The writings of Rachel Adler on Jewish law and ritual have catapulted her into the center of modern Jewish religious discourse, and she is unquestionably among the leading constructive Jewish theologians, translators, and liturgists of the modern era. One of the first theologians and ethicists to integrate feminist perspectives and concerns into the interpretation of Jewish texts and the renewal of Jewish law and ethics, Adler has garnered international attention from Jewish and non-Jewish scholars, women and men alike.

Ruthelyn (later Rachel) Rubin was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 20, 1943. Her father Herman (1907–1984), born in Chicago, was an executive in a large insurance company. Her mother, Lorraine (née Helman, 1918–2003), was a fourth-generation Chicagoan on her mother’s side; she had a master’s degree in guidance and counseling and was the chairwoman of a large guidance department at a suburban high school. Herman and Lorraine married in 1941. Their second daughter, Laurel, was born in 1946.

Rachel married Moshe Adler, an Orthodox rabbi, on December 20, 1964. They had a son, Amitai Bezalel, born on July 10, 1973, but Rachel and Moshe divorced in 1984. In September 1987 Adler married Los Angeles attorney David Schulman (b. 1951). She and Schulman divorced in 2008. Adler now lives in Los Angeles, where she serves as the David Ellenson Professor of Jewish Religious Thought at the Los Angeles campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

Adler earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in English Literature at Northwestern University in 1965 and 1966. She also completed all course work for her doctorate in English at Northwestern and was also actively involved during the 1970s as an Orthodox rebbetzin at Hillel Houses in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, where her husband served as Hillel rabbi. In 1980, Adler received an M.S.W. from the University of Minnesota, and after graduation from that program, worked as a therapist for several years.

Adler’s 1971 publication of “The Jew Who Wasn’t There: The legal corpus of Jewish laws and observances as prescribed in the Torah and interpreted by rabbinic authorities, beginning with those of the Mishnah and Talmud.Halakhah and the Jewish Woman,” in Davka, as well as her 1972 publication for The Jewish Catalogue of “Ritual impurityTum’ah and Ritual purityTaharah: Ends and Beginnings,” first gained Adler international attention as an articulate feminist spokesperson. In the former essay, Adler expressed discomfort with the treatment accorded women in Jewish tradition. However, she did so as a woman firmly ensconced in the Orthodox camp. In the latter essay, Adler argued that the ritual immersion of a Menstruation; the menstruant woman; ritual status of the menstruant woman.niddah in a Ritual bathmikveh did not “oppress or denigrate women.” Instead, such immersion constituted a ritual reenactment of “death and resurrection” that was actually “equally accessible to men and women.” This approach to the ritual, as well as the argument Adler constructed in its defense in “Tu’mah and Taharah” and the stance she articulated in “The Jew Who Wasn’t There,” marked her as a passionately committed if critical Orthodox feminist, a woman anxious to defend the tradition by employing categories taken from contemporary social scientific literature.

However, the seeds for a different trajectory that were planted in her 1971 article began to be more fully articulated shortly thereafter. While Adler had emphasized that the niddah ritual was originally “a way of learning how to die and be reborn” of symbolic import for women and men alike, she asserted—in her discussion of the ritual in the 1976 Jewish Woman reprint of this essay—that major strains in talmudic thought isolated the niddah and stressed “the alienness” of women. Adler condemned these directions as “damning” of classical rabbinic tradition and gave full expression to these critiques in her powerful 1983 Moment essay, “I’ve Had Nothing Yet, So I Can’t Take More.” In this essay, Adler indicted rabbinic tradition for making women “a focus of the sacred rather than active participants in its processes” and observed that “Being a Jewish woman is very much like being Alice at the Hatter’s tea party. We did not participate in making the rules, nor were we there at the beginning of the party.”

