As a young and idealistic high school graduate, I left for Israel to get a taste of real, in-depth Torah learning. It was there that I sat down with a chavrusa for the first time, and struggled to crack the code of cryptic Torah sources I had never been exposed to before. It was a life-changing experience and I knew this was what I needed to make Judaism come alive for me. When I finished my second year in Israel, my formal Jewish education was over and the opportunities for serious Torah learning for women in the US were limited. But most importantly, I noticed amongst the women in my community an underlying estrangement from the source of our tradition - the sacred text. For many of my high school students, their unfamiliarity with the evolutionary process of Halacha led them to the conception that modern day Halacha is merely a list of rules a couple of rabbis pulled out of a hat. For many of my friends, the lack of expectation for rigorous scholarship within their Torah learning led them to seek intellectual satisfaction elsewhere. For others I knew, the absence of knowledgeable female educators and leaders to look up to, led them to believe that as Jewish women, they could not have intellectual ambitions when it came to Torah.