Commentary on Sotah: On the Education of Girls

Chofetz Chaim

1918

Rabbi Eliezer said: Whoever teaches his daughter Torah teaches her indecency [m. Sotah 3:4]

The rabbis wrote that this refers only to the Oral Torah; but the Written Torah—even though one should not teach it to her in the first place, if one does so, it is not teaching her indecency. Even within the Oral Torah, she is obligated to learn the laws pertaining to feminine matters. It seems that all this applies only to previous times, when everyone dwelled in the place of his forefathers [avot], and the tradition of the ancestors [avot] was held very strongly by everyone, to conduct himself in the ways that his predecessors [avot] observed, in accordance with the verse, Ask your father, and he will tell you (Deuteronomy 32:7). In such a situation, one could say that the girl need not study Torah, but could rely on the conduct of her upright parents. But now, on account of our many sins, the ancestral tradition has greatly weakened and girls do not often dwell in their parents’ home, and some even regularly study the alphabet and language of the gentiles. Certainly under these circumstances it is a great merit [mitzvah] to teach them the Hebrew Bible—Torah, Prophets, and Writings—and the ethical teachings of the sages, such as Mishnah Avot, Menorat ha-maor, and the like, to instill in them the truths of our holy faith. Without this, they are likely to stray altogether from the ways of God and (heaven forbid) transgress all the fundamental precepts of our religion.

Translated by
Leonard
Levin
.

Credits

Chofetz Chaim (Yisrael Meir Kagan), "Commentary on Sotah: On the Education of Girls," from Likute halakhot ‘al sotah (1918), pp. 21–22.

Published in: The Posen Library of Jewish Culture and Civilization, vol. 7.

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Creator Bio

Chofetz Chaim

1838–1933

Born Israel Meir Pupko ha-Kohen (Kagan) in Zhetl in the Russian Empire (today Diatlovo, Belarus), the scholar who came to be called the Chofetz Chaim received his early religious education at home. Kagan’s father died while Kagan was young and his mother moved the family to Vilna, where he entered yeshiva. After moving to Radun (Yiddish, Radin), a town in the Grodno region, he married and opened a store, which his wife managed. By 1869, students from across the region would gather at his home to study. Eventually, he became known by the title of his first book—Chofetz Chaim (Ḥafetz Ḥayim, 1873), on the laws of libel and gossip—and his Radun yeshiva and kollel gained prominence as the Yeshiva Ḥafetz Ḥayim. Antagonistic to the secularism of the early Zionist movement (an antagonism he later extended to all forms of secular Jewish outlook, including socialist activism and secular cultural activism of any sort), the Chofetz Chaim helped found the Agudas Yisroel Party and aligned himself with the Musar movement. He vehemently opposed the emigration of Jews to America on religious grounds, as evidenced in his booklet Nefutsot Yisra’el (The Dispersion of Israel). By the interwar period, the Chofetz Chaim was one of the most uncompromising voices for and a living symbol of Orthodox Jewish opposition to any sort of Jewish embrace of modernity.

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