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This week’s Torah and Haftarah portions are both interesting ones, and there are several themes I could have chosen to talk about today--the exodus from Egypt, redemption, liberation, God’s goodness to the Jews, or leadership.  But the subject that interests me most is the strength of will that I see in many cases in these readings.  Being strong-willed can mean many things, both good and bad: it can mean being resolute, determined, bossy, stubborn, strong-minded, courageous, inflexible, spoiled, willful, forceful, or decisive.  If you want to achieve a goal, then it might be good to have a strong-willed person by your side.  But, if you want to avoid dealing with stubbornness and inflexibility, then it’s probably best to look for a different character-trait.  Most strong-willed people, though, possess a mix of good and bad characteristics.  In this week’s Torah and Haftarah portions, we have quite a few people who are strong-willed, in good, bad, and mixed ways.

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At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, Pharaoh releases the Israelites from slavery, and the Israelites, with Moses as their leader, head out of Egypt (Exodus 13:17-22).  God has Moses lead them around the long way, because the direct route would lead them through Philistine territory, and God thinks that if the inexperienced Israelites see war too soon, they will turn back in fear.  But they are not alone as they go through the wilderness: God leads them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.  They finally reach the Sea of Reeds and camp at its edge.

Meanwhile, God stiffens Pharaoh’s heart, and Pharaoh regrets letting the Israelites go (14:1-31).  Pharaoh gathers his men and goes after them, riding in chariots to recapture the Israelites and bring them back to Egypt again as slaves.  When the Israelites see the Egyptian army coming, they are afraid and cry out to Moses.  But Moses reassures them that God will help them.  Sure enough, God does.  God tells Moses to lift his rod over the water, and when Moses does so, God splits the sea so that the Israelites can walk across on dry land.  The Egyptians come after the Israelites, but the sea quickly comes down upon them and they all drown. 

When the Israelites see the Egyptian army destroyed, they have great faith in God.  Moses and the Israelites sing a song thanking God for this miracle (Shirat ha-Yam, 15:1-21).  They praise God, and they sing of God’s triumph, and of how other countries stand in awe of God.  Moses’ sister, Miriam, leads the women in song and dance.

            The Israelites then start traveling through the wilderness toward the Promised Land, but they run into problems along the way.  First, they have nothing to drink for three days, and they grumble to Moses about their thirst (15:22-27).  They come to a place called Marah, where there is water, but it’s bitter and undrinkable.  God tells Moses to throw a piece of wood in the water; and when he does this, the water becomes sweet and they all drink.

The Israelites walk through the wilderness some more, but after a few weeks their food supply starts to run out, and they again complain to Moses (16:1-20).  Moses cries out to God, and God says that manna and meat will be sent to the people.  Sure enough, every evening, God sends quail, and every morning, God rains down manna from the sky.  Each day, the people go out and gather food from the ground, with each person taking only as much as his or her family needs.  On the sixth day, God tells Moses that a double portion of manna will be sent:  the people should gather the double portion and do all their baking and chores on that day, so they may rest on the seventh day.  The Israelites then celebrate Shabbat for the first time in over 400 years. 

            Then the Israelites travel through the desert some more.  But again they complain to Moses that they do not have water to drink (17:1-7).  God tells Moses to gather some elders, and to strike a rock so that water will pour from it.  And so it happens.  They name the place Massah and Meribah, because there the Israelites tried God and quarreled.

            Finally, a group led by the evil leader, Amalek, attacks the Israelites from behind, where the weakest, youngest, and oldest members of the group are walking (17:8-16).  The Israelites are forced to fight, and they fight all day. When Moses, holding the rod of God, raises his arms, the Israelites succeed; when he lets his arms drop, Amalek’s men triumph.  Moses has his fellow Israelites hold his arms up for him, so he doesn’t get tired, and the Israelites win the battle.  God commands them never to forget that God will be at war with Amelek forever, because of Amelek’s unprovoked attack on innocent people.

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If ever there was an example of a strong-willed people, the Israelites are it—and I don’t mean strong-willed in a good way here!  In this week’s Torah portion, the Israelites are pushy and stubborn.  They grumble,  complain, and cry out to Moses.  They act, in short, like small, spoiled children.

The Israelites act up four times.  The first time is when they are at the Sea of Reeds, and they see the Egyptians coming toward them.  Greatly frightened, they cry out to Moses, “Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you brought us to die in the wilderness?  What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt?  Is it not the very thing we told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us be, and we will serve the Egyptians, for it is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness?’”  The second time they grumble is when they are thirsty.  “What will we drink?,” they whine.  The third time they complain is when they run out of food.  “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots, when we ate our fill of bread!,” they wail to Moses.  “You have brought us out into this wilderness to starve this whole congregation to death!”  The fourth time they cry out is when again they have no water to drink:  “Why did you bring us up from Egypt, to kill us and our children and livestock with thirst?”

