Related Study (Book Chapter)

Conservative Judaism: The Ethical Challenge of Feminist Change by Judith Hauptman

Jewish feminism has made American Judaism of the 1990s dramatically different from that of the 1960s. Over the last few decades, women have become fully integrated into the religious life of the community. For the first time, they count as full-fledged members of a prayer quorum, read from the Torah in public, and assume such leadership roles as rabbi, cantor, and synagogue officer.

Why have American Jews, unlike most others around the world, welcomed Jewish feminism so warmly? Elsewhere, most notably in Israel, Jewish feminism has not captured the public imagination. The success of the Jewish feminist movement in the United States can be attributed to a number of factors, mainly the continuing popularity of liberalism, the openness of American society to new ideas, the coming of age of the Jewish community, and its pluralistic denominational structure. The last two require some explanation.
By the 1970s, many Jews were already well integrated into American social and professional life. Young Jews on the college campus were no longer seeking to suppress their ethnicity but instead were seeking to identify Jewishly and to assimilate for themselves the best of the secular and Jewish worlds. The proliferation of Jewish studies programs after the Six-Day War in 1967 had led to an increase in the number of young Jews conversant with classical Jewish texts and able to analyze them with rather sophisticated critical tools. When secular feminism became popular in the late sixties, it was individuals like these who were in a position to issue the first feminist critique of Jewish practice.

The denominational structure of the American Jewish community also allowed the Jewish feminist movement to be accepted rapidly. Each of the three large denominations had a well-established network of affiliated synagogues, a sizeable membership, venerable rabbinical training institutions, and a distinct outlook on the practice of Judaism. When challenged by the feminist critique, each movement responded differently. Viewing halakhah as binding and stable, Orthodoxy found feminist change unthinkable. Since Orthodoxy seeks to insulate itself from its surroundings, viewing itself as an antidote to a morally bankrupt society, it is unlikely that feminist change will ever be instituted in this movement. Reform Judaism subscribes to the principle of personal autonomy, according to which each individual makes decisions for himself or herself about Jewish practice. Reform accepted most of the feminist critique willingly and is now beginning to grant women full, real equality in its main institutions. Given the nature of Conservative Judaism and its history, feminism presents an interesting case study because it did not become the extensive battleground it could have been for feminist modification. Although there was heated debate, the feminist agenda was accepted earlier and changes occurred more rapidly than might have been expected.

First, the Conservative movement had already made a number of radical changes in ritual, one of the best known of which related to Sabbath observance. Following the post-World War II exodus to the suburbs, the Conservative movement found its synagogues nearly empty on Saturday mornings. Concluding (mistakenly) that the reason for this lapse was a reluctance on the part of many people to travel on the Sabbath, it issued a responsum in 1950 permitting riding to the synagogue and back home but nowhere else.4 Although this did little to solve the problem of Sabbath attendance, it signaled to a generation of Jews that the Conservative movement viewed halakhah as a dynamic system, responsive to the changing needs of its members. Second, the movement had already adopted a number of measures that increased women’s involvement in Jewish practice, such as replacing the mehitzah with family pews and giving girls in its summer camps and junior congregations an opportunity to fill leadership roles in the prayer service. Third, an open-minded approach to the study of classical Jewish texts permitted its rabbinic leadership to become aware of past change and the possibilities of future change. Anyone who took courses in Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in the sixties, as I did, had those points repeatedly driven home. It is, therefore, not surprising that women who had learned about Judaism in Conservative circles and who had then become acquainted with feminism on the college campus were the first who attempted to explore the intersection of the two. It was they who discovered that a tradition that prided itself on its ingrained ethical stance did not apply the same high-minded principles to relations between the sexes. And it was they who discovered that Judaism, like other age-old religions, reserved the life of the mind and the spirit for men only. As enamored as these women were of Jewish observance, they were deeply frustrated by its entrenched male bias. Rather than spurn the whole system because of its sexism, they joined together in the fall of 1971, formed a consciousness-raising group called Ezrat Nashim, meaning “succor for women,” and formulated a call for change. Their platform included a long list of demands, from counting women in the prayer quorum and ordaining them as rabbis to eliminating women’s disabilities in the area of divorce. The common thread running through most of their requests was that halakhah must change in order to restore ethical balance to Jewish practice.

