Tel-Chai Nation

A woman who's religious made a case against what UTJ and Religious Zionism are demanding for publicly funded events, which is petty:

If approved, it would legally include libraries, healthcare funds, buses, and so on. How do I know that? Because it is written in the bill's draft, and because I'm from Jerusalem, and that is already the growing reality in the city.

The stated purpose of the proposed legislation is to expand the current gender segregation law to more spaces even if they are not intended for a religious public.

I'm a religious woman, and I wear a head covering, I also try to dress modestly. I pray in the synagogues with proper separation, and my children study, starting from middle school, in gender separate schools. So this is a complicated issue for me.

Still, I'm strongly against the idea of gender separation in public spaces. Why? First and foremost, because I believe in modesty, and such separation is not the religious way. Also, and perhaps the more importantly, because it is not a very modest thing to do.

The Jewish idea of modesty, which I sympathize with and love, is to keep or even sanctify sexuality by keeping it within the personal borders and space of the couple. It is a constant effort to maintain the connection between physical touch and intimacy and between sexuality and intimacy.

Not to diminish it, not to turn it into a day to day routine, and not to let it be present everywhere and all the time. It's the rationale behind separation in physical spaces, such as beaches. It means protecting the contact and the body from trivialization. But, when you separate women from men on a bus or in line at the healthcare fund, you achieve the opposite result. You take a place where we're all human beings and you insert the sexual aspect into it, although it wasn't even present there before.

Instead of reducing and keeping sexuality contained to dedicated places, the proposed draft only brings the sex out to the public space by putting it in our subconscious. It creates a situation where no matter where we are, we will never be seen as humans first, but as - first and foremost - sexual beings.

And that's before we touch on the subject of discrimination.

The reality of "separate but equal" has not been created yet. There will always be someone at the front and someone at the back. Those who get more and those who get less. And you can all guess who that would be. There is no "separate but equal" because even throughout history public spaces always belonged to men. Thus demanding such a law only takes us back to old, primitive times.

While her argument has validity, I think there's still a weakness she has: she dresses modestly? I think that's entirely petty, and definitely runs the gauntlet of making it look as though women are throughly sexual beings, or as though that's literally a bad thing. This is why it's best for women to cease acting as though they have to adhere to the bitter end to a custom that's very much backward itself.

She's right to be concerned, but then, that's why her argument could have more validity if she'd just say why dressing modestly is in itself an outmoded approach to religion.

Labels: haredi corruption, Israel, Judaism, Knesset, misogyny, Moonbattery