[Avodah] Tzeni'us and gender roles

[Ken Bloom]

I marked up your email for my linguistic research (mostly for my own
consumption, but a couple of example sentences may find their way into a
paper I'm writing) because I found it interesting, and also it raised
some issues about the linguistic structure of argumentative text that
the other texts I've been using didn't touch.

Since I have had your email staring me in the face for a week now, I
feel like I should weigh in on the discussion.

On Sun, 2009-07-26 at 23:57 +0100, Chana Luntz wrote:
> > But these are other women for whom we should be asking the very same
> > question. Are we supposed to be reengaging them on these terms, or are
> > they compromised terms? To assume the former is to presuppose the
> > conclusion.
> 
> Yes.  So I will ask you the question - Does/should aseh l'cha rav apply to a
> woman?  
> 
> I think it important to say that I don't think it ever has, historically.
> Before puberty, girls were under the jurisdiction of their fathers, who may
> have had their own rav, but the girl had no particular relationship with
> him. Around puberty she married, and generally had relatively limited
> contact with her husband's rav, to whom the family shialas would be asked,
> via her husband. There may have been some role modelling, via her mother, or
> possibly via other women of the community, but a woman would almost never
> have a direct relationship with a rav, in the aseh l'cha rav sense, unless
> her father or her husband (or both) happened to be a rav.  In fact, having
> anything approaching a real relationship with a rav, in the aseh l'cha rav
> sense, outside of these two situations, would probably have been regarded as
> being a  breach of tznius (in the opposite of pritzus sense).
> 
> We now have a situation where many women, probably most women in the Modern
> Orthodox community, grow up and leave home - often around seventeen
> eighteen, and then don't get married until - well often late twenties to
> thirties.  Even before they leave home, they are not necessarily comfortable
> with channelling any shialas they have through their fathers.

[SNIP a really insightful discussion about girls having crushes on their
high school rebbes.]

> So, given your mussar stance, what do you advise a woman to do?
> - not engage with a rav (and perhaps put on a shelf one's yiddishkeit until
> mr right comes along and makes it all right again)?
> - try and engage with a rav who is liable to come with problematic emotional
> baggage because of the natural dynamic between men and women?
> - try and find a female role model?


You raise some very cogent points about a woman's relationship with a
rav, and I thank you for the insight. I'm going to suggest that the
third option is best (having a female role model), but discuss how this
relates to Mahara"ts further down.

> As you say:
> 
> > Which path costs us more? Do we lose more by not even trying 
> > to preserve the value of tzni'us, particularly among women who are not
> given as
> > many reasons to violate it? Or do we lose more because there is simply
> > no way to produce a society of female professionals (or women who have
> > such among their friends and role models) who can be kol 
> > qevudah at home?
> 
> But it is not just the society of female professionals.  I knew many many
> secretaries and primary/nursery school and similar teachers who found
> themselves in precisely this bind because they had not yet managed to find
> Mr Right.  And they were dating throughout their twenties and thirties and
> going nowhere in terms of yiddishkeit (IMHO)
> 
> Now, I agree, if your parents arrange shidduchim for you during your year
> post high school, then chances are you go straight from your seminary crush
> to your husband and his rav.  
> 
> > That could very well be. Part of my lack of MO-ness is that I 
> > feel such a community needs correcting, not accomodating. My whole
> take-off on
> > RHS's theme is to justify that conclusion.
> 
> And how do you think best fix this one?  Are you going to push for women to
> get married earlier?  Are you comfortable with the shidduch scene as it
> presents itself in the non MO world?  I confess to my mind it strikes me as
> one of the strongest reasons to be MO - it sounds absolutely and
> unbelievably horrible from beginning to end, and I am so glad that my
> encounters with it were brief and not fundamental to my existence.  And I
> would have thought it was the sort of thing that would have somebody with
> musar bent of mind absolutely fulminating - because there is a level of
> personal degradation that goes on in that process that would seem to run
> completely counter to everything the mussar movement stood and stands for.
> Are you for correcting or accomodating?  

As someone who's been dealing with it for several years now, the
shidduch system is absolutely horrifying. The word shadchan is also
hebrew for stapler, and sometimes I think being physically stapled to
your marriage partner would be a lot less painful than working with a
matchmaker.

That said, there are lots of ways to make it less painful without
throwing the whole thing out and leaving people to their own devices.
Training shadchanim to do proper followup, training people to proper
reference checking, how to recognize important issues and unimportant
issues, having rules about how many dates you have to go on before you
can reject someone for stupid reasons. The shadchanim I have to deal
with know lots of girls, but are absolutely horrible at getting people
to look fairly at each other, and smoothing issues that may arise in the
dating process. (I'll vent a long list of issues on Areivim at some
later time.)

I'm a lot better off with the shidduch system than I'd be if I were left
to my own devices, but there are plenty of simple ways that it can be
made better.

> But on the other hand, it does a much better job at getting far more women
> (and men) married off at a much earlier age than the MO method - so if that
> is your goal, then presumably it works (despite the casualties).


If there's one issue in the frum world that's very common (almost
universal, I'm told), but almost universally swept under the rug (much
more so than issues of abuse, etc...) it's shemirat haberit. Anyone who
downplays this issue is deluding themselves. And from that respect,
getting people (particularly men) married earlier is a very important
goal, and we should rearrange a lot of other assumptions we have about
the lifecycle process in this modern world in order to deal with it.

