Religious Ranting

November 29, 2006 - 10:54 PM by Allison

When we get bored with political controversy around here, there’s always religious controversy to get us worked up again.

Danya Ruttenberg, a religiously observant feminist, is very unhappy with a recent conference by haredi (ultra-Orthodox) on the subject of women’s modesty, which only seemed to fall a bit short of recommending that women walk around in full-scale burka and veils.

Nothing says haredi Judaism like thousands of men packed in a room talking about what women need to do, does it?

A huge, married-men-only conference on modesty was held a week-plus ago to discuss the necessity of buckling down on dress codes for women and girls. As far as the article indicates, male modesty and/or a more broadly defined modesty as humility and care for the other were not discussed.

There was, according to reports, one woman who spoke there. But her remarks ticked Danya off as much as any of the mens’.

The one woman that they quoted used the tagline of the recent modesty handbook Oz Hadar Velevusha (which is replete with debates about the permissibility of patterned tights and the like) –“Just as the Torah is most important to men, so is modesty for women.”

I have never understood this. Torah isn’t important for women? Even if this was intended to mean “Torah study,” it still sounds awful. Men get God’s 613 commandments and a book describing the covenant between God and Israel, and women get implored to make sure shirts are at least 10 centimeters longer than their waistlines?

(Rabbi Yehudah Henkin observes, “This ideology prohibits a woman from standing out—and from being outstanding. She must not act in a play, paint a mural, play an instrument or otherwise demonstrate special skills in front of men, lest she attract attention and her movements excite them.”)

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