A balancing act

"Some people would be hysterical to see me touching this," says Eve Steinberg, Beth Tfiloh's executive director, as she removes one of the scrolls from the curtained ark at the front of the sanctuary to show a visitor.

Jewish law reserves certain uses of the Torah for men during religious services, and some people have never seen women handling the Torah, but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it, Ms. Steinberg says.

A change that will take place once the mechitzah goes up relates to a series of prayers that men say during early morning services. Included is a statement thanking God for not making them women, which is meant to express gratitude for having obligations to God that are assigned only to Jewish men, Steinberg explains.

But because some women find it offensive, men will start saying the prayer softly or silently, and women will no longer be expected to say amen to it.

Most congregants greeted his announcements with support, Wohlberg says, although he knows that with such a diverse group, there will always be different opinions.

One enthusiastic supporter is Nina Auster, a graduate of Beth Tfiloh's high school and now a senior at Brandeis, a Jewish-sponsored university in Waltham, Mass. She says she would have preferred a divider between men and women all along, but she continued attending Beth Tfiloh to be with her family.

"Now they're implementing the mechitzah and it's amazing," Ms. Auster says. "There are a lot of kids from the high school that ... have grown a lot within their Judaism ... but they're not going to stay at Beth Tfiloh if it doesn't learn how to adapt to [this generation]."

Michelle Lax, whose children attend the school, says if she had her druthers, she'd sit with her whole family during services. "I'm an ardent feminist ... but because [the services] are so spectacular, I'm willing to [come here], even though women don't have equal access."

"I have no problem with separate seating ... but I think a mechitzah is demeaning to women," says Liebe Diamond, a longtime member of the synagogue and one of the nation's first female orthopedic surgeons. "It turns [women] into a sexual object rather than a complete person - they're separated specifically because they are female."

Dr. Diamond was the only member of Beth Tfiloh's religious-services committee to vote against the mechitzah (although not the only person to disagree, she says).

But she is too deeply connected to Beth Tfiloh to let this issue get under her skin. For 16 years she has worshiped three times a day here, a practice that's made her eligible to wear certain religious garments rarely worn by women in Orthodox synagogues.

"A lot of people came up to me after the decision [to add a mechitzah] and asked if I'd leave, and I said no," Diamond says. "We have to live in the possible world, and this for me is the best of all possible worlds. I've never run into anything that's perfect."

Whatever their disagreements, the congregants seem to take pride in the sense that Beth Tfiloh is a place where people like Diamond, Lax, and Auster all feel welcome.

Greenberg, the New York author, says that in her own life, feminism and Modern Orthodoxy coexist harmoniously. "I don't think every single thing has to be exactly equal and identical at every given moment, if, on balance, [men and women are treated as] equals in the eyes of tradition and in the eyes of the community," she says.

Eventually she would like to see Modern Orthodox women ordained as rabbis. To her, it would be a natural outcome of the "quiet but profound revolution" over the past few decades that has opened up the study of rabbinic texts to Jewish women.

She accepts, though, that change often comes in small steps, such as Beth Tfiloh's current efforts. "We have a long way to go to get there, but taking the past with us as we move along is what orthodoxy is about."

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