The chavruta—the age-old Jewish practice of studying in pairs—has long been celebrated as a hallmark of Torah learning, sharpening minds and kindling hearts in dialogue. Yet while this formative experience has shaped the spiritual and intellectual lives of generations of men, for women in the Charedi world it remains far less accessible. Their exposure to Torah study is often mediated, passive, or tightly scripted—more repetition than creation, more reception than interpretation. This imbalance is not only educational but existential, shaping identity and belonging within the world of Torah. What happens when women are given the tools of chavruta, the freedom of question and dissent, the chance to interpret for themselves? And what happens when they are not?
This essay explores those questions: tracing how current practices limit women’s voices, how alternative models point toward empowerment, and how rethinking pedagogy—both in the classroom and at the Shabbat table—can reshape the very way women claim their place within the chain of Jewish tradition.
The Missing Chavruta Experience
Chavruta—study in pairs—is a uniquely Jewish mode of learning, so central that the Sages warn Torah scholars not to study alone:
“Rabbi Chama bar Rabbi Chanina said: What is the meaning of the verse ‘Iron sharpens iron’ (Mishlei 27:17)? To teach that just as one piece of iron sharpens the other, so too two scholars sharpen one another in halacha. Rabbi Bar Bar Chana said: Why are the words of Torah compared to fire, as it says, ‘Behold, My word is like fire, says Hashem’ (Yirmiyahu 23:29)? To teach that just as fire does not burn alone, so too the words of Torah cannot endure alone” (Ta’anit 7a).
Yet in practice, this experience is almost entirely reserved for men in the religious and Charedi world. Only a small number of Charedi women are privileged to encounter this practice of chavruta study in the beit midrash. I happen to be one of the fortunate few—though only partially so.
That back-and-forth was my first taste of Torah study as a living conversation, not merely a lecture, and it gave me something most girls are denied: a mentoring experience in active Torah study through the model of teacher and disciple
It began in eighth grade, when a teacher arrived who “knew how to learn like the boys.” Beyond the unforgettable classroom lessons, she took the time on Shabbat to sit with me in shul and study a sicha of the Lubavitcher Rebbe after the prayers, purely for our enjoyment. We learned in chavruta—equal and reciprocal—even though she was the teacher and I the student. Sometimes she read and explained, sometimes I did, alternating in turn. That back-and-forth was my first taste of Torah study as a living conversation, not merely a lecture, and it gave me something most girls are denied: a mentoring experience in active Torah study through the model of teacher and disciple. In the years that followed, I sought out chavrutot whenever I could. Even in larger groups, I naturally gravitated toward the role of reading aloud and explaining. No doubt, the confidence came from that first chavruta.
Today, I see the same spark in my own daughters when they get a taste of this kind of learning. But sadly, the moments are often fleeting. One of my daughter’s teachers allowed the class to study in chavrutot—until she stopped, explaining that it created too much chaos. I suspect the real issue was that the flood of questions overwhelmed her, and she lacked the tools to manage a beit midrash environment. She faced two obstacles: first, the all-too-common fear in Charedi girls’ education of students asking too many questions; and second, the pedagogical challenge of sustaining chavruta learning without it dissolving into disorder.
Curious, I asked my daughter about her experience in the program run by Rabbanit Tehila Gado at Midreshet Otot for Charedi women and girls. This is an informal framework, free of the compulsory atmosphere of school. “The learning there is an experience,” she explained. “She prepares a source sheet with everything we need to understand the sugya. She doesn’t answer our questions at all—she waits for us to figure it out on our own. Only if we really can’t does she explain.”
This is what a true beit midrash experience requires: trust in the students, empowerment to learn independently, and meticulous preparation of sources that open the path.
Passive, Secondhand Learning
Traditional Jewish learning has always been dialogical. It thrives on questions and answers, and on questions that remain unanswered—tzarich iyun, left to hover, unresolved. It thrives on multiple interpretations, often contradictory, and on the push and pull of debate, sometimes even heated argument. In the Charedi yeshiva world, learning is itself a mitzvah, which means it is not measured by exams or by outcomes. A student is honored simply for learning; if he demonstrates brilliance in the arguments he raises, he is praised even more. He may even challenge the rosh yeshiva in public, and this is not taken as disrespect but as intellectual vigor.
