Doubling up was popular when I was a kid. We had, for example, Doublemint and Double Bubble gums, baseball doubleheaders, and movie double features. The latter two evoke fond memories of exciting days at the stadium and entertaining afternoons at Far Rockaway’s single-screen Columbia, Strand, and Pix theaters.

Recently, I relived that experience by attending a lecture doubleheader. It started with a mini-doubleheader, delivered by the wife-husband team of Rabbanit Michelle Farber–Rabbi Dr. Seth Farber. She — founder and program director of Hadran, which is sponsoring the global Siyum HaShas for Women on June 6, 2027 (slated to be the largest women’s Torah gathering since Mount Sinai) — delivered a Talmud shiur on “Out of Bounds: Rabbi Yirmeya and the Boundaries of Beit Midrash Diversity.” He, founder and director of Itim, lectured on “Courting the Rabbinate: Can Civil Courts Save Religious Rights in Israel.” Where did this take place? As I quipped to friends, it must be Rinat, if the rabbanit delivered the shiur and the rabbi the lecture.

I then raced to the Teaneck Jewish Center to hear Dr. Malka Z. Simkovich — historian, author, and visiting professor at YU’s Bernard Revel Graduate School — speak on “Staying Together in a Dispersed World: Israel-Diaspora Relations in Ancient Times.” It was simply a smashing, stimulating, and scholarly evening.

These lectures highlighted the immense distance my Modern Orthodox community has traveled with respect to women’s Torah learning, scholarship, and communal leadership. In one night, we heard the first Jewish woman to publicly lead a daf yomi group and found a daf yomi podcast give a gemara shiur, studied with a female Jewish studies scholar who heads a major Jewish publishing house, and learned from a rabbi who devotes much of his professional life fighting to enable women to play as significant a role in Jewish life and learning as halacha allows. These are not minor steps; they are leaps from the Jewish world of my youth.

Yet Rabbi Farber’s lecture underscored that serious problems still remain. He discussed the Chief........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)