Innovation and Authority 9
to learn more, and a newly awakened determination to replicate their experience in their home communities. These themes are apparent in Blu Greenberg 's recollection of lifting the Torah at the Network Shabbat service.
Choose someone else, I pleaded. They persisted gently but firmly. It was only good breeding that propelled me down the aisle. Then something happened that was to make me think for a long time about the value of practiced skills. I had seen hagba’ah performed at least a thousand times in my life. Yet, as I stood there, I had to ask the women standing next to me,“What do I do now?” Also, to my surprise, caught as I was with my defenses down, I found it an exhilarating moment. It was the first time I had ever held a Torah scroll."
In subsequent years, women’s minyanim became an option at institutes and conferences. In some communities continuing women’s minyanim were established. At first, Orthodox women participated without constraints in these minyanim, relying on unpublished decisions such as that of Rav Shlomo Goren , the Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel.” This opinion was explicitly withdrawn in December 1989. Well before that time, however, most of the rabbis upon whom American Orthodox feminists relied were telling them that women were not permitted to say the distinguishing prayers of a minyan, devarim she-be-qedusha, including barekhu, gaddish, and gedusha, citing B. Berakhot 45b and the accompanying Tosafot and Shulhan Arukh Orah Hayyim 55:1. Although permissions were unpublished and came to the women concerned only by word of mouth, relayed from rabbi to rabbi, interdictions were published early on.
The very project of an Orthodox feminism came under attack while still in its formative stages in a famous responsum in 1976 by R. Moshe Feinstein (Igrot Moshe Orah Hayyim 4:49): Ha-Nashim Ha- Sha’anot Ve-Ha-Hashuvot(Concerning the new movement of smug and important women.” In this responsum R. Moshe labels the feminists“heretics”(kofrim), a code word for Conservative Jews , and forbids their taking on mitzvot from which they are exempt, not because he regards this as categorically forbidden but because“the desire comes out of a rebellion against God and his Torah .” The responsum clearly registers the political significance of the women’s ritual behavior and sees minhag as the battleground.” The tone of the responsum is