Can the Torah Love Us Back?

Reparative Reading Strategies in Feminist Torah with Rabbi Avigayil Halpern.So many of us have had experiences with Torah that are painful. We teach ourselves — and are taught in our learning spaces — to expect moments of alienation and even cruelty from the Torah we love so much. In this class, we will use the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s frameworks of paranoid reading and reparative reading to look at halachic texts that restrict who is invited to practice embodied mitzvot. We will experiment together with different lenses and emotional approaches to these texts. This is a part of Torah Studio's Elul Series: Our Torah, Ourselves - How today's Torah scholars are finding themselves (and so much more) in ancient texts.