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| Agudah Board of Trustees at the National Mission to Washington |
This is not to say that women are mistreated in those
segments. Nor does it mean to say that these women do not prefer having that
role. In the ideal, they view the role of a Jewish woman as responsible for raising
children, and taking care of the home.
The reality of course is that few women even in those communities
limit themselves to that. In the non Chasidic Yeshiva world, women are not only
responsible for the aforementioned tasks, they are often the breadwinners too.
They not only cook and clean, and take care of the children, they work – often putting in more time than the typical 8 hour day. All while their husbands spend long days
in the Beis Hamedrash toiling over a section in the Gemarah.
Women in the Chasidic world are out in the workplace as
well. While Chasidim do work - the vast majority of them are undereducated (except
in Torah studies) and can only find menial low paying jobs. Considering that a
family of 10 children is fairly common, a low paying job will not suffice even
if they are as frugal as possible. The women in that world therefore work too.
The point here is that women are as out in the world today
as men in virtually every segment of Orthodox Judaism. The idea of women staying home and out of
sight is simply not the reality.
It still however remains the ideal. Kevuda Bas Melech Penima
– Jewish women are to be seen as royalty and their honor is on the inside. Although
I interpret that to mean a Jewish woman’s true honor is internal (via her midos
- personal character), it is more often interpreted to mean that she should be modest
– to be a private person and stay out of the public eye as much as possible.
However, in light of the reality of women being out in the
world, is the latter interpretation even relevant anymore? There was a time that
women were not seen in public very much. They stayed home. Men would work. They
were the breadwinners. But that is rarely the case today. In fact even in cases
where women do not work, they become involved in a variety of activities
outside the home – with the full approval of their rabbis no matter how Charedi. There are Chesed projects, involvement
with their children’s school via a PTA,
and involvement with various other pursuits that take them out of the home.
In short, there has been a huge paradigm shift since the
days where women stayed home - rarely leaving the house. This shift did not happen
yesterday. When it was the case, women were so rarely seen in public, that even
sitting together with their husbands at a wedding feast was considered
immodest. So much so, that Halacha forbade saying a common introductory phrase
to the grace after meals of ‘Shehasimcha Bimono (….the joyous event is in God’s
abode) because it was considered immodest for men and women to sit together and
therefore not worthy of being in God’s abode. But many generations ago, Poskim
started permitting that phrase to be said because it was no longer considered immodest
for men and women to sit together. Women no longer stayed home all the time.
They were a common sight in the public eye.
There are many that insist on maintaining the old paradigm
of separating the sexes as much as possible. And in some cases they go to great
lengths to separate men from women. Although it is the right of any segment to
behave as they wish, that right ends at someone else’s door. And that is the
source of a lot of animosity between some of the more extremist Charedim and other
Orthodox Jews. Which has played out in a number of ugly ways, ranging from
beating up women who sit down in the men’s section of a sex-segregated bus in
Israel, to photo-shopping images of women out of pictures in Charedi publications.
The latest such occurrence involves a picture posted on
Agudah’s website (I know they don’t really have a website – but they do.) It
was a picture of a group of Agudah activists that were in Washington DC to mark
the 55th anniversary of their late leader, Rabbi Moshe Sherrer’s ‘historic
testimony regarding government assistance to religious school communities’.
Interestingly, women were included in that picture. But
Hamodia does not publish pictures of women. So Agudah, knowing that some
publications won’t publish pictures with women in them took another one without
the women in it. That is the picture Hamodia published. As much as I applaud Agudah
for publishing the picture with the women in it, I’m sorry that they felt the
need to honor a stringency they do not believe in themselves.
One might say it was nice of them to accommodate those to
their right. But by doing so they also participated in a wrong. It is unfair to
the women in the picture to have erased them from this event as though they weren’t
even there. But even if the women in that picture didn’t object to it, it is an
insult to women in general to be erased out of the public eye when they clearly
have no real problem with it themselves. As evidenced by the fact that they
published an identical picture with the women in it on their website.
Accommodating them in this grants legitimacy to a concept of
modesty that no longer exists. A modesty that can cause all kind of problems and
make Jews look primitive. In a world where men and women are out in the public square
all the time it is insulting to photo-shop women out of a picture before it is
published and explain it as a requirement of modesty. It is one thing to stand
up for Halacha – even if it would insult modern sensibilities. That is a mandate
for a Jew. One does not give up Shabbos
- even if it would make us look bad. But to stand up for a principle based on circumstances that no longer exist and haven’t
for many years is in my view foolish and even harmful.
If you want to separate men and women at a Kiddush in your Shul
on Shabbos… separate away. But if you are going to try to perpetuate archaic
ideas about modesty when it involves people outside of your community, it
should not be done. And those that wish to do so ought to be discouraged in any
way they can.
Agudah’s policy of accommodating those to their right in
this case was therefore a two sided coin. In my humble opinion, instead of accommodating them, they should
have tried to impress upon them the problems such stringencies can generate and
told them to if they did not want to use the picture with women in it, they should not use any picture
at all.
