Rabbinical Council of America

The Council was organised in 1935 out of an earlier alumni association, and its membership is drawn overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, from rabbis ordained at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary, the rabbinical school of Yeshiva University. It is the largest body of Modern Orthodox rabbis in North America, with roughly a thousand members, and it functions in the ordinary ways a professional association does: admission standards, continuing education, a placement service that matches rabbis with congregations, pension and insurance arrangements, and a convention.

It works closely with the Orthodox Union, the congregational body whose synagogues most of its members serve, and the two are often described together as the institutional centre of Modern Orthodoxy in the United States. The relationship is one of parallel organisations rather than of a rabbinate governing a laity: the Council speaks to and for rabbis, the Union to and for congregations.

Guidance it issues is addressed to its own membership rather than to the Jewish public, and it is not a legislature. Orthodox Judaism has no body that can bind its rabbis on questions of halakhah, and a resolution of the Council has whatever weight its members and their communities choose to give it. What gives it real consequence is not its resolutions but its court.

The Council's rabbinical court, the Beth Din of America, is where a professional association touches individual lives. It administers gittin, the religious divorce documents without which a Jewish marriage is not dissolved in Jewish law however completely a civil court has ended it. It supervises conversions through a network of regional courts established in 2007, so that a conversion performed under it is accepted by the participating batei din rather than being subject to case by case review. And it hears commercial and communal disputes as an arbitration panel, which under United States arbitration statutes produces awards that a civil court will enforce, so litigants who prefer a Jewish forum can use one without giving up enforceability.

Its most widely discussed instrument is the halakhic prenuptial agreement, which the Council has directed its members to use. The agreement obliges a husband to pay ongoing support until a get is given, which removes the practical incentive to withhold one and so addresses the position of the agunah, the woman whose husband will not release her. It is a contractual solution to a problem that arises inside religious law, and its adoption has been the Council's most visible contribution to the wider Orthodox conversation about the status of women in Jewish divorce.