Schachter lay out or weigh the conflicting arguments. He draws his conclusions by piling uncertainty upon uncertainty: it is uncertain whether women are obligated in Megillah and hence whether they count in the minyan for its reading. It is uncertain whether the concluding blessing requires a minyan(gender unspecified). So, on the apparent assumption that the most stringent opinion from every dispute must be applied, he combines the minyan dispute with the blessing dispute and concludes that women can fulfill the commandment completely only by dependence on a minyan of males.
Aside from the questions raised by this mode of legal calculus, Schachter’s argument contains another basic flaw. There is no evidence that persons who assume commandments optionally are limited in the manner in which they choose to do so. Whether they pray in congregation or at home, they are still credited as non-obligated persons who fulfilled a commandment. Whether they do so according to one legal opinion or another is as much a matter of personal preference as whether they undertake the commandment in the first place. Even the tradition of whether men have an obligation to pray in a minyan is disputed, for while authorities are unanimous that devarim shebe-gedusha cannot be said without a minyan, they disagree about Whether there is an obligation to say devarim she-be- gedusha.*s There is not, as Schachter seeks to posit, a recognized legal category of incomplete fulfillment of commandments. The underlying point of the section seems to be that women are legally constructed to be incomplete, and consequently, their deportment and their religious expressions should properly be characterized by passivity, receptivity, and dependence on men. This view echoes a long-standing tradition in Western philosophy Stemming from Aristotle that views women as maimed or deformed men who have“only a facsimile and a vestige” of what defines male superiority and justifies masculine privilege.
Misrepresentation of the Torah