The Bilhah Zilpah Project: Twenty-Four Lines of Torah

Where does a story begin …

My story with Bilhah and Zilpah — the enslaved women given by Lavan to his daughters, Rachel and Leah, as bridal gifts on their respective wedding nights to Yaakov — began in 2020. Drawing on an independent-study project about Bilhah and Zilpah in which I was engaged at The Pardes Institute in Jerusalem, I led a text study during an open beit midrash (study hall) for the entire community.

Or perhaps, it was many years prior, reading The Red Tent by Anita Diamant, drinking in vivid vignettes of biblical women like a parched wanderer who had just found an overflowing well.

Maybe, it was the moment when what began as interest turned independent study transformed into the Bilhah Zilpah Project in 2021, when I realized Bilhah and Zilpah would be with me for a very long time …

Then, there are the connections to the launching of Jews of Color Sanctuary that happened during a small community event over Sigd in 2019 which, at the time, felt unrelated. I didn’t realize then that Vayeitzei, the portion when Bilhah and Zilpah enter the Torah, falls two Shabbatot after Sigd, which sweetly, if not overwhelmingly, links the birth of a passion project, organization and a Jewish holiday preserved in the Beta Israel tradition with my passion scholarship of Bilhah and Zilpah.

All stories have a gestation, a seeding and germination, which makes the birth of “the beginning” possible …

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We live in a world that wants to believe that caste doesn’t exist, racism has been eradicated and everyone has an equal chance at life. The legacy of the enslavement of abducted Africans and entrenched anti-blackness continue to affect my modern life. Things like who or if I will marry. Where I live and the valuation of my home. Employment seeking and advancement opportunities. My ability to define myself and navigate the world holding intersectional identities. The legacy of enslavement and entrenched anti-blackness continue to affect your modern life, too. No matter your cultural identity, the systems that create, maintain and reinforce these hierarchies control us all.

In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson notes that “caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children.” This invisible guide tells us “what people look like, or rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to … how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live, what kinds of positions they are expected to hold, whether they belong in this section of town or that seat in a boardroom, whether they should be expected to speak with authority on this or that subject, whether they will be administered pain relief in a hospital, whether their neighborhood is likely to adjoin a toxic waste site or have contaminated water flowing from their taps, whether they are more or less likely to survive childbirth in the most advanced nation in the world, whether they may be shot by authorities with impunity.” Wilkerson highlights race as the workhorse of caste, a stand-in for “centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.”[i]

All we know of Bilhah and Zilpah are 24 lines of the Torah referencing them sprinkled across five consecutive parshi’ot. Their voices are completely absent. We know little about Bilhah and Zilpah beyond the decision to use their bodies to create life and intention to claim ownership over their children. Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s narrative reflects my own experiences of not having autonomy over my body, being named and categorized by others, my voice silenced, witnessing vulnerable children be controlled and taken, and feeling invisible in plain sight. Their biblical story reflects too many modern realities in the everyday lives of marginalized women. Missed opportunities to learn from Bilhah and Zilpah expand through the narrative’s underexplored potential for female solidarity, which evokes lingering feminist-womanist division and sexism within liberation movements.

Despite escaping slavery in Africa being a foundational Jewish narrative that we retell each Pesakh, my existence, the confluence of Jewish and brown in a single vessel, is too often contested as somehow beyond the mixed multitudes that left Egypt. How we approach Judaism and race often leaves my outward appearance interpreted solely as black, rendering invisible my Jewishness, my East Indianness and other aspects. How we learn from and retell biblical stories matter.

Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s narrative reflects my own experiences of not having autonomy over my body.

“A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.” — Wilkerson[ii]

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Ironically, while I did have interest in Bilhah and Zilpah, the independent study that became the Bilhah Zilpah Project was born through a plan to get out of a second semester of Mishnah. I loved the teacher and was excited to translate Mishnah Berakhot, but frequent shifts of my class hevrutot (study partners) intended to be for the full semester left me frustrated. Then, we translated the story of Rabbi Gamliel and an enslaved character named Tavi (Mishnah Berakhot 2:6-7). I was captivated by this fascinating reflection of real life through Rabbi Gamliel’s reaction after first his wife and then Tavi died. We had an opportunity to learn more about Rabbi Gamliel through his relationships complicated by Jewish law. Yet we ignored the invitation of these lines to explore differing and/or competing hierarchies between Rabbi Gamliel’s relationships with his wife and with someone enslaved in service to him who was also a respected study partner.

