Elliot N. D«

ziyyon(Salome Alexandra ), the Queen, ruled as well.? While our ancestors’ political and military leaders were overwhelmingly men, these examples indicate that even in ancient times, women could serve in these very public and important roles, contrary to what Jewish law became. Conversely, a baraita permits women to be among the seven who go up to the Torah and read it in the synagogue on the Sabbath . While that was legally permissible for women to do, it was not open to them in practice, for, as the baraita itself explains, to have women read the Torah would dis­honor the men in the congregation.® We certainly do not hear in later stories or rulings of many(any?) women who in fact read the Torah in the synagogue, despite the legal permission embed­ded in the sources for them to do so.’

These kinds of disparities between what the legal texts say and what the stories report become especially striking in the extended discussion in the tractate Kiddushin about the com­mandments from which women are exempt. The legal ration ales for those exemptions are, to put it mildly, extremely suspect, for the very verses which are quoted to exempt women from given commandments could just as easily be read to include them. Most are dependent upon masculine forms of

nouns or verbs which grammatically can just as easily include women as exclude them—a fact which the Rabbis surely knew as well as we do. One must conclude, then, that the choice of

whether to use the masculine noun or verb in question to desig nate men alone or both men and women was not at all deter­mined by the verses themselves but rather by what was pre-existing custom at the time.”

This discussion is based on the Mishnah’s attempt to gener­alize over the commandments from which women are exempt. Its generalization, that women are exempt from positive, time­bound commandments, is very quickly challenged in the Tal­ mud , which adduces quite a few practices which do not fit that rule. Women are obligated, for example, to light candles on Fri­day evening, even though that is a positive commandment which is most definitely tied to a specific time. On the other hand, women are freed from the commandment to wave the palm branch(lulav) on Sukkot even though that could be done at any time during the day—hardly much of a restriction on time.”