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Rav Avi: Hi, and 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 are recording live this Sunday morning from the Hadar National Shabbaton.

We're so excited to be here in the great state of New Jersey. Recording this morning. Good morning, how you doing?

Rav Eitan: Good morning, Avi. You can hear from my voice, it's been an amazing weekend.

Rav Avi: Yes, exactly. That's the evidence. Tell me what's your favorite part of the Hadar National Shabbaton?

Rav Eitan: 100% the kids in all aspects, whether they're playing chaotically in the back of the davening room or I got to do a great session with kids and parents this morning about how do we all stay engaged in prayer spaces? So just watching the future of a vision of religious life begin to take shape and root, that is my high point.

Rav Avi: Amazing. Do you want to know mine? Do you want to ask me mine?

Rav Eitan: Hey Avi, what's your high point?

Rav Avi: I'll tell you. I have a clear answer to this, which is 'Amen.' I love the davening, not just the davening at the National Shabbaton but we have hundreds of people here, 650 people here this weekend, and we have one service and the best part is just hearing an entire room of hundreds of people say amen together in response to the kaddish. So that's my high point.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, that's amazing too, I agree.

Rav Avi: Which is a great lead-in actually to the question that we are going to tackle today, which is a question that I think cuts to the heart of Hadar and some of our core values and what we're trying to do at this organization, what we're trying to do at this Shabbaton here this weekend, in the broader world, and it's a question that you've thought a lot about. So I figured we'd tackle it this morning.

Rav Eitan: I'm ready.

Rav Avi: The questioner writes, I grew up in a non-egalitarian Jewish community. I've only recently begun to experience egalitarian prayer spaces. I was always taught that women are exempt from a whole bunch of mitzvot and that's why egalitarian davening is not an option. Is that true? Does egalitarian davening simply ignore this part of halakhah or is there some way of addressing it?

Rav Eitan: That's a softball, come on.

Rav Avi: Yeah, have you ever thought about this question before? I will say right up front that you wrote a book on this topic actually and I just want to highlight that that book has just come out in a second edition. I'm going to hold it up for those who are here at the Shabbaton, you can buy it at the info desk on your way out. It's called Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law, and you co-wrote the book with Rabbi Micha'el Rosenberg, so we definitely want to give him a shout-out.

Rav Eitan: Another Hadar colleague.

Rav Avi: In addition. And this is actually the second edition of the book. So I'm hoping over the course of answering this question, you can also tell us a little bit about what makes the second edition different than the first, in addition to the absolutely beautiful cover art that we got on the second edition.

Rav Eitan: You know, so it is funny actually.
It's a softball question in certain ways because we wrote this book, I've been teaching on this for years. In some ways I'd say listeners of Responsa Radio are familiar with our set of egalitarian assumptions or thinking about those questions when we think about ritual. But we've never actually done an episode laying this out.

Rav Avi: Yeah, maybe we shouldn't make that assumption, right? We have all kinds of listeners.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. So I think that's kind of exciting and interesting about breaking this down. As we often do on this podcast, I think we try to break things down into subcomponents where we can talk about each one and give listeners a fuller sense. So I think the first thing we should just say maybe to underscore the background that the questioner is raising here, the notion that, oh, there's some kind of gender gap in obligation in rabbinic sources. Let's just explain for our listeners.

Rav Avi: Yeah, where does that come from?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, so that is in fact correct. That is to say if you go through rabbinic sources you will find with respect to a host of different practices that texts will say, oh, men are obligated. What are examples?

Rav Avi: Yeah, what's an example of that?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, things like the obligation to hear the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. Other things like sitting in a sukkah or taking the lulav and etrog, the four species on Sukkot. Other things in that list actually, the obligation to recite the Shema twice a day or to put on tefillin, any number of other things that are on that list where it's a common thing when you learn rabbinic literature, you'll come along a statement that will say women are exempt from this mitzvah. But just to sort of clarify and affirm, yeah, it's a real question based on real evidence here which is to say, yeah, the classical rabbinic sources are not gender-blind about obligation. That's not how they think about things and so it is a very important, essential question of to the extent one sees oneself as an heir to, a custodian of those texts, how do you get to a place of gender-equal practice while caring about halakhah?

Rav Avi: Yeah, I would like to know, how do you get to a place of gender-equal practice while caring about halakhah?

Rav Eitan: Okay, so with that, let's break it down, I think our episode will sort of come together in two parts in this way.
I'll just lay them out at the beginning. There are really two ways to answer that question and part of what we try to do in the book and what we try to do even more clearly in the second edition of the book is to chart out for people those two ways. And simply put, those two ways are either to take for granted the gender gap in those sources, but to explain how it turns out that that's just not really material to the mechanics of running a communal prayer service.

Rav Avi: I don't know what that means. Explain that for us.

Rav Eitan: One way of saying it is, yeah, I know that there's a gap between gender and obligation in terms of various mitzvot, but actually that just doesn't matter for who's allowed to lead things, who's allowed to lead davening.

Rav Avi: So there could be a gap, but it doesn't apply in this case?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, you might accept it, might have other consequences, but you can still run a totally egalitarian service even with that gap being in place. That's sort of approach number one and approach number two is to argue that the gap while it may have existed and made sense in the context of those earlier sources, in a contemporary environment, in a contemporary moment, those sources properly applied would not render a gap in 2026/5786.

Rav Avi: Okay, so you'll talk us through these a little bit more specifically, but in terms of the way we talk about this podcast as halakhah in modern times, for the second version, it's like underline the modern times part of that.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think when we get there we'll see it's underline the modern times and underline the sense that the sources themselves in their original context would say something different in modern times.

Rav Avi: Mm-hmm. Okay, great.

Rav Eitan: Great. But let's start for a minute on what some level is the maybe you could say the simpler reading or the more surface-level reading of texts where okay, there's a gender gap. Well, so what? Like what does that have to do with leading anything? Now, it turns out that actually there is a principle that kind of can get sticky here, which is one of the ideas in Jewish law that's pretty central, it's laid out in the Mishnah in Rosh Hashanah, is you can't do something for someone else if you are not obligated in the same way that they are. So for instance, if I want to blow the shofar for you, right? Like you could say in some ideal world everyone would have their own shofar, everyone would blow their own shofar.

That's not the way we do it. It's both way more expensive and complicated for everyone to have their own shofar and it's a lot of training for a lot of people who may not know how to do it.

