Are Women and Gemara Learning Incompatible?

While women’s Gemara learning is not assur, Jewish tradition holds that it’s not preferable and doesn’t actively encourage it due to women’s spiritual and psychological make-up. In this article, we will delve into the nature of Gemara learning as well as how Torah thought characterizes male and female thinking in order to gain a clearer understanding of why Gemara isn’t commonly the women’s domain.

The Halachic (as opposed to Aggadic) sections of Gemara learning are characterized by theory, looking at the most extreme cases to define the parameters of the law. Gemara takes extreme cases to define the cut-off point of a particular halacha, and from there, one strives to explore the underlying mechanisms through which the halacha operates. This theoretical nature of Gemara learning is, by definition, non-practical and refers to purely abstract situations that sometimes have no application in practice. Even though most of the time, one can derive practical laws from the Gemara’s discussions, this is not essential to the Gemara study process. There can even be discussions that have no practical relevance whatsoever – The Gemara (Sanhedrin 71a) lists examples of situations that “never were and never will be”:

There has never been a stubborn and rebellious son and there will never be one in the future, as it is impossible to fulfill all the requirements that must be met in order to apply this halakha. And why, then, was the passage relating to a stubborn and rebellious son written in the Torah? So that you may expound upon new understandings of the Torah and receive reward for your learning, this being an aspect of the Torah that has only theoretical value. 

There has never been an idolatrous city and there will never be one in the future, as it is virtually impossible to fulfill all the requirements that must be met in order to apply this halakha. And why, then, was the passage relating to an idolatrous city written in the Torah? So that you may expound upon new understandings of the Torah and receive reward for your learning. 

There has never been a house afflicted with leprosy and there will never be one in the future. And why, then, was the passage relating to leprosy of the house written in the Torah? So that you may expound upon new understandings of the Torah and receive reward for your learning. 

Torah thought sets up a certain typology of male thinking and female thinking. This is not to say that there is a rigid binary between the two, in the same sense that the categorizations of ‘male’ and ‘female’ in no way suggest that every single man is the same or every single woman is the same. Clearly, each person is unique and different from one another. There is a spectrum of thought patterns among men and women, and the nature of human thought itself is multi-dimensional. Yet this acknowledgment of variation doesn’t negate the universally observable differences between male and female thinking. 

We can see this at work in young children. Putting skeptics who say it’s a result of social conditioning aside, little boys typically take more of an interest in vehicles and machinery – how things work. Little girls, on the other hand, are more likely to be found playing mommies and daddies or dolls house, reenacting the roles, relationships, and happenings of real life – that which relates to the concrete, tangible world we live in.

Gemara learning is typified by theory, a more male approach, as opposed to concrete reality, a more female approach. The female outlook is typically more holistic and intuitive. Whereas male Gemara learning is relatively more ‘knowing to know,’ women’s learning is ‘knowing to do’ – a woman’s essential question is, ‘What practical message can I gain from this, and how can I apply it to my life?’ Of course, men also need to learn in order to know what to do, but the ikkar mitzvah for men when it comes to learning is Torah Lishma – learning purely for the sake of learning, with the learning being an end in and of itself¹. Women’s learning is always focused on the practical, with a women’s baseline requirement being to study the laws governing the mitzvot that she is obligated to fulfill² (needless to say, women can go beyond this baseline requirement).

In her book Circle, Arrow, Spiral, Miriam Kosman³ quotes the following explanation, which epitomizes male thinking as ‘abstraction’ and female thinking as ‘concretization.’ Nell Noddings explains the differences between the two as follows:

Instead of proceeding deductively from principles superimposed on situations, women seek to “fill out” hypothetical situations in a defensible move toward concretization. Suppose, for example, that we are considering appropriate punishment for one who has committed a particular crime. The traditional approach, that of the father, is to ask under what principle the case falls. But the mother may wish to ask more about the culprit and his victims. She may begin by thinking, “What if this were my child?”… The first [position] moves immediately to abstraction where its thinking can take place clearly and logically in isolation from the complicating factors of particular persons, places, and circumstances; the second moves to concretization where its feeling can be modified by the introduction of facts, the feelings of others, and personal histories. 

Thus while men tend to analyze situations abstractly – from the outside in, a woman’s tendency is to use her intuition – looking, so to speak, from the inside out and concretizing abstract principles by applying them to the tangible reality.

Thus while men tend to analyze situations abstractly – from the outside in, a woman’s tendency is to use her intuition – looking, so to speak, from the inside out and concretizing abstract principles by applying them to the tangible reality. We see the difference between the male mode of thinking and the female mode of thinking reflected in the verse:

שְׁמַ֣ע בְּ֭נִי מוּסַ֣ר אָבִ֑יךָ וְאַל־תִּ֝טֹּ֗שׁ תּוֹרַ֥ת אִמֶּֽךָ׃

My son, heed the discipline of your father, and do not forsake the instruction of your mother; (Mishlei 1:8)

Rashi explains that the ‘discipline of your father’ refers to the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. These are the absolutes, the firm bases of Jewish law. That which is unalterable and doesn’t change from one generation to the next. ‘The instruction of your mother’ refers to the words of the Sages of each generation, through which they innovated and added and made safeguards for the Torah. Even though these Sages are male, the role they manifest is the feminine approach⁴. Rabbi Avrohom Chaim Feuer explains⁵, “The compassionate Sages were painfully aware of the shortcomings of their own and future generations. In order to protect their beloved people from sin and its punishment, the Rabbis introduced safeguards which were custom-tailored to the needs of the weaker generations.” 

While we can study and analyze the “male” Written Torah and Oral Torah, their fixed nature means that we might not always be able to relate what we learn to our situation, right here, right now. The “feminine” safeguards, on the other hand, are characterized by flexibility where the Sages are able to take into account all of the multifarious contextual factors affecting each generation. 

There is no end to how much could be written on this topic, and here we have only given a brief overview. To summarize though, the male way of thinking can be characterized as abstract, theoretical, and idealistic versus the female way of thinking, which is concrete, practical, and realistic. Gemara learning, with its focus on purely hypothetical cases that “never were and never will be,” is not typically the women’s domain since it is not optimally suited to their way of thinking and their spiritual needs. 

¹ Nefesh HaChaim 4:3

² “This includes a large number of mitzvot – e.g., Shabbat, Niddah, and Kashrut – to the extent that many men would be proud if their Torah knowledge encompassed these areas. Furthermore, women are also obligated to perform “spiritual” mitzvot – e.g., to love God, fear Him, and believe in Him. Thus, they must also study those aspects of Torah which relate to these commandments.” (Mishneh Torah, Hilchot Talmud Torah 1:1 – translated by Eliyahu Touger, Moznaim Publications) 

³ Miriam Kosman, Circle, Arrow, Spiral, (Targum Press, 2017) 227, quoting: Nell Noddings Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education (University of California Press, 1986) 36-37. 

⁴ In the same way that in a teacher-student relationship, the teacher (i.e., the giver) is seen as the male role, whereas the student (i.e., the receiver) is seen as the female role – regardless of the genders of the actual student and teacher in a real-life scenario.

⁵ Avrohom Chaim Feuer, Ramban: A Letter for the Ages [Iggeret HaRamban], (ArtScroll Mesorah Publications, 1989) 26