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Rav Avi: Welcome to Responsa Radio where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, executive vice president at Hadar, here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, a center for Jewish learning and community building based in New York City. You can check us out and learn more at hadar.org. We're going to do a question today about a practice called duchening.

What is duchening, right? Such an interesting word. Birkat Kohanim, the priestly blessing. Here's the question: I daven at an almost entirely egalitarian minyan in the UK. I say almost because when it comes to duchening of Yom Tov, we still only invite men to say Birkat Kohanim.

I believe because only men truly inherit priestly status from their fathers. Is there another way in which to think about this part of the service that could be more egalitarian? So, I'm really curious to hear, what is going on with this practice? They say, only men truly inherit priestly status, is that the case? And how do different communities respond to this and handle this situation differently?

Rav Eitan: Just a linguistic note: this term duchening, comes from the Hebrew word duchan, which is just the elevated platform usually right next to the ark.

Rav Avi: Like the bima?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, but not the part where you might be leading services from in the middle, but the part up front where you've got the ark, and so ascending the duchan is what the Kohanim do, and so then that's one way of colloquially referring to it. We'll mostly refer to it as Birkat Kohanim here, which

Rav Avi: means priestly blessing.

Rav Eitan: So just to clarify the assumption, the questioner is right. Yes, the Kehunah is a patriarchal institution that is primarily and essentially passed down through men throughout the generations. It's from father to son, as it were. It's clear from a number of places. You see it in the Bible. There are certain sacrifices that are limited to kol zachar bivne Aharon, the males of the descendants of Aaron. The Torah actually does know how to and in a number of places talks about banecha uvenotecha, your sons and your daughters, when it is speaking figuratively to Aaron. And so then when it doesn't use the word benotecha in other contexts, your daughters, it does seem that the gendered piece is quite conscious.

Rav Avi: So it's not just an assumption that when we say priests, we mean men. It actually specifically is male priests.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think that's correct. I want to start with the particular question here and we can then at the end of the episode get to some fundamental questions of theory and approaching this more broadly.

The core language of this and the core institution here is gendered, is patriarchal, and so when the priestly blessing is described in the Torah as a command, as daber el Aharon veel banav lemor koh tevarachu et benei Yisrael, speak to Aaron and to his sons, koh tevarachu et benei Yisrael, here's how you should bless the Israelites, the Jewish people. And then we get of course the famous three, five, seven word blessing, Yevarechecha Hashem veyishmerecha, may God bless and keep you, etc. It's very clear that that obligation only devolves on the male patrilineal descendants of Aaron. So we're going to keep that right now as that's the assumption, that's the fixed point, giving a little more background to where the questioner is getting it from. And then try to answer specifically, okay, in that framework, what's possible in terms of the daughters of Kohanim to participate in this ritual of blessing the people? So let's start with what might seem like a weird question, but I think it's the necessary portal into discussing this:
Can a non-Kohen offer the priestly blessing?
Turns out there are two totally conflicting and confusing sources on this.

Let's start with the one that's kind of more intuitive. The Talmud in tractate Ketubot pretty explicitly, when it's asking questions of how can you figure out if someone is a Kohen, for purposes of who can they marry or can they eat... Sacred foods, like what behaviors could you have seen them do that would make you feel confident that you could then act that they're a kohen. And one of the questions is, if they offer the priestly blessing, can you assume they're a kohen? And at least as part of that analysis, there's sort of a trending in the direction of, yeah, definitely you can, because offering the priestly blessing when you're not a kohen, when you are a zar, a foreigner, is what the Talmud calls an issur asei.

It is a violation of a positive commandment in the Torah. So it's not something the Torah said don't do this, but something where the Torah, Rashi helps spell this out, says, hey you priests, you're supposed to bless the people. Implication, no one else is supposed to.

Rav Avi: Meaning it becomes like a negative commandment to other people?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, you're trespassing on someone else's role.

So that seems pretty clear, it actually seems like not only is a non-priest not welcome, if they do it, they're actually violating a form of a biblical commandment. Okay, so get this. This is in the Talmud in Shabbat. Rabbi Yosei says, I never go against what my friends tell me to do.

