Female Orthodox Jewish Clergy: Scandal or Opportunity?

This is the outline distributed at Rabbi Finkelman's talk on the issue of female Orthodox clergy, Shabbat Miketz, Dec. 12, 2015.

Scandal...

1. There exist hardly any precedents for female Jewish clergy
   1. A few biblical women have titles:
      1. The wise woman of Tekoa (2 Sam 13) and the wise woman of Abel (2 Sam 20:14-22)
      2. The prophet Hulda (2 Kings 22; 2 Chronicles 34).
      3. The Shofet Devorah (Judges 4).
   2. Women’s names appear on the walls of synagogues from Talmudic times at Hamat Gader and other places, but these do not appear in the Talmud. The women appear as donors, or with obscure titles such as “archsynagogos” and “presbetera”:These inscriptions include heads of synagogues, leaders, and elders. These inscriptions (in feminine conjugations) bear witness to the very public roles of women. Thus further proving that women were indeed active members within their spiritual communities.
      Lee Levine, Prof. Emeritus at Hebrew University: Throughout antiquity, women served key roles in synagogues. Women were recorded as donors and synagogue leaders (positions we would now consider president or head of shul, according to Levine).
      
   3. Great female students of Torah in the Talmud have no title:
      1. Beruriah;
      2. Imma Shalom, might have a title, Imma might be her name, or her title, but that serves as the title of any elderly woman.
      3. Eshet Haver, in the Talmud, refers to a knowledgeable woman committed to observing the laws of Tumah, Terumah and Maaser in her own right, not just to the wife of a man who fits that description as a Haver.
   4. Learned women thought history have not had titles. See Shoshana Zolty’s book, And All Your Children Shall Be Learned: Women and the Study of Torah in Jewish Law and History (1997). The daughter of Rabbi Shemuel HaLevi who taught in the Yeshiva of Bagdad which her father headed (from 1164-96), was called “Mekor Hakhmah” = “Source of Wisdom,” perhaps not as a title.
   5. Even Nehamah Leibowitz, the primary teacher of TaNaKh and rabbinic commentary in the 20th century, eschewed titles that she had earned, doctor and professor. Students referred to her by name, usually both names.
2. To restate the point in the previous heading, “It is against the mesorah.”
3. Another restatement: “You cannot claim to be Orthodox, if you assign a title to a learned woman.” Since 1935 in Germany in secret, and since 1972 in American publicly, all women rabbis were of non-Orthodox denominations. First Reform, then Reconstructionist (1977), and then Conservative (1983 admitting women to rabbinical school). It is non-Orthodox innovation.
4. It is against policy. In what way?
   1. “Semikhah originates with Moshe Rabbenu, and is given only to men.” Rav Zevulun Charlop.
   2. Rabbi Gil Student explains that Semikhah has as its main purpose qualifying someone to become the rabbi of a congregation; but women may not have a position of leadership, such as rabbi of a congregation, according to Rambam. Therefore, no woman may attain Semikhah. “It would be like granting a driver’s license to someone who is not allowed to drive.”
   3. “All the honor of the daughter of a king is within” (Psalms 45:13). Women should not have a public role. The Talmud rules that a woman may not be a witness (Mishnah Shabbat 4:1 & Talmud Shavuot 30a derived from Deut. 19:17, “the two men”). Rambam Edit 9:2 based on Deut. 16:6 & 19:15). My teacher, Rabbi Saul Berman, explains that the woman should not get subpoenaed into a public role, which, in the ancient world, she would find degrading and embarrassing ("The Status of Women in Halakhic Judaism," Tradition, 14 (Fall 1973), p. 14).
5. Women are exempt from the mitzvah of Talmud Torah (Talmud Kiddushin 29a; Rambam, Talmud Torah 1:1). So how does it make sense for a woman to become certified as an expert in Torah?
6. Women should not learn Torah, or should not learn Oral Torah, or men should not teach women Torah (Mishnah Sotah 3:4, Rabbi Eliezer says, “whoever teaches his daughter Torah, it is as if he taught her immorality.”) Rambam rules accordingly, and provides an explanation:A woman who has studied Torah has a reward, but it is not like the reward of a man. For she was not commanded, and the reward of anyone who does a thing concerning which he is not commanded is not like the reward of him who is commanded and has done it, but is less than it (cf. BT Kiddushin 31a). Yet even though she has a reward, the Sages commanded (Mishnah, Sotah 3:4) that a man not teach his daughter Torah, for the mind of the majority of women is not adapted to be taught, rather they turn the words of the Torah in-to words of nonsense according to the poorness of their mind. The Sages said: "Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah is as if he taught her lasciviousness!" [ibid.] With reference to what are these words said? With reference to the Oral Torah. But with reference to the Written Torah, he ought not to teach her before the fact, though if he has taught her he is not as if he teaches her lasciviousness. (Talmud Torah 1:13) See also Shulhan Arukh Orah Hayyim 246:6.
   If one should not teach his daughter Torah, and if women possibly should not learn Torah, then it seems obvious that we must not celebrate or give honors to women who nevertheless do learn Torah. Avraham Grossman, in his history of Jewish women in the middle ages, argues that medieval Jewish women generally could not read.
7. The Rabbinical Council of America has issued a statement to that end concludes:In light of the recent announcement that Yeshivat Maharat will celebrate the "ordination as clergy" of its first three graduates, and in response to the institution's claim that it "is changing the communal landscape by actualizing the potential of Orthodox women as rabbinic leaders," the Rabbinical Council of America reasserts its position as articulated in its resolution of April 27, 2010... The RCA views this event as a violation of our mesorah (tradition) and regrets that the leadership of the school has chosen a path that contradicts the norms of our community.
   
