Yeshivat Maharat’s Usable Past

• In Event: The Time and Space of Feminism: Women Renarrating Jewish Authority and Leadership

Abstract

In the last fifteen years there has been a significant expansion of rabbinic leadership roles for Orthodox women. In 2013, Yeshivat Maharat became the first Orthodox Jewish rabbinical seminary in the world to ordain women as rabbis. Supporters and opponents alike saw the ordination of women as the defining activity which made them rabbis. Yet as women were becoming rabbis through ordination within Orthodoxy, the very definition of what it means to be a rabbi changed for both men and women. Since the early 2000s, American Orthodoxy has been in a period of transition as Orthodox Jews redefine religious authority. In this paper, I advance an argument about the way origin stories function as a usable past for Yeshivat Maharat and its graduates. Through five years of interviews and observations at Yeshivat Maharat and with many of its graduates I found that they craft a narrative about the inevitability of Orthodox women’s ordination by claiming that they were rabbis before their own ordination, and that Orthodox women were rabbis before Yeshivat Maharat existed. I argue that they do this in order to downplay the significance of their ordination and present their role as rabbis as a natural evolution in their own lives and in Orthodoxy writ large.
The paper I will present at AJS focuses on the graduation ceremonies at Yeshivat Maharat. At these celebrations, Yeshivat Maharat often tells its history. They share four narratives about their history: 1. Orthodox women were already socialized into the role of rabbi, and Yeshivat Maharat was just certifying their leadership; 2. Yeshivat Maharat resulted from the expansion of women’s educational opportunities; 3. Women in the Bible and throughout Jewish history serve as precedent for women’s ordination; and 4. Yeshivat Maharat exists because of certain heroes who had vision and took risks. The narratives are intertwined, and often overlap with one another. Taken together, they help Yeshivat Maharat build a case of historical and cultural precedent for women’s ordination, while also introducing itself as a revolutionary movement.

Author

• Michal Raucher, Rutgers University