The first feminist change in the Conservative movement actually predated the Jewish feminist movement by more than fifteen years. Halakhic norms for Conservative Jews are officially set not by individual rabbis but by the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards (CJLS), a group of twenty-five rabbis who study halakhic problems brought to their attention by members of the Conservative movement’s Rabbinical Assembly. Any resolution approved by at least six of its members becomes an official position of the Committee and a legitimate option for a Conservative rabbi to implement in his congregation. This committee had decided in 1955 to permit women to be called for an aliyah to the Torah. The option was implemented in only a few synagogues in the Minneapolis area, a city with a strong liberal tradition, where women were apparently interested in fuller ritual participation.10 Following the decision, little happened for more than a decade. But in the seventies, at a time when women across the United States were growing sensitive to the seemingly irreconcilable differences between feminism and Judaism, more changes were introduced.

In the spring of 1972, the members of Ezrat Nashim decided to bring their feminist critique to the public’s attention by airing it at the annual convention of the Rabbinical Assembly. Their charges of sexism in halakhah, principally in the synagogue and in marital matters, resonated among rabbis and laypeople. I still remember the surprise felt by members of this group at the speed and enthusiasm with which its feminist position was endorsed. One year later, in 1973, the CJLS voted to count women in the prayer quorum. This measure was hurried through the committee by a few rabbis who felt it was an opportune moment to inform the American public that the Conservative movement recognized the equality of women before the law and was able to change synagogue ritual accordingly. Word of the decision was rushed to the newspapers, so that most Conservative rabbis first learned of it from the pages of the New York Times. In 1974, the CJLS adopted a series of proposals that equalized women and men in all areas of Jewish ritual. As a result, a Conservative rabbi could, for instance, allow a woman to serve as sheliah tzibbur (prayer leader), count in the zimmun for birkhat ha-mazon (quorum for Grace), and function as a witness.

For the rest of the decade, synagogue after synagogue wrestled with the issue of ritual change. Many people saw feminism as an attempt to justify philosophically what they believed was an ongoing erosion of halakhic standards. They framed the underlying problem in simple terms as tradition and halakhah on the one hand versus the feminist critique on the other. In the eyes of many serious practitioners of halakhah, counting women in the prayer quorum or letting them read from the Torah was equivalent to eating unkosher food. Such a response made it clear that the forces of traditionalism had inculcated in many laypeople the belief that halakhah does not change, that continuity is immutability. Instead of viewing the feminist critique as an expression of ever-deepening commitment to halakhah and a natural outcome of serious analysis of its built-in mechanisms for change, they labeled the feminist critique as antinomian. Others saw feminism as a just social cause whose time had come. As a result, virtually every Conservative synagogue in the United States in the seventies and eighties accommodated feminism in some way, from merely letting a woman open the door to the ark to according full gender equality.

The issue of ordaining women was first placed on the agenda by Ezrat Nashim in 1972 and debated for more than ten years. Allowing a woman to fill the pivotal role of religious leader of the synagogue seemed a greater break than allowing women to count in the minyan, which actually, halakhically speaking, was far more radical. A fact-finding commission was established, testimony was collected in Conservative synagogues across the United States, and a report summarized the various arguments. The majority of those consulted, as well as of the commission members, favored the ordination of women. The minority opposed ordination because of its purported halakhic indefensibility. Both the advocates and opponents of women’s ordination agreed that most contemporary rabbinic functions, such as religious role model, teacher, preacher, and pastoral counselor, could be filled by women without making any halakhic adjustments.

Although women had not engaged in these activities in the past, there were no explicit laws preventing them from doing so. The objections raised to ordaining women involved ancillary rabbinic roles—leading prayer services and serving as a witness at weddings, divorces, and conversions. Mishnah Megillah 4:3, the earliest law to address this issue, states that only men may count in the quorum of ten for prayer and discharge the prayer responsibilities of others. The Talmud and codes explicitly state that women do not qualify as witnesses.

