Jewish Women's Theology: A Literary Archaeology

Abstract

In this paper, I demonstrate specific methods, developed from Jewish and black Womanist traditions, for the derivation of theology and ethics from contemporary Jewish women's literature and auto/biography. In order to recognize these texts as potentially theological, a radical shift in perception and interpretation is required. These texts bring to us Jewish women's experience. More, they contain the Jewish woman's response to that experience. I suggest within that response is an ethics, behind the ethics a theology. These texts then bring to us the theologies of our predecessors and contemporaries. In this paper, then, I explore the possibility that a baseline feminist approach to Jewish women's literature must begin here: viewing every Jewish woman's word as a potential declaration, each context a revelatory setting, all content an epiphany of the hitherto unrevealed and unread Jewish women's experience and situation, pains and glories, wisdom and silence.