As an Orthodox Woman, Rivkah Bas Me’ir Helped Me Understand My Place in Jewish Liturgy

In January of 2023, I wandered through the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague’s Jewish quarter, trying to discern names and dates through vines that had grown over withered headstones. I was looking for the grave of a woman who would soon become the object of my studies for over a year. I found her epitaph, and, as the rest of my tour group continued through the maze of Prague’s Jewish history, I lingered. I already knew what the headstone read, but I wanted to see it with my own eyes and place my own stone atop. I made out the Hebrew and was able to follow the words: 

Rivkah, daughter of our teacher and master, Rabbi Meir Tikotin. She passed away on the 25th day of Nissan according to the count of Rivkah this stone. [1605]. May her soul “be bound up in the bundle of life.” Many women have done well, but you surpass them all. We put our confidence in her. Just like Abigail, she provided protection through her merit. A whole sacrifice, like a ram. She atoned with her death. She preached day and night to the women in every faithful city. The eye of every passerby and oncoming person wept, as concealed and buried she was.

I learned about Rivkah Bas Me’ir Tiktiner when I was a sophomore at Brandeis University, and Rabbanit Leah Sarna came to teach as a scholar in residence for Shabbat. Staking her claim that the way to advance women’s roles in Orthodox spaces is to get our names on the Jewish bookshelf, she proceeded to teach about the first Jewish book written by a woman: Meneket Rivkah. I immediately purchased a copy and dedicated three pounds of precious luggage weight to it as I was packing for my semester studying Jewish history in Prague. 

As an alumna of the Rising Voices Fellowship, you can only imagine how passionate I am about Judaism, feminism, and writing, making this work the object of my obsession and eventually culminating in my senior honors thesis at Brandeis for the Near Eastern and Judaic Studies department. Rivkah bat Meir’s story is not told enough, and her teachings themselves can offer the modern Jewish feminist a strong precedent for finding ourselves in ancient texts. 

Rivkah Bas Me’ir Tiktiner was the first woman to author a Yiddish book work, titled Meneket Rivkah. Published posthumously in Prague in 1609, it is a Yiddish ethical guide for women. It was written after a few male rabbis had written their own spiritual and halachic guides for women. In Meneket Rivkah, Rivkah Bas Me’ir addresses many of the same issues as these rabbis, but is standing on much firmer ground as she has a relationality with her readership that her male predecessors lack. 

There are seven chapters in Meneket Rivkah, each chapter instructing on proper modes of behaviour for Jewish women in the seven categories of relationships they maintain.  In each of these chapters, the bottom line of her instruction matches classic Jewish tradition, but the spiritual significance and textual precedence she uses to arrive at the same conclusions are developed with a revolutionary empathy and respect for female readers. For example, in the chapter on a woman’s duty to her husband, Rivkah Bas Me’ir references the Jewish text, Eshet Chayil (woman of valor), which is recited during Friday night kiddush in many homes. This text praises a woman who keeps her home piously and commits herself to her family. The classic translation of Eshet Chayil into Yiddish is bider vayb, meaning dutiful woman. Rivkah Bas Me’ir chooses her own word;  heldin– heroic woman. In writing about the Eshet Chayil, she subtly urges her readers to see themselves as heroic, rather than dutiful. She herself is described as an Eshet Chayil on her epitaph, validating her attestation that the responsibilities a Jewish woman holds make her heroic. 

There is something profoundly healing in Rivkah Bas Me’ir’s writings. In being an orthodox feminist, I often find myself having to apologize for or justify one half of that duality because claiming both is an invention of the 20th century. Judaism often assigns value to ideas, people, or texts based on how far back they can be traced in Jewish history. This is displayed in the rabbinic concept of yeridat hadorot, the decline of generations, espousing the idea that our national peak connection to the divine was in the time of the prophets in the Tanakh, and every generation after that has slowly diminished. Basically, the older the idea, the more value it holds. 

Jewish feminism is something shiny and new, but it has sparked the desire among many to seek examples of womanhood manifested in Jewish stories and practices of old. For me, this desire is twofold. If I do the work of digging into historical conceptions and representations of Jewish women and manage to ground my Jewish feminist values in text, I have something to point to when staking my claim. But this desire also exists without an agenda. It exists simply because there is a comfort in connecting to your own history. Rivkah Bas Me’ir displays this same desire and feeds it. She read the womanhood she knew in her time into the heroines of the Tanach as well as rabbinic literature, connecting herself to her past. She also has provided an incredible account of Jewish womanhood in the sixteenth century, nestling herself in our textual tradition and creating a diachronic stepping stone that allows me and others the ability to trace our own identities throughout the timeline of Jewish history. She has given Jewish women in the twenty-first century the gift of precedent. The time I have spent studying her text is my form of a thank-you note.