A number of JTS faculty members prepared position papers, some arguing in favor of ordination and others arguing against it. A responsum written by Rabbi Joel Roth proposed that women voluntarily accept the obligation to pray daily at fixed times, thereby equalizing their obligations with those of men; upon doing so, they could count in the minyan and lead it in prayer. Roth predicted that since only some women are inclined to accept such additional obligations, Jewish women would split into two groups: those who would continue to regard their requirement to pray as voluntary and those who would regard it as obligatory. Only women in the latter category could seek ordination. As for women serving as witnesses, Roth declared that the rabbis of the Talmud, basing themselves on Deuteronomy 19:15 and 19:17, considered women ineligible and viewed them as unreliable. Since women’s reliability was no longer in question, there was no longer any reason to exclude them. He therefore recommended invoking the ultimate halakhic act, abrogation of a biblical proscription. In all, Roth proposed a reasonable plan for changing certain aspects of Jewish law in order to allow for the ordination of women. He insisted that male-female equality played no role in his thinking. He meant that his conclusions were warranted by objective analysis of the law codes themselves and did not occur through a deliberate attempt to elicit leniencies or interpret the text from the a priori principle that women should be accorded equality. By implication, Roth held that looking actively for ways to solve social problems was unacceptable. But decisors and judges, both activists and those who exercise judicial restraint, have no choice but to read a text through the lens of their own life experiences. This has always been true of Jewish law and of secular systems. What distinguishes the Conservative approach to halakhah is an acknowledgment that the system is responsive to evolving ethical truths and, at the same time, that problems are soluble within the existing legal framework. Orthodox decisors, for political or personal reasons, claim that halakhic change in response to socially generated problems is impossible.

The various JTS faculty papers on the ordination of women provided the basis for voting on the admission of women to the Rabbinical School. Although the issue was first brought to the faculty in 1979, deep rifts in its ranks—and also, I suspect, Chancellor Gerson Cohen’s inner turmoil—caused the vote to be tabled. Seminary Rector and esteemed professor of Talmud Saul Lieberman had issued no statement whatsoever on the ordination of women but was assumed to be opposed. In the fall of 1983, a few months after Lieberman’s death, Cohen brought the issue up again. Prodded by the chancellor, the faculty approved the admission of women by a substantial majority. It did not predicate its decision on the acceptance of any particular position paper, but, when implementing the vote, decided in subcommittee to admit women as candidates for ordination only if they indicated that they had accepted upon themselves the same obligation to perform religious rituals as men accepted. According to Anne Lerner, author of one of the faculty papers, the Roth responsum is followed mainly at the Seminary, while the general public posture is egalitarian. Most congregations ask women no questions about their personal practices and beliefs but simply count them in the minyan when they show up at the synagogue.

By the time JTS ordained its first female rabbi in May 1985, much of the Conservative community was ready to embrace this change, which did not, however, mean that jobs for women in the rabbinate were easy to find. A little less than half of each year’s ordainees are women; some seek pulpits but many prefer other kinds of rabbinic positions. Smaller, outlying synagogues, which can only offer their rabbis relatively low salaries, find themselves faced with the choice of a qualified man and a more qualified woman who will not be employed by a larger or better-located congregation because of residual prejudice. Female rabbis report that these small congregations usually hire the best rabbi they can find regardless of gender; that is, women’s integration into the rabbinate is coming about not because of laypeople’s commitment to social justice or recognition of halakhic justification but because of the exigencies of the marketplace. It is too soon to tell what changes women will make in the rabbinate. Opening the rabbinate up to twice as many people ought to produce twice as many talented leaders. In 1987 women were invested as Conservative cantors. The four-year delay occurred, perhaps, because the newly appointed chancellor, Ismar Schorsch, felt that the community could not accept two such radical changes at the same time. The halakhic argumentation for ordaining women mainly concerned the permissibility of women serving as prayer leaders. In gaining employment, female cantors are encountering fewer significant problems than female rabbis. Because of a shortage of cantors, women are being offered high-salary positions in large congregations. It is still true, however, that many congregations will not even interview a female candidate. As cantors expand their role as a second spiritual leader and Jewish resource, rabbis often worry about competition, in particular from women. Half the enrollment in the JTS Cantors’ Institute is currently female. It remains to be seen whether synagogues will be comfortable with hiring both a female rabbi and a female cantor.

