Haviva Ner-David
Bringing a Woman’s Perspective to the Orthodox Rabbinate
By Ruth Mason

Haviva Ner-David doesn’t look like a revolutionary. A wisp of a woman, she lives with her husband and five children in a high-ceilinged stone house in Bak’a, Jerusalem’s answer to Manhattan’s Upper West Side. But her mission in life is to restore balance to the world by allowing women’s neglected voices to be heard.

Her new title, rabbi—earned after 10 years of hard work and study—is a step in that direction. Aryeh Strikovsky, the Orthodox rabbi who ordained her, doesn’t want her to use the title in places where it might arouse controversy. “He told me, ‘the Orthodox community is not ready for it, and they’ll just laugh at you,’ ” she says. There is no halachic reason, Ner-David maintains, for women not to become rabbis.

While the Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist movements have been ordaining women for years, Ner-David didn’t want to leave the Orthodox world. “There are things I wanted to say to girls growing up in the Orthodox world. I had taken on the mitzvot of tallit and tefillin, and I felt if I had seen even one female teacher in high school doing that, it would have made a huge difference to me.”

Before making aliyah, she applied to the rabbinical school at Yeshiva University. They didn’t acknowledge her application, but the press got wind of it and it caused a stir.

How has the Orthodox world greeted her ordination? “I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback in our neighborhood,” she says. “I hear controversies are being aired on the Internet, but I haven’t wanted to look.” She feels heartened by an incident that happened the other day. “A right-wing guy from the neighborhood came up to me and said, ‘We had a whole discussion about it at our Shabbat table, and we decided that since it’s a local thing, it’s okay. There will be one more person for my daughters to go to with questions.’ ”

While she insisted on an Orthodox ordination, Ner-David says, “More and more I’m feeling that holding on to a label restricts me. I see people trying to figure out how to have an authentic, passionate, sincere relationship with their Jewish identity and with God, and they aren’t so concerned with labels and denominations.”

She is working on creating a marriage center in Jerusalem that would help couples plan a more woman-friendly ceremony and ketubah and provide legal and financial advice, couples counseling and a mikva open to couples.

“Over the years, I’ve become more radical,” she says. “I would even encourage couples not to marry through the rabbinate if they are so inclined.” She said she’s beginning to think that the problem of agunot (chained women) could be prevented by changing the marriage ceremony to exclude kinyan—when the groom acquires the bride with the ring.

The newest Orthodox woman rabbi doesn’t see herself as a “the same kind of rabbi that I grew up with. People need to rethink that [traditional rabbi] role. Holy living isn’t just praying and studying Torah. Being with your family is part of a holy life.”