Orthodox Jewish women find a voice and audience on Instagram.
April 12, 2021 1:00 PM   Subscribe

 
Are there examples of religious fundamentalism in any religion which are not harmful to or controlling of women?
posted by Warren Terra at 3:39 PM on April 12, 2021 [23 favorites]


This sort of thing always amazes me, because I grew up with a female cantor at my Reform synagogue, and it never occurred to me that there would be male cantors, ever. I mean, why would there be? Women have such beautiful voices, and our cantor was absolutely incredible. Sexism is so silly.
posted by Slinga at 3:55 PM on April 12, 2021


Mod note: Comment removed - please try to keep this discussion on the rails and be mindful of the comparisons you make. Thank you.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 5:40 PM on April 12, 2021


I made the comparison I did because it matches my experience growing up Orthodox and, when I was in the process of leaving, the things I was told about how I should try to find ways to make it work and the approved things I could do. Celebrating women finding more ways to cope in the limited sphere they’re granted within a deeply sexist community and branch of religion and avoiding negative commentary about the community itself is misguided.
posted by needs more cowbell at 5:51 PM on April 12, 2021 [14 favorites]


I'm another Reform Jew who is often mildly surprised to see a man on the bimah - I mean, I know that men are allowed to be rabbis and cantors and I think they have lovely voices, it's just that I'm not used to them.

I think about how women are the mainstay of so many religious communities - and how much is lost when they are excluded. I read an article a few years ago about how for both the Orthodox Jewish community and the Mormon church, they had so many women active in their institutions (maybe more than men?), but those roles were restricted by the respective communities - and I think that the communities are left poorer for it.

Also, I have to wonder at the double standard: men shouldn't listen to the voice of a woman for modesty? If so, women shouldn't be listening to the voices of men singing (I've seen pre-teens at a boy-band concert) - and the logical conclusion would that they should have their own female rabbis and cantors. But no, "modesty" always seems to be a one-way street - and I wouldn't seriously suggest that women shouldn't hear men's voices, as I fear that would just lead to them being banned from services entirely.
posted by jb at 6:55 PM on April 12, 2021 [3 favorites]


Religion is so weird.

I’m not Jewish (or a woman) but the end of the article, where the women felt the need to proclaim they absolutely weren’t feminists reminded me of my very Roman Catholic mother. She was very loudly Not A Feminist but could also give you a long list of all the ways women are disrespected and subjected to unfair double standards in society.
posted by Big Al 8000 at 7:25 PM on April 12, 2021 [9 favorites]


"I think about how women are the mainstay of so many religious communities"

One of the outcomes of the "feminization" of ministry -- like the feminization of teaching and of secretarial work -- is that once women begin to enter what was previously a MALE high-status profession requiring specialized skills, men flee it IN DROVES, and it becomes a low-status profession. And while male-privileging religious institutions are somewhat insulated from this, they're not fully insulated from it (see, the Catholic Church's dramatic falloff in priest recruitment in countries where women are commonly in ministry leadership positions in other religious groups, while it remains relatively (relatively!) stable in countries where women do not have those opportunities). WATCH THIS SPACE for what happens to the prestige value of being a pediatrician now that pediatrics is 75% female in the US (and feminizing at similar rates in many other countries).

Women are absolutely the mainstay of religious work in Western countries and have been for 150 years or so (some scholars argue longer, but I'll plant my flag at 150 years b/c I feel confident talking about the last 150, with the caveat that longer is PROBABLY right and I just can't speak to it), but the moment women start being recognized for their contributions to keeping synagogues/churches/mosques/temples running, men stop attending services and stop participating in community activities and leadership, because once you recognize women in the community for their contributions, religion is for girls, and regressive patriarchal ideas about masculinity require them to distance themselves from it.