Rav Avi: Yeah, so the key here is is not just can I blow the shofar and you could hear it, but actually is my blowing the shofar going to fulfill your mitzvah of hearing the shofar?

Rav Eitan: That's right. It's I'm doing something vicariously for you.
I'm kind of like your agent in some way, but then I have to have the same skin in the game as it were in terms of obligation. To take this to sort of maybe a more extreme case that'll be more intuitive, you could have someone who was not Jewish learn the mechanics of blowing the shofar. Perfectly.

Rav Avi: Yeah, they may be better at it in fact.

Rav Eitan: They could do it better

Rav Avi: if they play the trumpet.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. Find someone from the brass section of the New York Philharmonic and get them up there to do it. And they may do it much better and on a recording you might not be able to tell the difference between that person and a Jewish adult doing it.
But you wouldn't be able to fulfill your obligation in hearing the shofar because when that person is blowing the shofar they're sort of doing an action, doing a service for you, but not doing something that has core obligatory meaning for themselves.

Rav Avi: So this concept will remain intact. We need to figure out how is it that we're saying what we're saying about gender equality in prayer without losing this concept.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, and that will mean you'll have to make some combination of claims of actually there is no gender gap with respect to ritual X, so therefore there's no issue based on gender of who can lead it, or obligation doesn't really matter with respect to ritual X.

Maybe it's not a thing that functions that way where each person is doing the mitzvah and we have to figure out are you obligated to do it like everyone else. So let's just let's sort of play that out, right? And one of the things we do in the book is do exactly that with respect to the main rituals of leading davening. So one of the central rituals of leading davening is that moment where after everyone has had quiet moments of prayer and contemplation during the amidah, at that point then the leader gets up alone and recites that whole prayer aloud essentially as the communal prayer on behalf of everyone else. And the tradition also tells us that role is also critical for anyone in the room in the synagogue in the minyan who might not know how to say the amidah on their own, the leader can do it for them.

Rav Avi: Right. And that originally, right, maybe when this was coming into practice, people didn't have books, right? Not everyone in the room is holding a siddur, so it's both about knowledge and access in a more sort of technical sense also.

Rav Eitan: Facility also meant some degree of memory, memorization, familiarity with the language, 100%, so it was much more central before there were printed siddurim.

Rav Avi: So the sort of question, the shofar metaphor of do I have a shofar and do I know how to blow it, this might be like do I have a siddur and do I know how to read this long complicated tefillah.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, exactly. So the leader and their obligation, their obligatory status is really important for that role. One of the things we show is that despite the fact that rabbinic literature has this gender gap in obligation all over the place with different mitzvot, it's just not true with respect to prayer. Actually the Mishna is unambiguous that men and women have an equal obligation in prayer.

It's actually only in 17th-century Poland that you start to get various sources that are dealing with the fact that women are not praying on a daily basis and it's not clear exactly the origins of that, no one really loves it but there's nothing they can do about it. Then people start spinning theories of could I justify that, how could I explain why maybe that would be okay? But essentially if you look at the core sources there was never any obligation about gender equality with respect to obligation in praying the amidah.

Rav Avi: So the answer is it was never a problem in the first place?

Rav Eitan: The answer is with respect to obligation, that really is not the basis for talking about there being any restriction with respect to, in this case let's say, women leading the amidah.

Rav Avi: It's really interesting. The way that you're framing it, it almost sounds like actually this idea that women are not obligated, which sometimes in our worlds we associate as a practice in like a more pious, you know, we might say like frummer community, is actually it sounds actually like it's a leniency that was created to allow for sort of a less pious practice.

Rav Eitan: 100%. The egalitarian standard of obligation in prayer is both the stricter, more original interpretation and standard. No less an authority than the Mishna Brura, one of the great commentators of the Shulchan Aruch at the turn of the 20th century, makes this point very clear and he has the same reality in his world of women not praying.
in the same frequency as men do. And he says, "We have to change this."

Rav Avi: He makes a different decision.

Rav Eitan: He says, "You've got to—I'm not going to justify this. We have to have an education campaign to make sure that everyone, irrespective of gender, is praying the Amidah regularly, multiple times a day."

Rav Avi: So I don't want to make it sound like large swaths of Jews, these women aren't praying at all.
That's not the case. So maybe do you have a thought on that?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, so one of the things that emerges is what is a practice that is very common among women and we have been blessed with some remnants of some of these tefillot, some of these prayers. Particularly in the European version, they would get up and say techinot or techines, which were usually Yiddish-formulated prayers to God that they would say upon waking up, right after washing their hands in the morning. And there was this kind of informal communing with God, basic acknowledgment of God, prayer for blessing that day.

And that was it, right, that's what women did. Yeah, and going back to what you said earlier about what are the skills required for someone to have felt comfortable praying something like the Amidah, women actually, not by their own agency, but by their communities, were mostly throughout history not given those skills. They were not taught Hebrew. We know that from the historical record.
It was the exception rather than the rule.

Rav Avi: Right. So the key there then is that the techines are in Yiddish. They're like, "I wrote my own journal entry of what I want to say to God." Mine would be in English. Theirs was in Yiddish.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, and even in communities where we have evidence that they did keep up the sort of ancient rabbinic tradition that everyone was supposed to do the Amidah multiple times a day, there were women who were doing that in Ladino rather than in Hebrew because that was the language that they knew. So you have some attempts, people look at that pattern of the techines and they'll say, "Well, is there a way for us to justify this as fulfilling the core obligation of prayer?" Beyond what we'll do in this episode, but you have later authorities that reach back to Maimonides, the Rambam's formulation of the obligation in prayer where he imagines there's sort of like a biblical core where you just reach out to God in any text you want. So maybe, maybe they're doing that and maybe that's enough.

But there are a number of later authorities who we highlight that say, "Hey guys, look at the Mishnah. Look at the Shulchan Aruch. We really should be trying to go back to this." And without casting any judgment on communities where they are still authentically carrying forward that more free-form context for female prayer, the egalitarian prayer setting that does not worry about a gender gap in terms of the leader of the Amidah is standing on not just very firm ground, but sort of the original firm ground of the rabbinic tradition.

Rav Avi: Yeah, I'm curious if you can give us a little window into when did you first discover these sources, discover this fact, and were you surprised? How did it land with you in making that discovery?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, the brief answer on that is I think I was motivated by finding an answer, a framework for what it looks like to be committed to egalitarian prayer in the context of halachah.

