Through case studies of two female rabbinical students, this article explores the ways that emotions point us toward students' search for subjectivity as they learn to read, translate, and interpret the Babylonian Talmud. These students' emotions result from a multi-directional relationship between content of text, method of study, gender, and perceived institutional culture. Once understood within a broader relational picture, these students' emotions lead us into the complex and nonlinear process of finding subjectivity in the face of a sacred text that can deny that subjectivity. Alongside skills such as translation and parsing an argument, the cultivation of subjectivity becomes a literacy skill.