Some fifteen or twenty years ago, my family’s home phone rang a week before Passover. It was a close friend of my mother’s, calling to discuss a brisket recipe in advance of the holiday. What makes the phone call memorable, however, is that the friend was Blu Greenberg, Orthodox Judaism’s leading feminist activist. And my mother was a co-founder and long-time board member of the feminist organization that Blu had founded.

I laughed at the incongruity of one feminist calling another for a recipe. My mother laughed as well, but she also noted there was a lesson there. Orthodox Jewish feminism, she suggested, should likely look different from its mainstream, secular cousin.

I have thought of that phone call—and the conversation that followed—often in the years since, particularly since I married my wife and we started our own family. And that memory has hovered often in my mind as I have struggled to reconcile the egalitarian values of contemporary America with the central texts of Jewish tradition.

In contemporary Jewish life, the most visible site of the struggle to reconcile feminism and tradition is the synagogue. Perhaps strangely, the role of women in communal prayer has emerged as a central denominational fault line in American Judaism. The presence of women clergy, the participation of women prayer leaders, and the absence of the traditional barrier—the mechitza—that separates the sexes at prayer instantly identify a synagogue as either Orthodox or not.

The prominence of that particular fault line is not mere accident. Rather, the debates over gender and prayer within Jewish tradition reflect, I think, an approach, and a set of tensions, that contain far broader lessons.

So let us explore those debates. But before doing so, a brief word about the tradition in which they occur: The tradition is the halakha—or Jewish legal system. The halakha begins with the biblical text; but it takes concrete and authoritative form in the Talmud and writings of the rabbis that lived in the several hundred years before and after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem (70 CE). And over the last two thousand years, the halakha has developed exponentially as rabbis of every generation have clarified, applied, and distinguished the rulings of their predecessors.

Like most legal systems, halakha is enormously (though not endlessly) malleable, particularly in the hands of knowledgeable and creative adjudicators. Human language can never fully describe reality as it exists, let alone predict or prescribe realities yet to come. All texts thus require interpretation. But the duty of interpretation is not a licence for fabrication. As readers, we are ethically bound to read faithfully: to try, where possible, to discern that which the author intended, and where that is not possible, to discern what the author might have intended, in light of what we know about what the author did intend.

Those duties apply all the more powerfully when the text we interpret is God’s Word. And yet, those interpretive duties are also made more complicated: God’s ways are not our ways. If he speaks through human beings, who is to say that his meaning is the same as that intended by his messenger? And perhaps his meaning for me is different from his meaning for you. Such are the inevitable problems of discerning God’s will. But God did not just give Scripture; he also gave law. And law is a communal project. The field of interpretation is limited, then, not just by one’s own sense of the plausible but by that of the larger community of the faithful. Interpretation in halakha requires attention not just to text but also to the text’s adherents.

Let us turn, then, to the question of prayer within that tradition. Today, observant Jews (at least the men—but more on this later) pray three times daily. Each of the three prayers must occur within a set, several-hour window linked to the rising and setting of the sun. The content of the prayers differs slightly, with additional psalms and biblical passages received in the morning. But the core of each prayer—a silent murmuring of nineteen specific blessings into which we are meant to pour our personal struggles and requests—is consistent.

From where do these practices derive? The Talmud offers a verse in Deuteronomy (11:3) that exhorts the Jewish people to obey God’s commandments and “to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all of your heart and all of your soul.” In a famous comment on the verse, the sages of the Talmud explain, “What is a ‘service’ that is performed in the heart? This refers to prayer.”

The selection is striking. Latent in that verse, and in the sages’ attendant commentary, is a tension: on the one hand, prayer is an expression of love and a movement of the heart; on the other, it is an act of obedience to a commandment and the performance of a “service”—a Hebrew root (a-v-d) that also means work, labour, or even servitude. We do not generally think of love as forthcoming on demand. Nor do we generally think of servitude as pouring from one’s heart. Yet the phrase “service of the heart” merges both concepts, and does nothing to resolve their apparent contradiction.