I've never violated their advice. I know that I'm not a kohen, but when my friends tell me to go up to the duchan, I go. Hmm. Now, that is crazy, right? Because it just seems like, oh, from that text on its own, well, what's the problem? Like kohanim are supposed to offer it, they have to offer it, but if other people want to offer the priestly blessing, what is wrong? And indeed, meditating on this text, Rabbi Yitzchak of Dampierre, who is one of the Tosafot authors in the Middle Ages in France, he says, yeah, I don't really know what would be wrong with a non-priest going up to the duchan.

The only problem I can imagine is there would be a berakhah le-vatalah. There'd be a blessing in vain. To remind our listeners, when the priests go up to offer Birkat Kohanim, what they do is not only recite that passage from the Torah verbatim, the three, five, seven-word formula, they first say Barukh Atah Adonai Eloheinu Melekh Ha-olam, and then they say, who has sanctified us with the sanctity of Aaron and has commanded us to bless Israel. So the Ri says, well, I get how you can't have a non-priest say you sanctified me with the sanctity of Aaron.

But other than that, there's a version of that comment in the Tosafot gets preserved by the Rema later on where he says, yeah, according to this view, regular Jews who are not priests can just go up and it's actually berov am hadrat melekh, the splendor of the king is in a greater crowd. The more people that go up, the more powerful the ritual will be. Though, note, but that's not common practice. Hmm.

But according to this text taken seriously, it seems there is zero problem whatsoever. So put another way, if we just were to sort of, we're going to go back—

Rav Avi: Meaning so long as you don't say the berakhah.

Rav Eitan: So long as you don't say that opening berakhah. That's right.

According to the first text, the only way you can ever offer this blessing is if you are a priest. According to the second text, it's completely irrelevant whether you are a priest. Okay, yeah. It still matters in that everyone thinks that the kohanim are obligated to offer the blessing, and anyone who's not a kohen is not obligated.

Yeah, but maybe it's optional. Yeah, you can join in, what's the problem?

Rav Avi: Yeah. Okay, so the reason that you're sharing this with us is because what's at stake may be in the question of whether or not women should be up there doing it is like how bad of a mistake would it be if we get it wrong? If we assume that these women are actually kohen, then they have to do it and you'd be in big trouble if they didn't. But if you assume that they are not, then the question is, is it then fine, or is it actually terrible in the other direction that they're not doing it?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, that's right. Or do they operate in some sort of middle spot where they're not a zar, they're not like a— garden-variety non-priest but they're also not necessarily in the category of kohen.

Rav Avi: Yeah, like not obligated but permitted?

Rav Eitan: Something like that. Okay, great. So classic two Talmudic precedents, they don't really work together.

Rav Avi: You're not, I'm guessing, the first person to have noticed that.

Rav Eitan: No. How many resolutions do you think we're going to get on this?

Rav Avi: Let's see. Two Jews, you know, ten opinions, something like that.

Rav Eitan: Not quite that extreme but seven. Oh boy. There's at least seven different things.

Rav Avi: Okay, buckle up everyone. We're going to be here for a while.

Rav Eitan: We're going to run through them, we'll try to do them quickly but make sure we understand each one. One, the Tosafot HaRosh says oh, Rabbi Yose is speaking in hyperbole. Rabbi Yose, the one who said I always listen to my friend. I go up to the duchan.

Rav Avi: He didn't always listen to his friend.

Rav Eitan: That was that's just an expression of I'll tell you the most extreme thing I would even do that if they said. But of course he wouldn't do that.

Rav Avi: Meaning that's like him saying I'd follow them off a bridge.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. I'd be run over by a train. Exactly.

Wow. Does not seem like it's the plain sense of the source but that's one easy way of resolving the conflict which is source one controls because source two doesn't mean what you think it means. Yeah, okay. Never happened. Okay, easy enough.

Rav Avi: Okay, so don't do it.

Rav Eitan: Don't do it basically right according to that view, of course you can't.

Rav Avi: Okay, that was number one.

Rav Eitan: Number two. These are not strictly in chronological order. A little more in conceptual order. The Taz says all he meant was he would defer to his friend's claim that he was a kohen.

So he was like I know I'm not a kohen but they keep claiming you are.

Rav Avi: Because his last name is Kahn.

Rav Eitan: And so he would yield as it were to their finding of fact.

Rav Avi: But the question here is about him, not about whether he's a kohen, not about whether a non-kohen can do the blessing.

Rav Eitan: And like the first resolution it's not really justifying in any way a non-kohen going up as a matter of law, there was just a question of fact.

