c. 2000 Religion News Service
JERUSALEM _ They have been accepted as rabbis and cantors. They are rewriting prayers and ceremonies to include the feminine gender. Still, women within Judaism’s non-Orthodox denominations often find they hit a”stained glass ceiling”when it comes to promotions and leadership roles, says Rabbi Susan Grossman.
Grossman, a petite, forceful woman of 45 who wears a colorful yarmulke atop a head of cropped curly hair, is a prominent feminist rabbi in American Conservative Judaism, the largest body of religious Jews in the United States.
She appeared here at a three-day conference this week on the status of Jewish women in Israel and the United States sponsored by the American Jewish Congress and the Israel Women’s Network. “It is 15 years since the Conservative movement began ordaining women. That’s enough time to see where they are at in comparison to their classmates,”Grossman said in an interview. “Yet even today, only 13 percent of women rabbis in pulpit positions actually lead their own congregations while the rest are associate or assistant rabbis. And only a handful have broken the `stained glass ceiling’ and serve in congregations of more than 250 people,”she said.
Since 1984, when women were first granted entry to the rabbinical ranks, the Conservative movement has ordained 117 women. Today, women comprise about 8 percent of the 1,500 Conservative rabbis worldwide who are formally associated with the movement through its official organization, the Rabbinical Assembly.
Yet only half of the movement’s female rabbis currently serve in pulpit positions in synagogues compared to two-thirds of male Conservative rabbis, who also usually lead their own congregations. Rabbis who aren’t hired by congregations usually enter lower-status positions as educators, chaplains or academics.”Currently, chaplaincy and Jewish educational positions, although critically important, are not given the financial support or the prestige of the pulpit positions,”she said.
In the seminaries of the Conservative movement, the situation is similar, notes Grossman.”Only a handful of women are senior faculty, and there are almost no women in the upper echelons of administration.” The more liberal Reform Jewish movement has been ordaining women since 1972, but there, too, women have also failed to break through to the top ranks of synagogue leadership, Grossman said.”Very few women in the Reform movement are in those big pulpits _ the mega-synagogues that are the landmarks in their communities,”she said.
Grossman, however, is an exceptions to the rule. She leads Beth Shalom Congregation in Columbia, Md., a”mid-size”congregation numbering some 600 members. She is also a co-editor of an acclaimed anthology on women in synagogue life, a former journalist, editor and Holocaust educator.
She readily acknowledges that statistical benchmarks have their limitations when measuring the performance of a spiritual leader, particularly in the case of women who enter the rabbinate as a second career. Yet those are the very measures that still dominate assumptions and expectations of the predominantly male clergy, she said.”If you meet another rabbi who is a relative stranger at a conference, one of the first questions they will probably ask is `… and how large is your pulpit,'”Grossman wryly noted.”Congregational size also says something about how much access you have to resources and influence in the community.” As compared to a decade ago, however, there are many more Conservative congregations technically open to women clergy in the sense that they hold egalitarian prayer services in which both men and women participate equally, she said.
Still, there remains a latent prejudice toward women in the rabbinical role, a role that for centuries has been a male-only preserve and from which women are still barred altogether in the Orthodox world.”Even in those Conservative congregations that agree to hire women, a significant number of congregants will express reservations and there will always be a few that will leave the synagogue,”said Grossman.
On the brighter side, Grossman sees the entry of women into the rabbinical arena as a trigger for far-reaching changes in the assumptions that underline the profession.”As women, we have been able to bring to Judaism and to Jewish prayer a degree of emotional intensity, a willingness to appear spiritual,”she observes.”That departs from the decorous `high church’ model the Conservative and Reform movements in America followed in the 1950s and the 1960s when Jews were still anxious to gain acceptance in America.” Both men and women are beginning to look for deeper sorts of professional satisfaction than is reflected in the size of their congregation, she said.”That might mean staying with a smaller community that is satisfying, rather than uprooting family and children and `moving up’ to a larger synagogue.”People also are beginning to understand that a good rabbi can’t only be dedicated to his or her congregation at the expense of the family that is waiting in the wings,”she added.”I think that greater commitment to family among both male and female rabbis was stimulated by the entry of women in the pulpit.” As women gradually attain equality in ritual life, new and fascinating issues are emerging over a wide range of Jewish ritual and legal issues that affect everyday life, she said. The female-inspired quest for innovation extends beyond the new gender-sensitive language of Conservative prayer books, and the growing tendency among non-Orthodox women to don formerly male-only symbols such as yarmulkes and prayer shawls in the synagogue.”People are now asking whether men should light Sabbath candles,”she said, referring to the Friday evening ritual marking the onset of the Sabbath traditionally performed only by women.
On another front, she noted, rabbis are beginning to think about whether the age-old Jewish marriage contract, or Ketubah, could be written in a more equitable way. Today’s Conservative formulation is almost identical to that of the Orthodox document, which views marriage essentially as a legal purchase or acquisition executed by the male partner.
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Grossman said non-Orthodox Jewish women are slowly becoming involved in hashing out Jewish legal precedents and rendering legal opinions. She herself sits on the Law and Standards committee of the Rabbinical Assembly, which issues decisions on questions of Jewish law for its members.”It’s true that the Jewish legal process is patriarchal,”she said.”So why should we remain engaged in it? I believe it is this process of agreement on what it means to be Jewish that binds us together as a community and enables us to survive.”DEA END FLETCHER
