“The learning women came to the passage, ‘Should a man take a vow,’ and once again were sad at heart.

“They said: Could it be that a woman’s word is worth less than a man’s? For a man must keep his vows, while a woman—her husband and her father annul her vows.

“The women sages answered them: Could you really have thought that a woman’s word is inferior to a man’s? Rather, the Torah got to the bottom of what people who make pledges are thinking and knew that a male would take a vow with a mind that it be kept, and a woman would take a vow with a mind that her father or husband would consent, and if they would not, they have the right to annul it.

“And in a place where all know that a woman doesn’t need her husband’s or her father’s consent, and her word is graven in stone, her husband and father can’t annul her vow.

“And this is what the wisest of men meant when he said: ‘When you make a vow to God, don’t delay in fulfilling it, for there is no pleasure in fools. What you vow, fulfil. Better not to vow at all, than to vow and not fulfil.’”

This contemporary midrash was written by the Israeli feminist thinker Rivka Lubitch and published in Dirshuni, an extraordinary collection of midrashim written by Israeli women.

The title Dirshuni comes from the Hebrew root meaning to seek, to inquire, to interpret. It might be translated: “Interpret me.” Or perhaps even: “Demand meaning from me.”

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Rivka Lubitch’s midrashim imagine a beit midrash, a house of learning, in which women have always been present: not merely sitting quietly at the edge of the room, receiving the interpretations of others, but asking questions, challenging inherited assumptions and creating Torah.

Lubitch paints a picture for us of the women entering that beit midrash carrying their sadness. They have read the opening verses of Parashat Matot:

“If a man makes a vow to the Eternal or takes an oath imposing an obligation on himself, he shall not profane his word; he must carry out all that has crossed his lips.”

The instruction appears unequivocal. A man has spoken. His words have created an obligation. He must do what he has said.

But then the Torah turns to the vows of women.

When a young woman living in her father’s household makes a vow, her father may annul it. When a married woman makes a vow, her husband may annul it. Only the vows of a widow or a divorced woman, a woman no longer living under the authority of a man, stand unconditionally.

And so the students ask the question that the Torah itself appears to place before us:

“Could it be that a woman’s word is worth less than a man’s?”

We should not hurry past their sadness. Nor should we pretend that there is no problem here.

The Torah describes a patriarchal society in which a woman’s legal and economic identity was bound to the household of her father or husband. Because a vow might affect the resources or responsibilities of that household, the man at its head was given the power to annul it.

But the practical explanation does not remove the moral difficulty. The effect remains that one adult’s word is sovereign while another adult’s word is conditional. A man speaks and creates an obligation. A woman speaks, and a man may decide whether her words will be allowed to stand.

Lubitch’s midrash does not deny that inequality. Instead, she makes a characteristically Progressive move: she distinguishes between the eternal value embedded within Torah and the social structure through which that value was expressed at a particular moment in history.

The Torah, she suggests, recognised the world in which women lived. A woman making a vow knew that her capacity to fulfil it might depend upon her father or husband. Her words were shaped by the conditions of her life.

But where those conditions have changed, the interpretation of the law must also change.

“And in a place where all know that a woman doesn’t need her husband’s or her father’s consent, and her word is graven in stone, her husband and father can’t annul her vow.”

This is not an attempt to rescue the Torah by claiming that it was secretly egalitarian all along. It is a claim about the unfolding authority of Torah: that a law addressed to one social reality cannot simply be lifted out of that reality and used to sanctify inequality for all time.

Torah demands interpretation because the world changes. But it also demands interpretation because our moral understanding changes. The question is not merely, “What did these words once mean?” It is also, “What holiness are these words asking us to bring into being now?”

And in our world, a woman’s word must be no less binding, no less consequential and no less sacred than a man’s.

Yet there is another reading of this passage, offered by the medieval Spanish kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla and quoted by Rabbi Alan Lew in his book This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared.

Gikatilla reads the woman in the passage not as a literal woman but as the neshamah, the soul: the feminine representation of the Divine will, the image of God that resides within every human being.

The man under whose authority she lives represents the yetzer hara: not simply an evil inclination, but the tangled collection of fears, habits, appetites and evasions that so often prevents the soul’s intention from becoming action.

On this reading, the Torah is describing something that happens within every one of us.

Deep within, the soul makes a vow. It knows the person we hope to become. It knows the apology we need to make, the relationship we need to repair, the injustice against which we need to speak, the habit we need to change.

The soul speaks clearly. But between the heart and the world, something intervenes. The voice of caution says: not yet. The voice of embarrassment says: what will people think? The voice of self-interest says: this may cost you something. The voice of despair says: nothing you do will make any difference.

And so the vow is annulled before it ever becomes action.

There is great spiritual insight in Gikatilla’s interpretation. Yet we must be careful. A mystical reading must not be permitted to erase the literal woman from the text.

For centuries, women’s actual words have been interrupted, discounted, doubted or overruled. Women have been told that their understanding of their own lives carries less authority than the judgement of fathers, husbands, rabbis, doctors, employers and institutions.

Even now, women regularly discover that they must speak more loudly, provide more evidence and endure greater scrutiny before their words are believed. We cannot turn the woman into a metaphor until we have first heard her as a woman.

But perhaps the two readings can illuminate one another.

Lubitch asks: What structures prevent a woman’s word from carrying authority?

Gikatilla asks: What impulses prevent the soul’s word from becoming reality?

One directs our attention outwards, towards law, power and society. The other directs our attention inwards, towards fear, avoidance and moral courage.

And Torah requires both.

We must examine the structures through which some people are granted authority while others are required to seek permission. We must ask whose testimony is believed, whose promises are trusted, whose anger is treated as legitimate and whose knowledge of their own experience is dismissed.

But we must also ask what happens to the vows we make in the privacy of our own souls. Which inner promise have we allowed fear to annul? Which truth have we spoken silently but refused to speak aloud? Which good intention has never crossed the distance between the heart and the world?

The Torah says of the man who makes a vow: lo yachel devaro—he must not profane his word. He must not make his word ordinary, hollow or without consequence.

Lubitch insists that this commandment belongs equally to women. Gikatilla suggests that it belongs to the soul within every one of us.

Our words matter. They shape relationships, communities and worlds. But they matter only when we allow them to carry consequence; when our commitments are not cancelled by the authority of others, nor quietly annulled by the fearful voices within ourselves.

May we build a society in which no woman’s word requires the consent of a man before it is taken seriously.

And may we learn to hear the quiet vow of the neshamah, the soul within us, and give it the courage to become action.

Ken yehi ratzon.