They're At It Again! This Time It's Separate...

... checkout lines at the grocery store.

You know, for the crowd who likes to scream "HaChadash assur min HaTorah" (that which is new is forbidden by the Torah) at every technical innovation, they never seem to frown at new ways of keeping men and women separate. Separate sides of the sidewalk? Separate seating on buses? Separate checkout lines at a grocery store? Yeesh, where are we headed?

One wonders where this is ultimately going to lead. Anyone want to take bets on how long it'll be before any of the following happens?

-- Separate weddings -- the kallah will send a shliach (messenger) to accept the kiddushin from the chosson. Separate receptions (in separate buildings) will be held for men and for women. The only time that a man might see a woman at all during the night is when the chosson and kallah arrive at their new home after the simcha.

-- Separate seating at the Shabbos table -- families will now have to eat the Shabbos meal separately. This is especially true if there are non-family guests who are invited over. A system will have to be devised so that men and women do not meet accidently in the kitchen while retrieving food for their separate dining rooms.

-- Single gender Parent-Teacher meetings -- only parents of the same gender as the teacher/rebbi will be allowed to meet with the teacher/rebbi. IOW, only fathers should go to meet their son's rebbeim, while only mothers should meet their daughter's teachers or son's pre-school moros (the issue of female pre-school teachers for boys will be addressed in the future).

-- Separate seating at restaraunts -- I'm sure it must be extremely unmodest to have women sitting out in the open while eating out with their families. After all, men from other families can ogle them from their seats. The only solution to this is to institute separate seating at restaurants.

All kidding aside, I think the best remark I've seen on this (and chumors in generals) came from a YWN commentator named gamzultova. He (she?) said:

When you make the derech 1 mm wide, don’t be surprised when more and more people fall off it.

How true.

The Wolf

The Charedim Finally Got It Right... Sort of

Vos Iz Neias is reporting that Egged (the public bus line that serves Israel) has rebuffed efforts by the Chareidi community to institute separate seating bus service to the Kotel. As a result, the Chareidim have called upon people to send money to establish their own bus lines.

In one respect, they finally got it right. If you're not happy with the service being provided and you think that there is enough of a demand for an alternative service, you should go out and provide that alternate service. Rather than forcing people who don't want to sit in separate seating buses* (and who don't hold that it's forbidden for men and women to sit together in public transportation) to accomodate to your wishes, it's far better to start your own bus line.

So, what's the problem? Well, the problem is that the community needs $100,000 to establish the service. The article doesn't state whether this is going to be run as a business or as a community service (and subsidized by charity dollars). My guess is that it's going to be partially subsidized by charity dollars, as I don't think there really is enough of a demand for separate-seating buses to the Kotel (if there were, wouldn't Egged agree to estblish the lines?)

Assuming the busing service is not going to be run as a business, I think it would behoove the chareidi community to decide if having the separate bus line to the Kotel is really worth it. In a community where children and families are going hungry due to a shortage of donations and kollelim might have to close (thereby reducing the amount of Torah being learned), I think the chareidi community needs to take a long, hard look and decide if this bus line is *really* necessary at this time. Resources in any community are scarce and sometimes tough choices have to be made in deciding which public projects should receive those scarce resources. I think that $100,000 could be spent in *much* better ways than setting up a bus line for separate seating to the Kotel.

The Wolf

P.S. I wanted to comment on some of the way over-the-top comments about mixed bus service (mixed journeys of promiscuity?), but I think I'll leave that for another time.

* When Eeees and I went to Israel several years ago, we were there for the first time. Never having been there, we weren't always 100% sure where we were going. Being able to sit together allowed us to feel far more comfortable riding the buses. Both of us riding separately in a country where we had never been, going to a place where we never went to before would have been very uncomfortable and unnerving.

The Road To Hell...

I read with interest the Letters To The Editor in this week's Jewish Press. Many of the letters were in response to Rabbi Horowitz's excellent column "You Might End Up Dead." Most of the letters (including one from Rabbi Eli Teitelbaum) supported Rabbi Horowitz's point regarding extremist violence from some Hareidim. However, there was one letter that, while not condoning the violence, seeks to mitigate it. Here's the letter:


I am amused by the sanctimonious expressions of outrage directed against those individuals who attacked that lady on the bus in Israel. While I cannot condone taking the law into one’s own hands, there is an incontrovertible point to be made that one of the Jewish tradition’s important messages to the world is that men and women not married to each other should not mingle with each other.

Rejecting violence is one thing, but let’s not indulge in political correctness at the same time. The young men in question obviously burn with the love of Torah. Their hearts are in the right place, even if they overreacted in their determination to enforce the standards and morality of our Holy Torah.

Yitzchok Melnick

Jerusalem

In short, he's saying that the extremists deserve sympathy because "their hearts were in the right place." Sorry, but that's not good enough for me.

Firstly, there is the question of Mr. Melnick's premise -- that men and women should not mingle with one another. While I'm grant him the obvious point that the Torah truly does discourage mingling of the sexes, there is the very significant question of what represents "mingling."

I travel by public transportation in New York City just about every day. There is mixed seating (and standing) in the subways, but I would hardly call what happens there "mingling." Over 99% of the time I have no interaction with any other person in the subways and buses, despite sitting next to or standing in front of them. Certainly no one has *ever* started up anything that could even remotely touch upon what the Torah would legitimately look upon as inappropriate mixing of the sexes. (Now that could be because I'm short, fat, balding and somewhat dumpy looking, but my general impression is that this is the case for most people.) I don't think that sitting next to a woman on the train or bus is any more "mingling" than passing her while walking in the street. If it were, there would be people seeking to have a p'sak passed that riding on the subway is forbidden. To my knowledge, no one has even attempted such a thing. Thousands of Orthodox Jews ride the subways every day without any question of whether or not it is considered "mingling."

