men and hence appropriate for inclusion in a minyan.”’ Some of Schachter ’s critics counter this charge by pointing out that Schachter distorts the facts; prayer groups explicitly differentiate themselves from minyanim.”' Schachter ’s objection, however, is more fundamental. As his previous section makes clear, Schachter regards women as incapable of fully effective prayer independent of men. His underlying assumption is that, by conferring on men the capacity to address God with a communal voice, the Torah renders them spiritually superior to women. Consequently, the Torah is misrepresented as soon as women pray together as though they constituted an entity to which God would listen. Schachter ’s category“misrepresentation of the Torah ” is based upon a metaphoric and hortatory use of the prohibition on misrepresentation by the Yam Shel Shlomo, the sixteenth century authority Rabbi Solomon Luria . As Schachter himself must acknowledge, misrepresentation(ziuf) applies legally only to monetary fraud. Neither Schachter ’s source nor his use of it qualifies as a legal argument.
The King is Honored by Multitudes*
This third objection is at best, quasi-halakhic.” The Talmud uses it to justify a worship aesthetic in which the largest possible number of persons participate, even though ritual efficacy does not depend upon their participation.” Having demonstrated that women are not part of the community, Schachter now forbids them to separate from an entity they did not belong to in the first place. The bulk of this section is a sermon based on Rashi’s commentary on Korah’s rebellion(Num. 16), which depicts the prayer groups as competing power structures that challenge normative authority by disrupting the alleged monolithic solidarity of Orthodox institutions. The prayer group is depicted as a forbidden attempt to circumvent the status of nonentitlement.” These three sections are followed by an argument categorizing women’s synagogue attendance as a mitzvah, preferably performed by those able to beautify it: the male minyan, its Torah reader, and its prayer leader. In these sections, Schachter depicts the modern Orthodox synagogue as a place where men