2007 April « Rejewvenate!

Halachics of Sefira

April 26, 2007 at 6:12 pm | In beliefs, halacha, holidays, israel | 4 Comments

An ongoing series…

In the past I defined halachics as “the study of the application of Halachic categories to contemporary behaviors and situations.” I believe that I may have to slightly amend that definition, but let’s not get caught up in semantics.

A.K.A. Pella, a Jewish music band, has released an album that is ‘kosher’ for listening to during the Omer. Many religious Jews refrain from listening to music, though that prohibition comes in a variety of flavors. Some people listen to no music at all, while others refrain from hearing live music. For many, the key distinction is between live and recorded music, but others claim that unaccompanied vocal music is permissible, but not music with instruments.

For years, a cappella music, which features only human voices, presented a halachic question during the Omer, and many rabbis, including Rabbi Henkin, allowed it. In fact, many Jewish a cappella groups find themselves in high demand during the Omer, when other musicians are precluded from performing at most religious Jewish events. Generally, though a cappella groups do mimic instruments with their voices, and use musical arrangements that help to create the illusion that instruments are being played, the illusion is largely superficial, and even with eyes closed it is easy to tell that humans are singing.

Not so the new album from A.K.A. Pella. The album features the voice of only one singer, who happens to mimic some instruments pretty well. After he recorded the various parts, the band augmented, modified, and otherwise played around with his recording to make it nearly indistinguishable from an instrumental album, and has traded on the verisimilitude by subtitling the album: “So good it should be assur!”

The issue does present some interesting halachic possibilities. Should a computer like the one used to modify the vocal tracks be considered an instrument for the purposes of prohibiting listening to the album? Alternatively, can we rest on an essentialist doctrine that claims that even though your ears can’t tell the difference between the voice and the instruments, your ears don’t decide the halacha, and the use of instruments affects the spiritual worlds in real ways that the voice simply cannot duplicate?

As usual, I think the above misses the point. The character of the Omer period itself is what is at stake. What began as an anxious but exciting time period on the agricultural calendar (anxious because though the barley crop was in, assuring feed for the animals, the wheat crop would have to wait seven more weeks, and the crop was at its most vulnerable to unseasonable weather) turned into a period of mourning some 1500 years into Jewish history, with the collapse of the Bar-Kochba uprising and the deaths of the students of Rabbi Akiva. Since that time, various other mournful moments were added to the omer, including mourning over the Jewish martyrs killed during the various pogroms that were so common during the time of the Crusades.

More recently though, the Omer has taken on a different tone. The corridor from Yom Hashoah through Yom Hazikaron, Yom Ha’atzmaut, and finally Yom Yerushalayim change the nature of the Omer in subtle and dramatic ways. Yom Hashoah commemorates the Holocaust, but I think it does more than that. I think that it manages to distill all the suffering, exile, destruction, and dehumanization that Jews have experienced since the destruction of the Second Temple in a way that the more religiously sanctioned fast days of Asara B’Tevet and Tisha Be’Av cannot.

After Yom Hashoah, we come to Yom Hazikaron, and the understanding that our suffering, our pain, our deaths and our sacrifices are no less painful for being meaningful, but they are preferable. In our hearts we believe that every Jew who died at the hands of the Nazis would have preferred to die, gun in hand, as a member of Tzahal. The devastation of the Holocaust did birth a new reality in which Jews could and would defend themselves. A small step perhaps, in acknowledging the humanity of the Jew, but a miraculous one nonetheless.

Finally, after the grieving and weeping of Yom Hazikaron come to a close, the siren wails, whether in the street or just in our hearts and minds, and Yom Haatzmaut begins. It is a celebration of salvation, independence, self-reliance, identity, and hope. We sing, dance, recite Hallel (some of use even make a bracha on it!) and spend time with family and friends. And soon after, we rejoice over the conquest of Jerusalem on Yom Yerushalayim, and yet another milestone in the return to Zion.

Whatever the Omer may have been, these holidays transform it, and they make the question of whether driving a truck through the halachic loophole of vocal performances is permitted almost obscene! The Omer is not a time of mourning anymore! It is extremely difficult to conjure up feelings fro Rabbi Akiva’s 24,000 students, or the countless victims of Europe’s Middle Ages. But we trudge along with our traditions because that’s what we do as Jews – we observe our faith, even as we find little meaning in the observation. So enough already! I try to reflect this in my life. I personally would avoid planning a simcha during the Omer, out of respect for our cultural traditions. I don’t shave during sefirah, but I do trim my beard on Rosh Chodesh, Yom Haatzmaut, Yom Yerushalayim, and Lag Ba’Omer. But I listen to music of all kinds (I’m a musician though, so my relationship to music may be somewhat different from that of a non-musician), even as I am meticulous about counting the Omer every night with a bracha.

Enough! Here we had a period of mourning that we observed for 2000 years. One day, God gave us our land back during this period, and a few years later, he restored the very heart of our religion to us, during that very same period. What more do we need? God has reversed our mourning, and turned our tears into laughter. At least, let’s compress the mourning of the Omer so that it lasts only until the final siren sound at the close of Yom Hazikaron fades, drowned out by the laughter and song of Yom Ha’atzmaut.

Hat tip: Avakesh

Marry Rich, or Marry Thin?

