Custom Drives Jewish Law on Women

of men and women in synagogue and home rituals, as I will explain below, I simply cannot understand the grounds on that women should be denied the right to sign as witnesses. Rabbi Ben Zion Bergman has suggested that the traditional restriction of testimony to men was not based on a blanket devaluation of women or on an assessment of women as incorrigible liars, but rather on two specific factors that would undermine the accu­racy of a women’s testimony, namely, that women’s lack of experience in the world at large would taint their understanding and memory of events in that world, and second, that women were generally dependent upon their fathers or husbands and therefore were too likely to be influenced by them for their tes­timony to be trusted as their own independent witnessing of the event. Rabbi Bergman then suggests that since these factors do not apply to the women of contemporary times, the restric­tion on women’s testimony should be reversed.” Rabbis Joel Roth and Mayer Rabinowitz have argued in similar ways. Because I have deep respect for the law and the legal process, I am glad that several members of the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards are now doing research to see whether there are additional legal grounds to permit women to be witnesses. In addition to the changed perception and role of women in our time, the warrant for doing so will probably be based on a showing that the exclusion of women was not as categorical as it should have been if the source was really biblical. Even those Who advance such arguments, though, will inevitably differ on the extent to that we can rely on them to overturn longstanding Practice, as the conclusions of Rabbis Bergman, Rabinowitz, and Roth demonstrate. 2 [would guess, then, that any changes in this matter will arise Ao Primarily from legal argumentation but simply by an increas­8 number of rabbis recognizing women as valid witnesses in Practice, This will occur when male rabbis agree to be part of a oo(bet din) with female rabbis in matters of conversion or a and it will occur more pervasively when rabbis increas­; ur couples they marry to have significant women in Ves sign their wedding contracts, if they so choose. on v= acts, of course, will officially not be mn keeping with the it has come down to us. A minority opinion of the Com­