sumed to derive from the system and process of Torah study, its sources are handed down from teacher to student.
Schachter ’s description of the origins and criteria for legitimate minhagim excludes women in two ways. First, women can always be accused of ulterior motives because in a system where Torah study and communal prayer are gender-specific, statusconferring obligations, women’s very desire to study and pray can be interpreted as desire for superior status. Yet even if women do study, since they are excluded from the yeshiva system in which learning, and with it authority, are passed from teacher to student, women can never qualify as vatikin. They are categorically denied access to the network through which divine revelation is said to flow.
Innovation that deviates from the teachings of the innovator’s rabbi is rebellion, which immediately disqualifies the innovator on the grounds of flawed character. This ruling, Schachter maintains, applies to those students of J.B. Soloveitchik who have supported the prayer groups, for Schachter maintains that R. Soloveitchik, like R. Moshe Feinstein opposes all the women’s customs at issue. Soloveitchik’s concurrence is disputed by Abra ham Weiss , who maintains that Soloveitchik not only told Saul Berman and Shlomo Riskin that women’s prayer groups were halakhically permissible but suggested substitute texts for the forbidden devarim she-be-gedusha.’ Moreover, even R. Feinstein ’s position is more moderate than Schachter ’s. A one page responsum by R. Feinstein ’s son-in-law, R. Moshe Tendler, written on R. Feinstein ’s stationery and circulated at the Women's Tefillah Network Conference of June 1983, permits“pious women whose considerations are solely for the sake of heaven”(that is, who remain doctrinally Orthodox ) to pray together as long as they refrain from devarim she-be-gedusha.®* This is the first overt indication in the responsum that the prayer group issue is implicated in a larger struggle between R. Soloveitchik’s conservative and liberal disciples. The struggle is complicated by the fact that most of R. Soloveitchik’s opinions were communicated orally and are difficult to verify. The latest scholars to offer an account of R. Soloveitchik’s attitudes toward women’s group prayer, the brothers Aryeh and Dov Frimer , represent Soloveitchik as having been convinced that women’s group prayer is halakhically per