And one of the things that you are driven to do when you're motivated by something like that is to look and to look and to research. I'll often tell people there's sometimes a myth, I think, that it's very important when you're doing halachic research to be completely neutral, to have no agenda, to come at it just like you're doing an experiment in a lab and who knows what will be. And I think scientists will tell you a version of what I'm telling you now as well, which is my experience is exactly the opposite. Which is to say you do your best research when you are motivated to find an answer.

You have to be honest enough to be able to deal with data that may point in different directions. But here I would say, yeah, part of uncovering this story was driven by, "Well, I would really like to be able to tell a gender-equal story about the halachah here." And then the research in this case, with respect to the Amidah—we've got to get to other components—happens to yield that in a very clear, unambiguous form. So that theory for the Amidah, that's pretty clear, pretty solid. We do really good work on that in the book.

Listeners may remember we said just a couple minutes ago, but for instance, one of the things that there's a gender gap about is one of the things that there's a gender gap about in rabbinic sources is the Shma. Well, the Shma is said very centrally and very publicly as part of the davening, and if you're working within a gender gap assumption, wouldn't that seem to be an insuperable obstacle to a woman leading that part of the service at least for a community that would have men?
Rav Avi: That does seem relevant.

Rav Eitan: So here is the second the second dimension that we were talking about, which is, yeah, but sometimes obligation actually just doesn't matter. Which is to say, if listeners think about how the Shma is traditionally said, certainly in most Ashkenazi synagogues, it is there's two dimensions to it.

One, it's not even said all out loud. There's most of the Shma, the multiple paragraphs of the Shma are muttered quietly by everyone to themselves.

Rav Avi: Meaning that takes the emphasis off the leader.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, the leader actually isn't leading that part. The leader is maybe setting some kind of pace, but there's an expectation that somehow or other it's getting done, and what's happening in that space is actually everyone is doing the obligation for themselves.

Rav Avi: Yeah, so why do you think it is that that practice that certainly women across all all of the Jewish spectrum are reciting Shma even though there was this gender difference in the original sources?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, so in some ways that'll get to our larger second mode of approaching this whole question, but you can see even within the tradition that says Shma is gendered, there are various rabbinic authorities in the Middle Ages, you have the Bach later on that are sort of incredulous about but it's the Shma. How that's the most Jewish thing you can imagine, and they'll say, well, they at least have to say the first line. So the notion that everyone at least has some obligation to say Shma Yisrael Hashem Elokeinu Hashem Echad, that emerges even from the soil of the gender-gapped assumption of obligation on the full three-paragraph ritual.

Rav Avi: Yeah, I think about that in particular about the Shma, the bedtime Shma, which so often culturally now, but also historically, women are often the ones putting their kids to bed. So women are often the ones reciting the bedtime Shma, that many people are learning the Shma first from women because they're learning it from their mothers at bedtime perhaps.

Rav Eitan: 100%. If I think back to when I was a little kid, who was the person bossing me to say all kinds of things? Say this, I want to hear it, say it loud. That was my Bubbie of blessed memory, one hundred percent. So, yeah, you have some sort of roughness around the edges there, I would say. But there are any number of things where, yeah, actually, it just doesn't matter that the person leading is not obligated. And when you start to pay attention how we do davening, most things are like this.

The Hallel, how do we do the Hallel, which is another thing traditionally gender-gapped? You the leader gets up and says the Bracha, everyone says Amen and says the Bracha for themselves, and then everyone sings the Hallel for themselves. Sfirat HaOmer, counting the Omer even, generally it's a person says the Bracha, you answer Amen, you say the Bracha yourself, assuming you haven't been eliminated yet, and then you count. Actually, we've lost in most context of communal prayer this assignment of vicarious fulfillment to the leader—we'll get to Torah reading and Kaddish and Barchu in a minute—but actually the Amidah is the main place where we do that, and that's the place where there is full gender equality even in the gender-unequal text.

Rav Avi: I like the first the first comment you're making is we are so we're such empowered Jews, right? We do the things ourselves now.
That's really powerful. I'm curious some of our listeners may be familiar with a format of Tfila that people call partnership minyanim, wherein women are leading some things but not all the things. I'm curious is this does that come from this sort of calculus that you're bringing us into right now?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, it's actually so it's a great segue to some of the other pieces that we'll do. Something like a partnership minyan, and obviously those who are exemplars of those can speak for themselves, but just sort of for explanation for our listeners, is fundamentally based on an assumption of, well, there are gender gaps in a number of things, and in the areas where we don't think a gender gap plays a role, we will have equality, so they'll allow the reciting of Psukei D'zimra and leading the Torah service.

and other things of that sort, but places where we feel there is an obstacle, then we have to have a gendered regime. Now, if you ask us as authors of this book, do we agree with where the partnership minyanim draw the line on that, we do not. But the main place...

Rav Avi: But it's the same approach.

Rav Eitan: It's this kind of approach. That's right. And the main line that partnership minyanim will draw is, well, things that are liturgical elements that are only said in the presence of a minyan, right? Like Kaddish, Barchu, Kedusha, those are obstacles to having a gender equal service.

Rav Avi: And why is that?

Rav Eitan: Okay, so there's a few things to break down. I'll say it more from the positive aspect of our argument, how do we address those questions? So there are a number of other pieces of the davening where one person is doing something for someone else, okay? The most prominent among them is the public reading of the Torah. And the public reading of the Torah also requires a minyan.

Let's hold for a minute the question of who counts in a minyan, we'll come back to that in a minute. But assume whatever you want about who counts in a minyan, these rituals, often referred to as Devarim Shebikdusha, ritual items done in a context of sanctity, the sanctity here being the sanctity of ten Jews gathering together to form a minyan.

Rav Avi: I love that community and sanctity are synonyms here in that sentence.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. Those things actually also Torah reading is explicitly addressed by the Talmud on the gender front. And it says something interesting and kind of a little confusing at first. It says everyone can read from the Torah, go up to the Torah in their times, it's reading from the Torah, having an Aliyah, it's the same job. Everyone can do that.

And they say lest you're wondering even a woman can do that, even a child can do that, even people you might think are occupying some marginal space in one way or the other and maybe in terms of obligation. No, they can read from the Torah. But a woman shouldn't read from the Torah because of the honor of the community.

Rav Avi: Yes, the honor of the community which means what?

