(New York Jewish Week) — What if the first book of the Hebrew Bible had a female God who created the world — and what if the first human created was a woman, not a man?
What if the story of the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham was flipped — and a mother was told by God to sacrifice her daughter? If the Torah were centered on women rather than on men, how would we understand these holy books, and ourselves, differently?
Israeli-American artist Yael Kanarek, 56, has spent eight years asking questions like this. The result of her musings is Toratah, which means “her Torah,” a project that is creating a “regendered” version of the Hebrew Bible. Over the years, Kanarek and her associates have reversed the genders of all characters in many books of the Hebrew Bible. The result is that divine inspiration expresses itself through matriarchal, rather than patriarchal, lineage — unearthing new possibilities for people of all gender identities to examine their Judaism.
The New York-based Kanarek also runs Beit Toratah, “house of study and ritual for the Regendered Bible,” which publishes the translations and spearheads related projects, such as a musical collection of “Songs of Toratah” and weekly study classes.
“I looked around in our huge library of Jewish wisdom and we don’t have books, canonical, that codified women’s experience as sacred,” Kanarek told the New York Jewish Week. “My goal is to build the missing library of women’s experiences codified in sacred terms.”
And now, Kanarek’s project is assuming a physical shape in Manhattan: Ten Toratah-themed prints — some sparkling with hand-applied gold leaf — and two works of ink on parchment are now on display in an exhibit, “Toratah: The Artistry of Transformation,” at Manhattan’s Central Synagogue. The works on view at the Reform congregation in Midtown include “Shiviti: My Beloved, 2022” — a print that weaves together the classic Song of Songs phrase, ”I am for my beloved and my beloved is mine,” in both the original Hebrew Bible version and the regendered one — and “Genesis 2: From Her Rib She Made a Man, 2019-2024,” which has a female God creating a man out of the first woman’s rib.
Kanarek describes her Toratah artworks as “visual midrash,” or commentary in the tradition of the Talmud, though she also cites as influences abstract modernist artists like Hilma af Klint and El Lissitzky.
“The Toratah project is transformational,” Central Synagogue’s Senior Rabbi Angela Buchdahl wrote in a promotional post for the exhibition. “Its translation does more than flip gender, it forces us to rethink all our assumptions about power, position, sexuality, and the Divine. To apply this regendering to our sacred text is nothing short of revolution.”
Kanarek, left, applying gold leaf to one of her Toratah-inspired artworks; 12 pieces will be on display as part of the exhibition at Central Synagogue. (Gili Getz; courtesy Yael Kanarek)
Kanarek was born in New York and moved with her family to Israel when she was 3 years old. She attended the exclusive Thelma Yellin High School for the Arts and, as a young woman, she gained a level of renown for her portraiture skills. Kanarek returned to New York City in 1991 when she was 24 — ”New York was the center of the art world at the time,” she explained — and became making art in a variety of media, including fine jewelry design.
“I certainly did not assume that I would be rewriting Tanakh,” Kanarek, using the Hebrew term for the Hebrew Bible, said about the origins of Toratah in 2016. “Even a day or two before [I started], an instructor said to me that the text cannot be changed. I tried to solve a spiritual problem for myself. As it turns out, many other people have been struggling with this.”
As an artist who believes “in the value of communicating using different senses,” as she describes it, Kanarek has also overseen the creation of original music based on the gender-switched Toratah texts.
Kanarek and Tamar Biala, a co-editor of Toratah, selected lines from the regendered Bible that they felt could work as song lyrics. Kanarek then reached out to Naomi Less, a co-founder of Lab/Shul, an “everybody-friendly, artist-driven, God-optional” New York congregation, to serve as the artistic producer for an album of Toratah-inspired songs.
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“As a musician and ritual leader, to be able to compose with divine presence in the feminine, to have the narratives where women were actually the ones with power, it opened up a new portal of creativity and agency within me the likes of which I had yet to have experienced,” Less, who describes herself as a “Jewish music feminist,” told the New York Jewish Week.
As part of the exhibition, Central Synagogue will be spotlighting these musical efforts: On Thursday, singers and teachers from across the Jewish world will perform at an event marking the release of “Zimratah: Songs of Toratah,” with songs written and composed by Jewish musicians Alicia Jo Rabins, Basya Schechter, Yuli Yael Be’eri and others.
Less will be performing at the event, alongside Central Synagogue’s Cantor Jenna Pearsall and her cantorial intern, Beth Reinstein, and many others.
Though Kanarek has previously displayed Toratah-themed artworks in Manhattan at Romemu and Hebrew Union College, this iteration of the Toratah project found a home at Central Synagogue after Biala, who lives in Israel, met Buchdahl when she visited the country. Kanarek, who lives in Manhattan, then brought a printout of some Toratah chapters to Buchdahl when she was back in New York.
“She sat with it and looked at it and I could tell she was getting it,” Kanarek said. “It was a visceral response to it. That’s when the connection started.” More than a dozen other Jewish organizations have since signed on to co-sponsor Thursday’s concert, including the National Council of Jewish Women and the Manhattan congregations B’nai Jeshurun and Romemu.
While other recent efforts to rethink gender in the Hebrew Bible have been met with mixed reactions — a Revised Jewish Publication Society edition of the Tanakh, available online at Sefaria, generated backlash on social media from some who see the change as sacrilegious — Kanarek is clear that Toratah is not meant to be a replacement for the traditional texts. As she writes on the Beit Toratah website, “Our hope is that over time, the interaction between Toratah and the traditional Bible will give birth to additional sacred texts towards a more inclusive canon.”
