Women in Judaism: Don't tell this cantor she can't

Elizabeth Stevens leads the synagogue in song and offers counseling to congregants. Photo by Claudio Papapietro

By Kate Pastor

When Elizabeth Stevens graduated cantoral school in 2000 at the age of 26, she flew to Chicago to interview for a position at a synagogue that had recently turned egalitarian.

“Practically with my suitcase in my hand they said, ‘well we’re not really sure we want to hire someone young and we’re not really sure we can hire a woman,’” she recalled in an interview at her office at the Conservative Synagogue Adath Israel of Riverdale.

Though her prospects seemed dim, she stayed for the interview, which was performed Oprah Winfrey Showstyle, she joked.

It included a panel of about 30 people peppering her with questions.

“Somebody said, ‘what will you do to make us comfortable with the fact that you’re a woman?’” she said.

“So I did not burst out laughing, but my answer was, ‘I’m not gonna do anything specific, I’m just gonna be a cantor.’ And I could see light bulbs going on over the heads all across the room. ‘Oh, she’s not a girl, she’s not a lady cantor, she’s a cantor, this is a cantor, she’ll be a cantor.”

While that job didn’t pan out, Ms. Stevens was hired by The Society for the Advancement of Judaism in Manhattan, where she served from 2000 to 2009, leading the musical portions of services, and performing other religious duties.

In 2009, she happened upon an advertisement for an open position at CSAIR. Attracted by the involvement and diversity of the 450-family congregation, she soon moved to Riverdale to become its first-ever female clergy member.

Though somewhat more conservative than the synagogue she had come from, CSAIR members did not seem overly concerned with her gender, she said.

The conservative movement graduated its first female cantor in 1987 and both lay men and women had been leading parts of the prayer services during CSAIR’s the two-year search for a cantor. Female cantors are fairly common in Conservative Judaism — Cantor Stevens said there were even more female cantors than male ones in her seminary for a time — but at CSAIR the job was held by a single person for 30 years, so the idea of hiring a woman at the synagogue had never come up.

“It was natural when the search for a cantor began that it would be open to men or women,” said Rabbi Dov Katz.

The primary concern, he said, was to find somebody who would take people new to the synagogue or to Judaism and train them, help coordinate lay leadership and, of course, somebody who would fit in and could help lead services.

“I mean, the Jewish prayer service is 99 percent song,” Cantor Stevens said.

While common now, admitting women into the Conservative clergy wasn’t straightforward, Ms. Stevens said.

Issues of Jewish law and tradition were hurdles that many congregations have resisted overcoming. These include a prohibition against hearing a woman sing in public (already a moot point at a synagogue which has prayers led by female lay people), and the notion that women have a lesser obligation to God than men.

In the Conserative stream of Judaism, legal experts have largely overruled these obstacles.

But no edict can change psychology.

“In my experience it’s a lot more about a culture of a place than the actual letter of the law issues because there are many synagogues that were fully egalitarian that still hesitated about having female clergy,” Cantor Stevens said.

Conservative Synagogue members did not greet her the way the panel that grilled her in Chicago did years before, but her gender didn’t go unnoticed.

“This is a congregation where I think there were a few people who were not sure how they would feel about it. I mean, there were definitely people who hesitated about it. I think it wasn’t a total non-issue here, but it also wasn’t a lot of drama … so again it was just a question of people’s comfort level and changing the image in their mind,” Cantor Stevens said.

To that point, Cantor Stevens said she remembers a female clergy member discussing a turning point in discovering her own Jewish identity.

“[A] rabbi was teaching a class and he asked everyone to close their eyes and picture a Jew. And so, you know, he said ‘what do you see?’ and they said ‘I see a guy with a beard and a black hat’ and the rabbi said why don’t you, like, picture yourself?”

“So it’s just kind of changing what you’re images are, what you bring to it,” Cantor Stevens said.

And while she’s helped members of her congregation make that change — she has had people come up to her and thank her for being an example to their daughters and has even had some members who were previously uncomfortable having a woman lead services tell her how she’d helped change their minds — the transformation to an egalitarian mindset was never something she had to undergo herself.

Cantor Stevens grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attended Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva, and Camp Ramah, a Conservative summer camp.

Though she was familiar with non-egalitarian ideas, she said, “I grew up with the idea that a woman could do anything.”

This is part of the November 26, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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