The More Things Change…

Doubling up was popular when I was a kid. We had, for example, Doublemint and Double Bubble gums, baseball doubleheaders, and movie double features. The latter two evoke fond memories of exciting days at the stadium and entertaining afternoons at Far Rockaway’s single-screen Columbia, Strand, and Pix theaters.

Recently, I relived that experience by attending a lecture doubleheader. It started with a mini-doubleheader, delivered by the wife-husband team of Rabbanit Michelle Farber–Rabbi Dr. Seth Farber. She — founder and program director of Hadran, which is sponsoring the global Siyum HaShas for Women on June 6, 2027 (slated to be the largest women’s Torah gathering since Mount Sinai) — delivered a Talmud shiur on “Out of Bounds: Rabbi Yirmeya and the Boundaries of Beit Midrash Diversity.” He, founder and director of Itim, lectured on “Courting the Rabbinate: Can Civil Courts Save Religious Rights in Israel.” Where did this take place? As I quipped to friends, it must be Rinat, if the rabbanit delivered the shiur and the rabbi the lecture.

I then raced to the Teaneck Jewish Center to hear Dr. Malka Z. Simkovich — historian, author, and visiting professor at YU’s Bernard Revel Graduate School — speak on “Staying Together in a Dispersed World: Israel-Diaspora Relations in Ancient Times.” It was simply a smashing, stimulating, and scholarly evening.

These lectures highlighted the immense distance my Modern Orthodox community has traveled with respect to women’s Torah learning, scholarship, and communal leadership. In one night, we heard the first Jewish woman to publicly lead a daf yomi group and found a daf yomi podcast give a gemara shiur, studied with a female Jewish studies scholar who heads a major Jewish publishing house, and learned from a rabbi who devotes much of his professional life fighting to enable women to play as significant a role in Jewish life and learning as halacha allows. These are not minor steps; they are leaps from the Jewish world of my youth.

Yet Rabbi Farber’s lecture underscored that serious problems still remain. He discussed the Chief Rabbinate’s adamant refusal to allow qualified women to take halachic exams and obtain a certification — not rabbinic ordination — that would allow them to perform various religious functions as well as receive major employment, financial, and governmental benefits. After years of struggle, the Israeli Supreme Court finally ordered the Chief Rabbinate, over its vigorous objection, to allow women to sit for the exam.

That much-too-slow legal victory did not, sadly, easily translate into reality. When the women agreed to take the exam in a separate location at the Rabbanut’s request, they arrived but the exam booklets did not. Strenuous last-minute efforts saved the day, but the Rabbanut’s dogged resistance to legal and halachic equality of women with respect to limud Torah, even in the face of Supreme Court decisions, remains a high hurdle that Israeli women must leap over.

So let’s go back home for more good news. As I look around classes at the Beit Midrash of Teaneck and see 10 to 30 women attending each one with more online, I can’t help but think how wonderful it is that opportunities are open to them now that were closed just a short time ago. Indeed, BMT, in discussing the focus of one of its more classic Torah study classes, noted that it will be “open to all.”

I also recently participated in a shul focus group about our future. Past experience led me to expect that I would be the lone voice advocating for cutting-edge leadership in the area of women’s roles in Jewish life, learning, and practice. Not this time. Before it was my turn to speak, multiple participants, across generations and genders, had already argued that inclusion of women to the fullest extent allowed by halacha is critical to our shul’s ethos. While I added my two cents (or perhaps a dime’s worth), the fact that others agreed was another indication of a rosier present and an even brighter future.

But now for some gray. The Orthodox Union runs a wonderful Torah learning program, Semichas Chaver, boasting over 280 locations and 4,000 participants. This innovative, practical halacha learning program — which does not grant “real semicha” but rather is “geared toward educated lay people who want to be able to answer the most common halachic questions that come up in the course of daily life” — provides weekly classes, complemented by multimedia presentations, devoted to study of sources from Torah verses through modern-day Torah scholars.

Classes deal with the ethical meaning of halacha, contemporary questions, and material designed to be imparted around the Shabbat table. And every six months there is a comprehensive exam followed by a community-wide siyum, with those successfully passing the exam awarded a “Semichas Chaver” certificate of achievement signed by leading Torah scholars.

Sounds wonderful; what could be wrong? Nothing, except that as the program’s director graciously confirmed to me, the program “is currently only open for men,” though he added that the OU “hope[s] to open a women’s track in the near future.”

I look forward to this happening, with the women’s program equal to the men’s. Yet I wonder, why not just invite women to participate in the current program? Think of the money that would be saved by not creating a separate, overlapping program. And, of course, that would ensure that all learn the same content in the same way. (In a 1953 letter from Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik to Rabbi Leonard Rosendfeld, the Rav wrote, in connection with elementary school education, that “it would be a very regrettable oversight on our part if we were to arrange separate Hebrew courses for girls.”)

I would be remiss if, in writing about the OU and Torah learning for women, I did not mention its terrific Women’s Initiative, which provides first-rate programming for women in Torah, leadership, and community engagement — certainly wonderful for many. But it’s not for everybody, which leads me to wonder further: why not let adults vote with their feet and attend those Torah programs they determine best meet their skills and interests?

I leave this column’s penultimate words to Justice Noam Sohlberg, deputy president of the Supreme Court of Israel, from his opinion in the case Rabbi Seth discussed:

“Moreover — and perhaps more importantly — our sources contain examples of women’s leadership and influence linked to Torah knowledge: the Matriarchs; the daughters of Tzelofchad; Devorah; Bruriah; and others — praised for their wisdom and understanding. One source especially apt here states: ‘The daughters of Tzlofchad were wise, expounders, and righteous.’ (BT, Bava Batra 119b).

* * *

“Thus, even within the halachic world, a significant development has taken place: an expansion of women’s access to Torah study, reflecting sensitivity both to their changing status and to the centrality of Torah study in Jewish tradition and culture. The present petition is an expression of this trend: women seeking to engage in the ‘toil of Torah,’ about which it is said, ‘whoever wishes to take, let [them] come and take.’ This accords with Israeli law and the duty of state authorities — in this case, the Chief Rabbinate — to treat all members of the public equally in providing access to the benefits it administers.

“The heading of this part [“Assemble the people — men, women … so that they may hear, and so that they may learn, and revere the Lord your God, and observe to do all the words of the Torah” (Deut. 31:12)] was taken from the verses of the Hakhel commandment (and, as is known, ‘a verse never departs from its plain meaning’). Fittingly, I will conclude with the assembly described in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah: ‘Ezra the priest brought the Torah before the assembly — both men and women, and all who could understand . . .and the ears of the people were attentive to the book of the Torah’ (Neh. 8:2-3).:”

How I wish the words of this eminent jurist and talmid chacham would be repeated and implemented by the religious and lay leaders directing the course of limud Torah in my MO community; how I wish they would allow all who seek to engage in the toil of Torah to do so completely and equally, with all hurdles and barriers removed; how I wish that the enlightening words of Torah could be open and available to all who yearn to partake of their sweetness.