"But no, "modesty" always seems to be a one-way street"

Typically, modesty (or "shame") is for women, and honor is for men; it absolutely is a one-way street and there's excellent sociological literature on cultures from ancient to modern throughout the Mediterranean (in particular), but also in many other parts of the world. One major difference is that a dishonored man can regain honor (typically through violence), but a shamed woman can never become un-shamed. Honor typically requires certain positive actions (fathering children, fighting enemies, getting really angry if someone questions your oaths), but shame requires negative actions -- NOT showing men your ankles, NOT having non-marital sex, NOT enjoying yourself during sex, NOT being ritually clean after childbirth, NOT singing where men can hear you, NOT preaching to men, NOT letting men see your hair. Lots of words that pretend to be equally applied (like "modesty" or "chastity") turn out to be code words for a gendered honor/shame regime, where different rules apply to men and women, and even when the same rules apply ("no non-marital sex"), men can regain their honor, while women are tainted by their shame forever.

In fact, female shame can stain male honor! A woman who does a shameful thing not ONLY taints herself, but -- OFTEN MORE IMPORTANTLY! to the culture/religion/story -- taints her father or husband, who then needs to kill a) her; b) the man or men involved; or c) some randos, so he can regain his honor and purge the taint of her shame. Which she retains, even after he kills people, and even if he kills her, or she kills herself. Violence and vengeance only cleanse him, not her. Or, you know, more modernly and less violently, perhaps he divorces her to regain his honor. She will remain shamed. In such groups, he will remarry easily, because he regained his honor when he divorced his shameful wife, and it was a salutary action that the community will laud; she will struggle to remarry because she is so shameful that her husband was forced to divorce her, and she has no means of regaining any honor after being so shamed.

Anyway, if you want to read about these honor/shame dichotomies that are SO common in Judaism/Christianity/Islam and their related cultures (but also lots of other cultures/religions too), search "honor shame gender" in basically any academic database and you'll have several years of reading to enjoy. Modesty is ABSOLUTELY a one-way street.
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:38 PM on April 12, 2021 [40 favorites]


I've enjoyed the singing and I think it's worth hearing.

This is a story about women insisting on making music as much as they can as well as being about bad rules.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 5:29 AM on April 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


Kol isha, like much of what's in the Mishnah, is simply wrong. That isn't what the Torah says, it says "nakedness" which the sages mangled into the female voice. I can think of at least two instances of women singing within earshot of men in the Torah, both noted with approval. And it's based on hopelessly archaic notions of how human psyche and sexual desire works - and in particular the lie that women don't experience lust.
posted by 1adam12 at 5:37 AM on April 13, 2021 [7 favorites]


> Are there examples of religious fundamentalism in any religion which are not harmful to or controlling of women?

My parents stopped going to church (Anglican) when I was seven or eight (we kids were given the choice to keep going or not and enthusiastically chose the "no" option); when I got a bit older and asked why they stopped going, they made vague noises about the hypocrisy of many of the members of the congregation. When I got a little older still they made vague noises, in their own way, about organized religions being systems of power and control above all else.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:45 AM on April 13, 2021


Religion is so weird.

Haredi Jews represent less than 6 percent of American Jews. They are not a representative sample of Judaism or of religion as a whole, and they are very, very much not like Roman Catholics. Let me ask that we not extrapolate from this example to presume that Judaism is yet another example of a universal presumption that religion is oppressive to women.
posted by maxsparber at 7:47 AM on April 13, 2021 [4 favorites]


So after all the outside-looking-in opinions clear, including the formerly-inside ones, as a current insider in the Orthodox community (and as someone who's not opposed to well-deserved criticisms of the community both on its own merits and as part of the wider discussion of fundamentalism and patriarchy like we have here), I think that this absolutely is something that should be celebrated. These women are amazing, and the community they're building is likely unprecedented - not least because it's global. The internet in general and social media in particular has done a lot of harm in the world, but the connections and communities that it enables are also a real force for change.

