Elana Sztokman

So… following my previous blog post in which I criticized the whole creation of this Maharat creature, my friend Elli Sacks, a great guy with a feminist spirit and genuine care for women’s well-being, took issue with my position. He took the time to argue with me on facebook (I know, adults are supposed to do these things on twitter, so I guess I’m not quite an adult yet). So I asked his permission to share some of his points here.

I am extremely excited by an Orthodox institution that is creating a PROGRAM for the ordination of women. Instead of concentrating on the inequality and lameness of the title of the ordination, I would concentrate on ensuring equal pay for both titles, and on aggressively pushing candidates into roles of leadership where a Maharat could hold stead. Day School Principals, Assistant Rabbi positions, heads of Beit Midrash programs all stand out as target areas for penetration. I’m sure there are many more.

I fear that some are wasting their energies on the wrong battle. Here is an opportunity to ordinate hundreds of Orthodox women within a decade — no small accomplishment — and to radically alter the balance of leadership positions in Modern Orthodoxy!

I suppose when he says “some” are wasting their energies fighting the lame title, he is referring to, well, me. So his is basically the JOFA position. You know, you attract more bees with honey, or something like that. We should not waste our energies making enemies out of Rabbi Weiss or “Maharat” Sara Hurwitz. If you can’t beat them join them. (Any other apt cliches available for this scenario?)

I appreciate Elli’s sensibilities. But I respectfully disagree. As I wrote back to him, this maharat thing isn’t smicha, and it is not “paving the way” for smicha. It’s paving the way for the maharat, whatever that is. It’s fake. It’s pretend. The way so much of what women are given to do is the “wink wink” k’ilu kind of stuff. It’s a joke.

In fact, when Hurwitz was interviewed by Debra Nussbaum Cohen of the Forward, her four-year-old son Zacharya told her “only boys can be rabbis.” Hurwitz apparently laughed it off, but it’s really not funny. It’s actually the whole story. This whole maharat thing reinforces gender difference. It says that men are one way and women are the other. And what that ultimately means is that men are in the ‘real’ or ‘proper’ position, and women are this kind of afterthought, a shadow or an echo of the real thing. It makes the problem embedded rather than fighting the problem.

Elli strongly disagrees with my characterization of maharat as “fake.”

When Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, hundreds of African American baseball players entered the major leagues over the next decade. That is what I consider to be “paving the way”… “Life on the Fringes” did not cause hundreds of Orthodox women to flood the Beit Midrash of R. Aryeh Strikofsky. This new program just might. I’m not sure why passing all the tests for rabbinic ordination and receiving official recognition for it should be considered “fake.” Just as “to’enet rabbanit” was a new title not so long ago, a title which garnered great respect within a short period of time, I don’t see why this should be any different, especially if the program is populated by the best of the Drisha crowd. The key is to have outstanding women scholars who will earn the respect of the community.

Elli’s examples actually prove my point. Jackie Robinson became a baseball player in the white league, not in some fabricated role or on a second-status all-black team. Similarly, the Toanot Rabanniyot — religious pleaders, the equivalent of lawyers for the religious courts — are the same for the women and the men. Interestingly, when women were allowed to take the tests for pleaders, the tests were made harder, but women passed anyway. So women and men pleaders are exactly the same and fulfill all the same functions in the religious courts, side by side, with the same title.

That model is precisely what’s missing here. By giving women a separate, different title, it’s basically arguing that women will never be rabbis, that they are secondary.

The idea that when women/girls take on roles it’s just a game, or “fake”, is not new. The most recent example was my 11 year old daughter’s bat mitzvah program commencement at her school — this morning (!). The school was very proud of the fact that girls learned trop. So how did they do it? There was no prayer service, no ceremonial removing the Torah from the ark, just sort of took it out and put it on the table and afterwards someone remembered to sing something, then they called up the girls four at a time — two recited the blessing on the Torah (even though they are not twelve yet, which really made it farcical), and then two girls read a few verses of Torah together. Together!!!! Have you ever in your life seen such a thing? (I mean, Torah reading is hard enough without trying to do it in a pair.) It was so absurd — because it bore little if any resemblence to the way Torah reading is done in a proper synagogue (by men). It was done this way I guess for reasons of logistics, but it made the entire experience completely removed from reality. Fake. That’s how it felt. Boys are trained to take part in a real service, and girls are just playing a little game. That’s what it felt like.

Nevertheless, Elli remains optimistic. “Ultimately we want the same thing,” he wrote, “and I hope that you are wrong, but I will be willing to reevaluate in a few years.”

Okay, I’m happy to continue the conversation in a few years. And although the blogger always has the last word, I would like to say that I deeply appreciate that there are men like Elli who profoundly care about seeing women achieve their just place in society. Thanks for the care and the conversation!