Rav Eitan: Well that's a good question Avi, what does that mean? Talmud doesn't spell it out. To the extent there's a medieval interpretation offered of it, there is only one, which is on some level it would be embarrassing to the community for a woman to read because it would imply that there were insufficiently educated men to do it. The term Kvod Hatzibur, the honor of the community, appears in four other places in the Talmud and in all of them it's actually around protocols around the Torah scroll where we're worried about not taking it seriously enough, like not having it rolled to the right place or the person coming up to it not being adequately dressed or any number of those sort of concerns. There's a sense of in the cultural context of this text it would have been self-evident to the listener that that's not your A-team of readers, that is not the way you run a serious event to have women read from the Torah.

Rav Avi: Yeah there's something interesting when you give us the other contexts here that it's this is going to sound maybe a little silly but it sounds to me like it's not about the woman it's about the Torah.
Like the message of that is coming to tell us it's really important when you read from the Torah, take it seriously, dress appropriately, prepare, have the right kind of person up there reading as opposed to like let me tell you about women and women's relationship with God. One of the aspects is it would be disrespectful for her to read from the Torah. It's not really coming in that context.

Rav Eitan: 100 percent correct.
I think it's actually a great insight in terms of like the direction and focus of the text. So look, the second you hear a sentence like that and obviously when you hear a sentence that's uncomfortable even to say a sentence like that as I explain it, the first question you have is oh well so what would that look like in a different context? And to the extent that sentence of oh that wouldn't be sufficiently dignified for a woman to read Torah just feels like out of whack with how we would think about something today, so how does that Halakha get applied? And there what we track and you see in the sources is there were historically two ways of thinking about texts that were about honor in this way. One is to say, maybe there's a dishonor here, but communities can decide to waive their honor to do things that are important to them. Like the Talmud also says, you shouldn't have as a fixed prayer leader, a young man whose beard has not yet filled in.

Like you can't hire as a cantor a 14-year-old. Right. But then the sources in a number of cases will say, yeah, but if you don't really have anyone else and that's the best person and the community decides it's in our interest to do that. Certainly if the community decides we need to have Youth Shabbat once a month because that's the only way we're going to keep people engaged, the community can waive their honor and forgo those things and a similar application would be, okay, an egalitarian oriented community could say, I understand the Talmud had this concern about honor, but it's our prerogative to let that go.

Rav Avi: So in that case you're saying, yeah, it is disrespectful a little bit and we live in a world of competing values and I have some other value that is making me think this is worthwhile and I have the prerogative to do that, but yeah, it's a little disrespectful.

Rav Eitan: That's right. And that's what makes that in some ways an easy work around and not entirely satisfying, I think to how most people today in the zone of asking this question would ask it. And so there is actually another school which thinks differently about this, which is that well, no, it's not that you can ever waive it if it's actually disrespectful, but there might be contexts where you've determined it's no longer disrespectful. So you have one really interesting source it comes up with Rav Yaakov Emden, another version comes up later with Rav Ben Tzion Abba Shaul, poskim that are imagining contexts where what if you're having a family minyan and the matriarch of the entire group wants to have an aliyah. It actually comes up in early modern sources.

Rav Avi: I mean she's the person with the most honor.

Rav Eitan: She is the most honored person in the room, right? Everyone agrees this is, show me the most honored person in the room, they will all point to her. Yeah. And while there's question of would you pull this off in practice, a number of those sources say, well yeah, in that context, sure, she could have an aliyah.

Rav Avi: And what time period are those from?

Rav Eitan: So you have this being raised first as kind of a thought experiment in the 1700s, and then it's coming up later context of the 20th century. There's Rabbi Daniel Sperber unearthed evidence in Baghdad that when Flora Sassoon who was like a magnate and very important woman in the community was present, she would sometimes get an aliyah in the shul of the Ben Ish Hai. So there were various contexts where it was so self-evident that a particular woman had that status that it was, oh, we're not waiving it, it's just that doesn't apply. And that's the kind of halakhic thinking that could lead you to say, oh, in our own context, you know, if you have women sitting on the Supreme Court, if you have just a context where it's obvious that the most important tasks in society and in the land are open irrespective of gender.
So yeah, transport that text from Chazal to today, they would not be concerned about that at all.

I want to emphasize for our listeners, this is not about we have to modernize this source. This is about listening to the source. The source says, hey, I'm concerned about the dignity of this ritual. And then the modern contemporary listener should say, I'm also really concerned about the dignity of this ritual.

What's the best way to think that through? Either maybe I have a prerogative following a school of the Beit Yosef and others to sort of waive that concern while acknowledging that it's there, or following the Bach and others I might have to say, but might be able to say, in my context I'm telling you this is dignified. The stronger egalitarian articulation is I'm actually starting to feel like it is undignified to deny half the room the right to an aliyah. And on some level that basic way of thinking through the Torah reading example can be extended, we get in all the nuances, addressing all the objections, to anything like Torah reading that requires a minyan. That is to say things that require a minyan are things that are not focused on people having individual obligations that are fulfilled necessarily.

What they are is important communal rituals that have to happen in the presence of a minyan that should only be led by someone whose presence and stature will not diminish from the august nature of what we're trying to create. The only last piece that has to be squared there is the question of counting in a minyan itself. And there the medieval position of Rabbeinu Tam is extremely important, where he essentially lays out that as long as you have some basic obligation in mitzvot, and he's very clear that we're talking about the obligation that everyone shares, like even the level of obligation that women share in the classical text where, okay, exempt from lulav, shofar, etc., doesn't matter, you're obligated in the basic concept and package of mitzvot.

Rav Avi: Which is essentially you're a Jewish adult.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, you're a Jewish adult, you might actually, right, he even connects it to children who will one day be obligated but also you're like a member of the Jewish people. Those people fundamentally count in a minyan and the reason that you don't just say ten kids make up a minyan or by extension ten women don't just make up a minyan in the time of Rabbeinu Tam, he says, is only for reasons of honor, the honor of heaven. The honor of heaven will be would be offended by doing otherwise. And interestingly Rabbeinu Simcha of Speyer, who was one of his students sort of following up on this logic, said, oh, so I think you can count a woman in a minyan according to Rabbeinu Tam.

Whether he meant only a tenth or he meant all of them that's a whole debate we get into in the book, but you see even in the medieval period there is basically a strand that says the minyan question too is also a question of what is dignified and honorable before God, not a question of obligation.

Rav Avi: Yeah, do you have a sense of there what the dignified and honor of heaven means? Like is that a I could imagine that it could be, well, if you, you know, once we say ten women, then the men will all never come home from work and come to davening, so that's, you know, it's gonna it's maybe a comment about the women but for the sake of the men and I'm curious if you have a sense of like what's at heart if we want to learn from it but not apply it in the same way?

