Rabbi Marianne Novak Speaks at Her Semikhah (Ordination)

Rabbi Marianne Novak speaks at her smikhah (ordination) at Yeshivat Maharat.

Rabbi Shimon Ben Elazar (Babylnonian Talmud 31b) … [warns] us that real change must come from a place of wisdom, experience, and tradition, and if it doesn’t even with the best design and intentions it is destined to fail. …

That is not to say, however, that many times my work hasn’t been very challenging, especially when coming up against those who felt threatened by all women simply teaching Torah.  And during those times of exasperation it was so tempting to completely burn the house down and start over. But when so many want to destroy Torah from without, we can’t be complicit in that project no matter how good and seemingly pure our motives might be, as Rabbi Shimon Ben Elazar warned.  We must resist the urge to completely destroy, for destruction we can be sure of, but rebuilding, sadly, we cannot.

During her speech, Rabbi Novak spoke of the books by her father, UTJ President Rabbi David Novak, as her touchstones for wisdom, knowledge, and experience and discussed her father’s opposition to ordination of women by the Conservative movement in the 1980s (Rabbi Novak discusses his opposition in the video here).  Rabbi Marianne Novak described her father’s “prescient” statement in his 1985 book Halakhah in a Theological Dimension that if women who desire to become rabbis “choose the harder road of learning and reverence (תורה ויראה) … this traditionalist is willing to become their student.”