The Torah of Our Mothers
Moses received the Torah at Sinai and transmitted it to Joshua, Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets to the Men of the Great Assembly. (Pirke Avot 1:1)
This, state the traditional texts, is where our Torah comes from, through a lineage of male, intellectual inheritance. To be sure, this lineage is part of the life-blood of tradition. We need the learning of our fathers.
But the Torah itself reminds us: the Torah of our fathers is not sufficient.
My son, heed the discipline of your father,
And do not forsake the Torah of your mother. (Proverbs 1:8)
The Torah of our fathers was never intended to be the only access point, or to stand on its own. To become fully human, to heal our communities, to bridge the gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be, we must also access the Torah of our mothers.
During rabbinical school, my classmates and I spent day after day developing our skills and immersing ourselves in the Torah passed down from Moses. We explored impassioned argumentation, fantastical stories, and grammatical explanations of early sages and rabbis. Dating back to ancient times, these discourses were recorded in the thick, gold-embossed books that lined the walls of our beit midrash, the study hall, a collective conversation across multiple generations. In the beit midrash, I learned the techniques that the (male) rabbis had developed to draw new meaning out of ancient text: wordplay, gematria, and cross-references that linked diverse passages from the vast canon of Jewish sacred literature to discover new understandings and sometimes surprising connections.
While these interpretive techniques allowed the rabbis to continually, and creatively, renew the tradition and gain insight into the challenges of their time, these practices remained highly specialized—ensuring not only the continuation of the tradition but also the primacy of the rabbi as expert.
Within these texts are stories helping us recognize that our tradition knew it needed continual renewal and that bringing in new voices was a key part of that. There is a story from the Talmud of a leadership transition in which access to the beit midrash is opened to all who seek. Rabban Gamliel, a strict leader with exacting standards who often employed tactics that humiliated and debased his students, is deposed and replaced by Rabbi Elezar ben Azaria. Under this new leadership, the text says, the “doors of the beit midrash were flung open” to all who wanted to come learn. So many wanted to enter to study, the text says, that benches upon benches had to be added to accommodate all the demand—some say 400, others 700. And, on that very day access was opened, the text says, every matter of Jewish law that had not yet been adjudicated was figured out.
Perhaps this story is rabbinic fantasy, or perhaps it reflects reality. Either way, here we see our forebears putting forth a story that uplifts the need for wider access to Torah’s riches. And as the story indicates, this was not done only to benefit the learners, but to revitalize tradition itself.
I am, in many ways, a beneficiary of Rabbi Elezar ben Azaria’s approach.
For me, as a woman, the daughter of a convert, raised without a lot of Hebrew fluency or textual knowledge, unaffiliated with any particular Jewish movement or community, relatively unschooled in Jewish law or traditional practice, I was able to enter rabbinical school and, six years later, was ordained as a rabbi. I am so grateful to have found a pluralistic school that was deeply committed to helping students develop fluency in and a love for text study. Here, beit midrash was central to the curriculum, a part of our schedule every day, and hevruta, learning with a partner, was foundational as a way to help us work through the texts and teachings presented in class.
Most of us in my class—and certainly those of us who are female, queer, trans and/or lacking a more thorough formal Jewish education—wouldn’t have even been considered for entry in Rabban Gamliel’s study hall.
Yet, with all that might have been thought of as deficiencies in our background, the doors of the beit midrash were flung open for us. We were welcomed into rabbinical school and became deep learners, lovers and teachers of Jewish text, ritual, practice and culture. Our teachers in rabbinical school gave us a clear charge once they inducted us into this sprawling world of words: It is upon you not only to study the scholars that came before you, but also to generate your own creative interpretations of Torah. In other words, we were not only to learn from the ancient commentators we were also to become the commentators of today, and to invite our students and congregations to do the same. Embedded in this charge was the gem of wisdom that has fueled Judaism’s continual creative evolution across millennia: the tradition must be renewed in the minds, hearts, and hands of each generation in order to meet the unique circumstances and challenges it faces.
And yet, even after six years of intensive study, I realized that this model of intensive, intellectual study was incomplete. For all of us to be invited into this project of receiving, interpreting and renewing Torah in a meaningful way, not only were more benches required, but new tools were also needed.
For me, these tools were my mother’s Torah.
I grew up the daughter of a prominent art therapist. While I didn’t grow up in the beit midrash, steeped in Jewish text study, I was privileged to grow up in another place of deep learning and exploration: the studio.
