Well, here's a conundrum. I declined to participate in this the first time I was asked. I changed my mind after a change on the masthead. And now find myself alongside a denunciation of "the subtle takeover of our generation's mind by progressive ideas...." (And @DBashIdeas. 😄)
I don't feel quite as compromised by who-else-is-commentating (which I didn't know until I saw it in print) as I would appearing in a publication whose editor had been inside the Capitol on January 6th. But perhaps that's post-hoc motivated reasoning.
Another version, @DBashIdeas, of the complicated calculuses (calculi?) of which ideas we use and share, and which songs we sing, and whom we'll appear with. Interested in hearing thoughts. (And of course, he may be as dismayed to be alongside me and my @SHI_America affiliation.)
Adding what I'm talking about to the end, because I forgot to in the beginning:
If you started following me yesterday because you liked what I said about material values and the frum community, now's your chance to get while the getting is good. 😄
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I know a fair amount about New York State law for hiring and firing clergy. I know a fair amount about shul politics. This is not a thread about those. So about the rebbetzin-ate, and what it is to inhabit and lose that role, and my heart goes out to @avitalrachel, a thread:
(I get to decide what this thread is for, and what it is isn't. Will viciously block anyone who brings any ugly into this thread. Not interested; not having it. You don't like it, start your own.)
I've spoken--publicly, in my shul, in my then-role as a rebbetzin--about how strange the role is. A job you get with no training or preparation, by virtue of your ketubah. (2/n)
I am utterly blown away by this appearing in Cross Currents. (You can read it and tell me all the ways it falls short, or you can read it and realize what an enormous sea change is reflected in this discussion, of these issues, this way, for this audience. I prefer the latter.)
(For those not familiar, Cross Currents is a publication of and for the intellectual/open haredi world. If you go back and look at R' Shmuel Kaminetzky (with Arthur Goldberg!) in Hakira on "same-sex attraction" a decade ago and then this, it's light-years. Parsecs.)
I cannot give a big enough yasher koach to Rabbi @YisraelMotzen for stepping up and saying these things, in this community, about LGBTQ members of our community and their families. There is neck-sticking-out here, and there will be backlash. Thank you for braving it.
Following up on @DBashIdeas, the Jewish Action issue, and @themishpacha supplement that I haven't read yet, I want to say one thing about cost-of-frum-life discussions: enormously underrated in this conversation is the choice of where to live--*not* in the cost-of-living sense.
In the setting your barometer of what's normal, acceptable, adequate, and setting your kids' barometer of what's normal, acceptable, adequate.
I think people consider a lot of factors when they choose a community in which to live and raise a family, and "how will this set our family's materialism-barometer" is not necessarily one of them.
As someone who lived through the awful days of March and April of 2020 in New York City, I cannot believe that a political movement made an active choice to replicate what we suffered through.
My son is an EMT. At one point, they received orders that if a cardiac arrest patient couldn't be resuscitated outside the hospital, they should be pronounced dead and not brought to the hospital for further treatment--resources couldn't be spared.
FOX hosts and GOP electeds chose this for their listeners and constituents.
אֶת־חֲטָאַ֕י אֲנִ֖י מַזְכִּ֥יר הַיּֽוֹם
I was once Mr. Logic Man. Everything was a debating society point; if I could argue my way around you I was right and you were wrong. (And I could usually argue my way around you.)
Not only were lived experience and feelings irrelevant, introducing them into the conversation proved the weakness of an argument that could not stand up to the rigors of reasoned debate.
(If this sounds like a whole lot of frum internalized misogyny, you are absolutely right.)
I remember in college at some point getting into a vigorous argument with someone about how disabled people would be best served by robust Access-A-Ride programs that would give them rides places, rather than retrofitting public transit stations. Cost/benefit analysis, you see.