Right now the Orthodox Jewish community (if you can still call it a "community," when there are so many different groups that constitute it at this point, many of whom have stopped seeing eye to eye in some major ways) has shifted a lot further to the right, with some of the more extremist groups refusing even to print photos of women, or womens' names. Something that's not only completely unheard of in Judaism before this century but requires the cognitive dissonance of constantly seeing womens' names throughout the Torah and Talmud where these men spend most of their days. It makes no sense other than misogyny. For these groups, the internet is forbidden. The odds are good that the women inside this community don't even have the outlet that the women in the article do. And yet. The flip side to this enclosure is that the men are in the box of learning all day, and the women are ones who are employed. And in Israel, that increasingly means tech jobs - which increasingly means access to the internet. The fact that the "prohibition" against men seeing images of women and hearing women's voices doesn't apply to women is an enormous loophole - that as the article is showing, women are leaping through. For some, that will be a ticket out, if that's what they're looking for. And for others, it will give them more meaning in their lives. And for some - it will just be being able to live the way they want to live, in a way that wasn't possible before. I don't see how that isn't a good thing.

I know it's uncomfortable in liberal circles (and that's especially true here) to admit that some religious women are happy - even fundamentalist women in patriarchal religions. That some religious women can see that there are problematic aspects to their religion that can be addressed from within, rather than needing to leave or tear the whole thing down as the only response. That you can be religious and a feminist. Meanwhile I'm seeing a lot of anti-religious and anti-patriarchy and anti-Orthodox-Judaism righteousness in the thread, which I think could appear in just about any thread here about women in Orthodoxy, and not a lot of comments talking about the music. I don't think any of the singers are singing as a statement about Orthodoxy. They found a way to sing and are getting enough of an audience to be successful at it. Which is pretty cool. And they're getting bashed here for it. It just feels like another flavor of Everything Women Do Is Wrong to me.
posted by Mchelly at 8:06 AM on April 13, 2021 [10 favorites]


I don't think anybody here is bashing the women. Commenters are criticizing rules that forbid them from singing in front of men.
posted by Anonymous at 12:35 PM on April 13, 2021


I don't think anybody here is bashing the women. Commenters are criticizing rules that forbid them from singing in front of men.

Yes, my comment was not meant to be a criticism of the artists at all, but of a halachic interpretation which would leave half of the voices of the world unheard by the other half.

I agree that one can absolutely be religious and feminist - my rabbi would certainly claim to be both, and has spent all of her adult life changing the system so she could be both (even for liberal Jews, women rabbis were unthinkable when she was a child and strange even after her ordination).

That said, I wouldn't describe these particular women as "feminist" - and that's not a judgement on them. They don't seem to be interested in changing the structures of authority in their communities to create equality of power between men and women. They aren't like the many women who wear traditionally modest dress (whether tichel or hijab), but who would still advocate for the leadership of women (whether religious and/or secular). This is not the goal of these artists: their goal is to find a place for their music within the existing structure which emphases distinct roles for men and women and within the restrictions of those roles.
posted by jb at 1:20 PM on April 13, 2021


To my mind, the issue wasn't that the women were being bashed (maybe somewhat for not going far enough), it was that a fair number of commenters didn't seem to be interested in their music.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 1:52 PM on April 13, 2021 [2 favorites]


I don't think anybody here is bashing the women. Commenters are criticizing rules that forbid them from singing in front of men.

I think there's probably a thesis here for someone who wants to write about the evolution of Jewish religious popular music. As far as I can tell, it is basically something that didn't exist seventy years ago.

If you go back to rabbhinic sources, one of the forms of mourning that Jews incorporated into their lives after the destruction of the Second Temple was a ban on almost all music. The parameters were a bit flexible: yes to work songs (e.g., the Volga Boat Song), no to songs sung for entertainment during work; yes to musical prayers, no to prayers adapted as songs; no instruments except maybe a couple of musicians at a wedding. This lasted a really long time: there are medieval responsa about whether dances ought to be forbidden because of the rhythmical sound of foot stamping. This prohibition started breaking down in Western Europe under the influence of what later became called the Enlightenment, but Jewish communal reaction to the Chmielnicki massacres actually strengthened the ban in Eastern Europe.

