הרב ברוריה

Beruriah (Hebrew ברוריה) was among the very few women whose teachings the Chazal preserve — a talmidat chacham of the fourth generation of Tannaim, in the latter half of the second century. She was married to the tanna Rabbi Meir, and her father was the tanna Rabbi Chananya ben Teradyon, who was put to death by the Romans, together with her mother, for teaching Torah in public. Amid that loss she carried on their learning, and won lasting admiration for the breadth of her knowledge in both halacha and aggadah; it was said of her that she learned three hundred halachot from the sages on a single cloudy day.

Beruriah took a full part in the halachic debate of her generation. She differed with her own father on a question of tumah and taharah in the Tosefta, and there her words were praised by Rabbi Yehuda ben Bava; when she intervened in a dispute between Rabbi Tarfon and the sages, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya declared, “Beruriah has spoken well.” She was known too for a sharp tongue: when Rabbi Yosi HaGlili asked her which road led to Lod, she rebuked him for using more words than needed. She once chided a student who was learning under his breath, telling him that Torah must be said aloud so that it will be retained.

Beruriah taught her husband a lesson in tefillah that entered the aggadah. Rabbi Meir, tormented by lawless neighbors, prayed that they would die; she showed him that the pasuk asks that sin, not sinners, be consumed from the earth — so that through teshuvah “the wicked will be no more.” Of her strength of soul, Midrash Mishlei relates that when her two sons died on Shabbat she covered them and kept the grief from her husband until Shabbat had passed, then broke it to him so gently that he was comforted — and the pasuk “A woman of valor, who can find?” was applied to her. Several modern Torah schools for women bear her name.