However, Leibowitz, always the educator, did not make do with comparing and contrasting; she almost inevitably liked to emphasize a moral message deriving from the study. The Torah indicates how the individual can resist evil. Neither moral courage not sheer wickedness are ethnically or nationally determined qualities. Moab and Ammon produced a Ruth and Naamah respectively, Egypt two righteous midwives.
This message, upholding the less accepted reading of this passage—i. She indeed believed that all of these messages can and must be relevant to modern life, as she says, paraphrasing Moses ben Maimon Rambam , b.
Spain, Maimonides :. Loathing as she did the approach of Biblical Criticism, Leibowitz turned to the newly developing literary approach as a method within academia that would be consistent with her beliefs. She felt that these were very close to the Midrashic method and that of the Sages and commentaries, with their close reading of the text. When her work is examined carefully, and despite her protestations to the contrary, she may even be discovered to have done some original literary analysis of her own.
Some of her work also bears an affinity to postmodernist theories. Famously, she gave a beggar a brand new suit she had just bought herself. A passionate Zionist, Leibowitz refused to leave Israel even when offered large sums of money to lecture abroad. She believed that Torah must be taught in Hebrew and that Hebrew should also be the language spoken by all Jews. She was a deeply religious person, but of the sort that emphasized The legal corpus of Jewish laws and observances as prescribed in the Torah and interpreted by rabbinic authorities, beginning with those of the Mishnah and Talmud.
Thus she had little to do with A member of the h asidic movement, founded in the first half of the 18 th century by Israel ben Eliezer Ba'al Shem Tov. She disapproved of superstition, contesting the practice of investing holiness in Jewish saints and praying to them; and, at the same time, believed that the heroes of the Bible, whom she respected and loved tremendously, were also not to be overly exalted.
The Torah itself marks their flaws, and so can—and should—we. Leibowitz also opposed the ideas of feminism and the feminist movement; several feminists who were close to her, such as Blu Greenberg and Chana Safrai, attempted to persuade her to change her mind, but without success. While she upheld equal pay and rights for women, Leibowitz did not consciously desire to change the balance of designated gender roles within traditional Jewish society.
The fact that she herself had been brought up in complete intellectual equality with her brother was probably a primary source of her self-confidence and powerful teaching, to the point of reducing some of the many distinguished rabbis in her class to anxious schoolboys. But she never referred to her good fortune in this respect or to the effect its absence might have in other homes. While she believed women should study Torah, and refused to countenance attempts to remove women from her Torah classes; and while she even referred to the Talmud from time to time—certainly an unusual phenomenon for a woman in the earlier years of her career—Leibowitz rejected the drive for women to take on more commandments, such as communal roles or laying of Phylacteries tefillin , as representing not the result of authentic religious emotion but rather ideas promulgated by the secular feminist movement.
All her achievements notwithstanding, the childless Leibowitz confided that she would have given it all up to have children. Aramaic "holy. The mourner's Kaddish is recited at prescribed times by one who has lost an immediate family member.
The prayer traditionally requires the presence of ten adult males. Her impact has been primarily within Modern Orthodoxy, but many non-Orthodox and secular people have also been exposed to her work, and even some ultra-Orthodox elements recognize her greatness.
One such yeshiva student, embarrassed to be heard quoting a woman, changed her name slightly when repeating her Torah, and thus, unbeknownst to her, Ne h ama was summarily transformed into Reb Nahman.
Jerusalem: Histadrut haTzionit haOlamit, New Studies in Shemot: Yitro Exodus 1— Jerusalem: World Zionist Organization, Jerusalem, Teaching the Commentators on the Torah: Exodus Hebrew. Abramowitz, Leah. Tales of Ne h ama. Jerusalem: A popular biography. The first half is made up largely of anecdotal material based on interviews. The second half comprises pages of reprinted articles. This is the most authoritative and comprehensive volume about Leibowitz to date. Frankel, Marla. Ochs, Vanessa L.
San Diego: While still in her twenties, Leibowitz began training other educators to teach Bible, eventually publishing several works of pedagogical insights. She soon became known as a superb teacher, espousing a warm, humorous, and creative style alongside a strict classroom manner.
She received a professorship at Tel-Aviv University, and was awarded several prizes throughout her life, including the prestigious Israel Prize in the Field of Education in In response, Leibowitz began mailing worksheets—known as gilyonot —to them on their kibbutzim.
The worksheets contained Bible commentaries unavailable at that time, which Leibowitz had unearthed at the Jerusalem National Library—for example, the work of the Italian scholar, Isaac Reggio Nehama sent her responses in the next worksheet, creating an ongoing dialogue.
Leibowitz continued this massive undertaking for several decades without ever being paid. In the s, Leibowitz began to publish pamphlets and then books of essays on the weekly Torah portion the Iyunim , or Studies , series. These books have been translated into six languages. The analytical manner in which Leibowitz introduced, probed, and compared the ideas of various Bible commentators was unprecedented.
She dared to bring in varied voices of interpretation, including certain non-Orthodox and non-Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber and Thomas Mann. Instead of using traditional methods of biblical criticism, Leibowitz chose a literary approach to the biblical text. Influenced by Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig , and Ludwig Aryeh Strauss, she implemented various techniques for literary analysis of the Bible, paying attention to keywords, flashbacks, parallelisms, and other literary devices.
While her methods are contested by many religious communities, she creates a model for approaching the Bible through an active, literary lens and paves the way for female Torah scholars.
She is awarded the Israel Prize in education in Contributions from people like you allow CIE to assemble and compose materials about Israel's rich and vibrant story. Please play a beneficial role in sustaining our mission.
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