Translating the Torah is a huge endeavor. I have a big vocabulary but am still working on Hebrew grammar and syntax. I was delighted to spend my days in the beit midrash. I had come from the creative industry of architecture, and yet, my time at Pardes was among the most creative in my life. It remains a gift I am grateful for, especially as it felt like my world was falling apart during the height of the pandemic. I was willing to work hard, but I yearned to engage with what we were translating through real conversations; what was the point otherwise. My drive to work hard and have the chance to focus on Hebrew and study Torah that mattered to me brought me back to my earlier interest in Bilhah and Zilpah.

Bilhah and Zilpah made me want to read Torah rather than feel I had to. There is no end of fascination for me in how the story of Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s relationship with each other, Leah, Rachel, Yaakov, Lavan, their children, the other children and other enslaved characters echoes later history of slavery, human hierarchy, belonging, disenfranchisement and challenging or dysfunctional family dynamics. As sister and/or co-wife, slave and/or free, maidservant and/or concubine — first, of Lavan, passed to Rachel and Leah, who then passed Bilhah and Zilpah to Yaakov. Their bodies and lives were directed by others and their absent voices reflect that we don’t know their perspective on their situation, or very little of Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s origin or end stories, and what they may have wanted for their lives.

I’ve studied satisfying Torah with fewer references. So, I forged fearlessly ahead. My design and project development background from building multimillion-dollar homes quickly became an asset. I intuitively pulled together a team of Pardes staff and students as advisors and hevrutot, developed what was basically a construction schedule noting interdependencies and began building! In the beginning, all I had was enthusiasm and questions. I still have more questions than answers, but over four years, Bilhah and Zilpah have welcomed me into their Torah each week with a cherished hevruta whom I have studied with since July 2021.

In many ways, Bilhah and Zilpah found me rather than the other way around. I believe I am their vessel. That these ancestors are directing their project. I learned the challenge of keeping the focus on Bilhah and Zilpah during that first text study. We all strayed to other characters we knew better. My early struggles to return focus to Bilhah and Zilpah were the impetus for the unique quality of the source sheets I use for the Bilhah Zilpah Project, limiting lines to only those referring directly or indirectly to Bilhah, Zilpah or their children. This reinforces intentions to give overdue attention to these characters, and highlights elements I might not notice which enhance my understanding of the story of Bilhah and Zilpah. This has made me more adept at listening to all of the Torah.

As the Bilhah Zilpah Project foundational text study was developing, the Creative Midrash session formed as a way to invite voice to the voiceless. Participants imagined writing letters to and from Bilhah and Zilpah to a range of characters, including us today. This helped them to see the humanity of these women, who made a way out of no way, like so many of us do and have done throughout history. These moments of reflection highlight the universal power of motherhood beyond biology. They offer an opportunity to connect what we know from our experiences today to infer what might have also resonated with Bilhah and Zilpah, drawing us toward them and translating wisdom relevant and meaningful in our modern lives.

Powerful writings from these sessions demanded further listening for the voices of Bilhah and Zilpah. An improv-based Torah-study process that was developed in 2020 infused character embodiment. Similarly, live-action role-playing elements brought participants to imagine Bilhah and Zilpah in our language of today. They then returned to the original biblical lines with insight they had gained, in order to listen for Bilhah and Zilpah as fully developed characters whose lives are their own, even under the circumstances they endured. Another playful choice imagined the movie version of particularly compelling scenes. Using film as a storytelling vehicle led to creating a storyboard process incorporating a scene structure technique learned at Pardes.

Bilhah and Zilpah nourish my approach to text study by reminding me that the Torah needs us to bring in missing elements. I believe that this is why and how the Torah has endured. We need each other. My yearning to better understand their story with each moment of study has led me to other ways of learning about the realities of Near Eastern biblical women. It has opened other places in the Torah that speak to the lives of those enslaved and highlighted midrash on Bilhah, Zilpah and their descendants. All of these excursions have yielded more questions than answers, and I have never been happier.

This work feels like a biblical reckoning intertwined with our history of enslavement. Halachic and rabbinic approaches to caring for community acknowledge a range of groups that need support and ways to meet those needs. We have allowed race, class and gender to break down systems of community support which included strangers living among us. Yet the ways religion has been used to justify, reinforce and institutionalize hierarchy feels like it has been on a continuum from biblical periods. They have developed into modern versions of biblical stories, as Isabel Wilkerson suggests “justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.”

Our circumstances make us who we are, and we are more than our circumstances.

