[Avodah] mechitza

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Micha Berger wrote:
> Until the 19th cent, it was assumed that since women aren't
> mechuyavos in meshiyas Amaleiq, they weren't mechuyavos in
> Parashas Zachor either. ... The earliest clear pesaq lemaaseh
> requiring women to attend Zachor is shu"t Binyan Tziyon by ...

Can someone please help me understand how halacha can change so radically?

I can understand how, over time, View A might shift from being held by only 5% of Am Yisrael to 95%, while View B becomes less popular, shifting from 95% popularity to 5%. This can happen when a person who was a mere talmid of a View A community when he was young, became a major teacher later on.

That's how I understand the shifts between Beis Shammai and Beis Hillel, or the shift from Shabbos starting when it gets dark to Shabbos starting when the sun goes below the horizon. In these cases, the different views were *both* pre-existing, only their popularity shifted.

But I get the feeling that this is not what happened in the case of Parshas Zachor For Women. I get the feeling that for millenia women were simply presumed to be exempt from this mitzvah, and then, relatively suddenly, someone came to a different conclusion, and out of the blue, this came to be a widely-held view.

How did people of the Binyan Tziyon's time view this? I don't doubt the forceful and compelling nature of his halachic reasoning, but surely there must have been some people who said, "That can't be right, because if it is right, then our mothers and grandmothers, for millenia, were mevatel a Mitzvas Aseh D'Oraisa."

I hope someone will tell me that, actually, there was a small minority of women who did hear Parshas Zachor all along, and the Binyan Tziyon (or someone else) merely popularized that view.

Akiva Miller