Gender and Religious Authority: Female Orthodox Clergy

• In Event: Jewish Orthodoxies: Social Science Perspectives

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research with female Orthodox clergy in America, I will explore the intersection of gender and Orthodoxy in the context of religious authority. Since 2013, Yeshivat Maharat, a Modern Orthodox Jewish seminary in New York, has been ordaining women to serve as members of clergy. Additionally, two Orthodox Yeshivot in Israel are ordaining women. Although some of the Maharats in America and one woman in Israel serve as clergy in Orthodox congregations, the majority of women who have been ordained work as educators or community leaders. This presentation will focus on the ordination of women in American Orthodoxy.

Women’s Orthodox ordination is accompanied by a number of paradoxes. The ordination of women challenges this group's acceptance within the mainstream Orthodox movement while simultaneously insisting on a sharp distinction between those who accept the ordination of women in Orthodoxy and more liberal movements that ordain women. Additionally, female orthodox clergy are often framed as female spiritual leaders, a descriptor that both confines them to certain gender roles and expands the place of spirituality in the Orthodox movement. Last, as female clergy fill in roles left absent by rabbis' wives who work outside of the synagogue, the phenomenon is both challenging and reinforcing gender norms within Orthodoxy.

I analyze how Orthodoxy is used as a marker of status and justification for those who desire to claim that their religious change fits within traditional modes of Judaism. While rejecting language of fundamentalism as well as alignment with liberal Judaism, the movement to ordain women in Orthodoxy embraces women's religious authority as within the bounds of the Orthodox movement. In order to walk this fine line, Maharats, the synagogues who hire them, and the rabbis who ordain them insist that while the ordination of women is groundbreaking, female Orthodox clergy perform traditional gender roles and thus maintain a gendered and hierarchical authority structure within Judaism.

Author

• Michal Raucher, Rutgers University