Innovation and Authority 21
occupy center stage, controlling and mediating religious expression for an encircling audience of dependent women. The vision is a distinctively modern one because women are essential to it, in contrast to earlier notions that the presence of women at services is inconsequential or even, as the Vilna Gaon admonishes his daughters, bad for their characters. Nevertheless, Schachter ’s modern vision is reactionary, since it seeks to reinforce precisely the subordination and powerlessness of women that a secular culture is eroding. This secular empowerment of women is the ultimate target of Schachter ’s wrath, as the concluding sections of the responsum will indicate.
Arguments Concerning Innovation of Minhag
As I have noted, a major strategy of Orthodox women has been to innovate in areas where there is no halakhah. Schachter consequently moves to close off these free areas to the feminists. He concedes that neither law nor minhag is static. But although changes may be made, he argues that women are ineligible to make them. Accordingly, Schachter cites Tosafot on Pesahim 40b reconciling two conflicting texts concerning Torah study that is not for the sake of heaven, and concludes that new minhagim may be created only for the sake of heaven. There are two criteria for evaluating this: the character of the innovators and the attachment of the minhag to preexistent law. Schachter declares the minhagim created by prayer groups unacceptable on both counts. He charges their leaders with an unseemly desire for public recognition and accuses them of innovating so that they can publish. Since the customs they establish are not connected to the fulfillment of any Torah or rabbinic law to which they are obligated, these customs can have no standing.
The women are, in any case, ineligible to innovate, since in order to ensure that innovation is in the spirit of the halakhah, it an be made only by vatikin, experienced Torah scholars,“who do Everything for the sake of heaven.” To supplement this ahistorical account of the origins of minhagim, Schachter quotes the Midrashic statement that everything a vatik will innovate was revealed to Moses at Sinai(Y. Peah 2:6). Since innovation is pre