Young Israel Dilemma

The issue surrounding the Young Israel movement and its national stand against women presidents against the decision of a few of its member synagogues to elect female presidents is one that demands our consideration. The question, though, is how to approach this issue in the best manner to truly address the real substantive issues.

In this regard, I draw your attention to the following article at
http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article./the_young_israel_dilemma_disengagement_or_confrontation_20100928/
which raises, for me, this very issue. The author of this article focuses on the American legal side of the issue which obviously, on a most practical level, has to be dealt with. The underlying question which the author does allude to yet does not really focus upon is the centralizaion/decentralization issue in Halacha and, more significantly, the very definition of Orthodoxy.

There can be no doubt that when the national Young Israel charter was first drawn up, one of the conerns of the founders of this entity must have been how to ensure that the organization indeed does remain Orthodox. At issue must have also been the very definition of Orthodoxy. The early Conservative movement in the US for example did not declare themselves as founding a new "religion" but saw themselves as simply extending the rule of Halacha as they saw it. In this regard, to be honest, it is most difficult to really define the line that separates. The greater question in this regard is, thus, not whether you disagree with someone or not but how you draw the line to determine when someone with whom you disagree is still within the pale and when this person is not. The simple way of drawing this line is often simply in action -- and so the safe way of ensuring some national standard is by critieria of action. The question, as such, cannot be simply whether the local rabbis who permitted a woman becoming president did so based on halachic standards but how these halachic standards themselves are to be measured. That ultimately is a much more difficult issue. The issue is not longer the practice but the very nature of the process of the psak.

Rabbi Ben Hecht