On Whether to Ordain Women to Serve As Clergy in the Orthodox Jewish Community

(in progress)

Please Note: This article does not address the subject of women's ordination in non-Orthodox Jewish bodies. Although outside the focus of this analysis, and therefore obiter dicta, I believe that it is proper for and incumbent on non-Orthodox Jewish bodies to extend the possibilities of clergy-ordination in their bodies to women and to all other societal subgroups of discrete and insular minorities who traditionally have been denied such opportunities. Presbyterian and Methodist Christian bodies often have led the way, ordaining women, later gay clergy, and other communities who historically had not been eligible for ordination.  Their model seems a proper model for emulation by those Jewish theological bodies who subscribe to several similar principles regarding adapting religion to evolving social-secular norms.

The Halakha of Unintended Consequences

 

 It is the least discussed issue in the debate over whether to ordain women as clergy in the Orthodox Jewish community: the law of unanticipated consequences. Many among my colleagues and friends have attended early Shabbat morning hashkamah services over the years so that our wives could attend shul, too, after we came home.  We built eruvin – making them as ubiquitous in American Orthodox life as kosher pizza and bobbie pins – so that our wives could attend shul, too.  We found ways to make Bat Mitzvah meaningful, encouraged and financed expanded Torah learning for girls and women, and a gazillion other things.

On the other hand, throughout my career, I have known fellows who skip minyan davening at any excuse they can get.  Sometimes, in some situations, a man simply is precluded from going to a minyan.  The halakhah recognizes that preclusive circumstances dictate what they dictate.  Of course.  But the business of “playing hookey” from minyan is another factor, and we all readily can compare synagogue attendance on weekdays to the turnout on Shabbat, much as we easily can compare Shabbat morning attendance with the turnout on Shabbat afternoon. Res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself.

One dimension of “playing minyan hookey” occurs when a new baby is born.  The hard-working professional wife – lawyer, accountant, surgeon, investment broker, astronaut – looks at her husband and understandably says: “Ferris, you work in your Good Ol’ Boys Network all week while I slave over the stove, repair the space shuttle, replace heart valves and absorb the insults from Dr. House, and trade in derivatives, and then come home to deal with the babies’ crying all evening, then have to wake up all night to deal with more crying.  I insist, I demand that you take on all the child-rearing duties from Friday at 5:01 p.m. until Monday at 8:59 a.m.”

Outside the shomrei mitzvot Torah-observant community, and even among the Orthodox-affiliated, many of us see a sudden disappearance or marked drop-in-attendance at shul and at shiurim Torah classes by these Ferris Buellersteins for several years.  Among those rabbis who have the gifts to inspire these vaporized lay fellows, we point out to them: “Ferris, you have a responsibility and a duty – to your wonderful wife, to your kids – to be an engaged father, a devoted husband . . . and not to dump all the baby-detail on your wife.  You have to learn how to diaper your kids, and you need to share the wake-up duties, and the bottle-feeding.  But you also have to figure out how to do so while attending minyan, being in shul, answering to “Barkhu” and Kaddish and Kedushah, reciting the Amidah b’tzibur, and hearing k’ri’at haTorah.  It’s simply not nice when the Gabbai is standing there at r’vi’i, looking to give you an aliyah, calling ‘Buellerstein? Buellerstein?’ – but you are not in shul.”

Now imagine ordained female clergy in the Beth Abraham Congregation of Avatar.  On Saturday morning, the baby needs to be watched.  Or the six-year-old suddenly develops stomach flu as the family is departing for the walk to shul.  Mom cannot stay home because she has a paid responsibility to be at shul, so Dad does Shabbat Morning Kiddie Patrol. Again and again.  When that rabbi’s husband pointedly starts missing shul, starts missing shiurim, attending with an irregularity demanded by the understandable circumstance of being espoused to a rabbi with babies at home – and we all know that a rabbi never really is completely “off duty,” even at nights, even on weekends, even and particularly on the Day of Rest – that will be the “Mother of all Mar’is Ayins,” to put it mildly.  Episcopalians and Methodists do not have to deal with this as an issue; their men, if need be, are permitted to miss the public reading of the weekly Torah portion. Reform and Conservative temples do not have these issues either.  They find inspiration not in the Chazon Ish but in the chazan isha, the female cantor.  But, for Torah Jews with a time-validated tradition of incorporating mar’it ayin concerns into halakhic practice – and for proven good reason – there is no question that the deleterious impact that inadvertently would be generated widespread degrading male adherence to mainstream normative communal halakhic obligation –with specific deleterious impact among Modern Orthodox lay fellows, where there already is a bit of a laxity sometimes in some such circles – is just one small tip-of-the-iceberg of unanticipated consequences that never comes up in discussion of the great issues that concern Orthodoxy in this wider debate.

