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"Gaining access to traditionally male roles is just the first step," Rabbi Janet Marder said before 300 people gathered at a Shabbat service in San Francisco. "We're not here to be male rabbis in skirts."

Addressing the changes that women in leadership roles have brought to Judaism, Marder, who is the first female president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, spoke Friday night at Congregation Emanu-El. The event was billed as a celebration of 30 years of women in the rabbinate as well as a Reform community Shabbat.

"The ordination of women," she emphasized, "set the scene for changing Judaism itself. It carried the seeds of revolution."

The bimah at Emanu-El was filled with female rabbis from congregations throughout the Bay Area, including Sonoma, El Sobrante, Oakland, Los Gatos, and Aptos. Marder, who is senior rabbi of Congregation Beth Am in Los Altos Hills, was elected head of the Reform movement's rabbinical association in March.

Cantor Roslyn Barak of Emanu-El led most of the service, with contributions from other women. She invited all girls and women in the audience who were b'not mitzvah during the last year to light the Shabbat candles together.

The election of Marder to CCAR head was a ploy of sorts, Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann joked. The true motivation behind Marder's successful candidacy for president of the CCAR was to step down from a job she despised — chair of the committee on ethics and appeals.

Said Karlin-Neumann, senior associate dean for religious life at Stanford University:"She had to look like she had attained enough height to step down."

In a more serious light, Marder pointed out that nearly all of the central Jewish texts, such as the Talmud, were created not by representatives from the entire Jewish faith, but only by its male half. Women bring an outsider's perspective to Judaism, challenging time-honored assumptions about the way things should be done.

"Things look different to us," said Marder. "Why must we assume that the way things are is the way they ought to be? Our job is construction. New rituals have come into being as an act of tikkun, or repair."

Among the changes that women have helped institute, she said, are a more inclusive language for prayer, a less hierarchical staff structure in synagogues and new rituals surrounding important events in women's lives, such as childbirth and menopause. The 2005 Reform prayerbook will mark the movement's first one edited by a woman.

Women rabbis have also questioned the idea that a rabbi's role is to devote oneself frenetically to their profession, abandoning commitments to family and community, said Marder, who is the mother of two daughters and the wife of a rabbi, Sheldon Marder of San Francisco's Jewish Home.

Thirty years after women joined the rabbinate, she pointed out, 377 of around 1,800 Reform rabbis are female, and around half the students at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where most Reform rabbis are ordained, are women.

"Thirty years ago, these ideas were radical," said Marder. "These transformational questions are being asked by all rabbis now."

In her sermon, she laid out plans for making support of Reform Judaism in Israel a top priority for the movement. She is the first woman and the third Californian elected to the position of CCAR president since its founding in 1889. The previous CCAR president was Rabbi Martin Weiner of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco.

To conclude the service, Marder asked congregants to appreciate the changes that women have brought to contemporary Jewish culture, and to spend some time thinking about changes they could make in their community and congregation.

"What is Shabbat but the gift of imagination — to imagine a better world?" she asked.