In addition, while in this case, the chayal and the woman weren't married to each other (and weren't even companions), I doubt that even if the couple were married (where we can all agree that "mingling" is allowed) that the extremists would have left her alone (provided, of course, that the husband looked like the type who wouldn't/couldn't fight back). I'm fairly certain that had they been in a situation where no one could question the propriety of them sitting together (husband/wife, son/mother, etc.) that the extremists would have made trouble if they could.

Lastly, I want to address Mr. Melnick's point about their "hearts being in the right place." In this, he's dead wrong again. They weren't "enforcing the standards and morality of our Holy Torah" but rather their own extremist version of it. While they may have thought that "their hearts were in the right place" and that they had "good intentions," we all know where that road goes...

The Wolf

Kol Ish

Yeshiva World reports (as does Ynet) about a new singer from Natanya named Eliyahu Haim Fayzakov. The twenty-year-old recently released his first album and was rapidly becoming a hit on chareidi radio stations.

Then, suddenly, his songs were no longer heard. Radio stations stopped playing them.

Was there a problem with the lyrics? Nope, they were fine. Was the music too "goyish?" Nope, that was OK too. So, what's the problem?

Well, the problem is that Mr. Fayzakov has a high voice, and his singing sounds like a woman's voice, which prompted calls from the listening audience. After listening to a clip of his singing (which can be found at the Ynet article I linked to above), I would have to agree that his singing could easily be mistaken for that of a woman.

But so what? The bottom line is that he *is* a man, and there is no more halachic problem listening to him singing than if he had long lustrous hair, was married and walked around without a sheitel. As long as the radio station identifies him by name (he has a man's name), he should be fine.

I'm kind of curious why people have no problem with imitation cheeseburgers, imitation bacon bits, sheitels that resemble real hair and any of the hundreds of other "kosher-equivalent" alternatives but seem to have a problem with this singer. I'd say that the items on my list are far worse in terms of violating the spirit of the law (while staying true to the letter) than listening to Mr. Fayzakov sing.

Now, to be fair, it should be pointed out that this seems to be a grassroots campaign against him. I'm not aware of any chareidi rabbi who has weighed in on the matter one way or the other. Hopefully, one of them will speak up and set the matter straight.

The Wolf

Funny What Sets People Off

Unless you've been living under a J-blog rock, you've certainly heard about the story of the woman who was beaten up on a bus for refusing to sit in the back of the bus.

I don't know whether the story is true or not, nor do I have any way to verify it. However, it should be noted that the issue involved is only one of a chumra, a stringency, and certainly not one that is universally held. There was certainly no Rabbinic or Biblical commandment being disobeyed here.

And yet, could you see this story happening because she was eating treif on the bus? Could you see it happening because she was eating chometz on Pesach? Could you see it happening because she was returning from having been on the Temple Mount? Could you even see this happening because she had a tattoo?

Personally, I cannot. If someone were to tell me that she were beaten up for violating a mitzvah d'oreissa, I'd have a hard time believing it - but for this, it sadly sounds plausable.

Funny which "violations" will cause people to react violently.

The Wolf

Separate Sidewalks?

Much has been written about the recent Tznius asifa in Israel. I plan to comment on it too in the future, but I need to get some materials together. In short, I think that raising people's conciousness about tznius is a good thing (even if the asifa went about it in a completely wrong fashion - but that's for another post).

However, there are times when it gets carried too far - and I think that the residents of Beit Shemesh (where I have relatives living) have reached that point. In parts of the town, there are now separate sidewalks for men and for women. Signs are posted on the street advising women that they have to cross over to the other side of the street. Women are not allowed on the side of the street where the shul is located.

Now, lest I sound like someone who is in favor of licentiousness and free love, let me reiterate that standards of tznius are a good thing. Lord knows I don't need to see any more bare midriffs in New York in the summer. But the idea that the sexes have to be so completely separated that they can't even walk on the same street is ludicrous.

Has there ever been a Jewish community where it was noted that this standard was observed? Did our ancestors in the midbar walk on different sides of the paths between tents? When Dovid danced in the streets, did he do it on the men's side? In any of the shtetls in Europe, was there ever a reqirement that the men and women occupy different streets?

Rabbi Maryles has noted in his blog recently the ever-increasing trend toward the separation of the sexes, starting with separate seating by weddings, to the ever-increasing fact that the kallah does not come over to the men's side during the dancing, to separate seating by Sheva Berachos - even of the chosson and kallah!

I recently read a science fiction series by Robert J. Sawyer called the Parallax Trilogy. The series centers on a world where the Neanderthals, not humans, survived and became the dominant species of the planet. On the Neanderthal world, the sexes live separate lives for most of the month. For 25 out of every thirty days, the men live in one community and the women (and small children) live in another. It is only during the remaining five days (when "Two Become One" that the men and womenfolk get together.

One has to wonder if that isn't the goal for some of the ultra-zealots - to, in short, have separate communities where men will sit and learn all day and not be distracted by the womenfolk and the women will work and support the men without being distracted by their presence. Of course, I realize that I'm greatly exaggerating the situation - after all, we're only talking about separate sidewalks, not separate houses and communities. But sometimes, I feel like that is the direction that we are headed in.

What ever happened to taking a moderate approach?

The Wolf