Ok, so I had an interesting encounter yesterday. I was at someone's house and she wasn't necessarily in the room most of the time. They were mamisha frummies. For starters, I was explaining the invisible monsters called germs that get on your hands to her four year old. He told me, "it's not in the Toy-rah, no such thing." Great... Later on when the two older boys came in from school (note to gentiles who may not be aware, the all-boys Jewish schools meet on Sundays), the four-year had a friend over, who was a girl. She asked the older boys, what they did today. They said, "learning." She said, "what did you learn?" They snickered at her and said they learned TOY-RAH. Poor girl, didn't have a clue. She probably came from a Modern Orthodox home.
These boys learn quick and young to have disdain for the fairer gender. I saw it first hand.
>>>He told me, "it's not in the Toy-rah, no such thing." ....These boys learn quick and young to have disdain for the fairer gender. I saw it first hand.
ReplyDelete(Sigh....)
Double :-(
So, should we be more concerned by the sexism or the attitude that anything not in the Torah doesn't exist?
ReplyDelete"It is prohibited for a person to place coins in his mouth, as perhaps they contain dried spit from diseased people ..."
ReplyDeleteRambam, Laws of the Murderer and Preservation of Life 12:4
You saw first hand that a few young Orthodox Jewish boys have disdain for young Orthodox Jewish girls.
ReplyDeleteTo me it looks like you are reading a lot into the incident(s).
Do you feel like the four year old was expressing disdain for you by his dismissal of germs? To me, it just sounds like a four year old being a four year old.
You might see their snickering at the young girl's question as them mocking her, but I've seen people respond that way to that question in other settings. Usually because they haven't a clue of what they "learned" that day.
You wrote that they "learn quick and young". Do you mean that someone taught them to show disdain to women? Do you mean they learned from society at large, but not through a specific instructor?
I dislike the popular term that you used, "fairer gender". There is no fairer or unfairer gender. We are all just humans. We might have very slight different outward appearances, but beneath it all, we are all the same.