From Women Engaging in Halakhic Discussion to Women Making Halakhic Decisions
In my lifetime, I have been privileged to witness a veritable sea change in observant women’s participation in ritual Jewish life, especially with regard to the synagogue, but also with regard to the beit midrash (study hall). We have come a long way from the era when Lincoln Square Synagogue was called “Conservative” by a local Young Israel rabbi because we had allowed hakafot for women on Simchat Torah in a space completely closed off from men—and my rebbe, Rav J.B. Soloveitchik, z”l, responded by giving a shiur in our shul, declaring, “Now let anyone dare say that this synagogue is Conservative!” (Simchat Torah, 1972).
The women who had originally requested the hakafot had studied in a “Kollelet” for women (where they learned Gemara and rishonim) opened under the auspices of Lincoln Square Synagogue in the summer of 1969, which, at that time, was the only game in town. Today, of course, women at Yeshiva University’s Stern College study Talmud on a very high level, as do women in manifold yeshiva high schools and seminaries throughout the United States and Israel.
Thus it seemed a natural progression to read a moving article by Rachel Kohl Finegold (Jerusalem Post, July 7), a recent graduate of Yeshivat Maharat in New York, in which she wrote of her own course of dedicated study of rabbinic texts and issues—and of the increasing demand in the Orthodox Jewish world for qualified women’s leadership. She was correct in pointing to a growing continuum of innovative programs that promote women’s advanced talmudic and halakhic study, including Nishmat’s Keren Ariel Yoatzot Halacha program and Ohr Torah Stone’s Monica Dennis Goldberg School for Women Advocates.
Admirably, Rachel spoke moderately and respectfully of corners within Orthodoxy where certain domains of women’s leadership remain outside their comfort zone— including the large rabbinic organization, the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), which called Yeshivat Maharat’s ordination of women a “violation of our mesorah.”
Israeli Reality Prompts a Different Response
Here in Israel, far from the American Jewish scene where the synagogue remains the uncontested center of religious experience (even though this was not true of Jewish life historically and probably has much to do with Christianity being constituted as a church-centered religion), our religious life takes a different path. We are not caught up in the RCA’s concerns regarding halakhic “slippery slopes,” and don’t have to confront the situation that occurs in many middle–American Jewish communities, where the rabbi is often the only Jew capable of reading the Torah scroll and leading the prayer services. Therefore, I believe that the Israeli reality calls for a slightly different—and, perhaps, additional—advancement on the part of women, one that involves the whole of Israeli society and not just the observant, synagogue-going community.
In the first sovereign Jewish political and social entity in close to 2,000 years, we face numerous challenges: religion versus nationality in determining critical personal status issues such as conversion, marriage, and divorce; integrating olim (new immigrants) from cultures separated from the mainstream of Judaism for centuries; organizing Shabbat in the public space in such a way that protects citizens’ rights not to work on Shabbat while not engendering coercion and resentment on the part of secular Jews and non-Jewish Israelis—to mention just a few. And because Judaism represents both a religious and a national identity for us, as expressed in our literature, our festivals, and our life-cycle celebrations, each of our unique challenges affects women existentially as equal citizens of our Jewish state.
To give the most salient example, there are no secular marriages or divorces in Israel at the present time. This means that, although a person of paternal Jewish descent—someone who is not halakhically Jewish, but who would have been sent to Auschwitz under Hitler’s government—is entitled to immediate Israeli citizenship, he or she may not be married in Israel without undergoing a halakhically acceptable conversion. Furthermore, secular Jews can hardly be expected to understand why women cannot sue for divorce in the same way men are able to. Hence, the need for learned women’s halakhic voices in areas of conversion and divorce is even more important to be heard in the religious court, the beit din, than in the synagogue or study hall.
Heter Hora’ah, a Time-Honored License
To be sure, women’s leadership in any meaningful Jewish institution concerned with Jewish tradition requires profound knowledge of the Jewish traditional library, including the Talmud and the Codes. Hence, for the past seven years, Ohr Torah Stone’s Midreshet Lindenbaum has been training women with rich prior backgrounds in Talmud and halakha in an intensive five-year program that leads to “heter hora’ah,” the time-honored license to answer questions in areas of kashrut, Shabbat and festivals, family ritual purity, and mourning practices.
Two years ago, Rav Yehoshua Reich and I certified our first two graduates, Anat Novoselsky and Idit Bartov, who are now teaching, lecturing, and writing halakhic responses. Idit is active in the new Israeli rabbinic organization Beit Hillel and participates in its beit midrash forum. Anat, who additionally holds a B.A. and M.A. in psychology, also functions as a pleader (advocate) in the rabbinical divorce courts.
