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Rabbanit Leah Sarna
Sasha Rogelberg | Staff Writer
Courtesy of Leah Sarna
I n seventh grade, Rabbanit Leah Sarna developed a love for study-
ing Talmud.

As faculty member and director of Teen Programs at the Drisha
Institute for Jewish Education, she’s focused on kindling that same
love for others.

The 31-year-old grew up in the Boston suburbs attending an
Orthodox Jewish day school and studied at a yeshiva in Israel, where
she developed an affinity for Jewish text study, before moving to Bala
Cynwyd and becoming a member at Sha’arei Orah Congregation.

“The genre of the Talmud is so special and unique: that it’s argumen-
tative and conversational, that it’s not afraid of anything — there is no
question off-limits in the Talmud — that it’s funny and interesting, that
there’s so many different ways of reading it or levels of understanding
it,” Sarna said.

Beyond the Drisha Institute for Jewish Learning, an institute
founded in New York to give women the opportunity to rigorously
study Jewish texts — and that is now
open to all genders — Sarna wants
to offer the lessons of the Talmud to
anyone who wants it.

Sarna, who was ordained at Yeshivat
Maharat in New York City in 2018, is
one of 20 Jewish women scholars in
the “Word-by-Word: A Jewish Women’s
Writing Circle” cohort program created
by Sefaria, to “increase and elevate
Jewish scholarly publications authored
by women,” as per a May 11 press release.

“One of the things that happens
when you are a woman who spends
her whole life studying Jewish texts,
like I do, is that you have to contend
with the fact that all day long, you’re
reading things written by men,” Sarna
said. “They’re just very, very few
women in our canon.”
This doesn’t mean there are no
Jewish women scholars, though. Works
by women in the 16th and 17th centu-
ries, often written in Yiddish, were not
translated or are just being translated
now. These texts never made it onto
the shelves of Jewish scholars and
were not cited or disseminated in the
same way as texts written by men.

Sefaria, a nonprofit that organizes,
translates and digitizes Jewish texts for
free, wants to help rectify the gender
disparity of available Jewish texts.

The “Word-by-Word” initiative, led
by Erica Brown and Sara Wolkenfeld
and funded by Micah Philanthropies,
Walder Foundation and the Arev Fund,
provides writing support for the 20
cohort members, who will complete
book-length texts at the end of the
three-year program.

Through “Word-by-Word,” Sarna is
working on a book about pregnancy,
childbirth and early parenthood to
serve as a guide for Jewish mothers.

“Pregnancy and childbirth and the
first few months of parenthood are
lonely times. There are times when
you are really isolated; your experi-
ence is meant to be private in a way,”
Sarna said. “And what I feel is that our
tradition has so much to say about that
time of life, but it’s very difficult to find
context for teaching it.”
Sarna knows this from experience.

She gave birth to her first child in April
2020, when the isolated experience
of early parenthood and postpartum
depression became even more isolated
due to the pandemic. Guided by ancient
Jewish traditions and texts, she learned
to balance prayer with taking care of an
infant, adapting baby naming rituals for
a ceremony over Zoom.

By the time she gave birth to a second
child in July, she adapted Jewish ritual
for an in-person ceremony.

Among the prayers she recited was
what she calls tefillat yoledet, “a prayer
of thanksgiving by the mother who
survived childbirth,” drawing inspira-
tion from the Book of Samuel, when
Hannah brings Samuel to the taberna-
cle after his birth and prays.

Deeply cemented in Jewish lore,
stories that feature Jewish mothers are
not readily available to all Jews.

“Most women today don’t know
about that stuff and just feel like, Wow,
the Jewish tradition forgot me,” Sarna
said. “Which it didn’t! It’s just that the
mimetic tradition of that was lost.”
Bringing ancient rituals and storytell-
ing to the modern world is the crux of
Sarna’s scholarship.

“The hope for this book is to help
people and to bring parts of our tradi-
tion that are there, that are ancient,
that are gorgeous and incredible and
funny and interesting, and just make
them available to people,” she said.

When it comes to the role and
presence of women in these books,
however, the translation of Jewish
thought and ritual is not straightfor-
ward. Tradition has centered women in
a Jewish home, so what happens when
women have lives beyond the home?
More broadly, what does modern spiri-
tuality look like?
Sarna and her “Word-by-Word”
cohort will not be able to answer those
questions, but she hopes to empower
others to look for the answers.

“The Torah is available to you,” she
said. “And it’s yours.” ■
srogelberg@midatlanticmedia.com JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
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