Most teachers in schools for girls, by contrast, have never themselves tasted this kind of learning. The educational culture they pass on is structured almost as its inversion. Girls are taught Torah frontally, with the teacher firmly at the center. They are expected to listen, absorb, and reproduce—not to interpret, not to construct ideas of their own. At best, they may be asked to read aloud, but not to explain. Questions are rare, and when raised, they are swiftly met with an emphatic answer. No space is left for questions without answers, nor for the slow, creative thinking that such questions can generate. Often enough, a question is seen not as curiosity but as a sign of chutzpah or even lack of yirat shamayim. The girl who dares to ask may be rebuked, sent out of class, or accused of “cooling the bath” of religious passion. Unsurprisingly, most girls stop asking. They internalize that their task is not to interpret but to memorize, not to wrestle with text but to absorb it passively.
The Torah that reaches the students is thus Torah by proxy, stripped of its rawness and complexity. It becomes material for exams rather than for life
The result is not only an atmosphere of fear but a pervasive sense of secondhand Torah. In many cases, the teacher herself has not worked through the sources, but is presenting material already prepared, translated, or adapted by her husband or by others. The Torah that reaches the students is thus Torah by proxy, stripped of its rawness and complexity. It becomes material for exams rather than for life.
The difference is profound. A woman who quotes a text often lacks confidence in her own understanding, and so she will not argue forcefully. A man citing a Gemara or a Midrash, by contrast, is heard as the bearer of authority. She cannot easily respond; she does not know the counter-texts or the interpretive tradition. In this way a subtle hierarchy is created: men enjoy a sense of freedom and authority before the text, while women receive Torah as something binding but sealed, holy but inaccessible.
Even the structure of schooling reinforces the divide. Boys’ learning is celebrated as an achievement in itself. When a boy finishes a tractate, the family bakes a cake and hosts a party with singing and joy. When a girl finishes a book of Chumash, she is tested with an exam, an event experienced as punishment rather than celebration. As one father wrote in Hamodia, this risks turning Torah itself into something bitter for his daughter. The mother’s cake for the son but not for the daughter leaves a mark: it shapes a deep sense of who truly belongs to Torah, and who is only tolerated at its margins.
Exams, of course, are not the problem in themselves. But when paired with the absence of joy, celebration, and ownership, they become one more force pushing girls away from Torah, and reinforcing the sense that Torah belongs—at least in its living, creative form—to men alone.
Three Modes of Jewish Learning
The late Professor Lee Shulman, a leading American Jewish scholar of education and former president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, was deeply shaped by his own youthful years in yeshiva. When he later turned to pedagogy, he analyzed and theorized his formative experiences in academic terms. Shulman argued that three modes of Jewish learning—chavruta (study partnership), machloket (disputation), and divrei Torah (the articulation of a Torah thought)—all play a crucial role in forging a strong Jewish identity in the learner. By demanding that the student formulate and defend his own position, the yeshiva model links the learner emotionally to Torah, while situating him within a historical chain of arguers and interpreters who have debated Torah across the generations.
By demanding that the student formulate and defend his own position, the yeshiva model links the learner emotionally to Torah, while situating him within a historical chain of arguers and interpreters who have debated Torah across the generations
Shulman became best known for his theory of “signature pedagogy”—or, as we might more evocatively translate it, pedagogical “imprinting.” Just as in nature certain animals imprint on their parents through sounds and smells in their early days, so too, argued Shulman, professional training imprints students with the basic skills, habits of thought, and values of their chosen discipline. These pedagogies are not generic but distinctive: the law school Socratic method, the clinical rounds in nursing or medicine, the problem sets and design reviews in engineering. They are so central to the field that they spread across institutions until they become virtually universal.