   • Resolves to educate and inform our community that RCA members with positions in Orthodox institutions may not
   • Ordain women into the Orthodox rabbinate, regardless of the title used; or
   • Hire or ratify the hiring of a woman into a rabbinic position at an Orthodox institution; or
   • Allow a title implying rabbinic ordination to be used by a teacher of Limudei Kodesh in an Orthodox institution; and,
   • Commits to an educational effort to publicize its policy by:
   • Republishing its policies on this matter; and,
   • Clearly communicating and disseminating these policies to its members and the community.
8. The change could tear the community apart (R. Jeremy Weider, based on Talmud Sanhedrin 110a). Change should happen slowly and organically, without fanfare.
9. Anthropological evidence shows that in about every society, men’s work differs from women’s work. Men’s work gets prestige denied to women’s work. The United States and Western Europe are experimenting with equality, but in long human history, no such experiment has succeeded. The change may have devastating impact on birthrates, and on other not obvious factors.

Or opportunity...“After such knowledge what forgiveness?”

1. Maybe entitled female clergy do not sin against history:
   1. Few biblical women have titles; but men also do not have modern titles, either. And “wise woman,” approximates the modern title of hakham as well as any.
   2. Synagogue leader titles from the time of the Talmud have not much relevance, except that some modern rabbis have ruled that women must not be synagogue presidents. Maybe in Talmudic times women did have such roles.
   3. Many learned women did not use titles. The sixteenth century daughter of R. Shemuel of Kurdistan taught the Yeshiva there, even after she married the Hakham Yaakov Mizrahi, and also after her husband’s death, but I do not know whether she had a title (R. Menahem Brayer, "The Jewish Woman in Rabbinic Literature: A Psychohistorical Perspective") “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” = “Lo ra’inu aino re’ayah” (Siftei Cohen on Shulhan Arukh Yoreh Deah 1:1 note 1, quoting Mishnah Eduyot 2:2).
2. Is it against the mesorah and norms of our community? Not everything that Jews have done, or refrained from doing, creates a mesorah. How do we decide? Which norms do we defend? How does one decide who can claim to be Orthodox? What standards does Orthodox imply?
   1. The word “Orthodox” does not appear in classical Jewish sources at all. Reform Jews in the 19th century pinned that name on Torah observant Jews, who later reclaimed it as a rhetorical response, according to Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. So we have no traditional metric for describing who can or cannot claim to be Orthodox; we have classical attempts to define the beliefs and practices of rabbinic Judaism.
   2. As far as I know, none of these sources mention women rabbis, perhaps for obvious reasons. Earlier opponents of rabbinic Judaism also do not mention women rabbis.
   3. Though non-Orthodox Jewish movements ordained the first female Jewish rabbis, that does not of itself contaminate the title. Not everything done by liberal Jews is automatically forbidden.
   4. Rabbi Daniel Sperber, author and editor of 8 volumes of Minhagei Yisrael, and head of Talmud at Bar-Ilan University, deserves recognition as a great scholar — perhaps the greatest -- on the difficult subject of what constitutes a binding minhag. Rabbi Sperber himself has ordained women as rabbis.
3. It is against policy.
   1. “Semikhah originates with Moshe Rabbenu” describes his action, laying his hands on his successor, Joshua. The Talmudic rabbis in Bavel denied that they had this form of semikhah. They admitted that the rabbis in Israel had this Semikhah in Talmudic times. Post-Talmudic rabbis generally assume that no one has this form of semikhah. Rabbi Yaakov Beirav attempted to reinstitute semikhah in the 1500s in Tsefat; opposition to his efforts, and his early death, ended that experiment. We do not have the classical semikhah limited to men.
      So what form of Semikhah do we have? My semikhah, as I have translated it:
      
