The frumka: Orthodox women find religion
Flash90In the past few months, reports have emerged of more than 100 Orthodox Israelis who have taken to wearing a Muslim-style burka, in the belief this will bring about redemption. They can be seen in Orthodox areas of Tiberias, Safed and even Jerusalem, and are mostly followers of Rabbanit Bruria Keren, a mother of 10 from Ramat Beit Shemesh.According to the newspaper Ha'aretz, she rarely leaves her home and speaks only for four hours a week to offer "alternative therapy" to her followers.
Some wear more than 10 layers of clothing, including dark socks, with the ends cut off, over their hands. They never wear heels, lest the noise attracts attention.
What to make of this?
By donning the burka, they are making themselves invisible, effectively non-persons. Modesty, for them, is not participation in the world, while de-emphasising their physicality – as it is in halachah – but complete self-effacement, to the point of self-obliteration. They have no faces. Some have no voices. A few have no existence outside the home.
Shaviv notes that "some bloggers have cited parallels to eating disorders."
Both anorexics and the burka women are denying their bodies in order to make them "disappear". Both are reacting to unattainable cultural ideals, be they size-zero thinness or increasingly stringent standards of modesty in the Charedi world, by taking them to an obsessive extreme. And anorexia is often understood to be a desperate way for women to assert control over at least one aspect of their lives. Surely, wearing a burka or vowing silence can be construed similarly.
According to Shaviv, the "frumka" is the logical extension of two clear trends in the frum world: increasingly stringent standards of modesty that require increasing effort to follow and a redefinition of modesty to be about keeping women, and images of women, away from men.
Open a Charedi newspaper, and there are either no images of women, or they are blacked out. In the past few years, several women have been beaten up in Jerusalem because they would not move to the back of the bus in Charedi neighbourhoods; a top rabbi in Bnai Brak asked women to leave before the end of shul so they did not mingle with men following davening; that same town has a street with separate sides for men and women; separate shopping hours are not unknown.Just last week, a sheitel shop in New York was boycotted for refusing to remove headshots of women wearing wigs from its window.
In conclusion, Shaviv argues, Orthodox women are "already being pushed out of the public sphere."
The rabbis may not understand the Pandora's Box they have opened, but the jump from the Brooklyn sheitel store to the burka-wearers in Israel is not that great.
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The Orthodox community takes in more converts and more Ba’al Teshuvah’s then any other Jewish denomination. But their numbers remain stagnant.
I see this and I can’t help but wonder why people wonder why?
They must separate themselves because they don’t know how to sustain a life in the modern world and commitment to Judaism. The halacha does not say we should cut ourselves off from other peoples. But these people only read what they want to read and they only hear what they want to hear.
Why is it that women feel that it is their fault the Mashiach is not coming? Will we ultimately have to climb into a sack to earn the respect of the men who expect us to bring home the bacon while they are in Kolel instead of supporting their families. I feel sorry for the women so riddled by guilt that they are willing to live in burkas.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov stressed moderate observance. You are not allowed to create new laws - this is not a healthy thing....
First of all Dave, it is not fair to paint the entire Orthodox community with the same brush. That would be the same as my saying that all Conservative and Reform Jews are afraid of being Jewish. While this could be said of some of them, I know many for whom this is not the case, they are just not yet ready to take on all of the mitzvot.
Secondly, I know of one Orthodox va’ad that issued a get to a man who’s wife insisted on wearing a burka. The rationale being that anyone who’d resort to something like this is too psychologically unstable to be married to.
Thirdly, these women are missing the point of being tznius. The concept is to be attractive only to your husband, not to erase who you are. Being tznius is saying that the relationship between a husband and wife is sacred, and is something that should only be shared between them. This is a physical way of honouring this commitment.
I feel great rachmanos for these women. What they’re doing has nothing to do with Torah observance. It speaks of some void in their life that they are not finding a way to fill. Some people turn to Frumkeit as an escape from something else, rather than turning toward Hashem. While they work hard to observe mitzvot they are also struggling against terrible internal conflicts, and in this process they build fences around the Torah that are unnecessary and sometimes very harmful.
As one of the bloggers referred to who “have cited parallels to eating disorders,” I would have appreciated a credit from Shaviv, especially since she basically paraphrases me. To give credit where credit is due, the original Haaretz article about this topic first noted the parallels, and blogger Mother in Israel, who’s been following the story closely, mentioned it before I did. Anyway, here’s the passage about eating disorders from my original post, (you can read the full post here):
This comparison to anorexia seems right on, but goes deeper than just the denial of femininity. ... Both anorexia and the burka-wearing phenomenon stem from an obsession with reaching an unrealistic ideal set up by society, be it a model’s lean and long figure or a model of modest virtue and spiritual purity. Both are ideals which the average woman cannot live up to, but trying to do so is an expectation of women in Western and fervently religious societies, respectively. The quest to reach both ideals involves self-denial, literally and figuratively. Anorexics deny themselves food in an attempt to wither away their physical selves (often the feminine curves that come with womanhood, as Mother in Israel points out), while burka-wearers are denying themselves the material pleasures of pretty clothing and physical comfort (it’s hot under there and hard to see) in an attempt to deny their physicality, to be purely spiritual beings. And both phenomena are about control, but here’s where the comparison veers off.
Ami: Has this phenomenon been verified by JTA or any other responsible journalists? It is so bizarre that one feels that it must be an internet scam or an “urban legend.”
Dan -
Here are the differences between the Jewish version and the Muslim version of full body covering as I see them: Those not wearing the coverings are not being recruited to become human bombs to restore “honor” to their family. Also, and most significantly, it appears from this story that it is the women themselves who are behind this new “fashion,” not the male leaders of the particular sect(s) of Judaism.
Do I think it is a healthy move? No. Do I think it is the same as the Burka brigade? NO.
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Dave Maron
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