First the liberal movements discovered the mikveh. Now the Reform movement is thinking of implementing its own version of yet another politically incorrect Orthodox practice.
The recent biennial convention of the Union for Reform Judaism offered a men-only prayer service.
The rationale:
“Within the Reform movement we’ve confused gender stratification with gender differentiation,” said Barden, a major proponent of the separate-but-equal approach. “We need to reverse the disaffiliation of men without setting the egalitarian clock back 30 years.” Women are more religiously active in most faiths in this country, and have been for a century. But the gender gap in Jewish life, particularly in the liberal movements, has grown greater in recent years.
I recommend the whole article:
Israeli blogger Trilcat is suffering from constant, severe, headaches. Her doctors haven’t been able to help, and she could use some support.
A friend of mine attended an odd wedding and shared some pictures of the new fa
shions. The one on the left is wearing three head coverings: one under her chin, one covering her forehead, and one going all the way down her back. This is in addition to a full-length cloak.
The woman on the right is also wearing a cloak.
It’s standard in some circles for brides to wear completely opaque veils. Usually the mother helps guide her, but at this chupah the bride’s mother wore a decorated “box” over her entire head. Faces were uncovered during the dancing, but sexes are strictly divided by that point.
A post by Jameel, based on an article in Haaretz, sheds light–or more accurately darkness–on this phenomenon.
According to the Haaretz article, a woman called Rabbanit (rebbetzin, wife of the rabbi) Keren is behind this approach. She has ten children and leaves the house as infrequently as possible. She also maintains a “taanit dibur,” a speech fast, except for four hours a week when she gives classes and treats women as an alternative therapist. I don’t know how she manages not to speak with her husband and children. She wears ten layers of clothing (one for each child?) and advises women to switch the heels of their shoes so that they won’t click. Makeup and perfume are also taboo.
Toward the end of the Haaretz article, the author quotes a professor who suggests that this extreme modesty is similar to anorexia. I agree; it’s obsessive behavior based on a desire to deny one’s femininity. Or maybe I’m being judgmental?
When rabbis in certain circles emphasize women’s modesty above all other virtues, it’s no wonder that some will take things to the extreme.
Rafi helped me out by blurring the faces (as requested by my friend) on this additional picture, where you can see the bride:
Update: In a Hebrew article from Maariv, Neshot Hare’alah (Women of the Veil), Sherry Makover-Balikov interviews Rabbanit Bruria Keren and some of her followers.
English summary/translation: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII,
Entire series
I’ve been reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million.
Mendelsohn grew up in an assimilated family in New York. In the background of his visits to his older relatives in Florida lay a story about a great-uncle who remained in the family’s ancestral town of Bolechow, Ukraine, only to be murdered during the Holocaust along with his wife and four daughters. The writer’s grandfather and the other siblings had already emigrated to Israel and the US.
The author intersperses his story with an analysis of Rashi’s commentary on the Torah and that of the modern commentator Rabbi Richard Elliot Friedman. Mendelsohn continuously revisits the theme of sibling rivalry– in the Torah, within his grandfather’s family, and among his own siblings (he broke his own brother’s arm as a child). I’m only about a third of the way through, but we can already see that the relationship between the brother in Bolechow and his American siblings is central to the story.
When Mendelsohn travels to Bolechow, Ukraine with his family, a man named Alex serves as guide and translator. Is this the same garrulous Alex with the hysterically convoluted English that appears in Jonathan Safran Foer’s book, Everything is Illuminated? Everything is Illuminated is a (semi-fictional?) book about an American Jew’s search for information about relatives from the Ukraine.
Mendelsohn gives Henry James a run for his money with his sentence structure:
And I might add that virtually all of the information provided by the same important source, the central database at Yad Vashem, for “Shmuel Yeger” (or “Ieger”) and “Ester Jeger” (and the three daughters the database attributes to them: “Lorka Jeiger,” “Frida Yeger,” and “Rachel Jejger”) is demonstrably wrong, from the spelling of their names to the names of their parents (“Shmuel Ieger was born in Bolechov, Poland in 1895 to Elkana and Yona,” an error which, I thought when I first read this, eradicates my great-grandmother Taube Mittelmark from history,* and with her the sibling tensions that may well have resulted in Shmiel’s decision to leave New York in 1914 and return to Bolechow, a decision to which his presence in this error-filled archive is attributable) to the years in which they were born and died.
*Presumably he figures out that Yona is a Hebraicized version of Taube (my own mother’s name), meaning dove.
Despite its length, the passage is readable, and is an example of the way the author maintains suspense by hinting at later-to-be-revealed surprises.
I’m looking forward to reading the rest.
If my mother hated cleaning, she never admitted it to me. But she didn’t research or think much about cleaning techniques, like she did with other aspects of homemaking.
She was fussy about guests, who were never allowed in the kitchen; she had me for serving and clearing. I didn’t mind much, except when I didn’t get soup because it had boiled away–sometimes she calculated too carefully. She kept the living and dining rooms, along with the front entrance, exclusively for company (a luxury most of us Israelis can only dream of). The family used the side door; she often complained about their previous house, where you had to bring groceries in through the living room.
My own friends were welcome in the house and ate in the “breakfast room” off the kitchen, with the family.
By the time I was born she could have afforded hired help, and did occasionally, but she was too private a person to feel comfortable with someone else working in the house.
I wonder how much of an issue housekeeping was for her. Was the house really dirty, even before my mother developed a chronic illness when I was twelve? Was she ashamed of the house’s condition? If so, I wasn’t conscious of a problem and chalked up her foibles to anxiety regarding guests. Maybe there is a lesson here: If your own house isn’t so clean, chances are your kids don’t care and won’t remember.
Twitter links powered by Tweet This v1.7, a WordPress plugin for Twitter.
