(no subject)
Mar. 28th, 2014 08:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretIn the Saw You at Sinai FAQ:
What is the difference between Modern Orthodox (liberal) and Modern Orthodox (machmir*)?: Good question! People define these terms in different ways. However, we use these terms because they are currently used and recognized in the Jewish community. Please answer it per your understanding. You can always change it later, if you feel the matches being sent are not exactly for you. Your answers to the religious questions will clarify your interpretation of Machmir or liberal.
I had a conversation with my Rabbi about using the site appropriately and usefully toward my goals, and it was both helpful and frustrating at different moments. But we spoke for several minutes about this question, since I identify on the site as Modern Orthodox (liberal) at the moment and he felt this was maybe not the best identifier about the seriousness of my faith. The crux of the matter, he said, was that I was using liberal to mean broad, open-minded, and expansive, whereas many use liberal to mean relaxed in their practice. [My Rabbi attempted to gauge my commitment by asking how I felt about partnership minyanim. I told him that I'd attended a partnership minyan once or twice, and sometimes felt they were a good approach to bringing more active participation by women, and sometimes felt that they were inappropriate alterations in our tradition. Which raised a tremendous eyebrow. I think he was impressed by the depth of my indecision.]
So far on the site I've been more interested in women identifying as Modern Orthodox (liberal), but not because of religious compatibility, necessarily. It's more a question of background, and what background authorizes us to share comfortably about ourselves. Women who identify as Modern Orthodox (machmir) tend to have had a somewhat narrower upbringing, in my totally amateur and probably incorrect observation. The range of professional outcomes modelled for them is narrower; the range of possible school choices presented to them is narrower; the range of encounters with people outside of their own community is narrower.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY ARE LESS CRITICAL THINKERS OR LESS INTELLIGENT OR LESS INTERESTING TO ME. {THIS IS A THING I HAVE STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT.} But it does mean that they have been trained to hide those qualities a little bit more. So when I see a match offered to me and I can see that the woman followed the narrow path, from girls' yeshiva high school to Stern College at Yeshiva University to a degree in social work or education to one of the expected careers working with children... I have interpretative difficulty. I do not know how to read personality out of this trajectory, and figure out if their personality is one I would like spending time with, sharing the world with. Which would be okay if their profile descriptions included a little more information about how they see the world, but because they have been trained not to really share this, their profiles just don't tell me enough to evaluate.
I was therefore kind of excited to see a match who identifies as Modern Orthodox (machmir) this week that appears to defy those expectations. It almost reads like my own profile, in that it demands someone who is deeply religious but also open-minded and questioning. Of course, I don't know if we are both exaggerating our own capacity for critical thinking, but that's what the dating process is for figuring out.
Then there's the other more prosaic problem with SYAS that I am struggling with. There are more women than men on the site, and the matchmakers tend to send matches to the men first before to the women. This means I'm fairly being inundated with matches, most of which are neither clearly bad nor clearly good matches.
The thing is, if I had infinite time I would probably accept most of the matches I'm getting, since you get a much better sense of a person by talking to them than by reading profiles. But I don't have infinite time, and I certainly don't have infinite energy when I get off work.
The site strongly encourages you to reject a match quickly if you are not interested, but I find that if I do that, then within an hour I am almost invariably sent a new match. I have thus taken to stalling on rejections in order to avoid having to do the same process again so soon. Since this is apparently rude, I've gotten some politely chiding messages from matchmakers asking me to be more prompt in my responses. I haven't yet figured out the correct balance. I think my fear is that after some number of months of being inundated, I will have rejected all of the possible matches, and because of these rejections inspired by nothing more than my time limitations, I'll be unable to revisit these matches later. God willing, I suppose, I'll meet my bashert before that happens.
*Machmir means restrictive, or strict. It really ought to be used as a descriptor for an interpretation of a particular law rather than as a descriptor for a person, but it has reasonable currency as a descriptor of a person who generally speaking tends toward more restrictive interpretations of many laws.
What is the difference between Modern Orthodox (liberal) and Modern Orthodox (machmir*)?: Good question! People define these terms in different ways. However, we use these terms because they are currently used and recognized in the Jewish community. Please answer it per your understanding. You can always change it later, if you feel the matches being sent are not exactly for you. Your answers to the religious questions will clarify your interpretation of Machmir or liberal.
I had a conversation with my Rabbi about using the site appropriately and usefully toward my goals, and it was both helpful and frustrating at different moments. But we spoke for several minutes about this question, since I identify on the site as Modern Orthodox (liberal) at the moment and he felt this was maybe not the best identifier about the seriousness of my faith. The crux of the matter, he said, was that I was using liberal to mean broad, open-minded, and expansive, whereas many use liberal to mean relaxed in their practice. [My Rabbi attempted to gauge my commitment by asking how I felt about partnership minyanim. I told him that I'd attended a partnership minyan once or twice, and sometimes felt they were a good approach to bringing more active participation by women, and sometimes felt that they were inappropriate alterations in our tradition. Which raised a tremendous eyebrow. I think he was impressed by the depth of my indecision.]
