Eshet Chayil: Bread, Gender, and Shabbat (Yitz Landes)

Proverbs 31:14 describes the Woman of Valor as going to great lengths to prepare food for her home, as she is “like a merchant fleet, bringing her food”—or, “bread”—“from afar.” The poem, in its entirety, outlines all that she does, and food preparation is just one of her many responsibilities and feats. When recited on Sabbath eve, this verse reads as if it refers specifically to preparing the Sabbath meal, and I will focus here on one way in which food preparation has intersected with the Shabbat meal in Jewish homes over the past millennia.

In the Torah, a clear distinction is made with regards to food preparation: men make meat, women make bread. We thus read that when the angels visited Avraham in Mamre, Avraham told Sarah “Quick, three seahs of choice flour! Knead and make cakes!” (Gen. 18:6), whereas he then “ran to the herd, took a calf, tender and choice, and gave it to a servant-boy, who hastened to prepare it” (ibid. 7). Sarah prepares the bread, and Avraham, with the help of his male servant, prepares the meat.

When discussing the separation of Hallah, however—the main ritual that accompanies bread-preparation—the Torah does not speak in gendered terms (Numbers 15:17-21):

The commandment to separate “the first yield of your baking” is incumbent upon all Israelites—regardless of their gender—once they enter the Promised Land.

Yet in the Mishnah, there is a clear assumption that the person preparing bread is female. This can be seen quite simply in that the Mishnah uses feminine verbs when describing the person preparing dough, as for example in m. Hallah 3:1:

While the commandment to separate Hallah is incumbent upon everyone, the Mishnah recognizes that in practice, it is women who ensure that it is fulfilled, as it is women, in the ancient Jewish household, who prepare bread, and thus ensure that it is prepared properly.^[1]

For the rabbis, this division of labor is a fact of life. But it is also a source of anxiety: the Mishnah in the second chapter of Shabbat famously mentions the “three sins for which women die in childbirth”—for not being careful with the commandments of niddah, hallah, or the lighting the Sabbath candles (m. Shabbat 2.6). Each of these home-bound commandments are incumbent upon the household or the married couple, regardless of gender, but it is women who are responsible for making sure that they are fulfilled. This Mishnah (and its expansion in Avot de-Rabbi Natan [(Schechter ed. pg. 13)]) thus betrays the male rabbis’ deep anxieties around having to rely on women in their religious lives; it also speaks to their related fears of losing their female spouse in childbirth, a phenomenon all-too common in pre-modern times, and one which people were mostly helpless to prevent and at a loss to explain.

These anxieties take the rabbis to an unsettling place of blame and shame. And yet, with that, these commandments have also been the object of creative reinterpretation and have served as meaningful spiritual practices for Jews throughout history. The commandments of niddah and candle lighting are not bound to the Land of Israel—they are to be practiced everywhere. In contrast, as we saw above, the Torah described the commandment of Hallah as taking place “when you enter the land,” and the Mishnah assumes that only produce from the Land of Israel is obligated in hallah (m. Hallah 2:1[2]). But to this day, Jews throughout the world separate hallah when preparing bread. Medieval rabbis struggled to explain why hallah was still separated, even outside of the Land of Israel (Tosafot, Qidushin, 36b):

According to the Tosafot, hallah, unlike other Priestly or Levitical gifts that are usually only brought in the Land of Israel, is more like “a person’s (or, bodily) obligation” (hovat guf)—as opposed to an obligation of the Land—as it only occurs once an individual begins to prepare dough.

Tosafot’s explanation here reads very much like an after-the-fact attempt to rationalize a practice that they find surprising. But I think there is some truth to it—at the very least, people may not experience bread preparation and hallah separation as intrinsically tied to the Land: it is a commandment, after all, that often takes place at home in the kitchen, and certainly not outside in the field. And yet I think there is more to say about why this commandment survived, for its survival has to with how Jewish women understood the practice of separating hallah and imbued it with meaning. One such text that allows us to glimpse at this is the following tkhine for the separation of hallah (trans. A Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book, ed. Lavie): ​​​​​​​

This tkhine understands Hallah as having the expiatory potency of the sacrifices once offered in the Jerusalem Temple, specifically in that the separation of Hallah and its burning may serve to atone for the sins of the woman that performs the ritual as they prepare their household for the Sabbath or for a holiday. Hallah separation is thus reimagined: if the rabbis understood the separated portion to be purely a gift to the priests, this portion is now offered directly to God, and it is rooted not in the Holy Land, but in the kitchen of the Jewish Home. The destruction of the portion in the home oven creates a liminal moment that opens a pathway for prayer, as its destruction is articulated as an offering, forming a relationship between the baker/pray-er and God. The priests are removed from the equation, and the Jewish woman creates a direct relationship with God, one that exists at the crucial intersection of food, sacrifice, and the Sabbath. Bread, the most basic form of sustenance, is made holy, precisely because it is the most basic form of sustenance—one that we cannot live without, just as we cannot live without atonement.[3] It is this reimagination—a rearticulation that gives additional meaning to the gendered aspects of bread preparation ahead of the Sabbath—that kept the ritual of hallah alive, in the kitchen of the Jewish home, a perennial source of Jewish culture and creativity. Moving beyond the kitchen, to the dining table, it is this work that further reimagines the Shabbat table as a sacrificial meal, ensuring God’s presence as They partake in the meal along with the family.

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I have taught this history of the ritual of hallah separation on several occasions, and I have struggled each time. I still ask myself, is this overly apologetic? Am I trying to put a positive take on an unfortunate division of labor, reifying a power dynamic that I should be seeking to dismantle? As an historian, I think that there is a truth in what I am describing here—that is, I do believe that the ritual survived because Jewish women reimagined it—and I think that is both fascinating and inspiring. And while this reconstruction is difficult to prove, an extra ounce of imagination is necessary when uncovering the histories of peoples who mostly did not write nor explicitly partake in the hegemonic discourse. The question may then become, how do we lift up these histories, the histories of creative ritual imagination, given that, for good reasons, we hope that these rituals are no longer gendered in the same way? Or better, what do we do with women’s rituals as we try and reimagine the ways in which aspects of gender influence our religious lives today?