Rav Avi: This is fun, I like this game. It's like a riddle, how many different ways out of this can we find. Okay, number three?

Rav Eitan: Number three. The Rama. The Rama says there's a difference between going up alone or with others. He notes the Rabbi Yose story is the friends are saying, as he interprets it, come on up, come with us. If you're joining as an adjunct according to this, it's actually fine for you to go up.
But the other source that says absolutely not non-priest can't do it, that would be like the example of the pregnant women who are not kohanim let's say, not benot kohanim all going up, that text would say no, no, no, that's like replacing

Rav Avi: the male priesthood from Aaron.

Rav Eitan: And that's the difference.

Rav Avi: I feel like we think about that with kids, right? Where you might say like there are parts of the service that like your little kid can stand next to you while you lead it and they can sing along with you but that's not the same as them leading the service.

Rav Eitan: That's right and actually the Rama is in part drawing this from the fact that this is the halacha around kohen kids who go up with their parents. But you do not have a nine-year-old if that's the only kohen descendant in the synagogue lead birkat kohanim. They just skip it. Okay, so there's a basis for that way of thinking.

Rav Avi: Okay, that was number three.

Rav Eitan: That was three.

Rav Avi: Okay, I'm keeping track. Four. Number four.

Rav Eitan: The Magen Avraham notes that there is a very early debate going back to the sages of the Mishna as to whether one is permitted to perform mitzvot from which one is exempt. That is to say if there's a mitzvah that I'm not required to do, am I allowed nonetheless to do it? And there was a split on that. There was the view of Rabbi Yehuda who said no, if you're exempt it means God doesn't want you to do that thing, don't do it.

And he actually played that out with respect to gendered exemptions around mitzvot. He would say if a woman has been exempted by a rabbinic tradition from doing a certain mitzvah, she should not do it. It's not just an exemption, it's also you should not do it. Rabbi Yose and Rabbi Shimon disagreed with this, particularly on the gender point but also more broadly and said no, exemption just means exemption but it's perfectly fine to do it.

Says the Magen Avraham, here's how you resolve... resolve these two texts. The text that says that a non-priest can't offer the blessing is fundamentally a text that sides with Rabbi Yehuda, that sides with the view that you're never allowed to do a mitzvah from which you are exempt. And the text of Rabbi Yose listening to his friends falls on the side of Rabbi Yose and Rabbi Shimon where we just are sort of free wheeling like, yeah, you're not commanded, but you can join in.

And so it's fundamentally a difference between dueling positions about whether you can optionally perform mitzvot. Right. And the Magen Avraham noting that we follow in general, philosophically, the approach of Rabbi Yose and Rabbi Shimon, which is generally exemptions are just exemptions, they're not prohibitions, we would come out on that side and say, yeah, a non-priest is allowed to voluntarily perform this mitzvah.

Now five. The Maharit says, no, no, no, no, no, that restrictive text, that was about the Temple. The priestly blessing we know today from synagogue, but originally this was part of the Temple service and actually in the Temple they used the ineffable name of God, they pronounced the actual four-letter name.

Rav Avi: Oh, so cool.

Rav Eitan: There, you cannot have a non-priest do it. That would be a violation. But when you're just talking about in the synagogue, that essentially vestigial version of the real thing, that's where Rabbi Yose was invited up despite not being a kohen, says the Maharit. Outside of the Temple, there's no problem with a zar joining in.

Rav Avi: Yeah. Yeah, I find that very compelling actually. It's I feel like if we want to play a game of like, what are the halakhic tools we have available to us to resolve a dispute, well, they were talking about different use cases is like a common one, right? Is like, well, that was about the ancient one, this is about the modern one, that's how we solve the problem.

Rav Eitan: That's right.
Another cousin of this, number six. The Bach says, no, no, no, the difference here is whether you raise your hands or not. Rabbi Yose, it doesn't say I lifted my hands.

Rav Avi: He just goes up.

Rav Eitan: I go up. So he said the words, but he didn't do the pose.

Rav Avi: All right, seven.

Rav Eitan: Last one. The Magen Gibborim says, yeah, the difference here is whether you're intending to pose as a kohen or not, which is signified by whether you said the bracha.

Rav Avi: This is why you need that book about how to find kohanim.