Professional synagogue cantors had always been a thing, but they started acquiring star quality, especially in the USA, and there was a certain amount of crossover between cantorial work and the opera. Some of them, e.g. Yossele Rosenblatt, started presenting works taken from the Jewish prayer service in theaters. When those extracts were brief they lost their context, and you effectively had the original Orthodox popular music. But if you look at early productions marketed to the Orthodox community by, e.g., David Werdyger, that's all they were: bits of prayer, wordless compositions ("nigunim") from Hasidic dynasties, that sort of thing.

Now, because of Jewish music's strong association with cantorial work you had two social things: the first, for our purposes, was that Jewish performers who were not cantors were not respectable; in fact were almost ipso-facto not Orthodox. And by implication there was no space for female Orthodox musicians at all. That's even ignoring the kol isha issue. There just wasn't the conceptual room for them: it was too obvious that they weren't performing cantorial work.

What changed things IMO was the guru/musician Shlomo Carlebach. He's a tremendously complicated (and extremely problematic) figure, but he was operating on the fringes of the folk music and counter-cultural scene in the 50s, and was composing his own music and setting Bible passages and prayers to them. I think all subsequent Orthodox Jewish popular music in the USA essentially comes from this.

In succeeding decades the link between Jewish music and prayer/Bible texts became weaker. One of the earlier people to radically move away from that was David Werdyger's son, Mordechai, (also problematic but differently) who had political songs that weren't based on the Bible/prayer at all. I'm pretty sure that he was influenced in this by a separate line of Jewish songs originating in Jewish summer camps, themselves also influenced by US folk singers of the 1950s. But he only had the space to do this because of Shlomo Carlebach, because the distinction between "adult" Jewish music and camp songs was otherwise pretty strong.

So now we have Orthodox Jewish performers who are men, despite the fact that you look in Jewish religious texts and see that it shouldn't be possible. This, I think, is why they seem to maintain a high level of Biblical/prayer compositions among the rest of their stuff: they're trying to stay respectable. Orthodox women don't have this fig leaf, because their productions are clearly outside the scope of Biblical/prayer compositions. I think this is actually more influential than the kol isha issue: after a review of the rabbinic sources I honestly believe that a person who is exercised about hearing a woman's voice via a recording should also be careful not to listen to music in general. No, not even those guys singing a capella compositions about Chanuka. IIUC this is actually the view of many Hasidic groups: they don't listen to popular music of any sort.

As for these women and their productions, I feel that the changes that we've seen with respect to male Orthodox musicians will continue: now that non-Biblical/prayer compositions are mostly acceptable among Orthodox Jews, there's no logical reason to demand that the singer also be someone capable of leading an Orthodox prayer service. Furthermore, given the realities of modern life I'd be kind of surprised if the Orthodox consensus didn't shift towards the view that there is no issue of kol isha with respect to recorded productions: there's already substantial halachic support for that position. I'm not saying it will alter the status quo with respect to live performances, but there's probably going to be an explosion of Orthodox women's musical productions akin to what happened with male Orthodox musicians in the 70s and 80s.
posted by Joe in Australia at 9:54 PM on April 13, 2021 [7 favorites]


In several of Lipa Schmeltzer's songs there are what sounds like heavily synthesized female backup singers - as much as I would love for this to be true, and fantasize about a world in which Lipa and the women abovethread work together, I know this can't be right. Are they (male) children's choirs or just synth? Can someone who understands the intersection of the music industry and kol isha explain this to me? Just something I've wondered about.
posted by epanalepsis at 6:32 AM on April 14, 2021


You can check the liner notes, but yes: those are probably boy sopranos/trebles, although they may be countertenors. I have to say it seems weird to me, but I suppose it's not unlike the use of boys to play the part of women in Elizabethan drama.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:47 PM on April 14, 2021


Via the same writer's Twitter feed: Emma Goldberg in the NYT writes They Told Her Women Couldn’t Join the Ambulance Corps. So She Started Her Own.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:55 AM on April 21, 2021 [1 favorite]


« Older Listening with the Eyes   |   From mental health to minecraft and WTF, plus two... Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments