The Ages of Man -- and Woman?

The following post, which was commissioned for the Judaism Reclaimed Facebook Group, has been developed from two earlier posts (here and here) on this weblog.

The Torah reading for parashat Chayei Sarah commences with a recitation that the life of matriarch Sarah was “a hundred years and twenty years and seven years”. Regarding this unusual mode of expressing the number 127, Rashi famously cites a midrash (Bereshit Rabbah 58:1) to teach that Sarah was as sinless at 100 as she was when she was 20 [the age at which one becomes liable for heavenly punishment], and as beautiful at 20 as she was at 7. Alternatively, she was as beautiful at 100 as she was at 20, and as sinless at 20 as she was at 7 (according to Shadal, this is the original version of Rashi’s source). Either way, we can conclude that Sarah lived a long life, a life in which she remained constant in her virtue and in the quality of her personal appearance.

On the subject of age and advancing years, Pirkei Avot (5:25) has much to say. In particular, it features a lifestyle chronology that begins with learning the written Torah at five and concludes with a person being effectively “out of it” by the time he reaches 100. This Mishnah is plainly addressed to ordinary people and does not describe the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs, whose pre-Torah lives were governed by factors that applied to them but not to us. In Sarah’s case, of the three ages cited in the opening of this week’s parashah, only two of them—20 and 100—are found in the Avot list. While 100 is the age at which one ceases to count for anything, Jewish tradition makes it clear that Sarah continued to take an active part in life. Likewise 20 is the age at which one goes to work (opinions vary as to whether this means making a living or going out to learn Torah), but we do not find that Sarah had a day job at that or any other age. The only other age we learn of in Sarah’s biblical biography is 90, this being the mishnaic age at which physical weakness makes itself manifest—but it is also the point at which Sarah conceives Isaac (Bereshit 17:17).

The “ages of man” Mishnah raises delicate issues in contemporary Jewish thought, since it appears to be addressed only to men. There are at least several possible views one can take. These include the following:

• Women are excluded from the equation because this Mishnah is exclusively a men-for-men teaching;
• Women are not mentioned in this Mishnah because there is no need of a separate list. One only needs to make the necessary changes as one goes along (e.g. substituting 12 for 13 as the age of being bound by mitzvot and deleting 18 as the age for getting married, since this is a men’s mitzvah only);
• There is no need for a women’s list, or it is impossible to create one, since the biological, familial and social factors that govern the course of a woman’s life are more varied and uncertain than those of men;
• The mishnah does not actually address men in general, because it maps out an ideal course only for those who seek a life of Torah study in which everything else is purely incidental. Since it applies so narrowly and embraces only a minority of males, it is not gender-specific and there is no need to consider how, or to what extent, it applies to women

We live in a world in which women’s secular education and Torah study are facts on the ground and it is now nearly 90 years since the death of another Sarah—Sarah Schenirer—who lifted women’s education to a new and hitherto unprecedented level from which it has continued to rise. While classical and modern commentators generally avoid any mention of the absence of a “women’s list”, Judaism Reclaimed (chap. 41) explores the extent to which the biblical precedent of Devorah, and the halachic mechanism which some authorities understand it to have endorsed, can be utilised in the modern era of more widespread and substantial Jewish education for women. It would be good to hear from leading Torah scholars and thinkers as to whether there should be a parallel set of guidelines for women and, if so, as to what it might contain.