Rav Eitan: When we saw these sources it seemed pretty straightforward to us. This is about who counts as head of household, who counts as making up a quorum for anything important. Do you look at this and say, yeah, this is a serious assembly of people, I would take this seriously for anything I would do in life? And Rabbeinu Tam there I think is saying, if that wouldn't be the case, then it is dishonorable to heaven that you have a lesser standard for what is required for a quorum in the synagogue than you would in the town hall. That seems to be the context.

Rav Eitan: And so hopefully listeners have a sense from what we just charted through that you could actually leave intact those assumptions about obligation gap based on gender in rabbinic sources. And there are precedents, there are bases, there are workarounds etc. that essentially you do not have to confront that non-egalitarian assignment of obligation in classical sources when thinking about running what we think of as the normal davenning space. However, and here we get particularly to the second edition. Yeah.

Listeners will also hopefully have noticed that there are a few not totally crossed T's and dotted I's on all the rituals you might think about here and also that there might be something unsatisfactory about what then you haven't gotten to the heart of the problem. I'm not just interested in opportunity I'm also interested in obligation as a signifier of dignity seriousness centrality etcetera. For instance this argument that we've charted out so far does not get you to a place where a woman can blow shofar for a man on the first day of Rosh Hashanah.

Rav Avi: I've been waiting for that one.

Rav Eitan: Right? That you can't do in the context if you're just sticking with the surface reading of original text in the rabbinic period. You would have to acknowledge that's a gendered mitzvah and therefore actually it's a limit like woman could blow shofar for herself she could blow shofar for other women but there would be a gender gap there that would be an obstacle. Right? Never mind the fact that for all the sources that I cited you there are some other sources that disagree with Rabbeinu Tam on the definition of minyan and say it is about obligation in all of those mitzvot or that think about Torah reading slightly differently or that have other ways of thinking about other components of the service where the obligation piece matters.

Rav Avi: Which means a different researcher who's researching with a different goal in mind is going to find their sources also.

Rav Eitan: Yeah that's right. And our goal in this book was not just to make an argument but to be thorough and comprehensive and honest and not to paper anything over. That said we wanted to sort of chart out well how might you address the question of the obligation gap head-on?

Rav Avi: Yeah so take us through that.

Rav Eitan: So Appendix A in the second edition of the book.

Rav Avi: It's a great start to any sentence. Everyone's like tell me more.

Rav Eitan: Ritual X and Appendix A that component lays out what we talk about as the concept of a category shift in Jewish law. And I want to explain this if I can by jumping to an example of laundry. Can I do that for a minute?

Rav Avi: Sure! This is going to be a example of what is a category shift but a different example from the one that we are talking about with gender and tefillah.

Rav Eitan: Okay great. And how might we apply it here. So the Mishnah says you're not allowed to do laundry in the days leading up to Tisha B'Av. Right. It's one of the things that is forbidden.

And then there's a text in the Babylonian Talmud hailing from Babylonia that says our ironing is like their laundry.

Rav Avi: Our ironing is like their laundry.

Rav Eitan: Our Babylonian ironing.

Rav Avi: Meaning I don't want to iron and they don't want to do laundry.

Rav Eitan: Good. So on one basic level it's saying in Babylonia the same way in the land of Israel they didn't do laundry before Tisha B'Av we don't iron clothes before Tisha B'Av. But the implication of that text is but we do do laundry. That is to say our ironing replaces their laundry. Later commentators explain this like what's going on here and they'll say well if you know anything about the water sources in the two areas the water in the land of Israel is full of rock and lime and therefore it's really good at knocking out dirt when you wash clothes in it.

Whereas in Babylonia they have the brackish water of the Euphrates and the Tigris and the irrigation canals that come out of them and essentially laundry didn't get clothes that clean or that fresh looking in Babylonia. The way you really spruce the garment up and made it look new again was by ironing it. We might say if we were doing our version of this question something like our dry cleaning. cleaning is like their laundry.

Rav Avi: Yeah, I was going to say I don't own an iron so I need an updated version of this story.

Rav Eitan: So I do love ironing clothes actually whenever I get the chance to, but it's not so often.

Rav Avi: Okay, so the moral here then would be don't, don't take your clothes to the dry cleaning in the week before Tisha B'Av. That's right. And why?

Rav Eitan: Okay, so the idea here is there's some underlying principle or idea which is part of the mourning ritual leading up to Tisha B'Av is hey, this is a time of destruction. This is a time of acting that out by looking a little bit disheveled. It's also practices on not getting a haircut and shaving, all of those things.

Rav Avi: Right, the mourning practice.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, you don't do this then. So don't make your clothing look brand new. And essentially in Babylonia they understand, oh I get it, laundry is one way of playing that out in that context, but actually in our context the better match for that is ironing.

Rav Avi: So what does this have to do with category shift?

Rav Eitan: So what you have here is there are basically two categories here. Category number one is the kinds of activities you can do to clothing that are kind of innocuous and don't matter and don't signify renewal and rejuvenation.

Think of just like folding something up and putting it on a shelf or shaking it out without putting it in water. That's fine. The Mishna comes along.

Rav Avi: It is the kinds that don't actually clean the thing, they just make us feel better.

Rav Eitan: That's right. Exactly right.

Rav Avi: Like if I folded it then I can pretend it's clean.

Rav Eitan: But the Mishna comes along and gives us the category of forbidden treatment of clothing and says you can't launder something, you can't put something that's dirty in water in order to clean it.
That's forbidden. The category shift is the Babylonian rabbis come along and they say actually in our world laundry, which we also have and we also do, has jumped categories. It has jumped to the permitted, insignificant, innocuous category of clothing care and the problematic category has been populated instead by ironing.

Rav Avi: So they're willing to look at their own lives, at their own world and context and at the technology in this instance of their own world and say if we want to reach the same goal, this action that was for them in one category, for us is in a different category.

Rav Eitan: Correct. And the category shift represents understanding that the goal is to apply the Halakha as accurately as possible, but that sometimes shifting circumstances means that that will play out differently.

Rav Avi: And what you're telling us is that this kind of category shift is a tool for thinking about Halakha, not that we have invented, but that we have inherited. We're not the first people to start to use this concept of category shift as a way of saying I want to most accurately apply Halakha to my life.
We have to remember that this is a tool on the table.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. And the laundry category shift, the laundry ironing category shift, is kind of a useful paradigm where you see the Talmud itself using it. And then in the book we detail a whole range of examples where this happens in the medieval period, in the modern period, where this is playing out. This model is something that we then think is really important for thinking about questions of gender as well.

