Why do women want to put on Tefilin?

MagentaYenta

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:12 pm

sequoia wrote:

That's fine. The whole point of a classic is that it's something for everyone. I was just responding to Dolly, who was using Romeo and Juliet to explain why women who lay tefillin have to stop now LOL

I don't think that Dolly is particularly accepting of modern women or women laying on tefillin. Most of the women I know that lay tefillin do it because of the mitzvah. None of which has anything to do with R&J.

sequoia

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:22 pm

MagentaYenta wrote:

Yeees.... clearly... hence the laughing smiley.

As in, her arguments have nothing to do with her thesis.

Boy, tone really doesn't convey very well online, does it?

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:25 pm

I dragged in R&J because it is an unarguable and universally recognized picture of non-rational passion.

This post-modern deconstructionism is apocryphal, false, politically sinister and cynical, and made-up.

R&J essentially invented the romantic genre, and so can't satirize it. It can't satirize itself. It was first. Meaning that's the Romantic genre's source in ENGLISH and in MODERN times.

Your teacher(s) could have taught Titus Andronicus, if they found R&J too sticky sweet, and just plain didn't like it, but it's wrong to falsify a work of art, especially when the artist is dead and can't fight back.

A dead giveaway that R&J means business is how long its love scenes go on and on. Shakespeare never satirizes anything too long without a break, because people can't keep up a snarky feeling for very long. It's tiring and uncomfortable. It has to be a brief stab.

I have to use the education I have. I am not learned like you people. So I used what I know. It isn't really appropriate here.

PAMOM

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:29 pm

Having deleted the nessage I was composing after reading you, magenta yenta and sequoia, all I can say is that I need to do a better job of picking my battles and thanks. To many of the rest of the respondants here, I've seen real sensitivity to the fact that we are varied women with different needs and that our biology doesn't necessarily determine our Jewish gender role division. That makes me very reassured .

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:30 pm

Way back upthread it was proposed that anybody who felt like it could lay tfillin, and women didn't injure men by doing men's usual things, and religion shouldn't be a men's clubhouse, and men shouldn't run out the door when women do the same things they do.

I opined men and women don't have calm, neutral feelings about what each other is doing, and men need their own clubhouse, and that's ok because we also need, and have, our women's clubhouses. I opined that people weren't sx-neutral beings and that gender roles needed to be protected.

I also said men will take that into their own hands, by running out the door, and many posters remarked that this indeed had been seen to happen, repeatedly, in Judaism and in other religions, a lot.

I brought in the chickens and Juliet because they both illustrate the centrality and inescapability of sx in life.

Last edited by Dolly Welsh on Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:34 pm; edited 1 time in total

sequoia

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:34 pm

Dolly, I'm sorry, but you are quite incorrect here. Shakespeare did not invent the genre. He played with it. His contemporaries were inundated with romantic love stories. We just haven't heard of most of them because they weren't good. We have heard of Shakespeare.

You know, kind of like everyone has forgotten Isaac Watts' "How doth the little busy bee," but everybody knows Lewis Carrol's parody "How doth the little crocodile."

That's not to say that there aren't great examples of non-rational passion in world literature, or in Shakespeare's corpus. "Romeo and Juliet," however, is not a good example.

This isn't some post-modern lit theory cr@p. This is pretty straightforward.

amother

Orchid

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:42 pm

Dolly Walsh, your first three paragraphs in your last posting are factually incorrect and logically unsupportable. Also, you can't claim that an argument suffers from misapplied deconstructionism and then claim ignorance beyond freshman English. I have multiple degrees in English, subspecialties in women's literature, Jewish literature, and literary theory. I have taught all 3 on the university level. You are certainly entitled to feel however you choose about any issue and free to explain your point of view. I respect your passion, but you need to recognize that your interpretation of R and J, the definition of "universal," and your understanding of satire/self-reflexivity/etc. don't equal your more typical kind responses or obvious desire to lead a righteous life.

zaq

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:49 pm

I would hope that the men in my life would be sufficiently secure in their manhood and their religious observance not to be panic-stricken and run out the door when the distaff side of the family takes up anything, be it tefillin or a hammer. I don't say they have to approve, but if they ran out the back door never to return, they wouldn't be my kind of men. Happily, I had the kind of dad who was pleased and proud of each of his dd's achievements, from writing an essay, to building a bookcase, to leining megillah. Happily, his sons-in-law are the same way.

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:52 pm

PA Mom, there are certainly a lot of ways to play being a Jewish woman, but they are all daughters of Sarah.

Shir ha Shirim does not portray a milquetoast woman. She teaches, allocates resources in the home, does business outside it, has wide range of skills, and is universally seen as the reason her husband is a somebody at all. You could hardly ask for more. She is, however, home centered. She isn't actually, herself, sitting in the gates. Her produce is there, though, and she is personally credited by name, and paid money for it. But she isn't physically sitting there. She is home.