Shulman compared the pedagogy of the beit midrash to these professional contexts. In each case, students are made to appear in public, to shoulder responsibility, and to confront uncertainty. The law student must stand before the class and argue his case. The nursing student must approach the hospital bed and offer her diagnosis while others look on. The psychotherapist-in-training must counsel a patient while supervisors observe through a one-way mirror. These pedagogies ensure that learning cannot remain passive. Anonymity—the curse of the lecture hall—disappears. One cannot coast through the semester uncomprehending. One must be prepared to risk error, to be corrected, to wrestle with doubt, and in that struggle to learn.
So too in the beit midrash. In chavruta study, each student takes turns reading and explaining aloud. Preparing a dvar Torah requires independent learning, shaping an idea, and presenting it before others. Machloket, the classic yeshiva dispute, obliges each participant not only to refine his own argument but to grasp the position of his partner, test it, and measure his own reasoning against it. All three demand visibility, accountability, and a readiness to risk failure.
The parallels extend further. In secular professional training, students emerge with cognitive mastery, practical skill, and an internalized sense of the field’s values—what it means to think like a lawyer, to act like an engineer, to embody responsibility as a nurse. Asked “what does it mean to be an engineer?” one student replied: “It means using math and science to design things in the world—and then being accountable for the mess you’ve made.” That single sentence captured the intellectual, the practical, and the ethical.
Likewise, the yeshiva student develops an identity as a Jewish learner, someone responsible not merely for his own study but for carrying forward the living chain of Torah to the next generation. The practices of chavruta, machloket, and divrei Torah are not merely pedagogical techniques but engines of identity, impressing upon the learner that he is a bearer of the tradition, bound by the discipline of Torah and charged with transmitting it further.
A Place in the Torah World
Shulman and others who wrote about chavruta study overlooked one crucial fact: in practice, those who undergo this formative pedagogical imprinting are almost exclusively men.
For women and girls in Charedi society, the parallel practices are truncated or absent. The dvar Torah, for instance, rarely becomes an exercise in independent inquiry. Girls are encouraged to recite a pre-packaged summary of the weekly Torah portion in kindergarten and early elementary school, usually memorized from what a teacher or rebbetzin has provided. Rare are the opportunities to prepare something original based on their own study of text and commentary. Even in the exceptional seminaries that make some room for this, the scope is limited. And at home, as Rabbanit Tehilla Gado has noted, whether a daughter has a “place” in the Torah conversation depends largely on the father’s willingness to invite her voice. More often than not, the girls of the house are busy serving the food while their brothers rehearse their identity as budding Jewish men by delivering a self-prepared dvar Torah to the table.
Shulman’s categories of imprinting—visibility, uncertainty, and responsibility—are systematically denied to girls
Shulman’s categories of imprinting—visibility, uncertainty, and responsibility—are systematically denied to girls. Boys grow accustomed to being visible in the beit midrash and at the table: their Torah words are heard, weighed, and challenged. Girls, by contrast, are often silenced, explicitly or implicitly. Boys learn to carry uncertainty, to ask questions that may or may not have answers, and to test themselves in public; girls are taught that a question is dangerous, or even a sign of weak faith. Boys are trained into responsibility: by articulating their own Torah they feel a duty to the Jewish past and future. Girls rarely experience that burden or privilege; they are left to listen, or to clear the plates.
The result is a distorted picture of Jewish identity. If the yeshiva boy learns to see himself as a bearer of the Torah chain, the Charedi girl is left standing at its side—adjacent to the chain but not a link within it. Her Jewish identity remains partial, denied the formative experiences of voice, risk, and accountability that define Shulman’s “signature pedagogy.”
Looking back on my own path, I recognize how much of my identity as a believing, practicing Charedi woman was shaped precisely by those rare moments when I did taste chavruta learning. The chance to hold the text itself in my hands, to explain a verse, to discover meaning in dialogue rather than receive it pre-digested from a teacher—these were the experiences that gave me confidence, joy, and love of Torah. They connected me to God not through fear of what others would say about my “shidduch prospects,” but through my own encounter with the sacred word. I am convinced that one of the great antidotes to religious attrition among girls is not merely protective rules about “what not,” but pathways into an affirmative “what yes”: empowering them to encounter Torah directly, with the dignity of learners rather than the passivity of vessels.
