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upon the“RIETS five.” Rabbi Bernstein openly admits that he“dis­cussed the issue informally” with the learned gentlemen before asking them to prepare a written response.“I did have an idea of their position,” he states.

The resulting responsum affronted learned readers with its deviations from the traditional formal requirements, as Rabbi Michael Chernick’s reaction makes clear:“The fact that the so called responsum... contained no documentation for its position gives the impression of a lack of scholarship, or alternatively, a patronizing and tyrannical attitude toward the community.”

The simplest reason for issuing a ukase rather than a respon­sum, however, is that there was no legal precedent for forbidding women from sharing their private devotions with one another. It is rabbinically established that women have an obligation to pray, because prayer is supplication for mercy(B. Berakhot 20b) and thus, As long as

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as Rashi explains, is needed by every creature. women’s prayers are directed toward the God of Israel, however, rather than some other deity, and as long as they eschew the for­mulae that distinguish men’s communal prayer, neither talmudic nor post-talmudic texts evince any interest in the content or form of women’s prayers. Such prayers affect no halakhic categories, and hence, the tradition accumulates no information about them. From the perspective of the tradition, they are“non-data.”*” The funda­mental problem facing contemporary decisors is how to exert authority over an issue that classical tradition does not address but that threatens the stability of Orthodox life and opinion. This dilemma shapes the document to which we are about to turn. Authored by Rabbi Zvi Schachter, one of the signers of the RIETS Five responsum,“Ze'i Lakh B'iquei Ha-Zon" superficially resembles a classical responsum, since it contains an argument buttressed with citations from classical sources. But it is even more reminiscent of the polemical responsa against the nine­teenth century Reformers. Polemical responsa attest that some­thing is happening among Jews that is beyond the control of the legal decisor but that he wishes to label as deviant behavior for those obedient to his authority. In that sense polemical responsa are policy statements. As David Ellenson demonstrates, modern polemical responsa have a boundary-maintaining function that Durkheimian deviance theory effectively describes.® In his clas­