Rav Avi: Yeah, so let's take it back into our question here about

Rav Eitan: because I held back one key data point, which is all those texts that say that women are exempt from various mitzvot, they actually don't say women are exempt from those mitzvot. They say women, slaves, and minors are exempt from those mitzvot.
There is a group of three people who are in some sort of more marginal social adjunct category in one way or the other, who are exempted. And once you see women in the context of slaves and minors, the category shift mindset asks you, oh wait a minute, was this about biology in the first place? Was this about chromosomal makeup in the first place? Or was this about a certain kind of social status lacking a certain kind of independence? And if I live in a world in which it is no longer coherent, never mind does it feel good, to group women with slaves and minors, maybe women have jumped categories from the un-obligated to the obligated.

Rav Avi: Yeah, I'll say like if we speak, you know, I guess I'll speak experience of being a woman and engaging in texts. I don't know about maybe the first time, but I would say maybe even many times or most times and for some people all times when you come across that triplicate, you feel it a little bit and it and it makes you ask like, really? Is this is there something right here? And for some people that just turns them away from texts entirely, right? Oh, they said women, slaves, and minors, this is not for me, this is a text that can't apply to me.

And in a and in that rejection there is maybe some actually insight as to this need for a category shift. Is there something that people read and say, this may have been coherent for them and it feels incoherent to me, it feels wrong or different to me. And that's maybe the indicator for us, that indicator light that comes on in our brains that says like, maybe consider the possibility of category shift here.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, and here too it's really helpful to see there have been other examples of this, like the Mishna also exempts from all kinds of mitzvot the cheresh, those who cannot hear, most of whom also could not speak, but that that character is always grouped also with minors and with the shoteh, someone who is mentally incompetent in a broader range of ways.
And so then later people who are confronting cases of those who are deaf but who speak sign language, who are serving as accountants, who are doing any number of jobs that people are requiring strong mental faculties from will say,

Rav Avi: I like that accountants is your number one example of strong mental faculties. I come from a whole family of accountants so they're going to love that part of this episode.

Rav Eitan: You want the numbers right. There are poskim who will say, oh well that's not the kind of deaf person that the Talmud was talking about, that's someone who never learned sign language, who never got an education and therefore can be compared to those other characters, but actually the juxtaposition itself teaches you about it.
So in the context of gender, right, the argument would be oh, what the Mishna is really talking about is people who lack social, political, economic independence, like let me give you three examples from the time of the late Roman Empire: women, slaves, and minors, who also everyone would have agreed couldn't serve in the Senate and any number of other things. But those were examples meant to illustrate a category.

Rav Avi: They aren't the category itself.

Rav Eitan: That's correct. And if you buy that way of thinking about it, which again we leave for the readers to decide, well then you're left to a whole different form of analysis where you just say, well kind of of course everything ends up being egalitarian on the ritual front, because if I were raising my daughter today, and here I'm speaking very directly, when I raised my daughter and raised her with our expectation that she would wear tefillin every morning and we also were studying Mishna Brachot as part of learning Seder Zeraim for her bat mitzvah, when we got to nashim avadim u'ktanim I said, you understand like that does not apply to you. Now she's going to have to come as a guest on the podcast, how did that land, how did she sit with it, what are all the ways it's complicated as a woman to sit in that tradition? But what it does mean is the kind of teaching, the kind of rhetoric was yeah, you're in this with your abba in the same way in terms of obligation and we're in the same category of responsibility here.

Rav Avi: Yeah, I think there's so much gained with this approach. It's it's cleaner, it's easier, it's faster, it's so much easier for you to say to your daughter or for me to say to mine, this is you're not in that category.

I'll just voice like experientially that I think there's also there's gained and lost, that there is for me as a reader moments when I am reading and I think, man, I don't want to be in that category of nashim, and there are moments that I think like oh, thank God, there are so much there are so many women in our tradition and there's so much thinking about women and acknowledgment that gender is real and that women's experience is different. And the same way that I think like all of modern feminist theory and thought is still really actively playing out that question of when do we want to say we're just the same and when do we want to say like no, women's life experience and perspective is completely different, makes me want to say like yes, I want this approach, and I want that first approach. I don't want to have to say well, I'm not really a woman. I don't really count in that category in every instance.
That could be freeing and that could also be denying something of my identity that I don't really know that I want to give up on.

Rav Eitan: I think one of the things that you and I love talking about on this podcast that's reflected in the book and in the way we talk about things, we really believe in holding multiple frames at the same time. We really think that only adds more possibility, more directionality, more directions on the compass of the ways that we may point, and we don't have to negate one frame in order to affirm the other. And sometimes history makes clear which one really fully gets adopted, but we don't have to issue that verdict in advance.

Rav Avi: This is really helpful. I'm so grateful for this and again I'll underscore that listeners who want to learn more could go to your bookstore, go online and find Gender Equality and Prayer in Jewish Law and learn a lot more about this. I want to point out that we didn't address a question of mechitzah, which I know people often group in with these other questions, and I just want to point to the fact that we have a different prior episode where we discussed what is a mechitzah, what's it about, how does it function, and how might you think about a mechitzah in your community. I wanted to end with a question, really a personal question that is something that I think about a lot as I engage with this book and the scholarship that you've done and work with you every day at Hadar, which is that for me as a woman, I need this book.

I need this book in order to participate in tefillah in the ways that I want to participate. And it strikes me that you as a man actually had a lot more communities and options open to you, and to know that you and Rabbi Michal Rosenberg spent so many years really devoted to this question. You said you were a researcher with an agenda. To just ask a little bit about what made that agenda so clear to you that you wanted to devote so much of your life, the years pre-the teshuvah and the years that you've devoted since then, building Hadar as an organization and writing and teaching and just really working so hard as your life mission to make sure that these halakhic egalitarian communities of Torah, Avodah, and Chesed can exist.
Where does that motivation come from for you?

Rav Eitan: I appreciate the question. I think it's important to begin with a humble acknowledgment that we are the product of our circumstances in many deep ways. I've always said jokingly but also dead seriously, had I been born Catholic, I definitely would have been an altar boy and I would not necessarily have found my way to Judaism. There are extraordinary people who find their way to different destiny points from their origins, but most of us are deeply products of our circumstances.

