An Observation About Women's Torah Authority in Orthodoxy

The difference between academia and religious thought and why it matters

Over Shavuos I read not just the Rav Shagar book I didn’t appreciate enough the first time I read it, but a number of academic articles I printed out using my printing privileges at work.

One article that made an impact on me was one by Rachel Elior, a well respected academic who mostly deals with mysticism and Hassidism about Shavuos. In this article, besides for making a startling good case for the Sadducee calendar, she tracks the history of mystical experiences occuring on Shavuos, from Matan Torah to R. Yosef Karo and the Ramchal’s maggids. It’s well written and well structured, and in the middle of it I realized “if she was a rabbi, this might have been her shavuos drasha”.

And that made me a little bit sad. Because one of the consequences of denying women in the Orthodox community religious authority is that those women go into academia most of the time. And academia frees you up in terms of the kind of claims you can make (Dr. Elior would probably have to cloak the Sadducee thing better for a congregational audience), but it limits you in terms of being able to make any binding religious claims. In other words, in the Orthodox community, women are allowed to be descriptive, not prescriptive. You can describe how things happened, you can describe what things mean, but you cannot make any religious claims that bind the community.

This might all seem obvious, but let’s compare the reception of two different Religious Zionist/Modern Orthodox thinkers and how they are read in the community. Tamar Ross, and Rav Shagar.