[Avodah] Women reading a ketuba

[Micha Berger]

I think we can agree that many of the inovations along the lines of our
discussion, women reading the kesuvah, women's prayer groups, etc... can
be done within the confines of the letter of the din.

The general argument against is one of slippery slope. How big of a breach
can mimetic halakhah absorb and still survive to guide us. Ashkenazim
have a much more paranoid estimate than Sepharadim do for two reasons:
1- we have more people and certainly more women who are textualists, who
want to do the spiritual thing, more than keeping with minhag imahos;
2- we saw what happened to the plans of R's Morais, Kohut, Drackman,
etc... when they founded JTS and tried to "conserve", not ammend,
Yahadus. Solomon Schechter never would have dreamed that the process he
started would lead to what passes for Jewish law in C today.

I want to pose the possibility, though, that "slippery slope" arguments
aren't beyond halakhah, but actually reflect ikkar hadin. Doesn't the
issur against being a "poreitz geder" mean "don't start down slippery
slopes"?

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy,
micha at aishdas.org        if only because it offers us the opportunity of
http://www.aishdas.org   self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                              - Arthur C. Clarke