The realities of quarantine and sheltering-in-place during these last few months have created challenges for the halakhically-observant community. Halakhic decisors have issued their rulings, responding appropriately and sympathetically to these unprecedented realities.
What has largely been absent, however, is a serious engagement with the person asking the question; sympathetic psak is not the same as collaborative or empowering psak.
I can remember the exact moment when this realization hit me. It was the early years of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, the rabbinical school of which I am now the president. We had just moved into a new space. A woman came to be part of our morning prayers, and we had yet had time to erect a mechitza — the partition between men and women mandated by Orthodox Jewish law.
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