Chaperone Culture - Orthodox Judaism

“Orthodox Jews are at home a lot.”

 

My mom’s friend alerted her, upon discovering that I was embracing this lifestyle.

 

“I almost peed out the window.” - Read to the end for an explanation.

 

Yichud - seclusion - is forbidden.

 

No dating, no attending places where people are clothed modestly, and this includes pools, beaches and lakes. If there are no separate swimming hours or separate areas for men and women, we do not swim.

 

No parties.

 

No suggestive music.

 

No sleepovers unless there is a great need, say, an emergency, then everyone is kept separate and supervised.

 

Orthodox Jews have a chaperone culture. Any who are permitted to marry must be chaperoned. The closest permissible marriage is a niece and uncle or nephew and aunt. This degree relative, first cousins, second cousins, and anyone unrelated of course must be chaperoned.

 

Even on a Saturday afternoon, if a boy grandchild age 10 and a girl grandchild age 11 are visiting: do not take a nap, you must chaperone them.

 

No allowing kids above age say 9, or maybe 11, to  mix socially.

 

A girl from age 3 cannot be alone with a  boy or man from age 12.

 

Three. That’s right. Three. A three year old and older girl must be chaperoned.

 

“I almost peed out the window.”

 

David was visiting his Rabbi and wife. He slept over on our Sabbath. The next morning, he tried to open his bedroom door. It was locked! He had to go to the bathroom! What was he to do? The sound of hurrying footsteps up the stairs came to the rescue and the Rabbi opened David’s guest bedroom door.

 

“Hope this was not an inconvenience, I was called out to an emergency and could not leave you alone with my wife, and I did not want to awaken you, so I locked you in your bedroom so there would be no yichud (seclusion).”

 

David made a bee line for the bathroom.

"Go out with your friends, I will scrub the floor by myself"

Great grandmother said this to her teenage grandson Frank "really, it's fine, go have fun."

Uncle Frank often told us, "and at the thought of my grandmother, on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor on her own, I couldn't bear it, so I stayed home with her and helped her move the kitchen furniture and scrub the floors."

It was a lesson in psychology, given by a simple Jewish housewife, my great grandmother.

Sometimes you need not say much, and the point gets through.

So if some states ban abortion after 6 weeks, chances are that the rate of abortion will plummet even before this cut-off point.

People will consider the unborn to be alive after 6 weeks, then ponder, hmm... the baby wasn't exactly dead until then.

And the thought of an abortion earlier than  6 weeks will make people cringe.

Just like uncle Frank did. He was allowed to go out with his friends, but he couldn't bear the thought.

So continue to advocate for protection from conception, but a cut-off point will stem even very early abortions.

It's simple human psychology.

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Traditional Judaism holds that sex should only happen in marriage, birth control should be used in only some circumstances, some forms of birth control are  immoral, and babies and small children are a normal part of the community. 

In this lifestyle, I call it a life society, people do not even hear about abortion, let alone ponder at what week gestation it should be allowed to occur.

Build a life society. Then pro-life will just flow naturally. 

 

 

A concept that works for some, and harms most, should be quickly identified and questioned.

A concept that works for some, and harms most, should be quickly identified and questioned.

We grew up liberal, in a social experiment.

Because we were liberal and therefore enlightened, it never would have occurred to us to question the basic assumptions within which we lived - we were here to change others, not look within and see if what we are living by is really a good idea.

Let's take gym. Most of us hated gym. Of course boys and girls did gym together in the enlightened 1970's and 80's, we could imagine nothing else.

And we hated it.

Then I heard about our previous generation.

They loved gym.

In the 1940's and 50's, boys and girls had separate gym classes.

We were not even allowed to question bigger things, like, um, is this sexual revolution really going to be okay for most people? Um, might affirmative action lower academic standards? Should male teachers really be sort of flirting with female students beginning in the 8th grade?

Nor could we wonder even about gym.

Modern social innovations were sacrosanct, above being questioned, and we hardly knew from where they hailed.

 

How Liberals Stoke Intellectual Anarchy

Some concepts build community. 

And others are manufactured only to keep only a few in power. 

 When you are raised relativist, you are taught that there are no truths, or, that there are multiple truths. You have no anchor, no standards, with which to evaluate any given concept. 

But you can notice something - is this concept, this idea that is being presented to you, creating happy people? Emma Goldman said, “if you are going to have a revolution, you should have fun doing it.” Fun times make you happy. Cynicism should not be permanent state to be in. You may need to define what “happy “ is, what “happy” means to you. 

In liberal Brookline Mass, we were groomed to be cynical. Cynical was the norm. We were not groomed to be good to ourselves, to make something of ourselves, to get along with others, or to give the benefit of the doubt. We were to seek racism and injustice in the very interactions we had in our families, with our peers. 

