tence of Orthodox feminism declares that gender complementarity no longer suffices to keep Orthodox women from desiring fulfilling and privileged masculine roles.
Conclusions and Implications
The final quintessentially modern feature of the prayer group controversy is that, like the other conflicts between traditionalists and modernists in the last two centuries, it focuses on synagogue decorum. As Riv-Ellen Prell maintains, because the secularization of modern society privatized and fragmented the everyday praxis of Judaism , the synagogue became the major institution where Jewish identity is rehearsed, authenticated, and replicated.” Because this is as true for Orthodox as non-Orthodox Jews , synagogue practice is the great Jewish battleground of modernity. The entrance of Orthodox women into the fray means that the Orthodox home no longer provides them an adequate rehearsal of Jewish identity. Orhtodox women also need a synagogue, and, like members of the havurot Prell studied, they have shaped it to meet the cultural aesthetic of third generation American Judaism , with its emphases on nonhierarchical structures, participation, and self-expression.
As a piece of legal argumentation, the Schachter responsum is third-rate, poor in legal evidence, lacking in balanced argument, and tortuously reasoned. What is remarkable is that a horde of elite male halakhists are spawning mountains of halakhic verbiage about an issue concerning which the tradition had no interest and hence accumulated no information. The latest of these productions is part one of an article by the brothers Frimer(part two is yet to come) consisting of 49 pages of argument, 20 pages of addenda, and 50 pages of footnotes. Paradoxically, these documents would be infinitely briefer if the classical tradition offered any specific data on the issue. Amid this din of pettifogging and pontification, only Eliezer Berkovits 2” has simply maintained that how women pray when they are not in the presence of men is a question on which tradition has neither data nor policy nor perspective but, rather is“a complete vacuum,” that may be filled now that the need has arisen.” But for others engaged in prayer