Guide for Halakhic and Egalitarian Minyan
From an email list to which I subscribe, JA pointed out the following article form Ynet.
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New guide for the halachic and egalitarian minyan
Egalitarian minyans are rampant throughout the country. Now thanks to PHD candidates Michal and Elitzur Bar-Asher they have a halachic guide to follow
Can women receive the maftir aliya? Lead the Hallel? Recite the half Kadish? Select the tune for Lecha Dodi? Women can now do all of the above—with appropriate halachic sanction.
For three years Michal and Elitzur Bar-Asher, an Israeli couple living abroad, have studied the halacha’s approach to including women in public prayer services, and have recently published a detailed guide on this rather tricky subject.
The couple’s newly published guide, the Guide for the Halachic Minyan, not only highlights the halacha’s perspective on female participation in prayer services, it also offers a detailed account of specific prayers that women may, or may not lead.
More conservative worshippers may be disappointed to discover that a woman may lead the Hallel prayer, though feminists may scoff at the fact that women are allowed to blow the shofar only on Yom Ha’atzmaut. Those following Ashkenazic decisors may even allow a woman to lead the Kol Nidrei.
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“We are engaged in a continuous process of study and clarification. Therefore, this guide should not be taken as comprehensive, and no inference should be made from silence,” state the Bar-Ashers.
The couple also notes that “if we do not explicitly indicate that women may lead a certain part of the prayer service, this does not mean that we have concluded that they may not. Such silences should be seen as invitations to further study of the sources that may eventually lead to the discovery of new grounds for permission.”
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The guide can be downloaded here. Although I am more liberal than this guide and its authors, it is an interesting and important development.
February 12th, 2008 at 1:35 am
In regard to the article about so called Halachic
Minyans I just find the whole enterprise amusing. I think most of us acknowledge that Halacha is man made and thus limited by the society people live in. There is no rational reason in modern times to exclude women in ANY religious practice. So let us daven- men and women- together because it is meanigful to us, and not because someone found some convoluted precedent from a Rabbi in the Middle Ages or even earlier.
February 12th, 2008 at 7:03 am
Harry,
I am glad that I now can hear your agitprop not only at kiddush, but also on-line. What you have difficulty understanding is that there are people who feel committed, for many different reasons, to a system of law, however imperfect it is, and refuse to throw out the baby with the bath water. There is a large group of people who do agree that halakhah develops, yet within this group there may be strong differences on how that development occurs. Maybe the most interesting thing about this guide is that it is a non-rabbinic, in the organizational and political-sense, initiative and guide.
February 13th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Right on Harry! The burden of justification is on those who maintain nonegalitariansim, not on those who are living up to the values of equality and mutual responsibility across gender lines that we profess. MM and anyone else - See Shaul Magid’s excellent article in Nashim vol. 8, available on Project Muse and in libraries.
February 14th, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I wonder whether RW RZ would scoff at the fact that women are even allowed to blow the shofar on yom ha’atzma’ut.