Groomed into activism, our liberal and leftist educators cared nothing about how all this so called “raised awareness” that we had would end up affecting our relationships, or our ability to work in a group with diverse people. It turned out that the “content of our character” was in fact second to the state of agitation we were expected to be in so that we would be ready to spring into action, into a fight, and not even action on behalf of ourselves, but as followers. 

Please take a moment to reflect if a given idea you are hearing is organic to the human experience, congruent with the best of most great civilizations, and gives you tools to relate well to people. 

The leaders who you admire who cannot define a word are stoking intellectual anarchy. They are stoking just enough anarchy so that you will be dislodged from any intellectual anchor - that is, until you are in their grip, then, no more free thinking is allowed. 

The anarchy is just enough to dislodge you, disconnect you from you community and classic truths, and decidedly NOT to keep you in a state of endless flux, but to then follow those who are claiming that simple words “mean lots of things to lots of people” ie - there are no definitions. 

This is springboard to then being owned by these new so-called leaders. Then, your freedom will be choked off. You will have cut off your roots, and be at the mercy of an intellectual machine that promised you freedom, but ended up chaining you to their new dictates, and intimidating you should you question them. 

 Hey, they should be wary of you. If you dislodged yourself from a classic opinion and joined the throngs of intellectual anarchists, then you may just use that freedom of thought that got you there in order to question them someday. 

Only a very few can stay in positions of power in a relativist society. Their gold dust will not rub off on you. You pledged loyalty to their anti-establishment stance, but you know that once they sense that you may not walk in lock step with them all the way, they will turn on you, and you will have nothing left. 

These so-called leaders in relativist-think do not even mean what they say, they do not live by what they say. 

They are testing you. Resist them.

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Here are some examples: it is impossible that anyone can really believe in abortion up to birth. They are testing you and in fact hoping you will put limits on them. So go ahead and put up limits. 

It is impossible that gender is suddenly fluid, it is impossible that underage children should be given the chance to choose their gender. Just say "no" to this.

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Another:  Leading feminists Gloria Steinham and Marlo Thomas promoted individualism, eschewed marriage and children, and claimed that women should not invest in their appearance. They both eventually married, galling many who had admired them, and were head-turning in their prettiness, photogenic and thin. They had much fulfillment from their  positions of influence, a level of fulfillment that cannot be achieved my most because positions of influence are by definition limited. 

Fulfillment can be achieved by living in a strong family and community. But following the dictates of leading individualist feminists will turn you into a confronter, and decidedly not someone who gets along well with people. 

Another:

Jewish studies professor, small New England College, mid 1980's thrilled that a student like me appeared to be in step with his message of intellectual anarchy, one of them being that there is no definition of the term "Jew" or "Jewish". Just because I was listening fully did not mean that I agreed with him, but he took my attentiveness as a sign of being a future follower. He smirked and scowled and sneered a lot, made fun of the Jewish Sabbath, of the kosher laws, and was in stark contrast to those professors who offered much objective information and left it for the student to continue studying, having been given the tools of "learning how to learn". I confronted him when he said something that was outright antisemitic (oh he was Jewish so he could play with antisemitic imagery, right? Wrong).

And then all that scowling was turned upon me.

Self-imposed so-called leaders who are not connected to classic ideas but to promoting their own agendas will turn on you. Avoid them.  

They gain much fulfillment from their  positions of influence, a level of fulfillment that cannot be achieved my most because positions of influence are by definition limited.

Connect with people who are fine with you if you question, if you do not fall in lock-step, like relativists want you to.

Pro Life Even regarding Rape - A Perspective

A snowstorm  rages outside. A woman hears a knock at the door, opens it and a man says, 

"take this baby til we locate  her  parents. I found him in a stroller under a thick blanket in this blizzard. It could be that the mother got separated from him in this wind and storm."  

 

This is a shock and much trouble, but of course she cares for the baby until better arrangements can be made. The news arrives the next morning, the wind knocked a tree over, hitting the mother and causing her to fall unconscious. She is hospitalized and still in a coma. The strong wind then made the stroller roll far away from the mother so it took some time to make the connection between mother and baby. Both child and mother are in need of help now.

The blizzard caused  much damage and social services are backlogged. This woman has cared for this baby now for a few days. No one is prepared to foster the baby right now, in fact, there is a nine month waiting list for foster services. 

 

Her place of work has granted an advance in vacation days, as they understand that this child needs care. This woman is in shock, saddened, angry, and feels alone. But pro-baby care organizations are in touch. They are sending volunteers to bring her and the baby to doctor's  appointments for his care and vaccines. They have a social worker who is giving therapy for the trauma  of the event that brought this baby into her life so suddenly.  

