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Our new minyan at Pardes is built on the Shira Chadasha model. This means that women do things which are halachically permissible but sociologically shocking, like reading parts of the service, reading Torah, etc.
This type of minyan is important because there are two ways to engineer change: you can do permissible but unusual things from within the system, until they become accepted, or you can say "Sod the system, I'm doing it my way" - which puts you outside everyone else's frame of reference, and limits your options. Granted, some people say that what Shira Chadasha does is also utterly renegade and unacceptable, but a fair chunk of people count them as orthodox, which is what they want. So, given that for it to be effective it must become accepted, and given that for it to become accepted it requires support, it needs to be supported.
A criticism often levelled at these minyanim is that they can't possibly be serious, because they only meet on shabbat, not on weekdays. Our minyan at Pardes is a weekday minyan, which is a different kind of support than attending on shabbat. So, it's important to have this minyan because not only does it get people into that kind of minyan, and thus hopefully contribute to women's involvement within orthodoxy, but also it establishes a weekday pattern, answering the criticism that only non-serious people go to that kind of minyan.
The other thing we do is we don't hold that ten men constitute a quorum - we require ten men and ten women. This states that both men and women are important members of the community.
Still, it's a real bitch trying to get ten men AND ten women together of a morning....sigh...
This type of minyan is important because there are two ways to engineer change: you can do permissible but unusual things from within the system, until they become accepted, or you can say "Sod the system, I'm doing it my way" - which puts you outside everyone else's frame of reference, and limits your options. Granted, some people say that what Shira Chadasha does is also utterly renegade and unacceptable, but a fair chunk of people count them as orthodox, which is what they want. So, given that for it to be effective it must become accepted, and given that for it to become accepted it requires support, it needs to be supported.
A criticism often levelled at these minyanim is that they can't possibly be serious, because they only meet on shabbat, not on weekdays. Our minyan at Pardes is a weekday minyan, which is a different kind of support than attending on shabbat. So, it's important to have this minyan because not only does it get people into that kind of minyan, and thus hopefully contribute to women's involvement within orthodoxy, but also it establishes a weekday pattern, answering the criticism that only non-serious people go to that kind of minyan.
The other thing we do is we don't hold that ten men constitute a quorum - we require ten men and ten women. This states that both men and women are important members of the community.
Still, it's a real bitch trying to get ten men AND ten women together of a morning....sigh...