Rav Eitan: So the Magen Gibborim says, the problem in the restrictive text is you're going up, you're saying the blessing, you're completely posing as indistinguishable from a kohen, that is not allowed.
In the Rabbi Yose listening to friends text, he definitely wouldn't have said the blessing and he would not appear to be a kohen for that reason, he's just joining in. And then what's the problem? You're just saying verses that anyone's allowed to say.

Rav Avi: Yeah. So here the distinction is actually like it will be confusing to people and it will look like something it's not.

It's not that it's so bad that you actually said the blessing, it's that it will make everyone say, oh, Ethan Tucker, I'm pretty sure he's a kohen, I saw him give that blessing.

Rav Eitan: That's right. I think that's one way of understanding it.
All right, seven different reasons, right? Where does it end you up? So look, at...

Rav Avi: It's like a choose your own adventure? Yeah, what do you do as a... like if we think of this as, how do you approach this as a posek, as someone who's inheriting Jewish law and trying to make an actual decision for a community or for yourself when you have seven different pathways?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, so you want to do a combination of watch where the tape goes, that is to say, where do later people fall out in terms of assessing these and how do they break, and you want to sort of keep in mind the full range as still being relevant because even the paths not taken on some level may open up when combined with other factors some flexible ways of thinking about it.

Rav Avi: Okay. But the first thing we do is look a little bit downstream and see where did the waters flow.

Rav Eitan: So here you'll find even though remember I said the Rama says oh maybe there's a difference between doing it with other people as opposed to doing it alone, maybe that's the distinction, but when he actually puts his sort of normative stamp on this in the Shulchan Aruch he says, Yeah, though there is this tradition that doesn't really know what the problem would be and maybe it should be fine with other priests, but he's tentative and doesn't like it. But a number of the reasons that we saw here, the Magen Avraham which is, yeah, actually the lenient side just leans into you can do optional stuff and we side with that side.
The Maharit, it's outside of the temple, doesn't really matter. The Magen Giborim as long as you're not saying the berakha you're not posing as a kohen. Seems like as long as you don't say the berakha and maybe for the other ones even if you do.

Rav Avi: We've sort of lowered the temperature on how what's at stake here.

Rav Eitan: Right. But the other three, the Tosafot Rosh, the Bach, and the Taz who all said no. The Mishna Berura, one later codifier among other later authorities, they go with those guys. And they say you can't ever let a zar offer the blessing. So if you were to ask me that question, if the questioner had said, "Hey, I'm a non-priest, can I go up?" our answer would be no.

Rav Eitan: All right, where are we? There might have been some room in some branches of this conversation for a non-kohen to participate, but that was controversial. It's not practice. Now we go to the bat kohen question. The daughter of a kohen.
Is she essentially a foreigner for these purposes? We do know the rabbinic tradition is very clear. A bat kohen, a daughter of a kohen, cannot do the aspects of the temple service. Okay.

But we have to remember when you talk about the daughter of a kohen participating in the temple service, that is displacing a male kohen from that action.

Rav Avi: Meaning only one person can do it at a time.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. You can't have ten people sprinkle the blood at the same time.

And so it's not a perfect map onto the question of but what about the priestly blessing where all these people do it at once?

Rav Avi: Right. And here it seems to me that we have three possibilities, right? One possibility is that she is a kohen and she's obligated. Another possibility is that she's a zar, she's completely not and she has no business being up there. It's forbidden.
And a third possibility is like is she something that is in between those two?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think that's right. The first possibility is basically dead on arrival. That is to say she's not going to be a kohen because once we have the notion that this is only passed down through the men and we have the notion that the specific terminology in various places singles out the zakhar as being in a specific place, we can't say that she is the equivalent of the male kohen. Okay, so that's pretty much out from the original conception of what's happening.

Rav Avi: Yeah, I don't want to take us too far afield, but I do feel like I need to I need to ask sort of you your broader take on gender and tefilla gives us a, you know, there's a paradigm shift concept of like, well, jobs that would have been men's might now be women's. Like why would we not, maybe you'll give one sentence version of that paradigm shift concept and then tell us why would we not use that same concept here in this case?

Rav Eitan: Well, you should definitely pick up the second edition of Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law to hear about the category shift, the paradigm shift.

Rav Avi: It's newly released from Hadar Press.

