The Bitter Waters and the Fear of Women’s Learning

“A man who teaches his daughter Torah teaches her tiflut.”
Mishna Sotah 3:4

The Hebrew word tiflut has been translated in a number of ways: foolishness, obscenity, frivolity, impropriety, even promiscuity. None of the translations are flattering. For generations, this language has been weaponized against women as proof that advanced Torah study for women is dangerous, inappropriate, and spiritually corrosive. But zoom out to read the statement in context, and an even more troubling picture emerges.

The Mishna’s discussion appears in the context of the sotah ritual, the biblical ordeal to which a woman was subjected when her husband suspected she was engaged in adultery. This is the context in which the rabbis debate whether a father should teach his daughter enough Torah to understand that certain merits might temporarily suspend the effects of the bitter waters. Ben Azzai states that a man is obligated to teach his daughter Torah, to which Rabbi Eliezer responds with the famous statement: “Whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her tiflut.” Which is to say: one should not teach a daughter enough Torah knowledge that it might help her navigate or mitigate the consequences of the sotah ordeal if she were ever accused of adultery. 

Setting aside that it is clear from this talmudic discussion that it was a common enough practice for fathers to teach their daughters Torah, the concern is not abstract opposition to women’s learning. The anxiety is that knowledge itself might allow a woman to understand, navigate, or potentially evade subjection to a degrading ritual designed to humiliate. Suddenly, this conversation feels very different.

At the center of the sotah ritual in this week’s Torah reading Parshat Naso is not simply adultery, but suspicion. A husband’s jealousy grants him the right to bring his wife to the Temple priests and before the entirety of the community. She undergoes a public and deeply humiliating ordeal. Her body becomes the site upon which communal anxiety, mistrust, and power are enacted. And surrounding that ritual, both in the Torah and later rabbinic literature, is the key question: who gets access to Torah knowledge?

Judith Plaskow argued that one of the central tasks of feminist Jewish thought is recovering the silenced voices within Jewish tradition. In the sotah narrative, the woman herself barely speaks. Men suspect, adjudicate, and interpret while the woman undergoes this very public humiliation. What becomes threatening is not only female sexuality, but female literacy and legal awareness. 

Tikva Frymer-Kensky contextualized the sotah ritual within the ancient Near East, noting that the Torah may have represented an attempt to restrain unchecked violence against women by channeling jealousy into ritual procedure. But even if the ritual limited private vengeance, it still reflected a system in which women’s bodies and reputations remained vulnerable to male suspicion.

The rabbis themselves eventually abolished the ritual entirely. The Mishna states: “When adulterers increased, the bitter waters ceased” (Sotah 9:9). A morally compromised society, they concluded, could no longer sustain such a process with integrity. That evolution matters. Tamar Ross sees moments like this as examples of Judaism’s capacity for moral development from within the tradition itself. The Torah remains sacred, but interpretation evolves alongside ethical consciousness. Which brings us back to Torah study.

For centuries, women’s exclusion from advanced Jewish learning has been justified through selective readings of texts like “teaching her tiflut.” But the irony is striking: limiting women’s access to Torah also limits their access to legal knowledge, communal authority, and the interpretive tools necessary to challenge systems of power. Knowledge itself becomes threatening.

That is why the growth of higher Jewish learning institutions for women has been one of the most significant religious developments of the modern Jewish world. Institutions like Yeshivat Maharat and the expanding landscape of advanced women’s batei midrash have not weakened Torah. They have strengthened it by widening access to serious learning, halakhic literacy, and religious leadership. Additionally, the Yoetzet Halacha initiative has trained women extensively in the laws of niddah, sexual health, fertility, and intimate religious practice, enabling women to seek halakhic guidance from other knowledgeable women rather than navigating deeply personal questions exclusively through male rabbinic authority. In many ways, these programs represent a profound shift in religious power: not away from halakha, but toward broader access to its knowledge and application. 

This is also why the behavior of the Israeli Rabbinate in recent years has done an injustice to Torah. After Israel’s Supreme Court required the rabbinate to allow women to sit for certain rabbinic examinations, officials delayed, obstructed, and mishandled the process rather than fully embrace women’s Torah scholarship. The message was difficult to miss: women gaining access to religious knowledge and credentials remained a threat to entrenched systems of male rabbinic authority.

The same anxiety now surfaces at the Western Wall, where efforts continue to police and harass women at prayer. Recently, legislation advanced in preliminary readings that would strengthen the authority of the chief rabbinate over the entire Kotel complex, including the egalitarian prayer section. Critics warn that this could effectively ban or criminalize women-led prayer services by defining prayer that violates the chief rabbinate’s rules as “desecration.” However, a confident Judaism should not fear the sound of women praying, reading Torah, or seeking connection to God at Judaism’s holiest accessible site. Spiritual authority that depends upon the continued marginalization of women is fragile and is a testament to its own insecurity.

And perhaps these are the deepest contemporary lessons of the sotah narrative. Suspicion thrives in systems where power and knowledge are unevenly distributed. Dignity requires access to information, transparency, literacy, and voice. The rabbinic response to difficult texts has never been less Torah learning, suppression or censorship. There have always been more people empowered to study it deeply, question it honestly, and ethically wrestle with it.