      Yeshivat Rabbenu Yitzhak Elchanan
      With the help of God, who to be blessed
      He is the Rabbi, great in Torah and religious awe, excellent in virtues and good qualities,
      Eliezer son of David Finkelman
      Learned many years in Yeshivat Rabbenu Yitzhak Elchanan, of blessed memory, worked and toiled in our Holy Torah, and found, according to qualities, and succeeded to go up higher in holiness to become one of the students who qualifies to issue rulings [teach], and was tested by us the undersigned in the field of forbidden and permitted in the first section of Yoreh De’ah, and found to be knowledgeable and expert in those laws, and we have ordained him with the ordination of our sages to issue rulings to the children of Israel,
      He may certainly rule [teach] in matters of forbidden and permitted
      
      Yoreh Yoreh Be’Isur VaHeter
      May God be with him to grow the Torah and to magnify it. As proof we have signed on the first day of the week, the nineteenth day of Elul, 5733, in New York.
      Shemuel ben HaRav Rav Shelomo ben (illegible)
      Yosef Dov Ber ben HaRav Rav Moshe HaLevi Soloveitchik, Boston
      
      Rabbis Daniel Sperber, Avi Weiss and Jeffrey Fox of Yeshivat Maharat granted Rachel Kohl Feingold the title “Spiritual Leader and Decisor of Jewish Law” in terms largely similar to mine:
      
      

1. In that form, her Semikhah attests to her proficiency in Jewish Law. Sefer HaHinnukh, in 12th century Barcelona, recognizes that a woman can have this form of proficiency; when he explores the prohibition on issuing a ruling in Jewish law when drunk, he explains that it applies both to men and to women, as long as they have achieved the expertise to decide questions of Jewish law. If an unqualified person decides Jewish law while drunk, paradoxically, that person cannot break the Torah commandment, because that person has no standing to decide Jewish law (#152 or #158 on Lev. 10:9). .
2. Rabbi Student makes a perfectly circular argument. The classical Semikhah claims that its holder may answer questions of Halakhah. It does not seem obvious that the goal of Semikhah to certify synagogue rabbis. Perhaps a male or female scholar may want Semikhah for some other reason, such as to teach Halakhah, which fits the text of the Semikhah. Perhaps a synagogue could accept as its halakhic guide a person who does not have Semikhah. If we follow Rambam, and if a synagogue rabbis has serarah, then a woman cannot become a synagogue rabbi. If we do not follow Rambam, or if a synagogue rabbi has no serarah, then a woman can become a synagogue rabbi. Rabbi Student has made an argument that assumes its conclusion.
3. All the honor of the king’s daughter describes a society in which we do not live. Many haredi circles espouse a new model in which wives work outside the home to earn a living so that their husbands may devote full time to Torah. In more modern Orthodox circles, many women have professional degrees and careers. Roselyn Yalow, a Jewish woman who kept kosher, earned a Nobel Prize in Medicine. In general culture, women serve on the Supreme Court, in the Cabinet, in the Senate, and both major political parties have female candidates for President. The Rambam’s model, does not describe the reality in which any significant segment of the Jewish world lives now:. . . A wife is not imprisoned, so that she may not go out or go in, though it is a dishonor for a woman to go out all the time, sometimes outside and sometimes in the plazas. A man should prevent his wife from this. He should not let her go out more often than once a month, or a few times per month if necessary. For nothing is more becoming for a woman than to sit in a corner of her house, as it says, “all the honor of the king’s daughter is within.” (Hilkhot Ishut 13:11)
   