Rav Eitan: Newly released from Hadar Press by myself and Rabbi Michael Rosenberg. And there's a new appendix there which gets into that concept which is broadly speaking that when you see women given exemptions in rabbinic... texts from various rituals and you pay attention to the fact that they are juxtaposed in those texts to slaves and minors as other forms of basically not being principals in the system for that purpose but adjuncts, you can start to feel that, oh, maybe actually the biological sex of the category here is not the essential piece, but this has something to do with the social status that allows you to compare women, slaves, and minors as sharing a category. And to the extent there's a social upheaval, transformation, progression where gender no longer breaks down that way on the social level, those sources don't apply, right, to contemporary gender considerations.

Rav Avi: Yes. So it sounds like the women are not obligated, so what's left is the question of are they permitted or are they forbidden?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, something like that. Can they be included in any way? So, I mean the Rambam when he talks about the daughters of Kohanim and the temple service, he says they are zarot. They for the purposes of sort of temple service things are not just not supposed to do it, but they would completely disqualify the service. They're out, okay.
And as an extension of that way of thinking, a much later authority, the Pri Megadim, actually takes up the question of who can participate in the priestly blessing and engages the question of the Rabbinic categories of tumtum and androgynus, which are people who essentially have some degree of either lack of clarity about their biological sex, some degree of spectral identity in terms of sex, gender, etc. They are not purely male, they are not purely female. That's what that category kind of captures. And the Pri Megadim says that kind of child of a Kohen cannot offer the priestly blessing. Implicit is his assumption that a daughter of a Kohen could not.

He assumes that the doubt in terms of those cases is, well, they might be a man or they might be a zar. Yes. And if you cannot make them as it were fully a man, they will then be in the category of zar, ineligible to offer the blessing. It's pretty clear he would say a Bat Kohen, a daughter of a Kohen, is not eligible to offer the blessing.
Okay. So, what would you have to say in order to get to a different conclusion than that? So, you'd have to say a couple things. I would sort of combine it actually into the following components.

Rav Avi: Before we jump into what you would have to say, which I think is important because there are obviously people, meaning the way the question arose, I daven at an almost entirely egalitarian minyan.
Right. This person wants to say that the Bat Kohen should be invited up, right? Because the questioner here is saying like we're only inviting men and therefore it's not egalitarian. Right. But we're also only inviting Kohanim here, so it's not egalitarian.
So I just want to sort of pause to say that someone might say we don't need our gender egalitarian ideals to like if we are a community that is not erasing the specialty of the Kohanim in the name of egalitarianism, then we might just say like, yeah, I'm okay with the fact it's a subset and it's the male Kohanim, that's the subset. So like that would be a potentially coherent position even if you were then otherwise an egalitarian community as opposed to other things like if you said we let women do everything in our shul but lead Maariv, that might be like a very strange thing to not let women do. This could actually be somewhat of a coherent approach, it sounds like. And you might not be satisfied with it and then we would need to say how can we get the women up there?

Rav Eitan: That's right. It is definitely a pathway that some people may find not just defensible, but quite coherent to say this is already a non-egalitarian institution.

Rav Avi: That was never the point of kehunah.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, and I don't I'm not actually worried about further egalitarianizing it even though egalitarianism is very important to me when you're dealing with things that any man in the community could do. I don't then want it to be gendered.

Rav Avi: Yeah. Okay. But if we do want the women up there,

Rav Eitan: then what would you have to say? So I would combine these different components. You would build on the following: one, we've seen there is some basis for allowing zarim to participate. That is to say of those seven resolutions, yeah, I had four, I had

Rav Avi: four people who would have been fine with it.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, exactly. Like three, three and a half, exactly. Second, maybe, despite what the Pri Megadim seems to think, it's not so obvious to say that the daughters of Kohanim are Zarot. I want to come back to that in a minute. Third piece is, remember the whole language that kicks this off, Daber el Aharon ve'el Banav.

Speak to Aharon and his Banim, which you can and intuitively might translate as his sons, but actually want to point us to a couple things that suggest that the word Banav in the context of the Kehunah is not always gendered. And the final thing is that Benot Kohanim, however you think about their exact status, they might actually very well say a blessing of who has sanctified us with the sanctity of Aharon. That is to say the blessing at the beginning there, while inappropriate for someone not descended from Aharon, we shouldn't assume is inappropriate for someone descended from Aharon, which she unambiguously is. Okay.
So let's just throw a few of these things out there. Here's a first thing which we could, you know, you can do the long version of, but we're going to do the short version of. Here's some really compelling evidence that the daughters of Kohanim are not Zarot. They are not really not priests in a full way.