That tension becomes more pronounced in two great debates among the ancient rabbis: The first debate concerns prayer’s origins: “Rabbi Yossi, son of Rabbi Ḥanina, said: ‘the prayers were instituted by the Patriarchs.’ Rabbi Joshua son of Levi said: ‘the prayers were instituted based on the daily offerings sacrificed in the Temple.’” That debate is nominally historical. But it is actually theological. Should we pray as our ancient ancestors did in a time before formal institutions, whenever events and emotions move us? Or do worship in the manner that Israelites sacrificed in the temple, with rigour, discipline, and consistency?

The second debate concerns the content of prayer, and here the stakes are more explicit: “Rabban Gamliel said, ‘a person must pray the prescribed eighteen blessings each day. . . .’ Rabbi Eliezer said, ‘if a person recites only fixed prayers, his prayers are no longer genuine supplications.’” Here again, we have deeply conflicting views about how best to serve God. By codifying a precise text for daily prayer, Rabban Gamliel emphasizes the universal aspects of the divine-human connection. We can all pray from the same text, he suggests, because our struggles and requests from God are more similar than they are different. He acknowledges that the struggle to formulate one’s own thoughts can inhibit spiritual connection. It is easier to speak when one has a script. And he suggests that religious devotion need not be spontaneous. Humans can worship through consistency, precision, and the fulfillment of clearly prescribed duty.

By contrast, Rabbi Eliezer emphasizes the individual rather than the universal. Our challenges and our relationships to God are particular, and no single text can capture the full range of messages we might wish to convey to him. Praying from a set text, he suggests, is stifling. Worship requires creativity, individuation, and genuine feeling, not merely adherence and compliance.

Strikingly, these ancient tensions are never fully resolved. In practice, we centre the formula decreed by Rabban Gamliel. But we are enjoined to supplement that formula with communal and personal additions—and to ensure that the formulaic does not become rote. Likewise, although the Talmud offers a nominal reconciliation in the debate between Rabbi Yossi and Rabbi Hanina over the origins of prayer, that reconciliation is delightfully inconclusive. “The prayers were originally instituted by the Patriarchs,” the rabbis explain, “but the Sages then based them on Temple offerings.”

With that foundation, let us return to the present, and to the problem of gender. The problem, in brief, is that the Talmud clearly asserts that women are obligated in “prayer.” But it seems clear that, for many generations, Jewish women—even those of unquestioning piety—rarely adhered to the model of thrice-daily, formulaic prayer articulated in the Talmud and ratified by millennia of (male) Jewish practice. And it seems even clearer that women rarely (if ever) led communal prayer in the synagogue.

For some of the great rabbis of the past few hundred years, that history of practice is instructive. Women, they argue, have never been obligated in the rigid formalities of daily prayer. They may conform to those formalities as a praiseworthy act of piety. But they do so out of choice, not command. Thus, when the Talmud speaks of a woman’s obligation to pray, it refers not to those formalities but to a more basic obligation—the requirement to beseech God in moments of need. Women are obligated, one might say, in the prayer of the patriarchs but not in the prayer of the temple sacrifices.

From the perspective of formal halakha, that view is almost certainly a minority one. Most of the great authorities have—at least nominally—rejected this view, believing women to be obligated in the formalities of daily prayer just as men. And yet, these same authorities have simultaneously endorsed women’s right to rely on the minority view, and especially women who find themselves busy with the raising of a family and the running of a household. That reality, in turn, suggests a question. When it comes to discerning the view of halakha, philosophically if not technically, where precisely should we look?

Communal practice is owed its due, and not just in a formal sense. In halakha, as in many legal systems, communal practice is highly persuasive when determining legal requirements. But the technical legal perspective is not the only perspective. And in addition to influencing the requirements of law, it seems to me, widespread practice provides a sort of theological evidence about the lessons we ought to draw from the law.

The question of how much philosophical weight we assign to the widespread practice of pious Jewish women thus turns on something very similar to the tension at the root of Jewish prayer. Here, too, we must navigate between different poles: between the formalities of law and the flexibilities of intuitive practice.

The question of women’s obligation in prayer is thus doubly bound up with tensions latent in the rabbinic understanding of prayer. Those tensions provide the basis for distinguishing between two different categories of prayer—the intuitive and the formal—and thus the cabining of women’s obligation only to one. And those same tensions also underlie the question of whether the tradition approves of that very cabining.

