Taking the Reins of Torah Leadership
The entire Torah world owes a great debt of gratitude to Rav Hershel Schachter and Rav Mayer Twersky of Yeshiva University for their respective responses to the decision of the principal of a Modern Orthodox girls’ school in New York to allow two female students to lay tefillin during morning prayers.
No Orthodox community has remained unscathed by contemporary egalitarianism the belief that any halachic differences between men and women are inherently discriminatory. Rav Sheftel Neuberger told me recently that already in the 1970s Rav Yaakov Weinberg warned that the challenge facing Orthodoxy was no longer from heterodox movements but from feminism. Rav Twersky shows us how to confront that challenge.
In addition Rav Schachter’s and Rav Twerky’s responses constitute an object lesson in responsible communal leadership. Rather than eschewing any responsibility for condemning deviations from Torah — on the grounds that it would be an insult to ask them to condemn behavior with which they do not identify — they felt the responsibility as eminent roshei yeshivah within the flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy to explain cogently and forcefully how misguided was the decision of the principal a graduate of their institution. The force of their arguments will have a powerful effect on their legion of devoted talmidim and will deter others from following the principal’s path.
“IN MODERN TIMES” writes Rav Twersky “women did not begin donning tefillin to emulate Michal bas Shaul or to be devoted Maimonideans or to invoke the Sheim Hashem upon themselves. Women donned tefillin because men do so.” Both he and Rav Schachter note that the practice is most closely associated with the Conservative movement for which the dominant philosophy is egalitarianism — the belief that halachic distinctions between genders are inherently suspect.
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