between the minyanim of liberal feminists and the prayer groups of Orthodox women that do not say devarim she-be-qedush. His equation of the Orthodox women with outright violators distorts a crucial fact about the case. There is another departure from classical form. Whereas classical responsa generally reserve their conclusion until the issues have been defined, Schachter’s conclusion appears in his initial section:“Tt is clearly apparent that all such customs are forbidden for a number of reasons.”*.
This opening section has a subtext of which its elite audience would be aware. The epistolary introduction to a classical responsum names the rabbi that requested it. This responsum lacks an epistolary introduction, but because of the publicity surrounding the RIETS Five responsum, readers know that this too is not the unsolicited responsum it purports to be. The circumstances surrounding its solicitation have been left unstated because authority was relocated in an aberrant manner. Rather than being handed up from a lower level of hierarchy, authority has been handed down. A powerful person representing a national constituency has delegated others to render the decisions he has commissioned. The reader’s foreknowledge of these circumstances compromises the impartiality of the responsum ab initio, and exposes it, to use Ronald Dworkin ’s terminology, as a policy statement masquerading as a principle.* Ironically, the responsum relativizes halakhah in the eyes of adherents who were previously naive about its possibilities as a tool for social manipulation and had thought that halakhic decision making was“objective.”
The Body of the Responsum
The body of the work, unlike classical, nonpolemical responsa and unlike scholarly articles, offers no arguments pro and con, no possible objections or contrary perspectives. It consists simply of a list of twelve reasons why women’s communal worship is out of the question. Like other polemical responsa, the document consists not of, an introductory statement of the problem, a body of text debating it, and a conclusion rendering a decision, but of one massive conclusion. With the exception of the sections dealing with minhag, the argument does not build incrementally from