[Avodah] Tzeni'us and gender roles

[Micha Berger]

On Tue, Aug 11, 2009 at 03:20:20PM -0400, David Riceman wrote:
: But the argument is much stronger in the absence of tznius.  After all 
: there can be lots of reasons to avoid innovation unless you need it.  
: Your invocation of tznius as the unique motivating reason is very 
: suspicious, for all sorts of reasons that several people have pointed out.

If I felt that innovation was inherently wrong, I would be ascribing
to chadash assur min haTorah, a very odd position for someone trying to
revive mussar in his corner of the community.

Also, I am not invoking tzeni'us as the unique anything. (Yet another
false assumption of simplicity.) I'm saying that tzeni'us is weighing in
against this innovation. The inertia inherent in halakhah needs to be
exceeded by a significant gain, and to that I'm adding what I consider
to be a huge weight against the change. As per above about changes I
would /want/ to see, when not speaking in terms of specific halakhos I
don't consider the need for inertia nearly as great of an issue as what
we're distrupting the status quo for.

But if the tzeni'us violation was the status quo, my assessment of the
situation would be different. It would be whether that which is gained
through having a Maharat minus the potential gain in tzeni'us opportunity
is so bad as to warrant changing it. I can't picture what that world
would be like, generations after O Jews accepted the notion of female
clergy, so I can't guess what my dopple-ganger would think. In truth,
I don't think the culture that produced the rishonim's takes on kol
kevudah would have gone there before now. I think the hypothetical is
necessarily false.

And so, I think it really boils down to someone explaining why we should
be accomodating a worldview in which control, power, prominance, etc...
should be further enshrined as being the essence of being more of an
eved Hashem.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Mussar is like oil put in water,
micha at aishdas.org        eventually it will rise to the top.
http://www.aishdas.org                    - Rav Yisrael Salanter
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