1 Drives Jewish Law on Women 91 Custom and law, as I have mentioned, continually interact and affect each other. It should be no surprise, then, that some steps in this evolution of the status of women were initiated by rabbis, or, at least, confirmed by them in very early stages of the emergence of the practice. Specifically, calling women to the Torah was officially permitted by the committee on Jewish Law and Standards in 1954,” but it did not become widespread until the late 1970s or 1980s. Similarly, counting women for a minyan Was approved as a majority decision of the Committee in June 1973, but that, too, did not become widespread until the 1980s and 1990s. The next year, a minority opinion approved by six members of the committee permitted women to serve as witnesses.?! Only three votes were required under the committee’s rules then to represent a valid option within the Conservative movement; the six votes in favor of’ permitting women to serve a witnesses would even satisfy the more stringent requirements enacted in 1985 for that status. Even so, women did not serve as Witnesses in any significant numbers until the 1980s, and it is probably still not the practice among the majority of rabbis and congregations to permit women to do so. : In what was probably the most public forum for deciding an 18sue, the Rabbinical Assembly asked the chancellor of the semihary to form a special commission to decide on the permissibility of ordaining women as rabbis. That commission voted in
favor of women’s ordination, leading ultimately to the first ordiNation of a woman by the seminary in 1985.2 That decision was Never officially confirmed by the committee, but several mem
bers of that committee now are themselves women rabbis, and so Custom has ruled there as well! It has taken some time, however, for women rabbis to be eligible for appointment to congregaal posts on an equal footing with men, and there is still some Way to 80 in that regard. The existence of women rabbis in the Various settings and capacities in that they now serve, though, 3S created a whole panoply of new customs, not only in cretive, new rituals but also in the ways in that rabbis and lay Jews Understand each other and interact with each other. Other customs regarding women have emerged, or are Iging , from the masses, just as one would expect for this genre of legal norms. So, for example, some women put on tefillin,
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