Elliot N
Consequently, although we should certainly probe legal sources to discover what our ancestors actually did in these matters, we should recognize that the real foundation for the laws that have come down to us on the roles of women was custom and that therefore the most appropriate vehicle for changing those laws will also be custom. We therefore need to take a fourpronged approach:
(1) Some customs have led to laws that indisputably harm women. These include wife-beating(at least in some Jewish communities), legal institutions that chain a woman in Jewish law to a man from whom she has already been civilly divorced, and the exclusion of women from Jewish education. Such bad customs we must annul altogether, and the Conservative movement has already done so.” We should similarly declare both morally reprehensible and legally null and void the kind of extortion now going on in part of the Orthodox world in Israel in that fathers marry off their minor daughters to men they refuse to identify as a ploy to force their wives either to stay with them in marriage or to give them money or custody rights in divorce. In these and other cases where the harm to women engendered by Jewish law is undisputed, we have already done, and should continue t0 do, what we must to rid ourselves of such bad customs.
(2) Most of the customs that have come down to us are appre ciated by some and opposed by others. In such cases, I would argue for tolerance on all sides. That is, we should allow a diver sity of customs to take hold and develop as they may. That will require tolerance for diversity in these matters, but such diver sity is in the very nature of custom.
Thus, even though I myself am an egalitarian in these mat” ters, I would plead with my fellow egalitarians to respect the will of some synagogues, or some minyanim within those syn?
gogues, to restrict some roles to men, and perhaps others 10
women. Conversely, those that want to maintain the traditional
role differentiation in services should recognize the deep roots these matters have in communal custom, even those that ult! mately found their way into codes or responsa, and that co™ sequently, in our own day, citing a text to justify exclusion of