April 25, 2007 at 5:50 pm | In dating and marriage, orthodox, sexuality | Leave a Comment

First off, my apologies for the long hiatus. I hope to continue posting regularly, at least until Mrs. rejewvenator has our first child, God willing, this autumn. After that, all bets are off!

I think I’ve made my position on the “shidduch crisis” clear in the past: I’m not so sure it even exists. As a good friend of mine pointed out, nobody has actually quantified the problem. If I wanted to know some basic statistics, like what percentage of Jews are married within a given age cohort, or what percentage of unmarried Jews are trying to get married, or how long it takes, on average, from the time a person starts looking for a spouse until they actually find one, or how Jewish marriage stats compare with marriage stats in other cultures, religions, or ethnic group, there is nowhere to turn. When asking these questions, you’re lucky to be met with a blank stare – more likely, you will face outright hostility for your callousness towards the poor, miserable, unmarried yidden.

While we may not have any firm idea of what the problem is, how big it is, or whom it affects, we do have a wealth of answers. From the hi-tech Jewish dating web sites to the decidedly low-tech matchmaker clubs, there is a dizzying panoply of companies, organizations, foundations, shuls, and individuals offering solutions to the crisis (and maybe trying to make a little bit of money too, why not?) Recently, while browsing Shadchan Magazine, I was struck by the fact that there were no pictures or physical descriptions of any kind, save for one – height!

Harry Maryles, with whom I’ve disagreed in the past on various hashkafic (philosophical/theological) issues, recently wrote about physical characteristics in shidduchim:

The desire to marry the prototypically western ideal size woman who wears a dress size of 2 or less… is all too alive and well in the Charedi world. That’s right. Young men seeking marriage partners seem to require one common thing of their potential mates: They must be “super-model” thin. That’s what they point out to their Shadchanim. Talk about shallow! Can there be anything shallower than specifying a dress size?!

I’ve heard this particular argument before, and I find it, like beauty, to be only skin-deep. First off, while everyone love to quote the Eshet Chayil (Woman of Valor) and its conclusion that “Sheker Ha-chen Ve-hevel Hayofi, Isha Yirat Hashem Hi Titahallal” (The lie of grace and vanity of beauty – a woman who fears God, she will be praised!), it’s telling that Sarah, Rivka and Rachel are described by the Torah as being exceedingly beautiful. In general, the Tanach views physical beauty in a woman to be a positive and desirable characteristic. While beauty can certainly be deceiving, it is also desirable, and a relevant consideration in choosing a spouse.

Whether the attitude described by Rabbi Maryles is in fact endemic to the broader Jewish religious world is uncertain, but it would not be surprising if it was. Most of us would argue that it is rather predictable. A young man looking for a wife within the shidduch process is an extremely dependent man, even as he is on the threshold of starting a family and leaving his parents’ house. He is dependent on the shadchan for appropriate matches, on his family’s money and good name in attracting the right kind of girls, and is extremely restricted even in the actual dating. It really goes down to the details – I’ve learned that it is not appropriate to order two alcoholic drinks on a date! (My personal practice was to down two shot before I went on any first date!)

The problem is not that the single Chareidi man doesn’t have the correct priorities, and their desire for the current cultural mode of beauty is not wrong or anti-Jewish. These men have nothing else! Chareidi dress is both not revealing (a good thing) and not flattering to a woman’s figure (a bad thing). It’s not realistic to expect men to stop caring about how women look, and it’s perverse to assume that being very frum means that you no longer need to be attracted your wife, or that you no longer fantasize about attractive women. From an economics perspective, if ‘good boys’ are a scarce resource relative to the women, it is natural that the boys will raise their price, so to speak.

I could go into a whole harrangue about whether it’s more menschlich to worry about a women’s waist or her father’s wallet, but it’s not worth it. Every adult understands that factors which may strike us as unromantic, or even vulgar, may nevertheless have a considerable impact on the ultimate success of a relationship. No, my concern is for something else.

The religious world has done a pretty good job of selling its women on the value of inequality. Orthodox Judaism to the right of the MO has convinced its women that their less-than-enviable position within Judaism is a part of the Divine plan, and that dignity, meaningfulness, and fulfillment can be found in an embrace of the traditional maternal role (as well as the not-so-traditional role of primary breadwinner and supporter of a torah scholar of even marginal quality – but that’s kollel, and a different post). My guess is that we may have fooled the women, but we haven’t fooled the men. The disrespect shown to women by insisting on a certain dress size is no small matter. I know many people who are happily married to women of somewhat greater proportions than what is in vogue in the Chareidi world, or in Vogue, because they met a person whom they knew how to relate to from a position of respect and appreciation rather than demands and expectations. It is simply not healthy to raise men like that.

But let me ask this question before we go: Let’s say we crunched all the number and discovered that being an overweight woman was highly correlated with being a single woman? How would we respond to that? Would we encourage our boys to marry fat girls, or would we encourage our girls to slim down? And let’s say that the expectations of the boys are actually unrealistic and unattainable? How would we lower their physical expectations? Put another way, if weight gain is connected to being single, do we shut down the shadchan and open a gym? Or do we force the boys to marry fat?

(NB – please do not pillory me for my insensitivity, which is itself the result of a mental disorder. I hope that you will be sensitive to my condition.)