There's a rule of Terumah, the sacred food that's for the priest. If you are a non-priest and you eat that, okay?

Rav Avi: Very bad.

Rav Eitan: Not good. If you do it by mistake, you have to pay back the Kohen the amount, the value of the Terumah.

It's basically like you stole it. And you pay a twenty-five percent surcharge, the Chomesh, the fifth, that is, you know, the twenty-five percent with the principal is a fifth of the principal. You have to pay that surcharge as a penalty. That's laid out in the Torah.

If you are a Kohen and you just eat someone else's Terumah, like basically you steal it by mistake, you just pay them back the value of that. There's no surcharge, right? It was fine for you to eat it. So the Mishnah has a case where it talks about the daughter of a Kohen who is married to a non-Kohen man. Yeah.
And the rule in that case is she's not allowed to eat Terumah anymore.

Rav Avi: Right, she gave that up when she married the non-Kohen.

Rav Eitan: Gave that up. The Terumah is basically a patriarchal gift that goes to the members of that household, and women essentially follow their husbands in terms of their rights to eat.

That's laid out in the Torah explicitly. But the Mishnah says what happens if the daughter of a Kohen who's married to that guy accidentally eats Terumah? And it says she doesn't pay the twenty-five percent surcharge.

Rav Avi: That's good because she might have just been home.

Rav Eitan: That's exactly how it would happen.
But what we see here is that holding makes clear that, and this is there's a Midrash Halakhah that says she gave it up but not entirely. She's not Zara lah. She is not among the people who is actually considered alienated from this gift. Why? Because she actually has intrinsic sanctity as the daughter of a Kohen. We're just saying the way we're organizing society, she doesn't get that anymore.

Rav Avi: It's also the case like even more strongly, right? You're saying, you're saying this case, but if she hasn't gotten married to a non-Kohen, then she fully eats Terumah. That's her food.

Rav Eitan: One hundred percent.

Rav Avi: So certainly, it would be a little weird if we were like, oh, the bat Kohen can do this blessing until she gets married to someone and then she can't anymore. But that would actually be pretty coherent.

Rav Eitan: You could imagine that. This text goes even further and essentially says the only reason anyone ever has to pay the twenty-five percent surcharge, this is in the Mishnah in Yevamot, is Ve'chol zar lo yochal kodesh.

A Zar cannot eat the sacred food. And if they do, they have to do this. Well, that's pretty clear evidence she is not in that category. I'll give you another example of that.

If a bat Kohen marries a non-priest man, when they have a firstborn son, there is no obligation to redeem that child. There is no Pidyon Haben. Why? He's not a priest. It's a well-established law that a priest doesn't redeem his own kids, a Levi doesn't redeem their own kids because that's all about basically replacing the firstborn with the tribe of Levi.

But here her tribal identity and enduring sanctity matters even in the marriage, even in giving birth.

Rav Avi: It seems like a pretty strong case to me.

Rav Eitan: I think it's pretty strong. So the notion that they're not Zarot has a lot of basis. Tell you something else that's kind of surprising perhaps if you haven't thought about it. When talking about redeeming the first born, so the Torah says who do you give the money to, the five shekels? Who does the father have to give the five shekels to? It says le'Aharon u'le'vanav, to Aaron and his banim. Right.

Now the Rambam indeed thinks that that requires you to give it to a male priest.

Rav Avi: Banim as sons. As sons.

Rav Eitan: But the Tosafot think that a bat Kohen, the daughter of a Kohen, can receive the money for pidyon haben.

That's not the way that it's traditionally practiced today.

Rav Avi: But that's the Tosafot, that's pretty old.

Rav Eitan: Yes, a major medieval opinion assumes that when the Torah says banav, which is the same word used in the context of the priestly blessing, that doesn't exclude the female descendants.
So you're building up sort of even further in that regard. I'll add one other detail here which is pretty striking is even the Rambam, who we've said on a couple of these things has toed the line, the Rambam himself makes clear that when daughters of Kohanim eat terumah, when they eat that sacred food in places where they're allowed, you know what bracha they say beforehand? They say Baruch Atah Hashem Elokeinu Melech Ha'olam asher kidshanu bikdushato shel Aharon, exactly the way the priestly blessing begins because they have the sanctity of Aaron, v'tzivanu le'echol trumot, and has commanded us to eat trumot.