I think that is about as good a deal as you are going to get. Other ways of life produce nice lives but not replacement birthrates. It just takes a long, long time to make a human being.

It's not like the wolf. She litters in a month or two, and boom, she's back hunting in the woods like nothing happened.

Perhaps it is better to be a first rate thing, than a second-rate other thing.

We can do plenty men can do, but not quite the same way, and I am very leery and careful never to be ridiculous as a second-rate man. I would rather stay in territory where I am unarguably something else entirely, and a first rate specimen of that thing. I like first-rate. Not second-rate.

Especially when you can never really be that thing. To me that has the inefficiency of walking on your hands.

I don't like inefficiency. I say, let the men do what they are designed to do.

And I expect the same from them. I never let them encroach on me, either. It's not just them who don't want me to encroach. I also will not tolerate encroaching.

People forget that part. They forget to protect their flank while they are forging ahead.

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 6:58 pm

MagentaYenta wrote:

Except you failed to include the fact that chickens lay eggs without the help of males, just as women ovulate without males. Science is hard to get around sometimes.

Chickens only lay eggs as a reproductive act. That their reproductive process has been fiddled with, distorted, by farmers, and the egg laying made to serve human purposes instead of its real purpose, doesn't change that.

Dolly Welsh

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 7:11 pm

amother wrote:

You are one heck of a scholar but a recent one. You have learned in the post-modern era of deconstructivism. You can't help when you were born.

Shakespeare didn't write for English scholars, he was selling tickets, and the upper seats were for smart people who wanted an exciting, not a nuance-y, experience. Shakespeare was competing with bear-baiting down the street. The groundlings whose money mattered too were even less nuance-y. When Shakespeare wants to be funny, we know. Indeed, the beginning of Juliet is hysterical.

To opine that four centuries of classifying it as a "Tragedy" are wrong can't be defended.

In Juliet Shakespeare grabs the Italians and Romans and French, and outdoes them at their own game, he doesn't mock them.

He mocks them hard at other moments.

An awful lot of stylized flirting and genuine loving was going on around the monarchs Shakespeare served.

No way to clean that up and give it a cool, detached, mocking tone. In fact the cool, detached, urbane, Englishman hadn't been invented yet. The English were a loud, gesticulating, roaring, emotional lot back then.

Thanks for your compliments. But I couldn't let it pass that a major work of art is a turnip instead of a potroast. It just isn't. It is what it is.

I am no stupider than the people who paid to see it the first time.

sequoia

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 7:22 pm

Dolly, I assure you, nowhere did I encounter "post-modern deconstructivism." Not at school, not in Columbia, not in Cambridge. The people who taught me were traditional scholars. Have you read James Shapiro?

Also, forgive me, but... all the historical information about theater in Shakespeare's time -- you don't think contemporary scholars know that? Or that you have just told me or Orchid something NEW?

You are entitled to your opinions, but they are incorrect.

MagentaYenta

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 7:27 pm

Dolly Welsh wrote:

I live in a world of backyard chickens and raised them myself. You are wrong again. Please stick to subject you know about or have actually researched.

cbsp

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 7:38 pm

Dolly Welsh wrote:

...
Shir ha Shirim does not portray a milquetoast woman. She teaches, allocates resources in the home, does business outside it, has wide range of skills, and is universally seen as the reason her husband is a somebody at all. You could hardly ask for more. She is, however, home centered. She isn't actually, herself, sitting in the gates. Her produce is there, though, and she is personally credited by name, and paid money for it. But she isn't physically sitting there. She is home.

...

Did you perhaps mean Aishes Chayil?
I'm following (and liking) your comments...

amother

Orchid

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 7:41 pm

Dolly Walsh, I am within 5 years of your age (based on a recent posting of yours). That hardly makes me a victim of Derrida.
And there is no woman at the gates in Shir HaShirim, only a lot of zxual longing and some terrific poetic devices. (You mean Eshet Chayil.) It's no wonder that it's considered part of the "wisdom litersture" of king Solomon. We don't need to discuss gender roles to enjoy the poetry, and one doesn't need to understand the literary context of Shakespeare or of his critical reception at the time and for 400 years after to buy a ticket to the play.

zaq

Mon, Jun 29 2015, 7:41 pm

Strong, confident men have no fear of strong, confident women.

May I point out that the blessed and revered Sarah Schenirer, founder of the Beit Yaakov schools and held up as a role model to generations of frum schoolgirls, was something of an iconoclast and not entirely unopposed by the Orthodox Establishment of her day when she proposed the idea of teaching girls limudei kodesh. This was something that WAS NOT DONE. No doubt her detractors believed that this deplorable idea would lead to the destruction of the Jewish family, too. Had the girls of her day not been attending nonJewish schools and in danger of being lost to frumkeit, she would probably have received no support at all.

Funny how breakaway movements sometimes manage to become mainstream.