Given this trajectory in her views, it was hardly surprising that Adler, in 1986, enrolled in the Reform Movement’s joint Hebrew Union College-University of Southern California doctoral program in Religion and received her Ph.D. in 1997. Her doctoral dissertation, “Justice and Peace Have Kissed: A Feminist Theology of Judaism,” served as the basis for her award-winning book, Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics, which in 1999 won the National Jewish Book Award as best book in Religious Thought. After graduation from USC-HUC, Adler received a joint faculty appointment in Religion at USC and in Jewish Thought at HUC-JIR. By 2001, she elected to serve formally on the faculty of HUC-JIR alone. Shortly thereafter, Adler also joined the editorial board of The Torah: A Women's Commentary and wrote “Contemporary Reflections” commentaries on Bereishit, Mishpatim, and Va’yakheil for this volume, which won the 2008 Jewish Book Award for best book of the year in any category. At this time, Adler chose to enter the rabbinical program of the College-Institute and she was ordained a Reform rabbi by HUC-JIR in Spring 2012.

It was hardly surprising, then, that Adler ultimately repudiated the position she had taken in “Tumah and Taharah.” In her essay “In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theology of Purity,” published in Tikkun in 1993, she stated “that purity and impurity do not constitute a cycle through which all members of society pass, as I argued in my [1972] essay. Instead, impurity and purity define a class system in which the most impure people are women.” By this point, a “new Rachel Adler” had emerged—a person who was going to contribute to a revolution in the Jewish world by paying systematic attention to gender as both an analytical and a normative category for understanding and redirecting Jewish life.

Adler’s concerns and subsequent writings culminated in her publication of Engendering Judaism. Building upon numerous articles written in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s on the presentation and classification of women in rabbinic literature, Adler gave mature expression to her thought in her 1998 book. In this work Adler refused to reject halakhah, as other Jewish feminists had done, as a source for her own reflections on Judaism. While she recognized that traditional Jewish law had systematically excluded the voices of women, Adler contended that halakhah was too central an idiom in the Jewish experience—too vital a part of the Jewish narrative—to be rejected summarily.

Nevertheless, Adler was too critical a feminist to allow classical notions of Jewish law to remain unchallenged. To construct this novel approach to Jewish law, Adler utilized the work of Yale University law professor Robert Cover who, in 1983, wrote a pathbreaking essay, “Nomos and Narrative,” in the Harvard Law Review (97:1). In that essay, Cover argued that law itself functioned in two complementary modes, one “imperial” and the other “jurisgenerative.” The former approach was marked by an emphasis upon authority and the application and enforcement of rules. It sought to institutionalize the nomos—the rules and laws—of the legal system. To be sure, Adler was appreciative of this mode of law.

Adler, however, adapted Cover’s jurisgenerative mode as more promising for her own enterprise, for this mode allowed the nomos of the system to be remade altogether. In this mode, law is viewed as embodying a paidea—the highest ideal of the community—that is embedded in a master narrative of the community; the ongoing enactment of legislation and the rendering of judgments attempt to give this ideal ever more exact and just application over time. In sum, Adler believed the imperial mode, with its focus on rules, was a required component of any legal system, but it was insufficient to capture the vitality and creativity inherent in the jurisgenerative mode. The empire of law is an element of any healthy culture and the task of the legist or judge is a constructive one. Law, as understood by Cover and adapted by Adler, constitutes a “bridge to a better world.”

Adler was sympathetic to the efforts made by non-Orthodox rabbis and scholars such as Joel Roth and Elliot Dorff in the Conservative movement and Moshe Zemer and Mark Washofsky in the Reform camp to offer “liberal correctives”—generally of an ethical nature—to traditional understandings of the halakhic system and process. She recognized that these “correctives” were often novel and even precedent shattering. Nonetheless, she found the efforts of these liberal male colleagues flawed, for they failed to question or even consider patriarchal legal presumptions that undergirded the traditional Jewish legal system. This screamed out for correction. Unlike them, Adler demanded that issues of gender play a central role in Jewish law. She therefore insisted upon a completely different theoretical approach to the question of Jewish law than that found in the work of others.