The other area mentioned in Ezrat Nashim’s platform for change is marital law. According to Jewish law codes, only a man may initiate a divorce and prepare the necessary documents. This creates extreme hardship for women: a husband may extort large sums of money in consideration for granting a get (bill of divorce) or may simply decide not to issue one; he may then take a second wife without divorcing the first, but she may not remarry without benefit of a get. Prior to 1972 the Conservative movement made a number of attempts to solve this problem. In the 1950s, Saul Lieberman added a clause to the ketubah (wedding contract) that made it possible for a woman to sue a recalcitrant husband in civil court. With pressure to remove women’s marital disabilities growing even stronger in the seventies, a separate antenuptial agreement was instituted. Such an agreement was considered more enforceable than a religious document that could be challenged by the courts on church-state grounds. Should the husband who did not sign such a document at the time of marriage refuse to write a get, the wife could appear before the Bet Din (rabbinical court) of the Jewish Theological Seminary and ask to have the marriage annulled. An annulment, by definition, does not necessitate a get, but it does neutralize a husband’s control of the wife’s marital availability. In practice, then, if not in theory, women in the Conservative movement are no longer disabled in the matter of divorce.

A few feminist changes met virtually no resistance. In the mid-seventies Ezrat Nashim published a booklet entitled “Blessing the Birth of a Daughter” to provide people with sample ceremonies for publicly inducting a baby girl into the Jewish religion. Not fraught with the same anxiety or historical symbolism as circumcision, this rite of passage rapidly became standard practice among Conservative and other Jews. Similarly, in the last twenty years, celebrating a girl’s becoming a bat mitzvah in the synagogue with her reading publicly from the Torah and Prophets has become commonplace. More and more women have begun to cover their heads in the synagogue, to don tallitot, and to be called for an honor by both patronym and matronym (as have many men). Finally, issues of sexist language in the liturgy are now discussed at JTS as elsewhere. In sum, the Conservative movement is assimilating feminist change with reasonable speed and without inordinate difficulty. Not all of its members possess the requisite resilience. A small number of rabbis and laymen broke ranks in 1984 and formed a new branch, the Union for Traditional Conservative Judaism; they claimed to be motivated by the desire to stress observance of mitzvot. Because the rabbinical school that they opened will ordain men only, it would seem that the immediate cause of their action was their wish to distance themselves from feminism. In 1990 this group dropped “Conservative” from its title, hoping to make itself attractive to modern Orthodox Jews, who are now losing ground to the ultraright wing of Orthodoxy.

Despite these achievements, I am troubled that the Conservative movement, which has in feminism a golden opportunity to apply its founding principles to an issue of substance, is viewed by some as a movement no longer committed to halakhah. The law-making body of the Conservative movement has lost credibility in the eyes of the Conservative public; the leadership of the movement has made only weak attempts to inform the laity that there are numerous halakhic standards that need to be upheld by every Conservative Jew. Rabbis continue to make changes in synagogue ritual that cannot be viewed as consistent with halakhah and, in some cases, the move to egalitarianism has served as a catalyst for this process. An ironic result is that even in those settings in which egalitarianism is practiced, the practitioners themselves often do not view their own actions as legitimate. There is a feeling in many egalitarian communities that they are doing what is right from an ethical perspective but that if examined objectively, their rituals and lifestyle would be found antihalakhic. Until people equate halakhah with principled change, and until they learn to distinguish between warranted and unwarranted change, the number of authentic Conservative Jews will remain small. The leadership of the movement needs to grasp that this is a propitious moment for creating a new understanding of the old slogan defining the Conservative position: “tradition and change.” The challenge facing the Conservative movement is no longer to make itself palatable to acculturated American Jews but to portray itself as the modern reincarnation of Talmudic Judaism.

Probably the greatest contribution of feminism, therefore, has been to force serious, thoughtful Jews today to ponder the relationship between halakhah and ethics. If one recognizes that halakhah changes, and that one motivation for halakhic change is adjustment to evolving ethical insights, there is no choice but to endorse feminist change, unsettling as such change may be. But a deepening appreciation of feminism in secular and religious society is forcing men and women to evaluate dispassionately their behavior toward each other and the behavior of social and religious institutions toward both men and women. The outcome of this ferment will be change in time-honored practices and a more ethical, and therefore more appealing religion. Will the legacy of today’s Jewish feminists be modest or significant? Certainly no one will ever again dare to characterize traditional Judaism as an egalitarian religion. People may endorse or lament women’s traditionally subordinate position, but they will no longer be able to ignore the critique of sexist elements in Judaism. A more enduring and substantive accomplishment is that Jewish feminists have brought about irreversible and wide-ranging accommodations in the synagogues, schools, organizations, minds, and hearts of most American Jews. Jewish life in the future will not resemble Jewish life in the past but will offer more people greater opportunities for involvement and religious satisfaction. As a result, Jewish life in the United States has become immeasurably strengthened.