This is not to say that women have no role in studying Torah and using their knowledge of it. I am a big supporter of women studying Torah if they chose to do so. And there are plenty of roles these Jewishly educated women can fulfill with the knowledge they obtained. Like pastoral counseling, or becoming educators. I see nothing wrong with that. But one does not need the title rabbi (or Maharat) in order to do that.
Using a sledgehammer called feminism to insert whatever feminist changes they can into a normal Shul environment will not change the fact that- bottom line – it falls short of a truly feminist goal as it is understood today at. It is abnormal. It causes divisiveness. And we may end up with yet another non Orthodox denomination that claims to be Halachic but attentive to the spirit of the times. Just as the Conservative Judaism originally claimed. That is the direction this is all going.
In the meantime some of the more left wing modern Orthodox Shuls are hiring these ordainees:
Of the five women who have been ordained by the yeshiva – three in 2013 and two last year – four are working in synagogues, serving essentially as assistant rabbis. (The fifth is a Jewish educator in Montreal.)
“The rabbi and I have a great relationship; we share a lot of the responsibilities,” said Rori Picker Neiss, a maharat who works at Bais Abraham, a modern Orthodox congregation in St. Louis. “We switch off who gives the drasha [sermon] every week, I teach classes, I’m available for counseling, I coordinate some of the programs. I have not yet done funerals or weddings, but I can. My job description would parallel an assistant rabbi’s position.”
My guess is that these Shuls will be boycotted by the Orthodox mainstream. Which means that as new graduates increasingly take new positions in the more left wing Shuls, a new denomination is inevitable. Which is sad. My guess, though, is that this new denomination will eventually suffer the same fate the older ones are.