Godel Escher Bach Rashi

Rashi's Bruria story is pretty wild, isn't it?  If you can, I suggest reading the original Hebrew (the citation's in the wikipedia article).

Until yesterday, my reaction to this story was just that I found it offensive.  But yesterday, my friend Moshe Noiman challenged me to look at the story a different way.  He asked me, what is the moral of the story?  After thinking about it that way for a little while, it hit me like a ton of bricks.  The moral of the story is very simple: maybe women are not so light-headed after all.

Think about it.  Rebbe Meir didn't intend to kill his wife, he just wanted to have some fun at her expense.  But Bruria took things much more seriously than he expected.

Note that neither Rebbe Meir nor his unnamed student -- the men of the story -- committed suicide, though their misdeeds were surely, from a technical standpoint, just as serious as Bruria's misdeeds.  By playing their little practical joke, the men of this story took very lightly something that the reader probably realizes should be taken a bit more seriously.

The story operates on two levels; it's a second-order narrative.  Rebbe Meir and his student set out to prove that women are light-headed (relative to men).  But they become part of a bigger story which proves the opposite, that men are light-headed relative to women.  Overtly, the story buttresses the Talmud's dictum that women are light-headed; covertly, the story satirizes and undermines that very dictum.