages comprehensible to American teenagers– I had not anticipated how different my role would be from that of male high school Gemara teachers.
During my first year teaching high school Gemara, I quickly discovered that I was not simply a Gemara-rebbe in a skirt. I had thought that the difference between me and a rabbi in the same role was simply a matter of semantics. After all, we had received similar training, and were performing the same teaching duties. But others did not see it that way. My students did not stand up the first time I walked into their classroom as they did when a rabbi walked in. Students who had no male limmudei kodesh teachers would complain that they had “no rabbis.” Many of my colleagues addressed the male Gemara teachers as “rabbi” and the female Gemara teachers by our first names. Early in the year I told one of my students a story about a dvar Torah that I had given at a shul, and she commented that she was impressed that the shul allowed “regular people” like me to deliver divrei Torah. I realized that my students did not perceive me as similar to a rabbi, but as a regular person who knows a lot of Gemara.
Not only did my students not perceive me as a rabbi, but since I am female, young in years, and even younger in appearance, my students perceived little difference between them and me at all. They were curious about my husband, and asked for stories from our courtship. Some even asked to hear stories about old boyfriends! While I made them memorize important concepts – for instance, every word that appeared a thousand times or more in the Gemara – they took it upon themselves to memorize every outfit of mine that appeared even once, and commented every time I wore something new.
“…I was not simply a Gemara-rebbe in a skirt”
Though it certainly made me worry about what to wear, this perceived similarity between my students and me is probably every Gemara-rebbe’s dream. I did not have a problem gaining the students’ respect; respect based on a title may give rabbis a head start, but eventually students respect a teacher as much as he or she earns their respect. And pedagogically, I had the incredible advantage of accessibility; my students perceived me, a learned woman, as someone they could easily become. In class I would often playfully begin sentences with phrases like, “So when you become a Gemara teacher you can tell your students…” and they would smile. My ninth graders seemed confident that they could soon learn Gemara independently; when I started to learn daf yomi after the siyyum hashas last year, some of them tried it too, albeit briefly. If I could do it, why couldn’t they?
I hope that sometime in the near future, women like men, will be granted formal recognition for their level of learning. But in the meantime, I am glad to have the opportunity to convey to my students the message that any “regular person” can learn Gemara well.
Back to the man who was surprised to see women Gemara teachers: it turned out that he taught Gemara in a co-ed high school. Unfortunately, his school is one of many institutions that teach girls Gemara but find the idea of a female Gemara teacher surprising and unappealing. I wonder when this short-sighted policy will end. When their top female students come back as learned women seeking to teach Gemara, will the school have to say “we lied when we said that your Gemara learning mattered?”
Yet, the ultimate goals for women educators are unclear to many of us. One male Gemara teacher in a women’s Torah institution once told me that his goal is to put himself out of a job – to have only women teaching women. But is that ideal? If women are taught only by women and men are taught only by men, will the Torah split into two traditions? On the other hand, do we aspire to have women teaching Gemara to boys as well? In co-educational settings it seems that having women be able to teach all subjects is a necessary step in making women equal partners in learning, but I don’t know very many women teachers who would want to face a classroom full of high school boys. Is separate schooling really possible if we want to achieve equality? On the other hand, is a co-ed setting ideal for all teenage girls?
It seems that none of us knows exactly where we are headed in this adventure. Every goal we achieve makes us question what exactly our next goal should be. Maybe this sense of introspection– examining what it means to be a Gemara teacher, a Rabbi, or a woman– will benefit Jewish education; maybe not. Important as these questions are, they are never as important as the actual Torah that we are teaching. On a day-today basis my primary concern is teaching my students as effectively as possible, much more than worrying about my status as a female Gemara teacher. Teaching and learning as much as we can is one goal that we can all agree on, and is a constant struggle. While issues of title, salary, and respect are important, the Sifrei reminds us that those are ancillary to the main point:
לאהבה את ה׳ אלהיכם, שמא תאמר
הריני למד תורה בשביל שאעשיר בשביל
שאקרא רבי בשביל שאקבל שכר לעולם
הבא, תלמוד לומר לאהבה את ה׳
אלהיכם, כל שאתם עושים לא תהו
עושים אלא מאהבה.
To love the Lord your God– lest you say, “I will learn Torah in order to become rich, in order to be called ‘Rabbi,’ in order to receive reward in the world to come,” Scripture says to love the Lord your God– everything that you do should only be done out of love of God (Sifrei Devarim Piska 41).