 

As much as he has interrupted  her plans, she recalls her high school friend who fell ill with mono, and missed three months of  school, yet she graduated and went on to study social work. 

The care-giving woman also recalls a colleague  who mentioned that her parents  divorced when she was in college. She was so distraught  that she took off a semester to heal and bring focus and acceptance into her life. 

 

Plans get interrupted unfairly. But people can cope, and at times, she even gets this holy feeling that she is doing God's work in caring for this innocent child until that waiting list gets to her turn, in about nine months time. 

 

As hard as this is, She knows she will always be credited with saving one of the Lord's children.

 

Israel Does not Host the Kind of Abortion Culture that the USA does. Here may be some reasons why.

Abortion has gone too far in the USA. On demand, up to birth, will make even many pro-choicers cringe. This is why many pro-choicers have thrown up their hands and taken a pro-life position, even in the case of rape. 

Such polarization may have been prevented if abortion access had some limits, as it does in Israel.

There are restrictions on access to abortion in Israel: only up to about 20 weeks, and a social worker must approve the woman's request.

Required social worker involvement means that there is no abortion-on-demand in Israel, with a few exceptions: "unnatural relations" - the woman is underage, and in the case of incest or rape. 

Required social worker approval also means that some women will not even request an abortion as they know it will not be approved, for example, if a woman wants the baby, but her partner is pressuring her to abort, they both know that that social worker will deny approval in such a case, so the request in not even put forth. 

That means that when you read that 98% of abortions are approved of by social workers in Israel, you are not seeing how many do not even make it to the social worker's file in the first place.

The requirement for social worker approval thus prevents many abortions from even being considered. It's real outcome is that it lowers the abortion rate.

Israel remains a family-oriented society, so pro-life efforts are spent on helping the woman and child.

Israel's position is one that no orthodox Jew can be happy with. It is too permissive. For the orthodox, abortion should only occur if the mother's life is threatened.  

There are pro-life organizations "Be'ad Ha'im" (For Life) and "Efrat" which focus on preventing abortion even in this society, which already restricts it. 

It is said that secular Israelis experiment with sex at a young age, but once they are in their early 20's, they marry. No orthodox Jew can be happy with that either, sex must only take place within marriage, but you do not feel that you have people living entire lives unmarried yet sexually active. As one colleague quipped, "I told my boyfriend that my family is religious and cannot take handle our relationship, we either have to marry or break up", and they married right after their army service at the age of 21.

 Israel does not host the abortion-culture that American does at this time. You will not see abortion pushed on television shows in Israel. No one is trying to get recreational sex or abortion into the fabric of Israeli society, like Planned Parenthood does in the USA. 

In Israel the family is accommodated, young men who enter the army because of the draft may already have kids, they are paid a higher stipend because of that. A higher stipend for a father in the Israeli army is one example of a pro-life society. You do not need abortion here like people feel they need it in the USA. 

On another note, there is no need to fear pro-life activists when they declare that certain forms of birth control are immoral.

Orthodox Jews eschew certain forms of birth control as immoral. But they make no move to make them illegal, not in the USA, and not in the state of Israel. People can raise awareness on a subject without making something illegal. 

Pro-life even regarding Rape

Reporting a rape is not like reporting a traffic violation. 

Many victims are overwhelmed and even in denial that it happened. 

A rape may happen so fast that resistance is impossible, ie, there are no signs of resistance, which would be for example samples of his skin under her fingernails in an attempt to fight, additionally, she may submit and choose being raped over not being killed, thus there may be no signs of resistance at all, and she may even cooperate until it is over. 

She may even lie and say, "Oh I won't report this, this was all my fault, you are right" to get him away from her, to stop him from threatening her with revenge if she reports it. 

The victim may be threatened by the rapist that if she reports it, the rapist or a cronie of his will harm her or her family members. 

I know someone who was violently mugged in her home. She cooperated with the thief and helped him locate her valuables in order to get him calm and so he would not kill her. She said to him, "you are right, you are right, do you want me to get you a bag from the kitchen to carry this stuff?" 

Yes, victims sometimes even cooperate, but they are still victims. 

Same can happen with rape. 

This is the sticking point in the bodily autonomy argument: sometimes you cannot even report the rape, let alone prove it. That is where even a prolifer may concede: let the woman abort without telling anyone how she got pregnant, and because of the denial she may have suffered, it may be later in gestation. THAT is where the prolifers gotta face this issue head on and have real answers. 

 Are you prolife in the face of rape? Ok - face the above complications of rape, and your door better be open to foster the child - and maybe even the woman during her pregnancy.