Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Oridnation, 1889-1985

Rating:
Summary: Change and tradition
Review: Pamela Nadell, director of the Jewish Studies Program at American University in Washington, D.C., put together the book, 'Women Who Would Be Rabbis: A History of Women's Ordination: 1889-1985', to trace the path of debate on the topic of women's roles in Judaism with particular emphasis on the issue of ordination. She quotes a reporter in the mid-1970s who declared, with the ordination of Rabbi Sally Priesand in 1972, that Judaism answered the question of women's ordination before it had been asked. Not so, according to Nadell, as she traces the 100+ year-old history of the debate.

In 1889, Mary M. Cohen, a Jewish journalist and activist, raised the question (in print, and on the front page, no less!) through a discussion that 'innocently' raised the question as a legitimate question about ministry. In 1889, this would not have been a question that could be easily asked, and if asked, would most likely be quickly dismissed. When one of the discussion members says that he would have to laugh at seeing a woman in the pulpit, Cohen's protagonist retorted that every good cause is apt to meet with ridicule at first.

The remarkable thing about Cohen's article is the aptitude she showed for anticipating much of the rhetoric and argument that would follow the women's ordination debate for the next century.

Are the people ready for it? Is it permissible by the Torah? Isn't this just a societal innovation out of keeping with the 'timeless truths?' Shouldn't women be happy with their more traditional role? And, if women give up the traditional roles, who will fill them? She wrote sthat Cohen prophesied that this 'thing will be' because so many innovations even by that time had already taken place and, in fact, continued to take place, in American Jewish religious life. American Jews of various persuasions, Orthodox to Reconstructionist, accept changes in various ways, but are nonetheless willing to at least question and debate.

Nadell follows from these early beginnings to early, unordained preachers (such as Ray Frank, 'the girl rabbi of the Golden West'); to Chicago and other large city club women who banded together to change restrictive rules; to the admission of women to theological and rabbinic studies (including showing the picture of Helen Levinthal with a story in the New York Herald Tribune which was headlined: Girl Completes Rabbinic Study; 9 Men Ordained); to the ordination of women in Judaism the 1970s (beginning with Sally Priesand); and finally to the continuing debates in various denominations of Judaism on the appropriate roles of women, and the nature of ministry generally.

Will there ever be women ordained as Orthodox rabbis? The Epilogue has an interesting, engaging discussion, which shows likewise the relationship of the different voices in Judaism. While Orthodoxy took little notice of the ordination of women to the rabbinate from the Reform or Reconstructionist parts of Judaism, the actions of the Conservative branch are of more consequence.

This book is a fascinating history, showing the beginning of a history of a process which is still unfolding in our own time.