To’anot, yo’atzot, madrichot ruchaniot, congregational interns, shul presidents, torah layners, executive directors, day school principals, mashgichot, gabbaiot, scholars-in-residence, contributors to halakhic journals, megillah chanters, tefillah organizers, ketubah readers—titles we never imagined, words that did not appear in our lexicon barely a decade ago. And the list grows day by day, with new roles moving onto the community agenda and into the communal psyche with little fanfare. Last year, as I strolled across a college campus with my old friend Barbara, she spoke of her 25 year old daughter who aspires to be a rahmit, a title new to my ears. (A rahm [masc.] is the acronym for Resh Metivta, one who teaches Talmud and other texts to young men studying at a yeshiva.) “Ironic, isn’t it?” Barbara said, commenting on her daughter’s need to distance herself from Orthodox feminism and the young woman’s rejection of any possible connection between her aspirations and the groundwork laid by her mother’s generation. For an instant, I wondered whether she wanted to be a rahmit at a men’s yeshiva or a women’s; that the question even entered my mind was to me an indication that the facts on the ground are fast outpacing the ideological debates over these new roles. I call this the era of ‘credentializing’ women in Orthodoxy, and we are poised at the beginning of an incredible new process.
All of this new leadership activity is more than the sum of its parts. Taken together, the new titles and positions for women constitute a fundamental redefinition of women’s roles in traditional Judaism. For the better part of Jewish history, women were considered as “inside persons.” Indeed, the Psalmist’s phrase, kol kevuda bat melech pnima (the honor of the daughter of the king is ‘within’) was applied by Rabbis of every generation to explain the exemption or release for women from duties that would propel them into communal space. Kol kevuda contained elements of modesty and taboo; while it honored women’s role in family life, it set women far back from the public eye in matters of religious ritual, community participation and spiritual leadership. Today, all of that is changing.
And yet… Though a host of titles are new to Orthodox women, leadership roles, in fact, are not. Many of us tend to think hazily of Orthodox women of yesteryear as, at best, behind the scenes; at worst, wholly uninvolved in communal leadership. But a good look at the history of Orthodox women in America over the last two centuries gives quite a different picture. In researching the subject, I was surprised to learn how fundamentally these women changed the quality of Jewish life, a definition of leadership if ever there was one. They took initiatives, assumed responsibilities, and helped bring our community to where it is today.
How many people know that it was a small group of women of the newly formed Women’s Branch of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations that created the Kashruth Division in the early 1920’s and gave us the OU label, a community institution upon which much of the Jewish world now depends? Those women hired one rabbi, then several others; they supervised them and paid their salaries from the Women’s Branch coffers; they negotiated with major food companies; they created the idea of labeling the kosher products; and they advertised and promulgated the observance of kashrut, which they themselves had made easier in the new land.
It was the Orthodox women’s groups that largely created the Jewish burial system in this country. On a visit to Beth David cemetery in Elmont, Long Island, where my parents-in-law and maternal grandmother are buried, the dry historical documents I had been reading suddenly came to life. The majority of burial societies in the huge graveyard, many of them dating back to the 19th century, had been created by ladies’ auxiliaries. The women purchased the community plots, kept the records, formalized the structures, and did everything other than public, rabbinic rites.
Similarly, the major religious Zionist institutions—social welfare and educational alike—were the product of women’s groups such as Mizrachi (now AMIT) and Emunah. To read the record of how a young Bessie Gotsfeld firmly held her ground in a controversy over who decides how funds raised by women are allocated, is to read a modern feminist treatise on women’s leadership. In the 1920’s the rabbinic leaders of Mizrachi insisted that the funds be turned over to them for distribution. Bessie, with great civility and dignity, refused. Then, as representative and founder of Mizrachi Women’s Organization, she traveled to Israel to see for herself where the greatest need lay
As the reader has noticed, there clearly are differences between then and now: then, women exercised leadership through the formation of women’s groups, rather than in gender-mixed institutions; they carried no titles other than those conferred upon them by their friends and cohorts in synagogue sisterhoods and women’s organizations; and they played no leadership roles in the liturgical life of the community or in the significant worlds of halakhic education and rabbinic authority. That is what is changing, and that is what we celebrate today. Women are newly expected to be in the Bet Midrash, the synagogue, and the courts of law; and not only to be present in these places but to exercise formal leadership roles.
Yet, as we chart new paths and create new expectations, it behooves us to remember that we of this generation are the next link, continuous with Orthodox women of the past who took initiative and exercised the collective leadership that has significantly shaped our entire community.
Such affirmation is a decidedly Orthodox thing to do, for what truly distinguishes Orthodoxy is that we bring the whole tradition forward with us—the entire religio-historical experience. Orthodoxy means to leave not one stitch of the past behind as we move forward through history, including those parts which may be less meaningful or less appropriate to us now. That is how we have been able to keep a sense of the Commanding Voice of Sinai throughout our long history.
Just as in halakhic and ritual matters we bring the entire past forward, so here too, in areas of community building and leadership, we take our past models forward. We do not reject those models but rather acknowledge the great good they accomplished. There is a tendency in the Western world at large to measure every society and culture by the standards of modernity, or the latest “ism.” As Orthodox Jews, we cannot fall prey to easy dismissals of the past in areas of community building and leadership.
All of us can learn lessons from the unfolding of future from the past; ‘all of us’ includes our rahmit and her postfeminist sisters, as well as those who struggled in recent decades to change the arc of women’s leadership, as well as those who believe that Orthodoxy is safe only when nothing changes. As we celebrate the new accomplishments and new challenges of living more fully as Jewish women leaders today, we can join the efforts of all those women before us who worked on behalf of the Jewish people and Jewish community. It makes for a more grounded, richer experience all around.