These unanticipated consequences do not draw much attention – because, by definition, they are unanticipated by anyone.  But these consequences are not inconsequential.  Welfare for the poor is noble, but who anticipated what its unbridled application in America would do to the recipient class, its family structure?  The American ban on drinking alcoholic beverages seemed persuasive and wise, but its unanticipated consequences led to one of the more quirky developments in American history, as we moved to admit virtually all nations into our culture except Carrie by repealing the amendment that had banned alcohol in the first place.  Unbridled deregulation of Wall Street.  The Great Society.  The Oslo Accords.  Life is full of interesting and noble ideas that sometimes lead to unexpected consequences.  And soon we are repealing the initiatives, and initiating the repeals. The Alternative Minimum Tax to soak the rich, similarly, unexpectedly became the bane of the middle class it was meant to help. G-d knows where ObamaCare will lead, if ever actually implemented.

When the issues deal with secular public policy, they are fascinating.  They fill textbooks for college Poli Sci majors and doctoral candidates to weigh.  Have expanded unemployment benefits deterred recipients from trying as hard to reenter the workplace, thus unintentionally lengthening aspects of the downturn and consigning more people to become unemployable because of extended absence from the workplace? Have increased minimum wages and mandated benefits reduced jobs available for young people? Did the shift to corn ethanol inadvertently fuel a precipitous rise in grain prices world-wide, leading to starvation and some death in Africa?  Did tax cuts lead to record deficits?  Did tax increases?  Did increased spending?  Did government-mandated lending laws, arising from anti-redlining concerns, aimed at expanding home ownership among members of discrete insular minority groups, lead unexpectedly to the collapse of the residential real estate market?  Was the time ripe for Coca Cola to change its formula and introduce New Coke?

These are fascinating subjects for debate.  And, when society determines that, ooops, we opened an unanticipated Pandora’s Box of consequences, society tries to reverse course, repealing, restructuring, reversing.  And so it goes.  We try “New Math” and then go back to the Old Math.  Kids can’t read, so we go from Phonics education, realizing that phonics limits the potential to write interesting reading texts for children, to “Whole Language” and “Sight Reading” education that permits more interesting texts.  Then we find that the kids love the new stories and their new texts, but they cannot read when those words appear in any other book.  So we return to being hooked on phonics.

In secular politics and secular public policy debates and even secular religion, these issues are fascinating and engage the intellect.  And we can always change and reverse course.  Initially, the founding fathers of Reform Judaism took Israel out of the prayer book, and a few decades later they put it back in. They initially banned yarmulkas, then reversed and welcomed them.  Some of their founders moved the Sabbath to Sunday, and then they reversed course and moved it back to Saturday.  They brought in the organ, and later they transplanted the organ.  They centered their religion around Germany as the New Zion and Berlin as the New Jerusalem, and then they later decided to modify that innovation.  Unanticipated consequences.

For the Jewish people as an Am Olam, an eternal nation, separated by the miles comprised by the globe, separated by the epochs living three and more millennia under a hundred and more different cultures and languages and religions and peoples, it has been amazing that we have held it together as well as we have.  But the genius, through it all, has not been we.  Rather, it has been the Torah and its system, to use a neutral term.  A system that understands unanticipated consequences, allows for flex when circumstances not only point towards that flex but demand that flex for survival in the face of incalculable adversity.  So, when needed, we stopped publicly reading Parshat HaShavu’a and instead adopted a weekly Haftorah to ride out a tide that we knew, someday, would be reversed.  When needed, in the face of a monogamistic Christendom, we who resided in lands of the Holy Roman Empire adopted monogamy – always permitted anyway – as G’zeirah/Decree public policy.  In time, the early American Mormon experience centuries later confirmed the validity of our underlying concern and the consequent judgment.  And that is at the core of every such debate within the contours of Jewish law.  We allow for flex, but our “system,” through it all, proactively allows – maybe more than it allows for anything else – for unanticipated consequences, rarely knowing what they might be, but knowing that they surely shall be, and therefore always allowing for them.

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