We refer to our graduates as morot hora’ah and manhigot ruhaniyot (spiritual leaders), as these titles reflect the areas in which they have been trained. We opt, however, not to use the title “rabbi” for our graduates because, especially in smaller congregations throughout the Diaspora, the rabbi is expected to read from the Torah and lead the congregation in prayer, functions that we believe women may not discharge for congregations consisting of both men and women.
Halakha, if understood profoundly, is the ongoing attempt to take the rich and multivocal talmudic tradition of law and custom and the voluminous, wide-ranging responsa literature, and to confront all these texts with the nuances of an ever-changing social, political, economic, and sometimes even psychological–personal reality. Halakha is, at its core, a great, ongoing conversation—a dialogue with the ages for the present age, in all of its complexities.
Women as Active Agents in Rabbinic Courts
The Israel Democracy Institute recently published a magnificent policy paper titled “The Status of Women in the Rabbinical Courts” (Jerusalem, June 2013), written by Eliezer Haddad, which documents the integration of women into the rabbinical court system: first as litigants for their own rights as property owners (when industry took over agriculture in Ashkenaz), then as witnesses (when “women’s shuls” developed), and most recently as pleaders or advocates. This third advance was initiated by Ohr Torah Stone’s creating a program of study in 1991 before women pleaders were allowed to appear in religious court, and came to fruition when formal status was finally granted to women pleaders by a Supreme Court decision in 1993 (Bagatz 6300/93).
We believe the time has come for women judges, especially in areas of women’s conversion and divorce. To this end, this year we opened at Midreshet Lindenbaum a program in dayanut for matters of conversion, which we hope to expand to include marriage and divorce as well. (In the meantime, we can guarantee a degree in Women’s Advocacy.) The halakhic infrastructure certainly exists. In addition to being based on biblical, talmudic, and medieval precedents of great women halakhists, judges, and spiritual leaders, the move to train women poskot (halakhic decisors) and dayanot has been recognized as legitimate and desirable by contemporary authorities as well. Rav Bakshi Doron, a former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel, wrote in Binyan Av (65:5, p. 287), his book of responsa, that women may be “gedolei ha’dor, great halakhic leaders of the generation, serving as decisors, teachers of Torah and dispensers of halakhic rulings.”
Additionally, the recent, well-received publication of the Shulhan Arukh Hoshen Mishpat, published by the Ariel Institute of Rav Sha’ar Yashuv Cohen, former chief rabbi of Haifa, with the imprimatur of former Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi Avraham Shapira, affirms that a woman is “qualified to render halakhic judgments (to be a dayan), if she is accepted by the litigants or by the leader of the municipal government, as long as she is learned and expert in laws of the Torah (halakhah pesukah, Hoshen Mishpat, Laws of Judges, 7,1).
It is truly heartwarming to see the large number of women exercising religious and halakhic leadership in the Israeli communities today:
- There are now more than 120 functioning women advocates in the Israeli divorce courts, and our own lobbyist group of Yad L’Isha has obtained more than fifty divorces in difficult cases since January 1.
- A number of women have positions on local communal rabbinical councils, specifically for the purpose of answering questions relating to family ritual purity, as well as lecturing on philosophic and halakhic issues, especially on the night of Shavuot.
- A significant number of women are serving as mashgihot for kashrut in many places in Israel, including our own city of Efrat.
- Many of the matnasim (JCCs) have full-time cultural facilitators teaching Jewish culture and renewal; among the twenty-five facilitators currently functioning, four are women (the other twenty-one are rabbis).
- Within the new halakhic movement of Beit Hillel, many women are involved in leadership roles and four women are part of the Beit Midrash halakhic discussions.
- In the Diaspora, as well as in Israel, a number of synagogues have women interns, teaching Torah and serving as role models for women religious leaders.
When we began our School for Women Advocates, we had not yet received recognition from the Israeli Chief Rabbinate. The recognition came, however, and our women are being accepted even in the hareidi religious courts. I believe the same thing will happen with our women religious judges in the areas of conversion and divorce. These issues affect women too deeply for us to exclude them from the area of decision making, and the biblical precedent of Deborah is too powerful a model to be avoided. Perhaps only the voice of loving-kindness that will emanate from women will finally remove the blot from the escutcheon of our religious establishment, which still has refused to invoke the necessary solutions to free our sisters from the bonds of impossible marriages.