[Avodah] how women should dress

[Micha Berger]

On Fri, May 07, 2010 at 01:39:49PM +0300, Eli Turkel wrote:
: I repeat my previous remark. I have great doubts that R. Akiva bought for
: his wife the Jerusalem of Gold to wear only at home

We don't know. The argument is being made that our cultures differ on
this very point.

But I want to point out a missing subtext that was driven home for me
by a story...

The scene is a Junior NCSY Shabbaton. A daughter is brought by her mother,
and takes her suitcase out of the car. The mother, being the kind of
doting mom one can find in the wealthier NY suburbs in Nassau County,
noticed that the daughter, age 12, "forgot" to pack one of her outfits.
"Here, honey," she says, pulling it out of the trunk, "Don't you want
this one? You look so sexy in it."

Who wants their 12 yr old daughter to look sexy?

In contemporary culture, from Madison Av to both men's and women's
magazines to even evolutionary psychologiest the notions of looking
aesthetically pleasing and looking sexually alluring have been deeply
confused.

RSSchwab speaks of flaunting beauty and flaunting feminity. Which
conflates these two issues as well.

However, someone who dresses beautifully with a reminder of what was
lost of Y-m (within their own lifetimes) is aesthetically relaying
"her greatness, of her holiness, of what she really is". RSS writes,
"Although we have many references to women's beauty in the Torah in
connection with the Matriarchs, Sara, Rivka, and Rachel, such beauty
always corresponded to and complemented their inner beauty." But isn't
such a tiara more related to inner beauty than feminity.

BTW, in those days women wore tiaras from one piece of gold, and necklaces
that were chains. This was intentional -- it would represent unity of
thought, but a plurality of maasim tovim.

:-)BBii!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Today is the 38th day, which is
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