Q&A: Regarding Article 476: Women as Witnesses
Regarding Article 476: Women as Witnesses
Question
Why assume that the Sages disqualified a woman because of a deficiency in the value of equality? There’s no justification for that when it comes to telling the truth. Even if she is not equal to a man, for some reason the Sages saw her as unfit for conveying information. I don’t know on what basis or why. But the value of equality seems unrelated to the issue of testimony.
Answer
I no longer remember what I wrote there, but I’m fairly sure I did not speak about the value of equality as the basis for disqualifying women. At most, since the reason they disqualified women (whether reliability, as you assume, or a reason such as preserving modesty, etc.) does not stand up against the value of equality, there may perhaps be room to change the Jewish law.
Discussion on Answer
See the series of columns on Modern Orthodoxy.
That’s what I’m talking about.
Seemingly, that’s already a direct dispute. It could be that they did take equality into account, but thought that because of modesty or reliability they should not be accepted, and that hasn’t changed.
And if so, what you wanted to argue—that you are a midrashically conservative person—isn’t precise. Rather, you have a value that overrides the value of modesty or reliability. And you didn’t say the facts changed, but the values. And even if you say they built this on the assumption that there is no equality—who says so? Maybe yes and maybe no. They didn’t speak about this.