And here I want to acknowledge, I think there is a deep way in when I was in college, I met, fell in love with someone for whom the egalitarian premise of practice was just a non-negotiable departure point. I love this answer. It's a love letter, this book. But instead I decided to stick it out for 25 years and have three kids and an amazing partnership and life.

And I think it's also just important though to note that, so in a certain way you could say this whole book is a little bit of a love letter to her, which is to say I mean it in a deep sense of I felt that relationship plunged me into how do I work this out? Some of it I came by from my own background. I grew up going to both non-egalitarian and egalitarian shuls and schools. So in some ways I always felt comfortable in both environments, but the sense that I needed a synthesis of my own, there's no question that my life partner relationship plunged me into that with more intensity, in a way that had I married someone who was, honey, that's very nice, but we're going to be going to such and such place and I really don't care what I do, I can't promise you that I'd be sitting at this table having this discussion. That said, I do also remember though a number of moments.

I'll just name two of them. One, showing up to college, feeling like I was functioning as an adult independently for the first time, and it started just to seem completely incohe- incoherent and unintelligible that I would be sitting in a lecture in a section with someone I was expected to treat as my intellectual and social equal and suddenly we walked into God's house and that person is on the side and marginalized and is never going to be offered revi'i. That didn't make sense to me on some deep level. Whatever relationships also reinforced that for me.

And the second inflection point was when I had my oldest child who was my daughter. It was also kind of unimaginable to me that I would with respect to a whole bunch of things say hey you don't need to worry about that. It was like my entire Judaism is you have to worry about that for myself for others for when I speak communally it's like we're trying to hold ourselves to high expectations. I wasn't going to have high expectations for my daughter? I think that was impossible for me to process.

Rav Avi: One of the I've been your colleague for many years but I was first a student of yours actually I was in the Hadar summer program in 2010. And one of the first things I remember learning from you was this idea that just in the most basic terms halakhah and morality don't conflict. And if you find yourself in a moment where what you understand to be the halakhah and what you experience as the moral correct answer are at odds that's not a moment where you have to pick am I going to be moral or am I going to study halakhah? That's an invitation and a mandate to do more learning because either you're misunderstanding morality or you're misunderstanding the halakhah. And that was really transformative to me and I think has really shaped the way that I think about the future.

But I think that like for here there are many people who have encountered those similar experiences that you're describing and the result was okay so I guess halakhah doesn't have all the answers. So I'm curious if you want to share like one more sentence about what made you then go back into the halakhah and not say like okay well I guess halakhah didn't have all the answers? If this is what the halakhah says and this is what I know to be true about my daughter and my spouse and the world and the person standing next to me what sent you back into the halakhah? Because I learned it from you but who did you learn it from?

Rav Eitan: It's a great way to close because in some ways the two arguments that we laid out here represent on some ways stations on my intellectual and spiritual journey in this regard which is to say what you heard in the first approach of like well where does this apply where does it not apply where can we get around it where do we have to confront it reflected almost a little more of well the halakhah is what it is but it might be a little more complex than you think and you might be able to like not have to worry about it in a number of places. And that I think reflected at an earlier point of time before I was so wise to make such pronouncements to you and others wondering I don't know I don't know is it all in here like can it really provide all the answers? Maybe what we can do best is to say well I don't want to violate this thing how do I not trip the wires that I shouldn't trip and find a way around it? And there might be some limits. And the category shift argument reflected a sort of deepening conviction of like now this should also be like pointing me in the direction I should be walking.

It should be functioning as much as a compass as an electric fence and more so. And the category shift on some level emerged from yeah an increased investment in the feeling of this is God's will this is God's word this is the Torah this is our tradition's treasury for millennia of course it has what to teach and what to direct me on this. For me the most profound aspect of the learning journey has been you will find those things. As you said you don't always find what you think you're setting out to look for or you may find that some of your assumptions whether it's about morality or how to structure the world were limited and need recalibrating.

But I really believe that and hope to spare whether it's students or listeners the doubt that maybe actually you will completely hit a dead end. I really do believe even though some projects can take a lifetime or a couple lifetimes that's what this discourse of halakhah is about and I just really believe it's possible.

Rav Avi: Okay we talked for longer than we were supposed to but we do want to turn it to the room and hear. We'll take a couple questions and then I'll say at the end, if you have a question you want us to record for a future episode, don't leave, come up, I have my computer and we'll get everyone's questions down so that we can do those questions in the future.

Participant 1: Hi, I'm Noa. Rav Avi, you mentioned at some point during the podcast sort of a tension between wanting womanhood to be seen as the same as being a man and also wanting to have the distinctiveness of gender and femininity. And I'm curious how that relates to questions of dress and head coverings and other things where gender feels very important and sensitive and sort of how you toe the line between wanting to be seen as an equal and also wanting femininity to be distinctive and important in its own right.

Participant 2: Thank you so much for all of that. I'm curious, so the paradigm shift or category shift was based on a notion that you have this tripartite group of women, slaves, and minors and they are this marginalized group and then nowadays they are not and so then you have a category shift. I'm curious how you would respond to an argument that I think you hear often times from non-egalitarian Jewish circles where they say it's not that they were marginalized groups, but actually that they ought to be marginalized groups and they might have some kind of complementarian theology that men are over here doing this thing and women are over there doing that thing and that's actually how it's supposed to be. How would you respond to that argument?

Participant 3: If what I'm hearing from the argument is that we shouldn't use the evidence of historical oppression to justify marginalization in the present, right? So evidence of patriarchal structures shouldn't be used to justify patriarchal structures today. And I guess what I'm wondering is, first of all, if that's right, but second, if that is right, are there other sort of structural oppressions that are documented through the halacha that we should also revisit in our current practice?

Rav Avi: I so appreciate this question and we should have coffee and talk about this for a very long time.

It's something that I think about a lot and for me I have done a lot of thinking about it in terms of minhag versus mitzvot. I wear tefillin, they're top three mitzvot for me, like I love the shofar, I love my tefillin. I don't wear a kippah because for me personally that always felt like it was gendered of a gender presentation that I was not interested in taking on. I feel there are things that I love about sitting on a women's side of a mechitzah, there are things that I love about lighting Shabbos candles and feeling like I'm getting to inherit a Jewish women's legacy.
And also, I use the title Rabbi and I study the Talmud a lot which historically women didn't do and I wear my tefillin. So I'm sort of I would say live walking that balance. I try to think of it as a superpower. I think sometimes people who have mixed influences in their life are like well I'm not really this or that you know I'm not really American or Israeli or whatever the mixed inheritance is and I try to really think of it as both.

