[Avodah] women lighting candles

[Arie Folger]

R. Zev Sero wrote:
> : I've often half-jokingly claimed that there is a separate women's
> : Shulchan Aruch, written by and for women, completely independent of the
> : men's SA. This is the SA where it is written that dirt is chometzdik,
> : that Shabbat comes in when you say the bracha on the candles, that if you
> : miss lighting one week you have to add a candle for the rest of your
> : life, not to touch a sefer torah while niddah, and a lot of other things
> : that men have never heard of.  Women learned halacha from their mothers
> : and grandmothers, not from their fathers, so there was some divergent
> : development.  A very feminist view, actually.

RMB
> No joke, not even half. Isn't this why Chazal take "shema beni musar
> avikha ve'al titosh toras imekha" and say "al tiqri 'imekha' ela
> 'umaskha'"? The Torah of the am, the cultural observations, what the
> Gra"ch (R' Dr Haym Soloveitchik) got MO Jews calling "mimeticism" is
> largely transmitted by our mothers.

But what if some women feel [without reference to feminist thought, for 
example R'n Rayna Batya Berlin well over a century ago] that some of these 
halakhot pessuqot in the very special, unwritten women's Shul'han 'Arukh, at 
variance with codified halakhah, is too heavy or otherwise unpleasant to bear. 
She feels slighted when all the men get le'hem mishneh at the table, but the 
women don't, same for the "mayim machroinem wasser" that is passed around 
among the men, but not the women, or by the fact that menorot are made 
available to all the male guest, but not the female guest. Will you say that 
the earlier way is the "righter" way, and that she is wrong, that  we will 
perhaps, begrundgingly tolerate her modernishe antics, or will we say that she 
has all the right in the world to feel upset.

Note that the issue here isn't what her motivation is to want to take on an 
additional practice, but the assumption of society around her that she has no 
relationship to the things mentioned, In the case of mayim machroinem wasser 
it is particularly egrerious, as it is not a matter of mitzvah, but sakanah, 
ve'hamira sakanta me-issurei.
-- 
Arie Folger
http://ariefolger.wordpress.com
http://www.ariefolger.googlepages.com