Women Rabbis Shed Light on Unique Roles

To watch a video of the Women Rabbis panel, click here.

Nearly 40 years since the Reform movement ordained the first female rabbi in America, women rabbis have become an integral force in American Jewish movements outside Orthodoxy, and their experience, thought to be distinct from that of men, has become a topic of curiosity.

The challenges women rabbis have faced, from their matriculation at male-dominated seminaries to the forbidding cultural stigmas held by their families and communities, were addressed during “Women Rabbis: Trailblazers and Innovators,” a cross-denominational panel sponsored by The Jewish Journal and Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary on Oct. 21, which drew about 600 people to the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills.

Moderated by Journal managing editor Susan Freudenheim, the event featured two generations of L.A. rabbis, including Sharon Brous (IKAR), Denise L. Eger (Congregation Kol Ami), Laura Geller (Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills), Zoë Klein (Temple Isaiah), Naomi Levy (Nashuva), Michelle Missaghieh (Temple Israel of Hollywood) and Debra Orenstein (Makom Ohr Shalom).

The rabbis’ roles as mothers was the evening’s most loaded topic, and one or two expressed discomfort at having to address the issue.

In her opening remarks, Geller, the third woman to be ordained in the Reform movement, read from a 1980 study compiled by the Women’s Rabbinic Network, an organization of Reform women rabbis, which spelled out community fears about hiring women rabbis at the time.

“If women can read from the Torah, preach, and teach, the rabbis’ duties become accessible to everyone,” Geller read. “This possibly leads to the breakdown of the hierarchy of the rabbi-congregant relationship.” It also said, “Women in the rabbinate will not be able to balance a career and personal life because their first priority will be to family,” or, Geller continued, “their work will lead to dissension within their families.”

Perhaps the most unfair stereotype a woman rabbi contends with is the idea that she must be a bad mother to excel in her work. Despite this and other obstacles, Geller said, “Judaism has changed because women’s voices are now fully part of the Jewish conversation.”

Some of the rabbis bristled at the idea of framing the conversation around gender.

“I’ve been a rabbi for 20 years, and I don’t even know what to think anymore about being a woman rabbi — I’m a rabbi!” said Levy, who was in the first class of women to be ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary.

Levy, who grew up in a Chasidic neighborhood in New York’s Borough Park, studied at the Orthodox Yeshiva of Flatbush. “I had to hide who I was and what I wanted because it was so unacceptable to be a rabbi in the community I was living in,” she said.

Levy suggested that women rabbis had more freedom to take risks and experiment with new approaches to Judaism since they did not have clear role models.

The year Brous reached rabbinical school, the Jewish Theological Seminary was ordaining its 120th woman rabbi, and she felt that being female in seminary was a “non-issue.” However, she admitted there was fierce competition among women to get ahead.

“There was a sense that while women could be accepted in the rabbinate, there was only really room for some of us — or maybe one of us,” Brous said.

Once she became a rabbi, Brous said it took years before the congregation’s focus shifted from her appearance to her teachings. “The next frontier is to be seen as rabbis and teachers, not women rabbis,” she said.

Orenstein, however, said congregants sometimes feel more comfortable sharing their struggles with a woman — someone they perceive as having overcome a tremendous set of obstacles. During the first five years of her rabbinate, she said she was approached “at least 100 times” about sexual abuse, while her father could recall only two such occasions during his rabbinate.

Orenstein became the first female rabbi in an Orthodox family line that goes back seven generations. Even as she was excluded from her father’s Torah study sessions, she knew her calling by age 8. “I looked around and saw that it was the family business,” said Orenstein, whose rabbinate has included a focus on women’s issues, incorporating new rituals for childbirth, miscarriage and abortion.

For Eger, who attended Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in the 1980s, her gender was the lesser of two evils, she explained, because at the time, openly gay and lesbian rabbis were often pressured during interviews to be “open” about their private lives. Eger said she asked herself, “What does it mean to be a rabbi and have to lie?”

Eger, president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, found a mixed blessing with her first pulpit at Beth Chayim Chadashim, a community of gay and lesbian Jews. There, she didn’t have to hide the fact that she was lesbian, but rabbinic colleagues warned her that taking a gay pulpit would end her career.

Missaghieh said she had the blessing of seeing a woman on the pulpit at her childhood synagogue. But she faced opposition from her own mother, who prodded her to consider law school upon learning of her daughter’s plan to become a rabbi. “I just thought it was normal that there were women rabbis,” Missaghieh said.

Zoë Klein addressed the challenge of being married to another rabbi. Her husband, Rabbi Jonathan Klein, is executive director of CLUE Los Angeles, an interfaith organization that addresses social justice issues. Klein said she once harbored fantasies of a big Jewish family who studied and sang together, but the reality is “a very messy home.”

“It’s not a unique struggle,” Klein said of balancing work and family life. “The difference is that we have the privilege of accolade, the advantage of education, of studying Torah; we have the privilege of leading a community.”

During the Q-and-A session, the women were asked about the continued rejection of their profession by Orthodox Judaism.

Eger pointed out that Los Angeles is a more inclusive community than most.

“Even though we may not daven together, there is still in our community a sense of mutuality and a sense of kavod [honor], that if your denomination recognizes you as a rabbi, you have a seat at the table,” she said.

A fifth-year female rabbinical student asked if the women ever felt isolated or lonely.

“I think the presence of women in the rabbinate has brought God down to earth in a beautiful way,” Levy said. “I never feel lonely; I feel very full. There is very little difference between who I am as a rabbi and who I am.”

“I love what Naomi said, but it’s not my experience,” Missaghieh added. “My Yom Kippur sermon was all about loneliness.” Missaghieh said it’s difficult for her congregants to see her as anything other than a rabbi, so when she wants to “let her hair down,” she said she calls Brous or Klein.

Klein said that in her congregation, “there is lots of love, but very little friendship.”

But Geller said she doesn’t feel the same kind of loneliness in her role as a rabbi.

“I was taught you can never be friends with people in your congregation,” Geller said. But, she added, “I think you can.”

To watch a video of the Women Rabbis panel, click here.