IB World Religions 6.2.5. Gender and Ritual: Time-bound Mitzvot Across the Movements Notes

6.2.5. Gender and Ritual: Time-Bound Mitzvot Across the Movements

The time-bound exemption

1. Jewish ritual obligation is not distributed equally between men and women, and the rule that produces the difference is narrow. The Mishnah exempts women from positive commandments tied to a fixed time, in Hebrew mitzvot aseh she-hazeman gerama.
2. Three other categories are untouched by it. Women are bound by every negative commandment, by every positive commandment that carries no fixed time, and by the whole of the ethical law.
3. The classical explanations vary. The fourteenth century commentator Abudarham argued that a woman's duties to her household cannot be scheduled, and that the law does not place a person under two masters at once.
4. Later Orthodox writers, among them Samson Raphael Hirsch, argued instead that women were held not to need the discipline these commandments impose. Both accounts treat the exemption as a description of role rather than a ranking.
5. The consequence that matters ritually is technical. Somebody who is not obliged in a commandment cannot discharge that obligation for another, so a woman does not lead the service or read the Torah for a congregation that is obliged.
6. The same logic produces the minyan rule. Orthodox practice counts only those under the obligation of public prayer, which means ten males aged thirteen or over, and the rest of the pattern follows from that.

What the exemption covers

1. The commandments concerned are those fixed to a clock or a calendar. Reciting the Shema at its times, wearing tefillin and tzitzit, hearing the shofar, sitting in the sukkah, taking the lulav and counting the omer all fall inside the category.
2. Several time-bound obligations bind women anyway, because the rabbis carved them out. Women are obliged in Kiddush, in eating matzah, in the four cups at the seder, in hearing the megillah at Purim and in lighting the Chanukah lamp.
3. The reason given for most of those exceptions is that women shared in the deliverance the day commemorates. The Talmud's phrase is that they too were in that miracle.
4. Prayer itself is contested ground. Maimonides held women obliged in daily prayer as a rabbinic duty, and most Orthodox authorities require at least a morning prayer, so the exemption is narrower in practice than it first looks.
5. Voluntary performance is permitted, and the traditions differ over the blessing. Ashkenazi authorities following Rabbeinu Tam allow a woman to say the blessing over a mitzvah she is not obliged to keep, while many Sephardi authorities allow the act without it.
6. Modern Orthodox women increasingly take on time-bound practices by choice, and a small number wear a tallit or lay tefillin with rabbinic approval. The practice remains uncommon and is contested within the community.

Bat chayil and bat mitzvah

1. A girl reaches the age of obligation at twelve, a year earlier than a boy, and Orthodox practice marks it without a Torah reading. The usual form is bat chayil, daughter of worth, named from the poem sung at the Shabbat table.
2. A bat chayil may be a celebration, a talk on a Jewish theme, a completed course of study, or a group ceremony in which several girls take part together. What it does not include is an aliyah, since reading for the congregation belongs to those obliged in public prayer.
3. The first American bat mitzvah is usually dated to 1922, when Judith Kaplan read from the prayer book in the New York synagogue of her father Mordecai Kaplan. Reform Judaism at that point preferred confirmation, a group ceremony for older teenagers.
4. Reform and Reconstructionist congregations went on to build a bat mitzvah identical in form to the boys' ceremony, with a Torah reading, a haftarah and a talk. Conservative congregations followed across the middle of the twentieth century.
5. Orthodoxy has moved as well, though not on the aliyah. Bat chayil is now common where it was once rare, some Modern Orthodox communities hold women's Torah readings to mark the occasion, and the day is taken seriously rather than treated as an afterthought.
6. The difference the ceremonies mark is real but specific. Every movement agrees that a girl becomes obliged in the commandments at twelve, and they disagree about which commandments those are and what a synagogue may let her do.

Women in the synagogue

1. Orthodox synagogues divide the seating with a mechitzah, a partition or a gallery, so men and women pray in separate spaces. The stated purpose is concentration in prayer rather than exclusion.
2. The Talmud records that women may in principle be called to the Torah, then adds that a congregation does not do so out of kevod ha-tzibbur, the dignity of the congregation. Orthodox practice has followed the second half of that statement.
3. Nineteenth century Reform removed the partition. Mixed family seating spread through America after Isaac Mayer Wise installed it in Albany in 1851, and it became the visible marker of a Reform building.
4. Conservative Judaism moved in stages. Its law committee permitted women to receive aliyot in 1955 and voted to count women in the minyan in 1973, leaving individual congregations to decide.
5. Partnership minyanim, beginning with Shira Hadasha in Jerusalem in 2002, keep the mechitzah and the Orthodox liturgy while giving women every role the law is argued to permit, including leading Kabbalat Shabbat. They remain contested at the edge of Orthodoxy.
6. Orthodox women's tefillah groups take another route, meeting as women only and leaving out the prayers that require a minyan. Both arrangements accept the halakhic rule and disagree over how much room it leaves.

Women rabbis and cantors

1. Semichah is rabbinic ordination, the certification that a person has mastered the law and may rule on it. Whether a woman may receive it is the sharpest ritual disagreement between the movements.
2. Regina Jonas was ordained privately in Berlin in 1935 and served the city's Jews until she was deported and murdered at Auschwitz in 1944. Her ordination was largely forgotten until her papers surfaced after 1990.
3. Sally Priesand became the first woman ordained by an American seminary in 1972 at Hebrew Union College, Sandy Eisenberg Sasso followed in the Reconstructionist movement in 1974, and Jackie Tabick became Britain's first woman rabbi at Leo Baeck College in 1975.
4. Conservative Judaism admitted women to its rabbinical school after a long internal dispute, and Amy Eilberg was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1985. Its cantorial school opened to women two years later.
5. Barbara Ostfeld was invested as the first woman cantor in 1975, and women now hold cantorial posts across Reform, Liberal and Conservative congregations. A cantor leads the congregation in prayer, which is why the question follows the same rule as the rabbinate.
6. Orthodoxy does not grant semichah to women, though other roles have widened. Yoatzot halachah advise women on the laws of family purity, and Yeshivat Maharat, founded in New York in 2009, ordains women as clergy under the titles maharat and rabba, a step most Orthodox bodies reject.

Arguments across the movements

1. Orthodox teaching presents the arrangement as differentiated obligation rather than unequal worth. On that account men need the scaffolding of fixed times, and standing in Judaism is not measured by how many commandments a person carries.
2. Critics inside Orthodoxy accept the halakhic framework and press on how much of current practice it actually requires. Partnership minyanim, women's Torah scholarship and the maharat programme all argue from inside the law rather than against it.
3. Conservative Judaism reached a different answer along the same route. Its rabbis hold halakhah binding but developing, and they ruled that women could take on the obligations they had been exempt from, which then opened every role that follows.
4. Reform and Liberal Judaism argue that the exemption encodes a household arrangement the movement has rejected on religious grounds. If ritual mitzvot may be modified where their purpose has lapsed, a rule resting on a way of life few Jews now lead is a candidate.
5. All the movements appeal to the same texts, and the argument is over what those texts oblige rather than over whether women are obliged to God at all. None of them questions that women are bound by the ethical commandments in full.
6. The practical result is that a visitor can read a community's position off its building. Where the partition stands, who is called to the Torah and whose name is on the rabbi's door together give the answer.