Now is the time to act as our foremothers did

March is Women's History Month, a time to pay respects, to celebrate, and to learn from the Jewish women in our lives.

One way we can do this is to look back at the brave and intelligent women in our Jewish history, and the important lessons they offer us for our current times.

The recent Torah portion, the episode of the Golden Calf, offers one of those lessons. In the passage, the Jews are waiting for Moses to return from the top of Mount Sinai. They have made camp at the base of the mountain, and they wait and wait, but in their loneliness and in their fear, they begin to act with mob mentality.

They ask Aaron to make them a new god, any god that will stand before them. Some of the men remove their jewellery, take their children's gold and use it to make a golden calf to pray to. The women, however, do not. They are not complicit in praying to false idols, they do not lose faith in the foundations of their society – even when those foundations are questioned, when the masses scream that there are cracks appearing.

We can learn something from the earliest of our Jewish ancestors, these courageous women who stood up to public pressure.