Last year the Bilhah Zilpah project was shared with a broader community through an inaugural Homecoming event. Participants were welcomed during the parshiot that invoke them. Participants came together to learn from Bilhah and Zilpah, give voice to their experience, dream of ritual and reclaim our matriarchs. The defining conditions that Bilhah and Zilpah endured, kindred with so many women throughout time, emerged as a new program within the Bilhah Zilpah Project. The new offering is called Modern Matriarchs. It explores the intersections between the experiences of Bilhah and Zilpah, and other biblical women, and with women throughout history who paved ways for survival.

Modern Matriarchs highlights the central importance of ancestral women in our collective humanity, linking the wisdom of the Torah to named and unnamed women throughout history who have navigated kindred silence and lack of bodily autonomy. Highlights include Lucy, Anarcha and Betsey (the women who made modern gynecology possible between 1845-1849); Emma, Carrie and Vivian Buck (three generations of women sacrificed to legislate control over women’s wombs in 1927); Henrietta Lacks (whose cells made modern drug testing and development possible in the 1950s); three unnamed Puerto-Rican women (whose sacrifice made safe female contraception a reality in the 1955s); Fannie Lou Hamer (whose Mississippi appendectomy sparked an activist and a movement during the 1960s); Joan Little (who was tried in 1974 instead of her rapist); and women of the Kaw Tribe of Oklahoma (intentionally targeted for genocide through sterilization between the 1960s and 1970s).

Marginalized women, especially those not among the white and wealthy feminists that are often focused on, leave rich legacies to be discovered. Women who have been on the front lines of actively resisting racial, sexual, heterosexual and class violence and developing integrated analysis and practice of interlocking oppression. The names and accounts that have been intentionally erased, whose wisdom is desperately needed, even if only to reduce isolation. The importance of knowing women’s stories is highlighted by Anita Diamant in the opening of The Red Tent, the reimagining of Dinah’s story:

We have been lost to each other for so long. My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust. This is not your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing. That is why I became a footnote.

Ritual to claim and acknowledge Bilhah and Zilpah as Jewish matriarchs has always been a goal of the Bilhah Zilpah Project. Some communities add their names after other matriarchs in the Amidah. Bilhah and Zilpah deserve more than inconsistent practice, including opportunities to recognize them individually. Modern Matriarchs offers a rich opportunity to bridge largely unacknowledged contributions of other women whose voices and experiences have been silenced throughout history. We find ways to celebrate and honor them through meaningful ritual that is authentically Jewish yet feels at home in our modern lives. It is able to hold the fullness of Jewish diasporic diversity.

Reconciling our relationship to enslavement is spiritual work — work that is necessary to create conditions that invite the return of the moshi’akh (messiah), who is often imagined as someone society has forgotten, left behind and rendered invisible. While the moshi’akh is commonly envisioned as male, marginalized women are often the most vulnerable among us. Honoring modern matriarchs may support living women, in addition to reclaiming biblical matriarchs —something I believe that Bilhah and Zilpah would celebrate themselves.

For the work of righteousness shall be peace, and the effect of righteousness, calm and confidence forever (Isaiah 32:17).

I still live within a racialized world, but through this project, I am better able to find ways to navigate institutionalized systems of oppression and to identify moments of choice.

Bilhah and Zilpah continue to invite me each week into surprising unending fonts of learning that enrich my understanding of their story, the Torah and my life. I can’t imagine life without them. Listening for their voices led to the creation of text study, creative midrash and ritual dreaming through an abolitionist lens. The Bilhah Zilpah Project explores themes of: power of naming, sisterhood, status/power/hierarchy/control, parenting/surrogacy/adoption, co-mothering/co-parenting/communal living, polyamory, home, legacy/inheritance, women’s value and enslavement. These themes offer frameworks to break down and look beyond narrative assumptions through the wisdom of our own lived experience. We all come to the Torah with so much more than we think we know. Finding the strength to read Bilhah and Zilpah as having power and autonomy helps me do that for myself. I still live within a racialized world, yes, but I am better able to find ways to navigate institutionalized systems of oppression and identify moments of choice — at least, the best choices at my disposal today, to survive while also trying to seed greater choice for those who come after me. Listening for Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s voices has helped me find my own.

This year, let’s read parashah Vayeitzei listening for their voices as Bilhah and Zilpah enter the Torah. Join Jews of Color Sanctuary for this homecoming celebration open to all.

[i] Wilkerson Chapter 2: “An Old House and an Infrared Light,? hardcover edition p.18f., ISBN 9780593230251.

[ii] Wilkerson, p. 17