Like how lucky am I that I get to inherit everything that a Jewish woman created and those tchinot are mine and I get to inherit everything that the tradition originally didn't offer to women. The Gemara is mine also, the tefillin are mine also. So I'm trying to create a life where I really get I feel so lucky to live in this moment and to work at a place like Hadar and build a world like the world Hadar is building where everything is available to me as opposed to having to cut myself off from those things.

Rav Eitan: I'll quickly answer these three you can add if you want.
On the question of, so your formulation, you asked is it correct, the oppressions of the past to the present. So I would say I think there's some overlap of what we said with how you put it but it is not how I would put it. And I think in that sense I would say I am not committed to seeing the exclusions of the past as oppressions. Sometimes I'm committed to not seeing them as oppressions but admittedly minimally am not committed to that.

I am more interested in what is the charitable reading of understanding what it might have meant and how can I charitably understand why the gap that I feel between where I'm sitting and what a surface application of that text today would entail would result in whether we call it oppression, exclusion, something that just feels religiously off or wrong today, is not the right application of Torah. And I think on some deeper level, it's to say if the Mishnah were alive today, the author of that Mishnah were alive today, do I have a good argument for saying, yeah, they would totally agree that the consequence would be a gender egalitarian approach. In general, I think this is the beauty of halakhah, one of the things to me is, you don't have to have fully laid out what you would have thought had you lived in the second century. I don't know what it would have been like to live in the second century.
I don't know what it was like without indoor plumbing, all sorts of things. I know what I know. Actually, I know what I know better than they know what it is today. But my job is to be a custodian of the idea behind it and to figure out what that is.
And what we do here is to be sort of also in that discourse of watching the other poskim in all these times and places do that and how could we do that in our own context.

Rav Avi: I'll just say one note on language, which is that for me, I try to, I have a masters in women's studies, I try to learn everything that I can from that field, but then make sure that I don't lose nuance of what Judaism is giving me when I try to apply one to the other. I remember sitting with living in a world where the patriarchy is the same as the wrong, but then also knowing that my patriarchs are the most important, I have this personal relationship, my name is Avi, I'm named after an Avraham, I feel so connected to the patriarchs. And so, is it right for me to live in a world where I'm like, oh, the patriarchy is what I'm fighting, but also it's a patriarchal religion.

Does that mean it's a bad religion? A discriminating religion? And does that mean I get to be the inheritors of the relationship that Avraham had with God? Because I want that last piece. Which is not to deny patriarchy as the way that it has caused a lot of women a lot of pain throughout the years, but also to make sure that I use language in a way that helps me uncover nuance instead of shut down nuance.

Rav Eitan: I'll answer this, and I really apologize that we're not going to have more time for more questions that come up.
So my simple answer to the question of, well what do you say to folks who are like, no, it's supposed to be that way? I don't see evidence for that. I don't see evidence for it really prior primarily to 20th century apologetics. That is not to say that you don't see evidence of mitzvot that took on gendered meaning. Candlelighting is a great example of an example of something where the rabbinic sources, the Shulchan Aruch says, there is no difference in obligation in candlelighting between men and women.

Even as we know culturally, historically, etc. and in rabbinic sources, that was delegated to women as a mitzvah. So it doesn't mean there's no delegation, it doesn't mean there's no culture, it doesn't mean there's no unbroken tradition of genders doing those mitzvot in different ways. But the notion that there is something particularly essentially important about the exemption, I do not see that. I will just end with quoting and giving my own spin on it, Professor Vered Noam, Israel Prize winner, prominent Israeli intellectual, but also someone who's been active in thinking from a religious perspective about what does feminism mean and how does it play out, says, and we actually took inspiration from this on one of our values posters. If you looked on the, right here, gender equality, where it is, right there, okay? If you noticed actually, what is the verse on the gender equality? It's an unexpected ve'atem tihyu li mamlekhet kohanim vegoy kadosh. You will be a nation of priests and a holy nation. What does that have to do with gender equality? Well, Vered Noam says about that, that is, from this week's parshah, that is actually the key sentence if you want to understand anything about the Jewish culture of expectation, which is that most people have religions where there's a bunch of priests who are supposed to do the stuff and everyone else is supposed to sort of be whatever it is.

I'm painting with a ridiculously broad brush. But in any event, the chiddush, the innovation of this part of the Torah is we're doing something new here. Everybody is going to be a priest. Everyone is going to be obligated in mitzvah.

And that, she says, shows you that on some level, where things are always meant to go is if you have maximal, whatever bandwidth you you have of freedom, you are meant to use to serve God. That is the entire narrative of the Exodus story: I am freeing you so that you could serve me. And the corollary of that in a gendered context is that, yeah, if we get to a place through the blessings of feminism, all sorts of innovations in society where we feel gender does not have to be a limiter on people's freedom and we still work towards that reality, that that means increased obligation for more people. The cute way I do that, I try to articulate that point, invoking Dr. Martin Luther King, is that the arc of the halakhic universe is long, but it bends towards hiyuv.

It bends towards obligation. That's what that pasuk gets to, that's where I think the vector is pointing and that's why I don't think we ever want someone to be exempt, even as there's lots of context where that makes great sense and we do what we need to do in various contexts, but our dream is a world where as many people as possible are serving God through mitzvot.

Rav Avi: Yeah, thank you. I want to thank you for this episode, I want to thank you for this book, I want to thank you for creating a yeshiva where this plays out every single day as we move from learning to tefillah to learning to tefillah, and for building a world wherein we can really live out these values together.

It is sort of customary to end a podcast with thank-yous, but I want to do them sort of off-script and in a very genuine way to say that while we have a role in creating Responsa Radio, it really could not happen without a team at Hadar. Jeremy Tabick, who has been working with us for years to help create this episode and knows what's in every single episode. When we can't remember if we've made an episode, we call Jeremy to say, did we say this in an episode? And Chana Kupetz, who's been helping us on this, and David Khabinsky who records and edits the episodes for us, and to David Zvi Kalman whose idea it was that, Hey, do you guys get along? Maybe you could make a Responsa Radio podcast?

Rav Eitan: I think he said something like, You guys seem to have a nice rapport and you're not boring.

Rav Avi: Yes, he originally, the original tagline was, A not boring podcast about halakhah, I think was. So hopefully we've lived up to that today. And maybe we'll close just with a gratitude to our audience for being here at the Hadar National Shabbaton.

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