4. Women are exempt from learning Torah, according to the Talmud, but all agree that women must learn those Mitsvot that apply to her (Rabbi Moshe Isserles, comment on Yoreh Deah 246:6) and therefore recites the blessings on learning Torah (Shulhan Arukh Orah Hayyim 47:14). Semikhah, permission to teach and decide questions of practical halakhah, seems within the bailiwick of women.
5. Women should not learn Torah. Those early authorities who follow Rabbi Eliezer in the Mishnah can make a strong case against allowing women to learn Torah, or at least, teaching Torah to women. The Rabbinical Council of America is in no position to make this argument, however, as it begins its 2010 statement:
   1) The flowering of Torah study and teaching by God-fearing Orthodox Jewish women in recent decades stands as a significant achievement. The Rabbinical Council of America is gratified that our chaverim have played a prominent role in facilitating these accomplishments.
   and later in the same statement:
   3) the Rabbinical Council of America encourages a diversity of halakhically and communally appropriate professional opportunities for learned, committed women, in the service of our collective mission, to preserve and transmit our tradition. Due to our aforementioned commitment to sacred continuity, however, we cannot accept either the ordination of women or the recognition of women as members of the Orthodox rabbinate, regardless of the title.
   
6. However strong the reasons for forbidding women to learn Torah or men to teach them Torah, the break with tradition has already occurred. Rabbi Yosef Dov HaLevi Soloveitchik established a high school in Boston in the 1930s at which girls and boys studied identical Talmud curricula, in fact, studied in the same co-ed classes. He gave the opening lecture, in the 1970s, when Stern College for Women began a program of Talmud study. Rabbi Soloveitchik apparently opposed having a woman serve as a synagogue president, unless the alternative seemed much worse; but I wonder if he foresaw where his revolutionary move would lead. He was posek for the RCA, and the RCA has not repudiated his position on women learning Torah.

The RCA statement needs further analysis. It seems ambiguous on the title of Yoetset, and on the role of women as advisors in rabbinic courts. It explicitly endorses women achieving expertise in halakhah and other branches of Torah, while it explicitly rejects women having a rabbinic role, under whatever title. It also rejects women having a title that seems rabbinic, even if the woman only assumes a traditionally acceptable role, such as teaching practical halakhah to women, for example. That statement would encourage a woman to gain the expertise to qualify for semikhah, but not to accept the title. If a school offers a bonus to teachers who have earned Semikhah, perhaps a learned woman should master the material but should forgo the bonus. Why? This seems a quixotic demand.
We can speculate why the rabbinic, or quasi-rabbinic title, should be withheld from a woman who meets the criteria, those listed in my Semikhah and in the Semikhah offered by Rabbis Sperber, Weiss and Fox. The reasons offered by the RCA and its defenders do not command assent.
As for whether a woman should serve as the rabbi of a synagogue or community, that should depend on

• Whether we follow Rambam, who rules that women (and converts) must not have serarah, leadership or mastery (Melakhim 1:5), and, if we do, whether leading a synagogue constitutes serarah. Other Rishonim agree that a woman should not be appointed regnant queen, but do not forbid other forms of leadership.
• Or, if we do not follow Rambam, or if synagogue rabbinate does not constitute serarah, we need to determine whether our centuries of not having women in that role constitutes a minhag, or merely a fact (see Rabbi Daniel Sperber). Plausibility structure: Given our life experience, the thought that women may not assume leadership roles has no plausibility for us; we should recognize that, given their life experience, the thought that women may assume leadership roles has no plausibility for part of the haredi world. It seems inevitable that, for many members of the RCA, thinking about this issue will cause conflict.

Note that Shemayah and Avtalyon, who headed the rabbinic courts when Hillel the elder was a student, were converts (Yoma 71b). Apparently a convert can exercise serarah when the alternative seems less qualified for the post.
The predecessors of the Talmudic rabbis did not protest against Shlomzion the queen. Apparently they felt that she was better qualified than the male alternatives. A regnant queen certainly exercises serarah.
Similarly, Rabbi Soloveitchik opposed having a woman synagogue president, unless the alternative was a non-observant man.
Perhaps the conclusion should read that a woman may serve as rabbi of a synagogue if and only if she appears to be the best qualified candidate. The same formulation would work for a man.
Indeed, as noted by Rabbi Wieder, this might qualify as the most powerful argument for granting titles to women who have earned expertise in Jewish law: we expand the pool of teachers, leaders, role-models, and consequently (by the laws of supply and demand) increase the quality of the role-modeling, teaching and leadership.