Let us turn now from questions of individual obligation to those of communal leadership. In particular, consider the views of two contemporary progressive theorists of halakha.

Rabbi Judith Hauptmann has been a leading advocate for women’s advancement in Jewish ritual life since at least the 1970s. The first woman to receive a doctorate in Talmud from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and then the first to join its Talmud faculty, Hauptmann authored an influential 1993 essay in which she sought to dispel what she labelled “some fallacies” regarding women’s role in synagogue. In that essay, Hauptmann embraces the “majority” view regarding women’s obligation in prayer. And she argues that the only barrier to women’s ritual leadership has been an erroneously assumed lower standard of obligation. Because women were equally obligated in prayer, she insists, women can assume all formal roles within the synagogue prayer service.

Hauptmann’s arguments are technical and lawyerly. She marshals the supporting sources from the Talmud to the modern period, and distinguishes and diminishes conflicting authority. And she concludes that the only barriers to women’s synagogue leadership have always been sociological rather than technical. In practice, women did not adopt certain ritual roles because public-facing positions would have been deemed unseemly due to the private role assumed by all communities of the time and place. Nonetheless, Hauptmann argues the evidence indicates that ancient rabbis believed women were permitted to lead synagogue ritual just as men do. And the assumptions of gendered propriety that held women back were not part of the halakha, but simply background norms to which the ancient rabbis responded.

Within progressive circles, Hauptmann’s arguments triumphed. All non-Orthodox seminaries now ordain women, and nearly all non-Orthodox synagogues now count women as part of the prayer quorum, include women in all ritual roles, and have ceased to draw any distinction between the roles of men and women in prayer.

But as the egalitarian ideal has triumphed, it has also evolved. Perhaps the leading theorist and advocate for that evolution is Rabbi Ethan Tucker. The son of a prominent and theologically progressive rabbi, Tucker studied in Orthodox rabbinic seminaries and was ordained by the Orthodox chief rabbinate of Israel. In 2006, however, Tucker joined with two friends to establish a formally non-denominational, but avowedly gender-egalitarian, institution for the rigorous study of traditional Jewish texts.

Although expert in the technical arguments of the sort advanced by Hauptmann, Tucker has urged his community to push further. He has written and spoken extensively about the need for what he terms a “paradigm shift” in the religious community’s approach to gender. It is not enough, he argues, to establish that the ancient rabbis obligated women equally in certain practices, or even that they permitted them to adopt certain roles. That technical strategy might suffice for redressing inequalities in communal prayer, he argues, but it cannot do the same for the other practices and roles for which rabbinic gender distinctions are far clearer and stronger. What are we to do, for example, with the Talmud’s express prohibition on women assuming the role of formal rabbinic judges?

More fundamentally, Tucker argues, although technical practice-by-practice arguments may recognize that the ancient rabbis existed in a context that viewed women as socially inferior, those arguments do not squarely face the fact that the rabbis shaped halakha in light of that context. A truly faithful interpretation of the ancient rabbis, Tucker urges, requires something other than literal translation of their words. When the ancient rabbis referred to “women,” we should understand a social category, not a biological or metaphysical reality. And in America today, that social concept simply does not exist.

In retrospect, the shift from Hauptmann to Tucker is unsurprising. The human desires for coherence and for consistency are powerful. And Tucker’s paradigm shift seems to offer both. Here is a sweeping theory, one that promises to reconcile halakha, finally and holistically, with the claims of contemporary gender egalitarianism. By contrast, the approach Hauptmann championed decades ago promises only partial victories. And most fatally, it offers no deeper explanation of what gender meant to the ancient sages—and no attempt to reconcile that vision with the world today.

But there is also something deeply troubling about Tucker’s radicalism—made all the more troubling for its claims of faithfulness. His approach, after all, might quickly become a licence to nullify all laws and categories with which we find discomfort. Perhaps when the ancient sages discussed the laws of Sabbath, they did so against the backdrop of an economy of physical, agricultural labour? Then those laws have no relevance to participants in today’s white-collar economy! Perhaps when the ancient sages prescribed the dietary laws, they spoke only against the backdrop of a less hygienic society? Those laws too have no application in the age of industrialized sanitation! And perhaps when the rabbis spoke of “gentiles,” they meant only pagans? Jews should thus be free to marry and mix and worship alongside our monotheistic brethren! There is, as far as I can see, no limiting principle.

