(This isn't meant as a criticism of RSA, or of Ger specifically. We know that many religious gatherings across the Orthodox world would look exactly like this. I am just so struck that beneath the rhetoric of nashim b'mai zachyan, and the tears of the Yiddishe mama, and the rest,
is the reality that many of the members of the religious community of which I see myself a part live with the unquestioned and not-needing-to-be-questioned default state that women are completely absent in religious spaces.
And not only is that not seen, but if it were raised, the answer would be that the absence of women is what constitutes those as religious spaces.
Moshe Rabbeinu thought that chag laShem required baneinu u'bnoteinu. If the question were asked today, would we be fine parking the women in Egypt for three days and letting the men go out to the midbar to worship?
If minimally we can constitute a religious polity without half of the Jewish people, and maximally the religious polity is defined by the exclusion of half of the Jewish people, where does that leave us? [Especially those of us who are in that half of the Jewish people.])
I've spend a lot of time think about citizenship these past few years. GWU professor (and former grad school colleague) Denver Brunsman wrote about the role that British naval impressment served in structuring a negative definition of citizenship in the early republic.
What it was to be a citizen was not be the sorts of people who could be kidnapped by the British navy and forced into service: A subject of the king. A slave. And a woman. Those were the people who weren't free to determine their own destiny, and that was what a citizen wasn't.
(It wasn't subtle. One founding-era figure said that impressment "put petticoats on them all.")
What struck you about that list when you read it?
What struck me was birchot hashachar.

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More from @Doc_RPS

12 Nov
Really curious about the Israeli school experience. Don't know much about it, but my understanding is much larger classes, much less individual attention and support. Is this true? And if so, how does it work for kids?
Do Israeli kids just have many fewer academic, social/emotional, religious needs? Do Israeli parents not expect the school to be the address for those needs?
Are there different expectations on what the schools will, can, should do? Is that because tuition-paying parents have different expectations?
Read 4 tweets
12 Nov
I found last night's conversation distressing in ways that surprised me. Accusations of bad faith, dishonesty, status chasing, rich-people-pandering, and klal-money-wasting are pretty par-for-the-Twitter course, but they got to me, and I don't choose to go there again right now.
Instead, here's one more try at making the same point. Like you, I pay yeshiva day school tuition. One of my children graduated from SAR--the other four went to/go to other day schools, which have to be paid for. Total bill this year for three kids is ~$60,000.
Youngest two are in two different schools. 12-y.o. in Bais Yaakov that costs a little over $10,000/year. 10-y.o. in Centrist Orthodox school that costs two-and-a-half times that.
Read 15 tweets
27 Oct
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)
Read 16 tweets
26 Sep
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.
Read 6 tweets
20 Sep
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.)
Read 5 tweets
19 Sep
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.
Read 21 tweets

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