            Rashi, the great medieval scholar, explains that the reason for the Israelites’ complaining was an understandable terror of death.

 Ibn Ezra, another commentator, offers a similar explanation when he says that it was not fear that brought on the Israelites’ complaints, but rather their misperception of themselves as weaklings before their former Egyptian masters. 

Rambam, the Sephardic master, also justifies the Israelites’ behavior by saying that they complained because they thought that Moses would quickly lead them to a city or safe place where they would find food, drink, and shelter, and because they believed that it would not be long before they entered the Promised Land.  But after weeks and months of wandering without shelter in the desert, they were disappointed and disheartened, and therefore complained.

            However, a modern scholar, Nahum Sarna, rejects the idea that the Israelites’ complaints were justified.  He argues that the Israelites are indeed like spoiled children.  Moses has led them out of slavery.  God has freed them from bondage and destroyed their enemies.  And yet, even after they have been given sweet water to drink at Marah, and manna and quail to eat in the wilderness, they still find reasons to grumble against Moses and God!  They remain skeptical, stubborn, and doubtful of God’s goodness and Moses’ abilities.  Shouldn’t they spend more time thanking and praising God, as they did at the Sea of Reeds, instead of complaining so much? Don’t they have faith in God, who led them out of Egypt by miraculously parting the Sea?  If God could part the Sea, wouldn’t God know when the people are in need of food and water?  They complain bitterly about how life back in Egypt was so much better, but when they were slaves there, they didn’t think it was so great. True, they have just been brought out of the land of Egypt, where they spent their lives as slaves, and so they don’t think like a free-born people.  Nonetheless, since everything that happens shows them that they are God’s favored and protected nation, their complaints seem ungrateful and stubborn.  The Israelites refuse to trust that God and Moses will help them—even though they always do so.

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If the Israelites are often strong-willed in negative ways, however, God and Moses are strong-willed in positive ways. When the Israelites complain, God and Moses give them whatever they want or need.  In some ways, God and Moses play the role of wise and good parents to this newly formed group of Israelites, who certainly behave like difficult children.  God and Moses lead the Israelites out of Egypt, coax them into the desert, give them food and water, and instruct them on how to behave.  God and Moses also teach the Children of Israel how to stand up for themselves, walk out of Egypt, feed themselves, and organize into a full-fledged people.

Let’s focus on Moses in particular.  In Egypt, the Israelites had never really been without a task-master, or someone watching over them, so that when they were brought out of Egypt, they naturally turned to Moses as their leader.  Now Moses was only one man, he certainly was not a slave-driver, and in fact he had never really been the leader of anything before in his life. But while Moses doesn’t always seem thrilled about his God-given job, he does his best to do it well, using several different strategies.  Sometimes he passes the Israelites’ complaints along to God.  When they cry out to him at the Sea of Reeds, he says to them, “Adonai will battle for you; you hold your peace!” (14:14).  Sometimes he teams up with God.  When the Israelites grumble for water a second time, Moses demands, “Why do you quarrel with me?  Why do you try Adonai?” (17:2).  Sometimes Moses gets so annoyed and frustrated with the people’s complaints that he himself complains to God, saying, “What will I do with these people?  Before long they will be stoning me!”  (17:4).  Luckily, God always calms Moses down, and helps with whatever the problem of the moment is. 

Moses is calm most of the time, so he usually is able to be the kind of strong, patient, and caring parental leader that his people need.  In the Midrash (Exodus Rabbah 2:2), it says “[When Moses shepherded the flocks of Jethro, his father-in-law], he used to stop the bigger sheep from grazing before the smaller ones, and let the smaller ones loose first to feed on the tender grass; then he would let the older sheep feed on the grass of average quality; lastly he let the strong ones loose to feed on the toughest.  God said, Let . . . he who knows how to shepherd the flock, each according to its strength, come and lead My people.’”  Moses is a good shepherd when he tells the Israelites where to go, gives them God’s words, helps them get food and water, protects them as much as he can (as in the war with Amelek), and stays with them, no matter how badly they behave.

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This week’s Torah portion portrays the Israelites as strong-willed in negative, spoiled, childish ways, and God and Moses as strong-willed in ways that include patience, wisdom, care, faithfulness, and true leadership.  This week’s Haftarah reading balances the Torah’s focus on a positive male leader with its own focus on positive female leaders, strong-willed women who follow in the steps of Moses’ sister, Miriam.