Adler employed these insights in Engendering Judaism to maintain that a messianic goal—the creation of a more just world—lies at the heart of the Jewish story, and that the responsibility of each generation of Jews is to allow that goal to be more fully approximated so that a messianic vision of righteousness can be more fully realized. Her aim in this book was to indicate to men and women alike how a “more inclusive Judaism” could be forged, one that would inspire all Jews to draw upon the totality of Jewish tradition and law to fulfill the Jewish paidea of messianic justice.

In Engendering Judaism, Adler selected the issue of marriage to illustrate the nature of her overarching approach to Judaism. She noted that classical halakhah employed the legal instrument of The act whereby a person voluntarily obtains legal rights over an object.kinyan (acquisition) to grant religious sanction to the relationship created between a man and a woman when they marry. Through kinyan, the husband literally acquires the wife and only he can dissolve the marriage. Such inequality all too frequently leads to abuses on the husband’s part when a marriage is terminated. This rightfully offended Adler’s sense of justice. In addition, Adler maintained that the “metaphor of acquisition” that undergirds the act of kinyan failed to express the feelings of reciprocity and concern that more properly characterize the bonds that obtain between two persons who wish to sanctify their devotion to one another as permanent partners.

Adler thus turned to the notion of covenant and maintained that the ideal of the “brit” provided a more fitting metaphor for the relationship of mutuality and love that existed between these two people. Drawing upon diverse examples of covenantal commitment and care found throughout the tradition, as well as classical Jewish sources surrounding partnership as opposed to property law, Adler composed a document she entitled a Brit Ahuvim to create a Lovers’ Covenant that could be used by both heterosexual and same-sex couples to celebrate and consecrate their enduring connections. In writing this document, Adler observed that because “love and relationship are volatile,” one cannot “rely exclusively on love without any obligation structure.” She therefore insisted that “the b’rit metaphor” employed in her Brit Ahuvim be grounded in the “structures of partnership law.”

In writing her Brit Ahuvim, Adler granted ritual expression in the realm of praxis to the theological ideals she had articulated in her book and employed Jewish law and texts in an original and innovative manner. Her book provided a bold understanding of how the resources available in the tradition could be reconstructed and reconfigured to provide novel directions for Jewish law, life, and thought.

Adler has continued to be a productive author. Her book Tales of the Holy Mysticat: Jewish Wisdom Stories by a Feline Mystic was published by Banot Press in 2020. In this whimsical and thoughtful “take-off” on tales of Hasidic rebbes, the rabbi-narrator tells short stories about her cat, who is revealed to be a kabbalist who has entered his final incarnation in superior feline form. The volume contains a glossary, a Jewish timeline, and a variety of short explanatory articles on Jewish texts and tradition, so that non-Talmudists and non-Kabbalists can understand the humor and substance of the work.

In addition to this last book, Adler also writes on a wide array of theological and philosophical topics. While her approach to these subjects—ranging from sexual abuse and exploitation to the Holocaust—remains grounded in feminist thought, she also employs diverse literary and social scientific methods to approach topics of concern to men and women, Jews and gentiles. Her current research centers around themes of suffering and lament and she is actively developing a theology of lament. She is currently working on a book on this topic, Pour Out Your Heart Like Water: Jewish Perspectives on Suffering, with Oxford University Press.

Adler has also contributed recent articles to two anthologies that have come out of Hebrew Union College’s Kalsman Institute on Judaism and Health. “Those Who Turn Away Their Faces” compares the treatment and category of the biblical metzora (leper) to modern treatments and attitudes towards persons plagued by health stigmas, and “Bad Things Happen” deals with various Jewish theologies of suffering.