The art studio was the biggest room in my house growing up. In the midst of my upwardly mobile suburban Chicago neighborhood marked by manicured lawns and pristine playgrounds, the studio was a place of messy, colorful aliveness. Its walls were covered in images, tables were marked with paint, shelves overflowing with brushes, tools and all manner of odds and ends—jars full of pebbles, pipe cleaners, nails, buttons, dried out animal bones. The rawness and color of the studio invited in the rawness and color of life.
Here, one could be their perfectly imperfect, in-process self—and could be so alongside others.
Rather than a place to make art for the purpose of being praised or sold, in the studio art-making was a way to touch in on the depths of one’s own soul, to struggle with the most pressing questions in one’s life, and to seek meaning, connection and vitality through engaging in the creative process. My mom and her colleagues developed a method to support this time of art-based spiritual inquiry called the Open Studio Process, and opened up a community art studio called the Open Studio Project where they could invite everyone—regardless of perceived talent or experience—into the power of this kind of art-making. This method brought together a simple practice of intention setting, intuitive art-making and writing.
Like Elazar ben Azaria in the beit midrash, in her own way, my mom flung open the doors to the studio—inviting in the artist that exists in everyone to come create.
Drawing on this lineage, and aliveness I felt in the Studio growing up, I began to bring this practice of art-making into the beit midrash. What might it be like, I wondered, to take these two methodologies of meaning-making, spiritual connection and inquiry—beit midrash and the Open Studio Process—and bring them together into one practice? What kind of access might be opened up, who might now feel fully welcome and at home, and what new insights might come to the fore? With gratitude for the benches that have been added to the study hall, what might it be like to add the tools of the studio? Beyond adjudicating halacha, what other possibilities, innovations and discoveries might be brought forth?
If art-making could allow us a way to touch in on the deep wisdom and intuitive knowing that exists within us, what might happen if we brought that knowing to Torah?
It is these questions that led to years of play and experimentation with teachers, classmates and colleagues, interweaving the process-oriented creative practice I had grown up with—the decades of work and wisdom I inherited from my mother—with the traditional practice of textual study I inherited from my rabbinic ancestors. It’s from this experimentation that the Jewish Studio Process methodology, and the Jewish Studio Project organization were born to support each and every person to meaningfully engage with Torah with their full selves: head, heart and hands, so that, at this time of peril and possibility, each of us may bring forth the insights and wisdom that are most needed today—for ourselves and for the world.
The complementarity of these different types of knowing has proven generative for me and for so many I have had the privilege to work with over the years.
I see participants enter the studio, in itself a unique technology combining both a freewheeling art space and a library of gold-embossed volumes; an aesthetically lively place, a combination of order and orderly chaos. We begin with spiritual grounding—warm-ups that include breath work, singing, moving meditations or guided imagination—to open ourselves to the learning and begin to build shared resonance. We engage in a particular theme through text study, exploring commentaries, questions, reflections, and analyses about the selections of text, noting what feels most alive for us from the learning. This leads us into our intention, often using a word or phrase from the text that we seek to more deeply explore.
We then put the text aside, letting the material drop down from head to heart and hands, we move into art-making. I see each person experiment with materials—fat brushes, found objects, bold colors—and others, observing without comment, considering what aspects of that experimentation they might incorporate.
Colors splatter on pages, images come into form, each person has space to follow where their own energy and questions lead them, yet does so in parallel process with others. The art created is often wild and deep and personal, sometimes with clear connection points to the text, though most often not. The connections tend to be what we discover in the final piece of the process: witness. We close with writing, witnessing and testifying to our work and our creative process, noting what we see in the image before us, what occurred for us as we created, and what new resonances the text offers us after this exploration.
In this way the Torah of our mothers mixes, melds, and coaxes forth new interpretation from the Torah of our fathers. Spent and satisfied, we feel the vibrancy of community, the power of our own inherent creativity, and a sense that more is possible than we might have thought when we first entered the studio.
We all have something of value to offer. May we discover the gifts of our own individual lineages, and may we offer them up with generosity and care. In so doing, may we be blessed by the ever-renewing nature of our tradition, the full expanse of experience: from the Torah of our Fathers and the tools of the beit midrash, to the Torah of Mothers and the tools of creativity. May we access the wisdom that comes when we can bring our full selves into the place of all possibility.
Rabbi Adina Allen is co-founder and Creative Director of Jewish Studio Project. A version of this appears in The Place of All Possibility: Cultivating Creativity Through Ancient Jewish Wisdom by Rabbi Adina Allen.