Nor does Tucker’s account resonate with human experience. Some of today’s fiercest cultural and political debates concern the malleability of gender, and the strength with which gender should remain tied to biological sex. But the very fierceness of those debates highlights that nearly everyone experiences those categories intensely. The categories of “men” and “women” are not outdated vestiges of a forgotten hierarchy. They are deeply felt. One need only google “J.K. Rowling” to confirm.

But even if we reject Tucker’s ultimate approach, his insistence that we confront the issue squarely carries undeniable force. Lawyerly solutions might reconcile particular claims of feminism and tradition in the short term. But in the long run, such solutions must be anchored in larger coherent explanations. Discerning ancient rabbinic approval for equal synagogue participation is nice. The far greater task, however, is to discern a plausible vision of gender that is faithful to the tradition and to a basic sense of God’s will.

And it is here that the tensions embedded within the rabbis’ understanding of prayer become helpful once again. For here we have clashing instincts, both of which the sages decreed valid and incorporated into acts of worship: Rigour and passion. Discipline and emotion. Service and supplication. Codification and personalization. Liturgy and intuition. Sacrifices and patriarchs. Leviticus and Genesis. Law and custom. Perhaps we might add to that list: male and female.

That correspondence is not, I think, any great leap. As we have seen, there is a powerful strand within halakha—dominant in practice if not among authorities—that already draws that connection, obligating women in prayer without the formalities, in the prayer of the patriarchs, but not the prayer of the temple sacrifices.

And that correspondence also draws support from the text of the Bible and Talmud. When the Talmud considers prayer’s origins, it looks not only at the patriarchs and the temple sacrifices. The sages also turn to the story of Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel. As we first encounter her at the start of the book of Samuel, Hannah has grown despondent. She is favoured by her husband Elkanah, but childless. Hannah thus goes to the sanctuary at Shiloh to pray for a child. In a place where everyone has come with sacrifices, however, she “prays from her heart so only her lips moved, but her voice could not be heard.” Seeing her standing in the sanctuary with lips moving silently, Eli the high priest initially takes her for a drunk.

The ancient rabbis saw in Hannah’s story a template for prayer: “Rabbi Himnuna said: How many great laws are there to learn from these verses of Hannah! The verse says: ‘And Hanna was speaking upon her heart.’ From this we learn that a person praying must orient his heart. The verse says: ‘only her lips were moving.’ From this we learn that one praying should enunciate with his lips. And the verse says: ‘her voice was not heard.’ From here we learn that it is prohibited to raise one’s voice loudly in prayer.”

Hannah reflects a classic feminine biblical archetype, a woman longing for a son. And the biblical text depicts her prayer as a sharp contrast to—and likely superior to—the institutional, sacrificial worship that surrounds her. Her behaviour is portrayed as deeply idiosyncratic—such a deviation from the norm that Eli cannot understand what she is about. But the Bible also makes clear that the institutional norm had become deeply corrupt, with the priests—led by Eli’s own sons—seizing sacrificial meat from the Israelites who sought to worship at the temple.

And yet, the rabbis do not allow Hannah to remain an iconoclast, nor do they permit a simplistic hierarchy between the woman’s noble personal prayer and the men’s corrupt institutional sacrifice. Instead, they transform Hannah’s prayer into a paradigm from which “many great laws” can be learned. Her prayer may be personal and emotional, but it gives rise to laws, setting fixed principles that limit choice and prescribe future behaviour.

Nor is the dichotomy between obligation and inspiration, nor the linking of that dichotomy to gender limited to prayer. From the Talmud to the present, here are millennia of debates about precisely which commandments women are exempt from, and why. But it is, in any event, a well-established feature of halakha that a substantial subset of prominent commandments (including, for example, the sounding of the shofar on Rosh HaShanna and the sitting in booths during Sukkot) are formally obligatory for men and yet optional for women. The dynamic tension we have seen embedded in Jewish prayer—flexibility and originality versus rigour and obligation—is thus reflected in halakha’s approach to men and women far beyond prayer.

