On Rosh Chodesh Cheshvan, my school had a very special event: a combined Rosh Chodesh Chagiga and Hachnasat Sefer Torah for a new Torah that a family dedicated at our school. There were many things that made the day beautiful, but one that made it particularly moving for me (and some of my similarly-aged colleagues) was seeing our girls and women, as well as the boys and men, dancing with the Torah. “Mah ahavti Toratecha; kol hayom hi sichati.”
Too often, our community’s discourse about women’s Torah learning treats it as suspect, a threat, a challenge: why does she want to learn? What’s her agenda? What does she plan to do with it? Gedolim of our times and previous generations, R’ Aharon Lichtenstein and R’ Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, supported women’s Torah learning as a good, even a necessity in our time. It’s time for us, as a community, to fully embrace that: to revel in girls’ and women’s joy in gaining access to the texts and tools of our mesorah, to view it as a resource and source of strength, and to do everything we can to encourage and foster it.