For example, a modern community that teaches secular studies in high
school might construct some kind of vocational program in high school so
that their graduates might find a job parnasah when they graduate. Or YU
and Stern might arrange their course of studies so that people can have
jobs and families at the same time. (Lots of students have jobs at the
same time even in secular colleges so this should not be a big issue.) 

> OK - so lets go from the general to the specific.  I agree that this reality
> of women spending decades on their own is, in MO circles, taken as a given.
> And indeed, it is unquestionably a product of modernity - absolutely never
> happened before the modern era, except for the very few.
> 
> If you do the cheshbon nefesh, what is your view on whether this particular
> societal change is mutar (in the halachic sense)?
> 
> So what is your view - is this aspect of modernity something that needs
> correcting (perhaps towards these communities who tend to marry at 16) or
> something that needs accommodating?

See above.

> The model that has been offered to the world, at least at the present time,
> is of Rav Weiss as the senior rav, and of Sarah Hurwitz as functioning under
> him - or at most along side him.   That seems to be OK to R' Weiss, and it
> seems to be OK to the kehilla.  Would the kehilla be keen to employ her as
> the sole leader of the community?  I don't know.

Here's where I think the issue is. I think R' Weiss is being
disingenuous about how he presents this. He wants to create a woman who
can be the sole leader of a community, and he's not doing it because he
thinks that people can improve their halachic observance that way. 
AISI, R' Weiss wants to build a female pulpit rabbi so that he can show
the world we have gender equality. His constituency is so enamored with
the idea of gender equality that they're willing to pay for this.

> Now this is in itself interesting.  You seem quite open to the reality that
> shialas are being asked and answered by women.  RTK admitted that she does
> it all the time.  She is not the only one who gets put in this position.
> The difference between me, and I think, a lot of other women, is that I tend
> to feel I am woefully inadequate to answer a lot of these shialas (I would
> never put my head above a parapet about whether an individual should
> postpone surgery or not, for example) - especially since (here we go back to
> the beginning) -  I don't have a good relationship with a rav directly, and
> the one set of questions I *really* can't ask my husband's rav via my
> husband, relate to shialas that women try and ask me, especially when they
> ask me because they do not want to go to a rav, for one reason or another.  
> 
> But basically it seems to be that we are comfortable with the current
> arrangement, where women tend not to have relationships with rabbaim
> directly, where they tend to ask other women, but the women they ask tend
> not to have anything like the training one would give as part of a basic
> smicha programme, - well just in terms of the complexity of it all.  And we
> mix up people like Nechama Leibovitz - who were wonderful tanach teachers,
> but were not known for knowing an awful lot about halacha, and Rn Jungreis,
> - a great mussarist etc, but ditto - none of whom have cut their teeth on
> yoreh deah and orech chaim - and we think this lack of quality control is
> just fine and dandy (or we keep telling the askers to go off and ask a rav,
> which they won't- but maybe we should have some thundering from the pulpit
> on this - except that they don't come to shul in time to hear the thundering
> from the pulpit, not being very engaged by shul in the first place).  And
> the people asking the questions don't have the knowledge to know the
> difference (believe me, they don't).  And you end up being faced with either
> letting them muddle through on their level of knowledge of, eg hilchos
> shabbas (which can be woeful), or your knowledge of hilchos shabbas (neither
> of which is anything like near the level one ought to have to posken but in
> the land of the blind etc etc).

We've conflated a lot of roles in to the title of Rabbi: someone who
does kiruv, someone who teaches in schools, someone who speaks from a
pulipt, someone who presides at lifecycle events, someone who writes
STA"M, someone who does hashgacha at giant food plants, someone who
gives good mussar and chizuk, someone who answers simple she'elot,
someone who answers complicated she'elot that haven't been answered
before. And these she'elot come in several different areas of halacha:
Orach Chayim, Yoreh Deah (Kashrut), Niddah, Dinei Mamonot.

If you look at R' Michael Broyde's article in the Jewish press
(http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/40150/) he points out something
very interesting "In England, different members of the clergy (not all
of whom even have semicha) go by distinctly different titles, reflecting
different roles: reverend, minister, rabbi, and dayan; maybe that is a
fine idea worth importing to America." I agree, even if we aren't adding
women to the mix, that clarifying people's expertise through their
titles would help people to know the right address for a particular
issue.

(Of course, alternatively the issue is with the proliferation of rabbis
-- we've cheapened the role and watered down the education -- and what
we really want in a rabbi is to have someone who's learned for a lot
longer and has both the breadth and depth of learning to really
versatile and fill many of these roles. In that case, getting semicha
should be a lot more than answering questions on the Shach and the Taz
on Yoreh Deah.)

Adding women to the mix, creating training for women so they can "answer
simple she'elot in area X of halacha" probably would help with this
problem. We've done it with niddah, and we call them Yoatzot. From what
I hear on Avodah/Areivim, it goes a long way towards improving halachic
observence, and it sounds like it's working well. If you do that, then
people can recognize R"n Jungreis and Nechama Leibowitz for their
strengths, and not for all-around halachic expertise.

> No idea whether maharats will help deal with this mess - and whether they
> should

They probably won't deal with this mess, because they're trying to solve
the wrong problem.

--Ken