Much of the difficulty in reconciling the claims of religion and feminism stems, I think, from a failure to distinguish between three distinct critiques. The first is that the roles assigned to men and women have often been unequal, creating a hierarchy in which women are subjugated by men, entitled to less of whatever value we think most important: power, liberty, material comfort, or prestige. This is a critique of the particular substance of particular conceptions of gender norms.

The second critique is that enforcement of prescribed gender roles is unduly restrictive, punishing those—and especially women—who defy or strain against their presumed place. In other words, it is not the substance of gendered norms that is the problem; it is the strict refusal to tolerate or accept exceptions.

The third critique is that the very recognition of gendered categories—the division of the world into men and women at all—is irrational; that any communal or legal distinction-drawing on the basis of sex is archaic and indefensible.

The first two critiques have always struck me as reasonable. More important, they are reconcilable with a faithful reading of authoritative Jewish sources. The biblical narratives include, of course, apparent inequalities between the sexes. But apparent prescriptions or endorsements of hierarchy are generally subversive. God may tell Eve, “Your desire shall be for your husband, but he shall rule over you” (Genesis 3:16). However, that statement pronounces punishment, not an ideal. (And no one thinks the other punishments of Genesis 3, painful childbirth or difficult agricultural labour, are ongoing mandates.) And in the book of Esther, King Ahasuerus’s petulant decree “that every man should bear rule in his own house” is portrayed as ridiculous, not enlightened (Esther 1:22). Likewise, although the biblical narratives mostly depict men and women who conform to the gendered roles of their time, the text also embraces individual exceptions: there is something faintly feminine about Jacob, the “dweller of tents” and favourite of his mother who abhors violence (Genesis 25:27–28; 34:30). And Deborah’s martial leadership, while acknowledged as exceptional, is also clearly heroic and necessary (Judges 4).

There is nothing inevitable, however, about proceeding from these first two critiques to the third. That social distinctions between the sexes have often come layered with hierarchy does not mean that they must always do so. And that previous generations have not always achieved the proper balance between promoting general norms and accepting exceptions does not mean that such a balance can never be achieved.

Nor does the third critique make much sense, I think, in light of Jewish tradition. In the Bible, gender is a fundamental, primordial classification. There is dark and light, water and land, heaven and earth, and yes—male and female. These are not categories that can be dismissed as latecoming rabbinic innovations or concessions to a surrounding cultural milieu.

The question thus becomes what the content of gendered norms that do not impose hierarchy and that do not unduly punish exceptions might be. And here is where the tensions that underlie Jewish prayer become so valuable—offering both a partial answer and a template for what further answers might look like.

The Jewish tradition refuses to resolve the debate between patriarchs and sacrifices. It affirms that worship requires flexibility, passion, individuation, but also rigour, obligation, and communal standards. A balanced religious society requires both of those sometimes-duelling tendencies. And while individuals will, almost inevitably, favour one tendency over the other, a life lived entirely in one mode or the other would be a spiritual failure. One who prays only a fixed liturgy is no longer genuinely requesting mercy. But one who only prays when the spirit moves him will soon cease to pray.

Linking those often-duelling tendencies to the dichotomy of the sexes reflects, on some level, a recognition of reality as expressed in rough averages. But such a linkage also offers a powerful means of preserving and balancing two critical modes of religious expression. By imprinting those two crucial—but conflicting—dimensions of a religious personality into our most basic biological and social categories, we ensure that neither will ever completely dominate the other.

The lesson here is not that men ought to reject spontaneity, suppress emotion, and quash moments of religious passion. Nor is it that women ought to free themselves of restraints, abandon institutions, or defy obligations. These are archetypes, not manuals. And no doubt each of us has much of both the obligated and the inspired within ourselves. But the existence of these archetypes provides anchoring. They give us a way to make sense of the differences—in emphasis, in aggregate, but yes, in reality—that so many men and women feel in our souls and in our relationships. And they guarantee that sometimes-conflicting but essential spiritual tendencies remain embedded in our families and communities.

I do not yet know how my twenty-month-old daughter will navigate her way between those two great poles of obligation and inspiration. But I do know she will grow up in a world and a tradition that—in part through a refusal to cast aside the categories that have lasted so long—has blessed both.