In a religious society constantly thirsty for authentic leadership, three women were certified earlier this month as halachic and spiritual leaders by the Susi Bradfield Women’s Institute of Halakhic Leadership (WIHL).
Rabbanit Avigayil Unterberg Nouriel, Rabbanit Idit Mevorach-Shaag, and Rabbanit Hila Naor joined 19 others already certified by the institute out of Ohr Torah Stone (OTS).
The WIHL’s intensive five-year program covers a wide range of topics in Jewish law, including Shabbat and festivals, kashrut, mourning, family purity, and marriage.
The women have been certified as morat hora’a and manhiga ruchanit, meaning spiritual leaders qualified to guide in matters of Jewish law, having passed exams on these and other topics. The certificate and title (Morot Hora’ah) authorizes them to give halachic rulings on the subjects they covered.
Mevorach-Shaag’s sister-in-law, Yehudit Mevorach, is the sister of hostage Avinatan Or, kidnapped to Gaza by Hamas on October 7 and still held by the terrorist group, along with 119 others. Or’s girlfriend, Noa Argamani, was rescued in an IDF operation earlier this month.
“We are living in a time that makes connections difficult, especially now [with the] political upheavals and during the war, [when] there is a feeling of fear and dread in the air,” said program director Rabbanit Devorah Evron. “That is why during this period it is even more important for women to fight for their sisters and their colleagues,” she added.
OTS announced last week that Rabbanit Chamutal Shoval had been appointed as the new director of WIHL, taking over at the helm from Evron, who is stepping down after seven years in the role. Shoval is herself an alumna of the program.
The fight for women Torah scholars in Israel
Five years is no small commitment of time. Naor, 48, uprooted her family from the North to be able to complete the program.
“I’ve searched for this type of learning for years. Back then, learning, at the level that exists today, [with] today’s convenience and access – we weren’t there yet. I took the initiative and was active about it, learning on my own [and] with friends, but I was looking for something established that could give me a deeper level of learning,” she said.
Conversations about Halacha can sometimes begin with: “I have a problem with this law,” and the response can often be, “But this is the law, it is not flexible.”
Naor says she always knew “that wasn’t a comprehensive answer.”
“I knew it wasn’t that simple,” she said. “Those conversations would always end with, ‘This is what Halacha dictates,’” although she knew that “couldn’t be the final answer.”
“I always loved to learn Halacha and everything [else],” she said, “but once I started learning it in this framework, my love for it, and for learning it, inexplicably [increased]. I felt that I [had] arrived at a place that was correct and accurate for me. The halachic world is deep and wide and fascinating.”
She explained, “You think you’ll come and you’ll know things, and you’ll learn. These five years have shown me how much I don’t know and how much more there is to learn. It doesn’t end; these five years are only the beginning.”
OTS has 32 educational institutions, social projects, outreach programs, and leadership development initiatives for men and women.
The WIHL program is one of a few that are currently attempting to increase opportunities for women to contribute significantly to the Jewish community in professional ways. It includes training in pastoral care, as well as learning leadership skills, to ensure that graduates are well-prepared to address the multifaceted challenges and opportunities they will encounter in their roles.
OTS director Rabbi Dr. Kenneth Brander addressed the graduates, “We see bottom-up leadership creating transformative change in our country – soldiers and citizens are defining our generation. The demand for your Torah – the demand for women Torah scholars – is coming from the bottom up, from the people in Israel and the Diaspora.”
Of course, gaps still exist – both in Israel and the United States – and “change needs to be happening at every level,” said Unterberg Nouriel.
She explained that “In Israel, the big gap [between men and women’s halachic education] is when and how they start learning Gemara, which is the basis of everything.”
When her students ask her why it is important, Unterberg Nouriel explains that “Gemara is the language of Judaism,” she said. “If you can’t learn Gemara, if you don’t understand what it is and what it is doing, then you can’t really learn Halacha, because it is at the base of everything that we do.”
“Here in Israel,” she continued, “in the religious-Zionist world, men start learning in a yeshiva tichonit (national-religious high school). In seventh grade, they are doing morning seder ([intensive, in-depth learning of a particular Gemara section, learned in pairs]. Women, in contrast, never have obligatory Gemara learning – even in the select high schools that have it, it’s a regular class” so the learning doesn’t delve as deep.
After that, “maybe they go to midrasha (seminary), maybe they don’t, there’s no hesder [intensive yeshiva study years before the army] for women, so if they want to do the army, sometimes they attend a midrasha, sometimes they don’t. Men in the same circles usually default to hesder, so they [automatically] get another three years [of intensive learning] under their belt. So, even if a woman does go to midrasha, it’s only for one year. There’s so much catchup to do.”
Naor added, “Young girls today, those who choose halachic lifestyles, come from educational systems in which their experiences actually push them away from Halacha. It is boring, something they ‘have to do.’ It gets painted to them in colors of what is ‘permitted’ and what is ‘forbidden,’ and lacks the nuances therein. They learn specific halachot that the schools think they need to know, that their home structures think they need to know, which is fine, and is also important; that is a baseline to Halacha that is so important” [for them to acquire]. But many layers to it go beyond that, and they are either afraid to approach that or are not even properly aware of it.
So, as they grow older and plow through the educational system, “it gets easier for educators to teach them, and for them to learn, things that are more thought oriented – things like Jewish philosophy, Hassidut, and Gemara. When they learn Halacha, it becomes a harder thing to come up against, because then they get hit with, ‘Well, what if I’m doing something wrong? What if I should be doing something differently?’ The question becomes, how do I deal with it? What do I do? How will this affect my day-to-day? So sometimes they prefer to not touch it. It can rattle [you]. Something happens to them when they meet that nuance and that depth found in those texts, and they realize that they don’t know it well enough. And this is a constant process.”
Naor will continue to teach Halacha – as she did previous to her certification – to the girls studying at Midreshet Lindenbaum, a gap-year and pre-and-post-army women’s learning center. It also hosts the WIHL program.
Unterberg Nouriel, who will also continue in her teaching post, explained, “I always knew I wanted to teach and that I wanted to teach Torah. I started teaching at one of the gap year programs, and I realized that I didn’t have the level of expertise to be the teacher that I wanted to be. I also saw that my students needed female halachic role models.”
She sensed “that they weren’t connecting to the world of Halacha as something that belonged to them, that, rather, it was a male-dominated field that was forced upon them by men from 1,000 or 2,000 years ago and was just restrictive of their lives and wasn’t a conversation that they had a voice in.”
Which is why she decided to study Halacha. “I felt that the next generation of Jews – not only women – but women and men, needed to see a world of Halacha in which the voices of men and women were reflected.
“I came to become a better-qualified teacher,” she said. “I have more breadth and depth of knowledge, not only to [be able to] teach the subject that I teach – but to answer the questions that [my students] have, to address the issues that they are [grappling with].”