And yet, the weight of tradition still constrains. Classical texts that exempt women from study, or relegate them to the margins—“women are exempt” has too often been read as “women cannot”—have supplied the cultural template for a pedagogy of passivity. But when girls and women actually enter the learning, the fire of Torah inevitably breaks through. Research by scholars such as Lea Taragin-Zeller has shown how even in Bais Yaakov contexts, teachers and students subvert the silences, creating their own interpretations, and in doing so they step into visibility, uncertainty, and responsibility—sometimes without even realizing they are transgressing the boundaries.
I have seen this myself in the rare teachers who dared to open a beit midrash atmosphere for girls, and in the women I have interviewed over the years who grew into Torah learners against the grain. Too often they were told by fathers or suitors that their love of learning was unfeminine, a threat to their marital prospects, or a sign of deviance. A girl in a short skirt might pass, but a girl with a Gemara is suspect. These small acts of social policing draw sharp boundaries: the “desirable” woman bakes cakes and buys dresses, while the “strange” one opens books and asks questions.
Yet precisely here lies the seed of renewal. For every Bruriah, Yalta, or Sarah Schenirer in our past, there are women today who, by insisting on their place in the beit midrash, reclaim the imprinting of Torah identity for themselves—and for their daughters.
The Deeper Wound
The deepest wound in the messages given to girls is this: what is positive and celebrated for boys is deemed negative and improper for girls. For a boy, opening a Gemara is noble; for a girl, the message is: chop the salad. A boy is expected to deliver a dvar Torah; a girl is told it is unbecoming for her to “speak.” (Unbecoming? What could be unbecoming about a woman giving voice to Torah?) Even learned women, who in seminary may lead their students through sophisticated texts and offer their own interpretations, often revert at home to the role of serving soup—thus transmitting to the next generation, sons and daughters alike, that Torah belongs to men, who exercise ownership through study and speech.
Even learned women, who in seminary may lead their students through sophisticated texts and offer their own interpretations, often revert at home to the role of serving soup
One striking example illustrates the point. In 2016, a massive rally of seminary girls was held in Jerusalem’s Arena stadium, aimed at dissuading them from pursuing academic study. Rebbetzin Menucha Levi gave a fiery, impassioned address, which was later posted online. For women, this was a familiar mode of discourse: an inspired teacher speaking passionately, weaving sources and exhortation. But for many men who saw the video, it was utterly foreign. They reacted as if confronted with something unnatural, comparing her to a parrot that had learned to speak, or a child mimicking adult phrases. Even men whose wives or sisters were learned had rarely seen them in that public role of preacher or teacher. The gap in expectations was laid bare.
The challenge before us is not merely academic. It is about who is allowed to stand as a bearer of Torah, and who remains on the margins. When everything that is celebrated in boys—argument, curiosity, interpretation—is discouraged in girls, the result is not modesty but silence, not piety but estrangement. If we want our daughters to love Torah with the same fire as our sons, we must give them access to the same practices of ownership: chavruta, questioning, interpretation, and the public voice of divrei Torah.
The good news is that the tools are within reach. Teachers can be trained to run batei midrash for girls; parents can encourage their daughters to speak divrei Torah at the table as naturally as their sons; families can mark their daughters’ achievements in Torah with celebration and pride. Change can begin not only in institutions but in the intimacy of the home.
If we take these steps, our daughters will not feel they are outsiders to the tradition but full participants in it. They will know that their voices matter, their interpretations count, and their love of Torah is not a concession but an inheritance. That inheritance, once nurtured, has the power to enrich not only women’s learning but the vitality of the Jewish people as a whole.
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As I wrote this essay, I realized something about myself. I am one of the mothers who bakes cakes when my son finishes a masechet, but not when my daughter completes a chumash and passes her exam. This, too, is pedagogy—an imprinting as powerful as any classroom. The work of reform is not only in training teachers; it begins in small, simple acts at home, in family circles, where we model for our daughters that their Torah learning is precious and celebrated.
So I accept upon myself something very concrete: to bake cakes for my daughters as well, in honor of their Torah study, which they love and rejoice in so deeply. May such small gestures be steps toward a broader transformation. And may we all merit to bring true joy to the Ribbono Shel Olam—in every act of Torah and in every act of love.
