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<DIV>In a message dated 12/22/2008, eliturkel@gmail.com writes:</DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Arial color=#000000
size=2>RET: I would even suggest that much of the stress on their<BR>not
lighting is anti-feminism more than strict halacha. </FONT></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>TK: "Anti-feminist" for hundreds of years before there was any such
thing as a feminist movement?!</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="PADDING-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; BORDER-LEFT: blue 2px solid"><FONT
style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: transparent" face=Arial color=#000000
size=2>RET: >> RYBS and RAL are not radical leftists and after
deeply considering the issue suggest that women should light their own
candles. As with many issues there are other viewpoints <<<BR><BR><BR>--
<BR>Eli Turkel<BR></FONT></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV>>>>>><BR>It's just a funny coincidence that this serious new
consideration should have just happened to come along in America in the 20th
century. It reminds me of another funny coincidence, a shidduch that was
once suggested to me, at a time when many young men were growing their hair
very long, and by coincidence, this particular young man had decided to become a
nazir and grow a ponytail. It was just a chance thing that
he happened to want to be a nazir, and that he studied these strangely
neglected halachos just then when the play "Hair" was so popular on
Broadway, but to suggest that his wanting to be a nazir had anything to do with
the zeitgeist would surely do him an injustice. Right.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>As for women and Chanuka, I note in a Chabad pamphlet that somebody gave my
husband -- and there is something similar in Sefer Hatoda'ah -- that women
benefited even more from the nes Chanuka than the men did, and it's a special
holiday for women -- but nobody suggests that therefore women should light their
own menorahs -- neither the Rebbe nor Sefer Hatoda'ah suggest that.
Instead they say that women should refrain from doing melacha while the candles
are burning. (I assume that cooking is exempted from this minhag, as
on yom tov.)</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>BTW it happens that there is a [slight] link between the recent "Dinah"
thread here and Chanuka being a special holiday for women -- although the Chabad
pamphlet doesn't mention it. (The pamphlet just says -- it's in Hebrew, so
this is a rough translation -- "the meaning and content of the Chanuka candles
penetrate davka the hearts of women, to the point where they refrain from work
and progress in the spiritual light of Chanuka.") The slight "Dinah"
connection is that when the Greeks ruled E'Y they exercised the droit du
seigneur and the rulers claimed the "right of the first night" -- helping
themselves to every bride on her wedding night -- so that the women suffered
even more than the men and their rescue and salvation in the nes Chanuka came as
an even greater relief and joy to the women than to the men for that
reason.</DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV>But nobody actually tells girls in school any of that, TTBOMK.
Sometimes they say it's a special holiday for women because Yehudis killed the
Greek general (Holifernes? -- my memory is getting fuzzy). There was
a a Dinah connection there too but they don't talk about that in the girls'
schools either.</DIV></DIV>
<DIV> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT lang=0 face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10"><B><BR></B><BR><B>--Toby Katz<BR>=============<BR></B>"If you don't
read the newspaper you are uninformed; <BR>if you do read the newspaper you are
misinformed."<BR>--Mark Twain<BR><BR><B>Read *Jewish World Review* at <A
href="http://jewishworldreview.com/">http://jewishworldreview.com/</A></B></B><BR><BR></FONT><FONT
lang=0 face=Arial color=#0000ff size=2 FAMILY="SANSSERIF"
PTSIZE="10"><B><BR><BR>--------------------------</FONT></B></DIV></FONT><BR><BR><BR><DIV CLASS="aol_ad_footer" ID="e4e7481de5f1cdb3a861983bb1704dc4"><FONT style="color: black; font: normal 10pt ARIAL, SAN-SERIF;"><HR style="MARGIN-TOP: 10px">One site keeps you connected to all your email: AOL Mail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. <a href="http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp&icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000025">Try it now</a>.</FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>