TORONTO — Rosh Chodesh Nisan – next Tuesday, April 5 – marks not only a change on the Jewish calendar, but also a turning point in the role of women at Beth Tzedec Congregation.
Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl
Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl, the shul’s senior rabbi, has issued a responsum permitting women at Beth Tzedec to be counted as part of the minyan.
The new policy will be implemented next week, making Beth Tzedec only the third Conservative congregation in the GTA to allow women to be counted for the prayer quorum necessary for mourners to recite Kaddish, as well as for certain other aspects of the service.
The two other egalitarian congregations – Beit Rayim Synagogue, and B’nai Shalom Congregation of Halton-Peel, a 25-family congregation that meets in Oakville – are affiliated with the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (USCJ).
At Beth David B’nai Israel Beth Am Synagogue, women can have Torah honours but are not counted in the minyan. Women’s ritual participation is more limited in most GTA Conservative synagogues.
Beth Tzedec, a former member of USCJ, was one of three Toronto synagogues to end its affiliation with the Conservative congregational umbrella in 2008.
At the time, Gary Mansfield, a past president, told The CJN the USCJ dues policy left “virtually no money” for synagogue programming, but that the shul was still Conservative and would continue to support other Conservative organizations. The congregation was the largest USCJ congregation in North America, with more than 2,600 families in 2008.
In late 2008, it became one of four synagogues to form the Canadian Council of Conservative Synagogues, but opted out of the new organization in late 2010 to become unaffiliated. Organizational dues would be redirected toward shul expenses and growth, Beth Tzedec’s president Norman Kahn told The CJN at the time.
The new policy of counting women in the minyan came about as part of the shul’s strategic planning process over the past year and a half, Kahn said in an interview last week.
“The one question that came up more than any other was the role of women in public prayer,” he said, recalling town hall meetings that were held to discuss “all aspects of what our priorities should be.”
As a result, the board asked Rabbi Frydman-Kohl a year and a half ago to see if there was a way to expand the role of women and be “consonant with Halachah.”
Both Kahn and the rabbi – in a phone interview from Jerusalem, where he is on sabbatical until the end of April – stressed that the tshuvah (responsum) is specific to Beth Tzedec.
For the past 17 years, women at Beth Tzedec have received Torah honours. Rabbi Frydman-Kohl’s 1994 responsum at the time regarding Torah reading and honours opened the door for women to receive aliyot (as long as men were also called to the Torah), to carry the Torah, to lift it for hagbah, to roll the Torah scroll and tie the Torah sash for glilah, and to open the ark to remove or replace the Torah.
Until then, women had been permitted aliyot only under certain conditions, such as at a child’s bar or bat mitzvah.
Rabbi Frydman-Kohl told The CJN at the time that the community “should not misunderstand the justifiable inclusion of women for Torah honours with the abandonment of rabbinic law or gender distinctiveness.”
However, he said last week, Jewish law changes and adapts to new situations. The new policy is “not an abandonment of Jewish law, rather it’s an affirmation of it.”
The issue of counting women in a minyan is “much more complex halachically” than the Torah honours he wrote about 17 years ago, the rabbi added.
At the time, he said, he didn’t find all of the arguments he had read in favour of counting women in the minyan “sufficiently cogent.” But in the past three years, he’s read other sources “that I believed had significant halachic cogency.”
Among them, he said, were writings by Conservative halachic authority Rabbi David Golinkin and Orthodox Rabbi Michael Chernick. Arguments by Rabbi Chernick, which are not cited in the tshuvah, were not related to public prayer per se, but rather to the potential for women’s holiness.
Rabbi Frydman-Kohl’s tshuvah explains that women have a personal responsibility for daily prayer, despite the mishnaic exemption from time-dependent mitzvot.
As well, he notes that “the dignity of the congregation” – often cited as a reason for limitations on women’s participation – is a “fluid concept, reflecting cultural context.”
Rabbi Frydman-Kohl said he was surprised to receive e-mails from people all over Canada in response to the tshuvah. “I would say by and large women have written me to tell me that the idea of personal dignity resonates for them… I haven’t received any significant negative reaction.”
He plans to provide study opportunities for the congregation on this issue after he returns from his sabbatical in May.
Kahn said there has not been a need for women to be counted in the minyan, from a numbers standpoint. For at least the past year, he said, there hasn’t been a shortage of men to be counted toward a minyan.
He said the reaction from the congregation has been “overwhelmingly positive,” although he knew of one person who didn’t agree with the tshuvah.
Kahn said the new policy refers only to women counting in the minyan. “We’re not expanding the role of women as prayer leaders or changing the fact they can’t have the first two aliyot.”
Toward the end of the 29-page tshuvah, Rabbi Frydman-Kohl wrote, “In our time, when many social barriers have shifted and women are involved in all areas of public life, their personal dignity (kavod habriyot) is impinged upon when they are marginalized within the spiritual life of their religious community… In a time when women are socially, politically and culturally integrated with and equal to men, an unjustified gap between genders in synagogue life can bring about a denigration of Torah and a desecration of the Divine name.”
