Women’s exclusion from Torah study

Women’s exclusion from Torah study is presented as both a rule about who may learn and a boundary around who may seek religious knowledge. For Devorah, being told that sacred books are for men does not quiet her curiosity; it makes independent study an act of secrecy, and turns a forbidden volume into a route toward questions her teachers will not answer.

A Gendered Boundary Around Learning

Devorah’s grandfather, Zeidy, keeps Hebrew religious books locked in his closet and tells her that they are only for men, while girls belong in the kitchen. The distinction is not merely between different lessons: it places scholarship and its authority on the male side of the household, and assigns girls domestic work instead. Devorah is fascinated by the learning that occupies Zeidy for hours, but is denied access to the books through which she might understand it for herself.

The instruction she receives at school offers only what she experiences as diluted wisdom. Rather than satisfying her, these partial explanations sharpen her appetite for fuller knowledge. Her questions about Rachel, Rabbi Akiva’s wife, make that frustration concrete. Her teachers present Rachel as a saint who endured poverty while her husband studied Torah far away for twelve years; Devorah wonders how a rich man’s daughter could accept that life, why she would marry a poor, uneducated man, and whether the accepted account leaves out something important. When the school will not give her an answer, she decides that finding one is her responsibility.

The Forbidden Book as a Private School

Devorah acts on that decision by purchasing the Schottenstein Edition of the Talmud at a small Judaica store in Borough Park. She has made reconnaissance trips to learn who works there, then tells the elderly bookseller that the large, leather-bound volume is for a cousin. She pays sixty dollars, much of it in babysitting money, and carries the book back toward Williamsburg. The careful lie and the money she has earned herself make the purchase a small exercise in independence as well as a breach of the gendered rule against her study.

At home, the volume is hidden beneath her mattress. Devorah waits for a chance to shut her bedroom door and read while Bubby does not need her help making kreplach. Its thousands of pages promise weeks of study, and its forbidden English translation offers access to a text she has been taught is beyond her place. The contrast is pointed: the closet keeps Zeidy’s books beyond her reach, while her own room, with a book concealed under the bed, becomes a secret study space.

Exclusion Beyond the Classroom

The same division appears in communal worship. Devorah’s schoolmates do not attend the synagogue; girls pray at home or at school, while the men’s prayers are the ones described as regimented and counting. In morning prayer, she cannot read or speak Hebrew quickly enough to keep pace with the class’s chant, so she moves her lips and occasionally makes sounds to appear to participate. Once the girls pass the age of twelve, singing is forbidden to them, removing the tunes that had helped her remember the prayers when she was younger.

Devorah continues the motions under an overseer’s watch, but prayer has lost its feeling for her. In this setting, exclusion from study and restriction in worship reinforce one another: girls are given little access to religious interpretation, while their participation in prayer is constrained and monitored. Her secret reading therefore challenges more than a ban on a particular book. It asserts her claim to question, interpret, and learn within a religious world that has assigned those privileges to men.