Deborah is a prophetess, and a judge or leader, and she governs Israel in the time of the Judges, just after the Jews enter the land of Canaan (Judges 4:4-24).  One day, as she is sitting under her tree, the Palm of Deborah, she calls on Barak, a military commander, and tells him to lead the Israelite army against Sisera’s Canaanite army.  Barak replies that if Deborah goes with him, he will go, but if she does not, he will not go.  Deborah agrees to accompany him, but she warns him that God will give the glory of Sisera’s defeat to a woman. 

Deborah, Barak, and the Israelites go up to Kishon River, where Barak’s army charges Sisera’s army.  When Sisera sees Barak, he flees in terror, leaving his army to total destruction.

            Meanwhile, Sisera runs to the tent of Jael, a Kenite, who he assumes is friendly to him and not to the Israelites.  She  welcomes him in, and gives him a blanket and some milk, after which he falls asleep.  While he is sleeping, Jael takes a tent-peg and a mallet, and drives the tent-peg through his temple.  When Barak comes to find Sisera, Jael shows him the dead general. 

            Barak and Deborah then sing a victory song in which they praise God, and sing of God’s glory, the war, the tribes of Israel, Jael, and God’s enemies (5:1-31).  The Haftarah portion ends by noting that the land was peaceful for forty years.

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All the women included in this week’s readings are strong-willed.  Granted, there are several respected women in the Torah prior to Exodus, especially the matriarchs, Sara, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah.  But today’s portion includes an unusual number of strong, independent, and active women.  The Torah mentions Miriam as a prophetess, leading the women in song and dance after crossing the Sea of Reeds. And the Haftorah portion really features strong women.  Deborah is a prophetess who is also a judge and a military leader.  Jael is a non-Jew who helps save the Israelites by driving a tent-peg through Sisera’s head. 

Despite so many interesting women in just one week of biblical readings, however, women as a group don’t get much respect in the commentaries.  In the Babylonian Talmud (Kishon 80b), for example, it says that “women are temperamentally light-headed.”  In another section of the Talmud (Bara Batra 16b), it says, “Happy is he whose children are sons, and woe to him whose children are daughters.”

When the Talmud talks about the particular case of women reading the Torah, it’s even more negative.  In one instance (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 17a), it says that the only value of women is in bringing their sons to study at the synagogue, in letting their husbands study at the Beit Ha-Midrash (the study hall), and in waiting for the men to return home from the Torah study. 

In the Palestinian Talmud (Sotah 3:4), it says that once, when a rich woman asked Rabbi Eliezer to explain a verse from the Torah, the rabbi refused to answer, saying, “There is no other wisdom for a woman except in the spindle.”  When his son complained that his father’s comment would hurt him financially, Eliezer said, “Let the words of the Torah be burned rather than entrusted to women.” 

In the Mishnah Torah, in the section entitled “Laws of Torah study” (1:13), Maimonides says that girls should not be taught Torah “because the minds of most women are incapable of learning, and thus, because of their intellectual poverty, they turn the words of Torah into words of nonsense.”

            To be fair, the commentaries have a few good things to say about women.  Maimonides himself says that “a man should honor his wife more then himself and love her as himself” (Mishnah Torah, “Laws of Marriage,” 15:19-20).  And in the Talmud (Niddah 45b), it says, “The Holy One, Blessed be God, endowed women with more insight than men.”  But if women have more insight, shouldn’t that help them to study the Torah?  And if they studied the Torah, wouldn’t they learn from today’s readings that women can be smart, strong, and capable in all sorts of different ways?  We might think so, but the commentaries do not see it that way.  For example, while they grant that Deborah is a prophetess, they have a hard time accepting her as a judge or leader,  and they accuse her of being vain and a trouble-maker.  Rabbi Deborah Schloss notes that Rabbi Nachman calls Deborah a “ziborata,” an angry hornet, and that many of the commentaries “claim that Deborah boasts when she sings, ‘Deliverance ceased, ceased in Israel, until you arose, Deborah, arose, O mother in Israel.’”  Yet it was true that deliverance came with Deborah’s rule, that peace lasted for an unusual 40 years, and that Deborah’s main claim is to be what an Israelite woman was supposed to be— a mother! 

If we turn from the commentaries back to the Torah and Writings, however, we can find ways to think positively about the strong, good women that we find in this week’s Parshat.  In Proverbs 31 (31:10-31), for example, we find the beautiful acrostic poem, Eshet Chayil, “A Woman of Valor.”  The Eshet Chayil describes a working woman, a wife, and a mother as having the same strengths of character as Miriam, Deborah, and Jael.  Proverbs 31 says that a woman of valor is hard to find, but that she is worth more than rubies or pearls.  It says that her husband can trust her, and that she will never to do anything to harm him.  It notes that a woman of valor enjoys working with her hands, both making things for her family, whom she keeps well-fed, and buying and selling things for profit in the world.  She is strong in body and in soul, helps the poor and needy, and is not afraid of hard work or hard times.  She is wise and kind, and her husband, children, and community all praise her. 

