mittee on Jewish Law and Standards approves of permitting women to be witnesses, but it was not justified with a formal paper.” It is therefore important to note that, contrary to the claim that legal formalists might make, allowing women to serve as witnesses in practice is not civil disobedience or, worse, an abandonment of the law. It is, instead, a use of one of the sources of the law, namely custom, to lead the way. That source may not have the advantages of law delineated above, but it has recipr cal advantages, as also described above. Moreover, custom i historically authentic source of the law and, in this case, the very one that produced the law on witnesses as it is in the first plac It thus seems to me to be exactly appropriate that this law, gen

erated by custom, that limits witnessing to males, should ulti mately be changed by custom as well.

Implications For Our Own Day

This sets the stage for my recommendations about how w¢ should treat the status of women generally. All in all, we have? veritable patchwork of practices with regard to women within our movement. Some Conservative professionals and laypeople would advocate that we as a movement become egalitarian by fiat, enacting a takanah to make women fully equal to men in all privileges and obligations of Jewish law. On the other end of the spectrum, others regret the extent to that we have already gon“ claiming that we have lost our claim to legitimacy as a halakhit movement by taking steps to enfranchise women without careful and closely reasoned rabbinic rulings justifying such actio™ Such people often feel downright attacked by any step to equal ize women's status. In the meantime, some people have left the

: 0 movement, either because we have moved too slowly and to¢

narrowly on these issues or because we have moved too far a"

too fast. would suggest that we have all talked about these matters 4 the wrong way, although in practice we have done exactly wh! we should do. The task to be accomplished in justifying new rolé® for women in Jewish life, we have thought, is to find warrant I! the codes and responsa literature for doing what we want to do