Reflections on the WRN

The question doesn't come up as often or as loudly as it once did. When it does come up, its tone isn't hostile as much as it is curious: "Why is there (still) a need for the Women's Rabbinic Network?" We can point to visible signs of our success. We don't need to fight for our voices to be heard within the CCAR. We don't need to fight for women to be hired on the HUC faculty. Our new CCAR president is a woman; our Israel campus has appointed its first female dean. Women rabbis are integrated into every level of the Conference and sit on every committee. Why, then, is there still a need for the WRN?
The WRN wasn't conceived as a way of achieving such lofty and concrete goals. It was born of necessity. Some would say it grew out of desperation No one was sure what to do with us (female rabbis) at the beginning and we didn't yet know how to make a place for ourselves. We were strangers in an institution whose maleness confronted us wherever we looked, from the lack of women's presence in ancient text to the absence of women on the faculty to the scarcity of women's bathrooms.
This was nobody's fault. It was just the way it happened. Once we realized that no one was charting a path for us, we chose to take charge of what was within our control. What we couldn't solve individually we hoped we might solve collectively. Looking back now, it seems we reflected the waves of the larger feminist movement. In the first wave, we found strength simply in being with each other, in sharing our stories, hopes, dreams and fears. In the second wave, we directed our energies toward more concrete goals of inclusion and integration into our institutions And in the third wave we began to look at our liturgy and our history through feminist eyes.
We found that our presence and our professional and personal choices began to impact our movement in ways we never could have imagined at first. And yet for all these successes, we still find as much meaning in being together today as we did at the start. The quality of despair is gone, but that old intimacy allows us now to ask deeper questions about our evolution over ten or twenty or thirty years of the rabbinate. We women rabbis are still experiencing the full cycle of the rabbinate for the first time. We have discovered that we are not done charting that path we began years ago. And we stand in solidarity with our female Israeli colleagues who face challenges uniquely their own yet somewhat reminiscent of our own experience. We learn from their experience as they learn from ours.
It is no failure of the CCAR that we continue to exist The WRN continues to exist because it meets a profound need that we can't always put into words. Should the time come when that need disappears, the WRN might well cease to exist. But it is also possible that new reasons will arise for the WRN's continuation, reasons that we can't now anticipate. It has happened before. If and until that time should come, we continue to cherish this community that was forged in desperation but that continues in friendship and love.