by Rebecca Honig Friedman

The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance has been on a roll with the emails lately. Earlier in the week there was the website-crashing Koren-Sacks Siddur endorsement, and today there’s a deceptively plain-looking, unadorned missive titled “Responsa Regarding Women in Religious Leadership,” containing a veritable goldmine of blogging fodder.

The email contains a link to a PDF of the responsa of three Orthodox rabbis to the questions posed them by Rabbi Avi Weiss as he prepared to confer a title on the not-yet-Mahara”t Sara Hurwitz and to assign her a place as a full clergymember in his synagogue (in the case of Rabbi Daniel Sperber it’s an actual handwritten note!)

The main question, as restated in the answer of Harav Yoel Bin-Nun, regards “the possibility of appointing a woman, who has learned Torah, and especially the halakhot of Orah Hayyim and Yoreh Deah from outstanding Torah scholars, and who according to her skills, knowledge, middot and life style is worthy of serving in Rabbinic roles, fulfilling a Rabbinic responsibilities in the community, and to be called Morateinu [Our teacher], or Hakhama [wise one].” (”Morateinu” and “Hakhama” were two initial ideas for an appropriate non-rabbi title that were ultimately thrown out in favor of the acronym Mahara”t.)

I’m still going through these rabbis’ reasoning (and they all do support Weiss and Hurwitz) but here’s one excerpt that struck me, from Bin-Nun, about the notion that putting a woman in a position of leadership as Weiss was proposing would lead Orthodoxy to down-spiral into a (shudder) Reform-like, Feminist-like movement:

Regarding that which many people are concerned about – the breaking of boundaries, and an erosion towards Reform and Feminist directions – this concern exists for men no less than for women.
Ultimately, the Reform movements were founded and led by men many generations before the issue of
women came up on the agenda. And in general, anyone who is trained in the teachings of Hazal knows
that the women of Israel did not sin at the Golden Calf (egel hazahav – see the weekly Torah portion),
nor at the sin of the scouts (meraglim; Bamidbar Raba 21:20), and that the redemption of Israel from
Egypt was in the merit of the assembling women (nashim hatzov’ot; Rashi Exodus 38:8), … – and what right do men, whose forefathers’ filth (zuhama) returned to them because of these sins, have to accuse the women of Israel of all of their concerns regarding breaking of boundaries – it is better that they create boundaries within themselves, and not seek examples of faulty women, corresponding to whom there are such faulty men aplenty.
On the contrary, we are well versed in the ways of the daughters of Israel being more stringent upon
themselves, much more than the original prohibition, in the issue of keeping seven clean days on any
drop of blood (Nida 66a, and see the Ramban’s explanation in his novellae there on the stricture of the daughters of Israel), and that which some people claim today, a few men and women, that this entire
stricture came from the men and that they ascribed it to women, since the entire “Halakhic discourse”
was in the hands of men – all this is not plausible in my eyes whatsoever, since I see today the relation that exists between the actual laws of Hametz on Pesach, and how great the distance is between the Halakha and that which most women do, being increasingly stringent upon themselves in the cleaning for Pesah far beyond the boundaries of the law. Therefore, I often plead persistently of the female Torah scholars of our time, that they not be excessively strict upon themselves and upon us, and there is a great need to be concerned for excessive stringencies, which turn in the end into leniencies, especially in our generation.

Quite a mouthful, but here’s what it means: Women won’t be the ones to ruin Orthodoxy. So, men, don’t blame them!

Posted on May 21st, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized |