Restating the case for women orthodox rabbis

Professor Geoffrey Alderman's momentous op-ed piece in last Friday's Jewish Chronicle (JC) seems either to have slipped under the radar or to have been brushed under the rug.

Some bona fides for those unfamiliar with Alderman and the JC:

• Professor Geoffrey Alderman is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Society of Arts. He recently received an honorary second doctorate from Oxford University for his work on Anglo-Jewish history, which includes his Modern British Jewry, the first such comprehensive rejection of top-down community apologetics. He is a strictly observant Orthodox Jew.
• The JC is the oldest continuously published Jewish newspaper in the world (since 1841) and, perhaps more importantly, the unofficial mouthpiece of the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Orthodox United Synagogue, Britain's largest Jewish denomination and Europe's largest synagogual organization.

In Women rabbis? Why ever not? Alderman goes beyond endorsing Rabbi Avraham Weiss' decision to train and ordain women rabbis, to actively encouraging the practice, even noting that today's "Orthodox prohibition on women holding positions of authority derives [not from within Tradition but] from a purely Maimonidean view, and that even while he lived Maimonides was widely regarded as a heretic." (Maimonides, of course, borrows many of his positions from outside Tradition; from the decidedly non-Jewish Aristotle, in whose scheme women are less than human.)

I've spoken at length with Professor Alderman and know his diverse work well, so his response doesn't shock me in-and-of-itself. I'm glad, however, that he's gone public with it in the JC at a time when Modern Orthodoxy is struggling to prove its moniker meaningful.

Now read Women rabbis? Why ever not? for yourself.