Proverbs defines female valor as a woman being accomplished and admired in her work and family and community.  She takes care of her own and others’ needs and desires, and she “openeth her mouth to wisdom,” fulfills the commandments, and fears God.  We might not normally think of a working woman, wife, and mother as being valiant— as being strong, courageous, determined, bold, or brave— but that is just what the Eshet Chayil asks us to do.  It asks us to think of women in the real world as being as strong-willed and valiant as the woman in this week’s Torah and Haftarah readings. 

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When I thought about this question, about how real women are as strong-willed and valiant as the women in this week’s readings, I thought about the Bible, Jewish history, American women, and the women I actually know.  And I ended up deciding that, yes, the Eshet Chayil is right to praise valiant women.  Here is my list of some women of valor, from biblical times to the present.

Miriam is brave and bold when she leads the women in song and dance, praising God, after the Israelites cross the Sea of Reeds.  Deborah is courageous and strong when she helps Barak lead an army against Sisera, and she is wise and fair when she predicts that the glory of Sisera’s death will go to a valiant woman, and not to fearful Barak.  Jael certainly had to be determined and strong-willed when she drove a tent-peg through Sisera’s head! 

            Other women in Exodus are valiant, too.  Shifrah and Poah were the midwives who defied Pharaoh’s orders to murder all newborn Jewish boys, and they therefore saved Moses’ infant life, as did Yachoved, Pharaoh’s daughter, and Miriam. 

In Jewish history, Bruria was the learned wife of the famous second-century scholar, Rabbi Meir.  When he wished death upon the Roman thugs who were harassing him, the wise Bruria corrected him by quoting Psalm 104, “Let sins be uprooted from the earth, and the wicked will be no more.”  Her greater insight into the Torah’s teachings guided her husband.  (She also guided him when he had to deal with the loss of their two sons.) 

Many centuries later, in 1918, Sara Schenirer, a Polish seamstress, opened a school to instruct Jewish girls in their own tradition.  From a first class of 25 students in 1918, Schenirer’s Bais Yaakov schools expanded to 250 schools with 38,000 students in 1937, and today represents the largest Jewish women’s educational system in the world.

            In the public realm of politics, Israel’s fourth Prime Minister was a woman: Golda Meir led the country from 1969 to 1974. 

In our own country, we see many valiant women in public office every day.  There are now 16 female U.S. Senators, including Hillary Clinton, Diane Feinstein, Barbra Boxer, and Elizabeth Dole.  There are 73 U.S. Congresswomen, including Eleanor Holmes Norton and Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.  And so far there have been two women Supreme Court Justices, the former Sandra Day O’Conner and the current Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

            In the Jewish world, Conservative and Reform Jews have women cantors and rabbis.  Here at Hebrew Tabernacle, we have our President, Elise Cagan; Hebrew School Principal, Connie Heymann; and my Zayin Hebrew school teacher, Lisa Kingston— among the many other strong women in our community who teach Torah and live out its ideals. 

            In the world of my own family and friends, I have my seven aunts, including here today Aunt Penny and Aunt Deborah, as well as Ann, Timea, and Judith.  I also have my grandmother, Judith Topper.  And of course, my mother.

            All of these women are women of valor—strong, moral, courageous, determined, bold, learned, generous, and brave.  They are strong-willed in the best sense of the word.  Powerful like Miriam, Deborah, and Jael.  Wise like Bruria and Sara Schenirer.  Leaders like Golda Meir and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

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            And: valiant like Moses and God in today’s Torah portion, when they led the willful Children of Israel out of Egypt, guiding and caring for them like any good parent, male or female, father or mother.  I think that’s what this week’s readings about strong-willed and valiant men and women mean to me in the end: these are stories about people who believe in something important, act on those beliefs, and make a difference in the world, for themselves and  others.  That is why these biblical stories feel so meaningful to me: they teach me the qualities of patience, strength, persistence, kindness, and wisdom that I want to develop in myself.  These stories also help me to look around, in history, in the world, and in my life, and to recognize what I might not otherwise see—that the real world is and has been filled with individuals, both men and women, whose strong, caring, faithful valor repairs the world. 

Last year, my school went on a trip to Washington, D.C., and we visited the Holocaust Museum.  Upstairs was all the grim evidence of genocide, but in the basement was a record of the many strong-willed individuals who hid, fed, protected, or freed even one Jew.  I think that the Museum, like today’s Parshat, wants us to remember people of valor, people who know what the right thing to do is, and who do it, making the world a better place.  Today, as I become a Bat Mitzvah, I am grateful to have before me and around me, in writing and in person, valiant models of how to be a Jewish, human, female adult.