Let it be known, far and wide that, once again, my life changed and for the better when we prayed from a Torah at the Kotel, the Wailing Wall, in an all-female group in the women's section. It was a transformative moment in history and in my own history as well. The date was Rosh Chodesh Kislev, 1988.

And why? Because that's when and where God introduced me to my future chevrutah, Rivka Haut, z"l, who, even though we did not know each other, nevertheless turned to me in the crowd of 70 women and asked me to open the Torah for our service. It wedded me so fatefully, so faithfully to the struggle for Jewish women's religious rights in Israel--but also to Torah study. It was a transcendent moment for us all.

As a girl, growing up in 1940s and 1950s Borough Park in Brooklyn, I went to a Hebrew School, but back then, no one believed that an Orthodox girl had a future in terms of Judaism. Not one of us had a Bat Mitzva. Women were not rabbis, or cantors, or in charge of interpreting Jewish religious law. Even though I was often called the "smartest boy" in our Hebrew School, that's how it was. On the day I should have been Bat Mitzva, I went to another neighborhood and ate non-kosher food for the first time.

And I did not die.

What did I do after I met Rivka? I persuaded her that what she had envisioned and accomplished was highly significant; that it would be easy for me to help her and others to launch a grassroots movement and then a legal struggle to pray in the woman-only section there (a struggle that remains ongoing). But I immediately realized that what I wanted to do was study Torah.

And so, we did so together for 25 years, from 1989-2014, until she left me. Like Rahel left Ya'akov, Rivka "died on me, actually, she died all over me" (this was Rabbi Michael Shmidman's, z"l, view of the phrase "met alai.") I still miss her every day. A chevrutah is both a very special kind of friend as well as a teacher, but she was far more than that. Together, we two listened hard for God's voice. Together, we "heard" and discovered much that had been hiding in plain sight if you took the time and "wrestled" with the words and with more than two thousand years of rabbinic interpretations.

Rivka was also like a mother to me in the sense that she knew both Hebrew and Aramaic perfectly, had been a Talmud "junkie" for most of her life, and was far more than familiar with many of the great Commentaries on the Torah. My Hebrew was grade-school level, my Aramaic non-existent; I only remembered bits and pieces of Torah, the Prophets (Isaiah, Ezekial), and some of the Megillot (Ruth, Esther). Still, she thought I had something to "bring to the table." I'm not sure what she saw in me. My secular intellectual passion, my worldly reputation, my Zionism, my overwhelming eagerness, my writing skills? Did she think that I'd bring "feminist" insights to our learning? I usually did not.

We could not have been more different. Rivka was a very traditional woman, a long-time-married mother, a member in good standing of a synagogue community. She observed every holiday, kept kosher, was a loving daughter, mother, and wife. She fed the homeless every Shabbos night--but here is where she departed, in a way, from the prepared script. She studied Talmud with her husband, Irwin Haut, "zl" (her companion Talmud "junkie" so to speak)--and she went on to publish some books and, eventually, one with me.

Me? I was a well known heretic, even in the secular world.

Rivka taught a Talmud class to women only in her Flatbush home every Shabbos afternoon. And she organized the earliest women-only prayer groups in Brooklyn. She was also a brave and determined agunah activist on behalf of Jewish women who were denied their divorces by abusive husbands and corrupt rabbis. Tirelessly, she advised and accompanied such agunot (chained women) to batei dinnim (religious courts) for many years and eventually wrote about that too.

So, for love of Torah, and for a chevrutah, without which I could not "have" Torah access, I found myself out on the street, accompanying Rivka and her unexpectedly bold activists as they publicly called out very cruel husbands in the streets, in front of their homes, at their synagogues, and at large rabbinical meetings. (I secretly thought that they were more confrontational, bolder, than the most radical of feminists back in the day when feminists really were radical. And I was both surprised and amazed. These were the "good girls" or so I thought.) Hmmm...

And I began to do Shabbos with Rivka and her family as well as many other chagim. We attended shiurim and lectures together as well as family celebrations. This was the life I’d once fled. But this was the life I never really had--one with Torah-dik women. Something like this was "not done in that place" at that time.

In the mid--or even the late--1990s, and for the first time in my life, the rabbi at my Brooklyn shul asked me to deliver a few words on the parashah. It happened to be Vayishach. No one had ever asked me to do so before. Oh, how I studied this chapter. And then--magic of a sort happened. The sweetest rain from heaven poured down upon me as I tried my hand at this. When I shared my thoughts on Shabbos, the rabbi said: "I did not ask you to do a Ph.D. thesis--but that's what you've done. Thank you."

Rivka (and Irwin too, I think) read every single word before I ever dared speak them aloud. Both she and her husband "approved" of them all and congratulated me on some original thoughts. ("She's got a hop, a hiddush here!") Something original. In a few years, my D'var Torah was published at the academic journal Nashim (Women). It became clear to me that God did not approve of rape and that, in fact, once caused a flood to wipe out all of humanity for this reason. The rape of Dina, her very name, reminds us of God's words in Bereshit: "Lo yadun ruchi" (my spirit will not continue to wrestle with/contend with these men who take any woman they want--after all, they are only flesh and blood.)"Lo Yadun/Din"--a divine ruling. Dina, the dishonored daughter, has two brothers who do not murder her but instead rescue her. I liked this very much. Mine was very clearly a minority view.

I returned to this parashah twice again. The reward for studying is that each time you really do see another parashah or, at least, you see things that you did not note before. Here's how I introduced my second D'var Torah in 1999:

“Last year, I delivered a Dvar Torah for my shul on this parashah. This year, neither Dina's rape nor Yakov's solitary wrestling with God are as compelling for me, for I am transformed. My Vayishlach is now another Vayishlach. My reward for having worked on this parashah last year is that God has not only granted me another year, but another parashah as well. Abundant themes and details, new to me, emerge. Ice-skating, fancifully, through several centuries, in Virginia Woolf's novel, Orlando, is a fairly modest voyage when compared to the forward/backward time-travel made possible by the study of Torah—a scroll small enough to unroll, in its entirety, in my shul on Simhat Torah, compact enough for us to carry for 40 years in the blazing Sinai wilderness, and for thousands of years, thereafter, into all the lands of exile. In Torah, one time-travels at any one of a hundred levels of meaning: the historical, the narrative, the prophetic, the redemptive, the psychological, the legal, the mystic, the personal. (Chagall had it right. In his paintings, stern and dreamy Jews dance with our Torah in the air, against both gravity and time.)”

I was not done yet. One is never "done." And so, I delivered my third D'var Torah on Vayishlach in 2008, for the Yavne Minyan on the Upper East Side. This one brings the best of my feminist and psychological knowledge to bear on the rape of Dina. It was enormously strengthened by my growing knowledge of Torah and commentaries. Against so many commentaries, I still defend what her brothers Shimon and Levi did--they did not honor kill their sister for having been kidnapped, raped, and held in captivity. They rescued her and punished her rapist as well as all those who were bystanders if not collaborators. Here it is. Make of it what you will.

Rivka and I went on to publish a number of devrai Torah together. We were in the midst of one when she became ill with cancer. I have our notes on what we were going to say. I have not had the heart or the will to complete it without her. It, too, is a minority view, but this time it belonged to both of us. It remains, like Rahel Emanu (Rachel, our mother), on the road, crying out to be shared, but waiting for the Moshiach to arrive.

Or, for us two, to continue our studies in the Next World.