518 A History of Judaism
North America, Israel and Great Britain, but those involved have not
always sought the same results, as is evident from lively debate – about
everything from feminist funerals to whether Jews should own Christ-
mas trees – in the magazine Lilith, published since 1976 and proudly
advertised as ‘independent, Jewish and frankly feminist’.^5
For some, what matters is access to all aspects of religious experience
in Judaism open to men, as in the appreciation of ritual described by
Susan Grossman when first putting on tefillin (phylacteries):
I used to suffer from tefillin- phobia. It was an embarrassing condition, one
I found difficult to explain to my friends or strangers. They saw me com-
fortably wrapped in my sky blue tallit [prayer shawl] and would ask, ‘And
do you wear tefillin too?’ ‘No,’ I would answer, invariably shrugging my
shoulders and looking down ... Everything felt strange and constricting
until I began wrapping my fingers with the straps of the yad [the tefillin for
the arm]. As I wound the straps around my second and ring fingers, I read
from the prayer book this excerpt from the prophet Hosea: ‘I will betroth
you to Myself forever, I will betroth you to Myself in righteousness and in
justice, in kindness and in mercy, I will betroth you to Myself in faithful-
ness and you shall know the Lord.’In the modern orthodox community, which now includes many women
with extensive Jewish learning, women have increasingly since the early
1970s set up their own groups for separate prayer, often meeting on
Rosh Hodesh, the New Moon, following a rabbinic legend in Pirkei de
Rabbi Eliezer that God made the New Moon a special day for women
in reward for their refusal to join their husbands in building the golden
calf when Moses was on Mount Sinai.^ It has become common for mod-
ern orthodox girls to spend a period studying Jewish texts at a seminary
before entering a secular university. The notion that learned women in
orthodox circles might be ordained as rabbis with religious authority
over men has remained controversial, but Sara Hurwitz, who had served
for some time in the orthodox community of the Hebrew Institute of
Riverdale in New York as, in effect, assistant rabbi, was given a private
ordination and the title MaHaRat, ‘leader in halakhic, spiritual, and
Torah issues’. The title was changed in 2010 to Rabba (a feminine form
of ‘rabbi’), despite opposition by others in the orthodox world. The
ordination of women has become the main issue in contention between
the ‘open orthodoxy’ advocated by Avi Weiss, the rabbi who ordained
Sara Hurwitz, and more traditional orthodox Jews who prefer to brand
the open orthodoxy movement as ‘Neo-Conservative’.^6