The first time a woman sat for Israel’s Chief Rabbinate exams did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in the middle of reserve duty, between operational briefings, in a room where secular officers debated theology over maps and radios.
That matters. Because the story being told is that something new has begun. It hasn’t.
Women have already been learning, teaching, and ruling on halakha for years. Communities have already been turning to them with their most intimate, complex questions about mourning, about family, about how to live a Jewish life. The only thing that changed is that the State of Israel finally caught up.
When I sat for the Rabbanut exam, I did so as a major in the IDF, studying the laws of mourning between shifts. Around me were Israelis of every kind, observant and secular, skeptical and supportive, who took for granted that I could open a religious text and answer a halakhic question. No one needed a ruling from the Chief Rabbinate to make that real. It already was.
And yet, formally, it wasn’t.
For years, the Chief Rabbinate barred women from taking the exams that certify halakhic knowledge. That wasn’t because women lacked the learning or the experience. By the time a group of my colleagues petitioned Israel’s Supreme Court for the right to sit the state rabbinic exams, many of them had been issuing halakhic rulings in practice for years. The system excluded them not because they were unqualified or even unpresent, but because they were women.
It took more than six years for the Supreme Court to rule. By the time it did, the victory was almost symbolic. The women who fought for it had long since moved on. They didn’t need the exam. Their authority came from their learning, their teachers, and their communities.
But symbols matter: especially in a country where the Rabbinate is the official gatekeeper of religious life.
I took the exam not to prove I could do the work. I was already doing it. I took it because the state that I serve, and that I love, had not yet recognized my reality and the reality of so many female religious leaders.
Even then, the system resisted. The women’s exam was moved at the last minute. It started hours late. It was literally placed in a box labeled “Women’s Hall,” as if to mark it as separate, secondary.
I took the exam for my children. For a daughter who assumes that women learning Torah at the highest levels is normal, and for sons who assume the same. They are growing up in a world where women open books, teach texts, and answer questions of law and life. They do not yet know how recent that world is, or how contested.
The real story is not that women are now entering the world of halakha. It is that the world of halakha has already been changed by their presence.
I grew up in a community that taught me to love Torah without teaching me that it might not fully belong to me. That omission turned out to be a gift. By the time I encountered the barriers, I had already internalized something stronger: that Torah is the deepest language of Jewish life, and that it calls to anyone willing to engage it seriously.
When my students and neighbors began bringing me halakhic questions, they were not making a political statement. They were responding to a reality. They saw someone who could learn, think, and care deeply about the questions that mattered to them, and they turned to her.
That is how halakhic authority has always worked.
The Rabbinate exams did not create that authority, and they will not contain it. But they do signal something important: that the State of Israel is beginning, however reluctantly, to acknowledge a shift that has already taken place.
Chochama Yaara teaches Talmud, rabbinical literature, and Jewish philosophy at Midrashet Ein HaNatziv. She holds a BA in Jewish Philosophy and Jewish History from the Ofakim program at Tel Aviv University, and is currently pursuing a master’s degree. Rabbanit Yaara also recently received semicha from Yeshivat Maharat and is in the process of sitting for Israel’s rabbinical exams. Trained as a group facilitator, she brings a dynamic approach to her educational responsibilities. Yaara resides in Kibbutz Ein HaNatziv with her family.