OPINION: Wins and frustrations for women in Orthodox spaces
A new survey shows comparatively fast progress has been made in the past few decades
As one of the few women ordained as orthodox rabbis, and one of even fewer who run a shul, I’m always on the lookout for news of attitudes in the orthodox community towards women’s roles in the synagogue.
An Israeli colleague recently shared a new survey, whose context is the dati leumi religious nationalist community in Israel, but nevertheless bears parallels with our UK context.
Dr Ido Liberman at the Leshem Institute for Social Research conducted this survey with several thousand respondents.
A headline is that in our 3500 year old religion, comparatively fast progress for women has been made in the past few decades. With Purim coming up next week, it was good to learn that women’s megilla readings were a clearly acceptable feature, here to stay in mainstream orthodox communities.
JOFA, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, recorded 139 such women’s megilla readings around the world in 2019. This was based on those who recorded readings via their form, so in reality the numbers are likely to be much higher.
The same category included women reading from the Torah in women’s only spaces, with a huge 73% feeling either supportive or neutral about this. This detail shows that Israel is several years ahead of the UK, as few orthodox shuls here allow women to lein (read from the Torah), even in women’s only spaces.
In other surprisingly positive results, women’s work “as female rabbinic leaders in the religious community” was welcomed or seen as neutral by 56% of respondents. This is an incredibly high result, which spells good news for those of us who have taken such a path.
A relatively new phenomenon which received overwhelming support was female teachers giving “psak halacha” – Jewish legal rulings – to other women on female-related areas like the laws of menstrual purity.
In the UK, we have a handful of women qualified in this area of law, but I sense we are underutilised, with women choosing to direct such questions to male Rabbis, “Rabbi Google” or simply not asking the questions. It was fascinating to see that the language of “legal rulings” from women received such warm support, when many trained women are encouraged to give “advice” only, and to pass any “legal ruling” questions up the chain to male rabbis.
Women giving halachic rulings to mixed groups on a broader range of topics received cooler support, with a respectable 54% showing either support or neutral feelings.
However, areas that received much lower support were those where women’s voices are brought into spaces traditionally reserved for men’s voices – both at shul and in the home.
Most shockingly, women reciting kaddish out loud in a shul received a meagre support. Only 29.5% of respondents (who were men and women) felt positive about women saying kaddish without the chorus of a male voice, and this rose slightly to 36.2% with a male voice chiming in.
Anecdotally, women who do attempt to recite kaddish in shul often face trouble and pain, even in shuls which theoretically welcome them. Some examples include their voice simply not being heard and the service continuing without them, or men reciting much louder and faster, leaving the woman feeling flustered and silenced. This topic is certainly worthy of its own column in the future.
Also disheartening to me was that in areas where men and women are equally obligated in a law, such as reciting kiddush or hamotzi on shabbat, over half of respondents felt negatively about a woman taking this role when a man was present. This shows that social norms take precedence over the straight halacha – but arguably it was ever thus.
The study shows both wins and frustrations for those of us interested in seeing opportunities grow for women in orthodox spaces. With Israel (and America) often leading the way, and the UK following a decade or so later, we can look forward to more teaching, legal rulings and leadership from orthodox women. We can expect more women’s participation in women’s-only spaces. However the power of social norms, or “meta-halacha”, rather than what the law itself allows, is set to stay in tension with progress.
Rabbi Miriam Lorie is a JOFA UK Rabbinic Scholar
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