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Can the demand for change in the status of women be halakhically legitimated
Judaism, Fall, 1993 by Tamar Ross
The long time that it has taken to properly and effectively solve the problem of Jewish women being blackmailed by husbands who refuse to give them a get (halakhically proper Jewish divorce), reflects the continuing tension between the Law as it is, and the world as it is, and not any bias or animosity by male poskim against Jewish women -- and particularly observant Jewish women, for whom a get is so critical to their ability to get on with their lives. Halakhah does not change easily, and particularly not through broad theological pronouncements -- and it should not, if it is to serve its function of governing us rather than having us govern it. Halakhists do not see themselves as innovators, but as mere interpreters of the law, using the sources at their disposal with as much intellectual integrity as they are capable in order to apply them to constantly evolving situations.
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This may seem a bitter pill for some women to swallow, but if one is to accept Harav Kook's understanding of history as a form of revelation, the recognition of certain absolute limits existing in Halakhah need not be regarded as an insuperable obstacle to its acceptance. Just as belief in history as revelation allows us freedom from the constraint to be bound by a particular interpretation of a Halakhah as it has been explicated in the past, it also ought to reinforce our faith that none of the practical, absolute limits to this freedom have appeared by chance. Thus, with regard to women's equality claims, it may be noted that the phenomenon of role stratification exists even in the animal world -- with one gender instinctively adorning itself and the other functioning as breadwinner. The likelihood is that there is vital anthropological purpose buried in these Halakhot regarding women, of which we are not sufficiently aware.(25) Thus, for the believing Jew, both the flexibility remaining within the constraints, as well as the absolute nature of the constraints themselves, are a matter of Divine Providence. Moreover, anyone having faith in the eternal nature of the Torah will believe that, given revolutionary developments in society, a way will nevertheless be evolved by poskim to take these developments into account in such a way that our emerging feelings will find palatable forms of expression.(26) The old and canonized formulae will no doubt be retained -- such is the way of Torah. But the manner of practical interpretation will be determined by the demands of the new reality. What remains in the meantime, for those uncomfortable with the traditional view of women, is learning to live with a certain uneasy split between the letter of the law and its purported intent. This, however, may be accompanied by exploiting to the maximum whatever avenues of self-expression and status are already feasible within the law, even when this entails a certain degree of tension with the image of women previously conceived by its spirit.
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