the United States and in the recent legal cases before the Israeli Supreme Court involving the prayer group Women at the Wall and their right to pray communally at the Western Wall in Jerusalem .

The responsum is interesting for several reasons. First, as a responsum, it confronts a singular challenge: to render a halakhic decision on a phenomenon for which halakhah has neither law nor precedent, data nor categories, and which involves behav­iors in which classical halakhah had no interest. Hence, both Schachter ’s responsum and the activity it seeks to suppress raise questions about the location and the limits of halakhic authority and of communal creativity. These questions are not new. There is a sizable literature in the philosophy of halakhah about whether halakhah is an inclusive and self-sufficient system of behavioral norms or a code confined to particular concerns that allows room for supplementary ethical systems.* Similarly, there is both philosophical and historical literature concerning how customs originate and take root, and how Torah authorities respond to these new religious developments.’ But it is interest­ing to trace the implications of particular answers to these theo­retical questions in a work whose purpose is quite practical: to forbid a religious expression it views as subversive and to dis­mantle the institution that embodies it.

There is a second point of interest. Information exists about this responsum that is rarely available. Had Schacter’s respon­sum been written five hundred years ago, we might now have only his legal argument, his precedents, and the counter argu­ments of opposing authorities from which to infer a complex social reality. The reasoning and motives of the innovators them­selves would be refracted obliquely through the only perspec­tives referenced in responsa literature: those of the jurisprudential elite who control the discourse.

In contrast to law whose authors are specifically cited in the literature, custom is attributed to groups or communities rather than individuals. In the case of women’s prayer groups, how­ever, indisputable evidence exists that identifiable leaders cre­ated and popularized the controversial legal and liturgical vision under discussion. We have their writings. We know their names. Yet the voices of women and the impact of women’s actions on their social and religious environments are as subtextual in