Rav Avi: And the women say that.

Rav Eitan: And the women say that. The Rambam says that. So here I would say to you here's the argument I would proffer. You have an argument here that I think minimally supports not stopping a bat Kohen who decides to go up from participating and maybe even an argument to allow and even encourage it and invite, which is essentially what we've talked about on previous episodes, a sfek sfeka, the double axis of doubt or exploration of different possibilities and how they come together. First of all, maybe we've got all this evidence they're really not zarot.

There's really no basis for saying they violate that restrictive text of atem v'lo zarim. You are supposed to offer this blessing, the priests, and not outsiders. Yeah, and they're not outsiders. Second of all, even if they are, there were all these views that we don't normally follow for people like you and me, but that say zarim were allowed to do it. And even if that's not what we normally follow, it remains as a voice in the system. And if you say those two axes, right, I'm sort of covered either way. What's the worst problem? First of all, it might be totally fine for her to do this.

Second of all, even if it's not because she's a zar, maybe it's fine for a zar to do it. And then what are you worried about, the bracha? She can say that bracha. Why?

Rav Avi: She would have said it.

Rav Eitan: She has the sanctity of Aaron and in the Ashkenazi tradition at least, there's a long pedigree to women saying mitzvot brachot over things from which they were considered exempt. That is to say, even a woman who was assumed, let's say in the Middle Ages, to have been exempt from shaking the lulav on Sukkot, but the Ashkenazi ruling over a thousand years old is, but if she chooses to do it, she says asher kidshanu bemitzvotav v'tzivanu. So to say that a bat Kohen can then voluntarily do this, I think you actually have some very strong basis for at least supporting that practice if not advancing it.

Rav Avi: Yeah, so it sounds like we came up with some pretty strong arguments for the practice of not having the women say it and some pretty strong arguments for the practice of having women say this blessing. Dare I ask if you were to set up your own community and no one was enforcing any other rules on you, how you would do it?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, you can definitely dare ask. I think about this as a choice and then I'll tell you my own preference. A choice actually I think communities have to make about this kind of question.

I think when you're thinking about a patriarchal institution like the kehunah from the vantage point of trying to build a gender-equal world or experience, including in Jewish ritual space, you basically have three choices. Option number one is you just deal with it as is. You say The priesthood was never an egalitarian institution in the broadest social sense. It was excluding lots of people all along.

It's a vestige. It's not really how we run anything anymore. You don't get a leg up in the rabbinic search if you're a Kohen. It's not an actual seat of power in the Jewish community anymore, so it's fine. Leave it, who cares. Mr. Kagan gets the first aliyah and I don't really,

Rav Avi: right, doesn't matter.

Rav Eitan: I think that's a coherent and defensible approach. I think for a lot of people actually the power of the Kehuna is this is this weird old thing.
We still do it the way it was. And it's like how did we still know it? It's crazy. Yeah. And then for I think there's actually some people, even from a very gender-egalitarian outlook, for whom the maleness of the Kehuna is almost more of a feature than a bug.
Yeah. Okay, that's one option. Totally respect that, not interested in talking anyone out of it. Second option is people who are just like allergic to the Kehuna writ large, see no way of fixing it, its intrinsic gendered nature will always threaten to undermine moves towards gender equality.

Right. We just got to actually find a way to minimize its presence beyond the scope of what we're doing here, but you find ways through communal consensus, this and that, to decide the aliyot are no longer going to go to those people. There's already a diaspora tradition that reduced the frequency of the priestly blessing from every day or every Shabbat to just a few days a year.

There were communities in the 20th century that said we're just going to take that another step and we're never going to have Birkat Kohanim. Again, I don't think that's the greatest way to proceed in terms of the larger framework of halakha, but I can't tell you it has no defensibility. Like it's continuing a trend that already began. The third option, which overall is my inclination, but again, depends space by space, is how do you make the experience of the Kehuna as gender-equal as possible without pretending that it's a completely gender-egalitarian institution.

I think there is an ability to say look, the Kehuna is a patriarchal institution. It's passed down patrilineally. That's the way it works. But I can have my experience of aliyah in shul or people offering a blessing not actually have a gendered component to them.

Rav Avi: Yeah, this has been really interesting. It just gives us a window into this like really interesting aspect of our Judaism that I think we could spend a lot more time unpacking. Thanks.

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