Adler’s interest in issues involving women and religious law persist. She and the Muslim scholar Ayesha Chaudry co-authored a chapter on “Guardianship of Women in Jewish and Islamic Legal Texts” for Islamic and Jewish Legal Reasoning: Encountering Our Legal Other, edited by Anver Emon (2017). The book emerged from a study group for Jewish and Islamic legal scholars to which both women had belonged for some years. To the collection Between Jewish Tradition and Modernity: Essays in Honor of David Ellenson (2014), Adler contributed the essay “Between A Rock and A Hard Place: Rav J.B. Soloveitchik’s Perspective on Gender.” With Rabbi Robin Podolsky, she coauthored “Sexuality, Autonomy, and Community in the Writings of Eugene Borowitz” (Journal of Jewish Ethics 2015).

Rachel Adler is by all standards one of the preeminent “mothers” of modern Jewish feminism who has been responsible for moving feminist concerns and sensibilities from the margins to the center of modern Jewish life and thought. She will undoubtedly continue to promote these concerns even more through her ongoing writings, thereby enhancing her position as one of the most significant Jewish theologians of the modern era.

“The Torah, Our Chavruta.” In These Truths We Hold: Judaism in an Age of Truthiness, edited by Joshua Garroway and Wendy Zierler. Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2020.

“Equality of social and political rights, irrespective of gender.” In Deepening the Dialogue, edited by Stanley Davids. New York: CCAR Press, 2019.

“Commentary on Na’ashe v’Nishma: Pirkei Avot 1:17.” Sh’ma (October, 2019).

“For These I Weep,” CCAR Journal 2014.

“Innovation and Authority: The Case of the ‘Women’s Minyan Responsum.’” In Gender Issues in Jewish Law: Essays and Responsa, edited by Walter Jacobs and Moshe Zemer. Tel Aviv and Pittsburgh: Studies in Progressive Halakha. New York: 2001.

Engendering Judaism: An Inclusive Theology and Ethics Philadelphia: Beacon Press, 1998

“The Battered Wife of God: Violence, Law and the Feminist Critique of the Prophets.” Review of Law and Women’s Studies 7:2 (Spring 1998).

“A Carnival At the Gates: Jonah and Laughter on Yom Kippur.” In Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion To the High Holy Days, edited by Judith A. Kates and Gail Twersky Reimer. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

“Women and Tradition: Talking Our Way In.” In The Jewish Condition: Essays on Contemporary Judaism Honoring Rabbi Alexander Schindler. New York: URJ Press, 1995.

“Feminist Folktales of Justice: Robert Cover as a Resource for the Renewal of Halakha.” Conservative Judaism 45 (Spring 1993).

“A Stumbling Block Before the Blind: Sexual Exploitation in Pastoral Counseling.” CCAR Journal 40 (Spring 1993).

“In Your Blood, Live: Re-visions of a Theology of Purity.” Tikkun 8:1 (January/February1993), Reprinted in Lifecycles 2, edited by Debra Orenstein and Jane Litman. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 1997.

“A Question of Boundaries: Toward a Jewish Feminist Theology of Self and Other.” Tikkun 6 (May/June 1991). Reprinted in Tikkun Anthology, edited by Michael Lerner. Oakland and Jerusalem: Institute for Labor & Mental Health, 1992.

“The Virgin in the Brothel and Other Anomalies: Character and Context in the Legend of Beruriah.” Tikkun 3 (November/December 1988). Reprinted in Tikkun Anthology, edited by Michael Lerner. Oakland and Jerusalem: Institute for Labor & Mental Health. 1992 Reprinted in Vox Benedictina 7 (January 1990), with additions and footnotes.

“I’ve Had Nothing Yet, So I Can’t Take More.” Moment 8 (September 1983). Reprinted in Jewish Possibilities: The Best of Moment, edited by Leonard Fein. Northvale, NJ and London: Jason Aronson, 1987.

“Tum’ah and Taharah: Ends and Beginnings.” The Jewish Catalogue, edited by Michael Strassfeld, Sharon Strassfeld, and Richard Siegal. New York: 1972. Reprinted in The Jewish Woman, edited by Elizabeth Koltun. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.

“The Jew Who Wasn’t There: Halakha and the Jewish Woman.” Davka (Winter 1971). Reprinted in On Being a Jewish Feminist, edited by Susannah Heschel. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.