So far on the site I've been more interested in women identifying as Modern Orthodox (liberal), but not because of religious compatibility, necessarily. It's more a question of background, and what background authorizes us to share comfortably about ourselves. Women who identify as Modern Orthodox (machmir) tend to have had a somewhat narrower upbringing, in my totally amateur and probably incorrect observation. The range of professional outcomes modelled for them is narrower; the range of possible school choices presented to them is narrower; the range of encounters with people outside of their own community is narrower.
THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY ARE LESS CRITICAL THINKERS OR LESS INTELLIGENT OR LESS INTERESTING TO ME. {THIS IS A THING I HAVE STRONG OPINIONS ABOUT.} But it does mean that they have been trained to hide those qualities a little bit more. So when I see a match offered to me and I can see that the woman followed the narrow path, from girls' yeshiva high school to Stern College at Yeshiva University to a degree in social work or education to one of the expected careers working with children... I have interpretative difficulty. I do not know how to read personality out of this trajectory, and figure out if their personality is one I would like spending time with, sharing the world with. Which would be okay if their profile descriptions included a little more information about how they see the world, but because they have been trained not to really share this, their profiles just don't tell me enough to evaluate.
I was therefore kind of excited to see a match who identifies as Modern Orthodox (machmir) this week that appears to defy those expectations. It almost reads like my own profile, in that it demands someone who is deeply religious but also open-minded and questioning. Of course, I don't know if we are both exaggerating our own capacity for critical thinking, but that's what the dating process is for figuring out.
Then there's the other more prosaic problem with SYAS that I am struggling with. There are more women than men on the site, and the matchmakers tend to send matches to the men first before to the women. This means I'm fairly being inundated with matches, most of which are neither clearly bad nor clearly good matches.
The thing is, if I had infinite time I would probably accept most of the matches I'm getting, since you get a much better sense of a person by talking to them than by reading profiles. But I don't have infinite time, and I certainly don't have infinite energy when I get off work.
The site strongly encourages you to reject a match quickly if you are not interested, but I find that if I do that, then within an hour I am almost invariably sent a new match. I have thus taken to stalling on rejections in order to avoid having to do the same process again so soon. Since this is apparently rude, I've gotten some politely chiding messages from matchmakers asking me to be more prompt in my responses. I haven't yet figured out the correct balance. I think my fear is that after some number of months of being inundated, I will have rejected all of the possible matches, and because of these rejections inspired by nothing more than my time limitations, I'll be unable to revisit these matches later. God willing, I suppose, I'll meet my bashert before that happens.
*Machmir means restrictive, or strict. It really ought to be used as a descriptor for an interpretation of a particular law rather than as a descriptor for a person, but it has reasonable currency as a descriptor of a person who generally speaking tends toward more restrictive interpretations of many laws.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-28 05:11 pm (UTC)What is a partnership minyanim?
THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT THEY ARE LESS CRITICAL THINKERS OR LESS INTELLIGENT OR LESS INTERESTING TO ME.
*nods* Yeah. As someone who was brought up in a somewhat broader path than many of the religious people of my acquaintance, that took me a while to realize, but -- yes. In my experience, often people (particularly women) brought up this way can be less critical thinkers, simply because critical thinking wasn't something modeled for them, and it is to a great extent a learned skill much more than a natural human instinct. But to consider critical thinking as the only interesting and worthwhile quality, or even to consider critical thinking in the particular (scientific-based) way I'm accustomed to it as the only way critical thought can be accomplished, is limited and limiting. (And it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this out. Glad you're not as slow as I am :) )
(no subject)
Date: 2014-03-28 09:12 pm (UTC)The sort of underlying principle is this: My father likes to observe that surprisingly often you'll find that a particularly learned Rabbi is actually less machmir than an ordinary pulpit Rabbi. The reason for this is that it's easier to teach a broad, stricter law, so whereas the learned Rabbi knows the ins and outs of the law and knows all of the obscure exceptions, most Rabbis only know the broad general law well enough to confidently issue rulings based on it.
The people behind the partnership minyan concept believe that ensuring greater equality between men and women is sufficiently important as a Jewish value that one should seek out the narrow lenient circumstance even if it contravenes centuries of tradition.
How this works in practice is that women can lead certain parts of the service, in alternation with the men. When women are leading, no men can be up on the bima, and vice versa. There are other wrinkles to it, architectural features and procedural features, but I'm not an expert.
I sort of grasp the halachic argument, and of course I support the idea of trying to promote female power within Judaism, but at the same time a lot of Rabbis I respect don't consider it halachic and I appreciate their argument from tradition. In general, as I think I've told you, I believe we should question Jewish gender roles, but we should do that in a way that doesn't begin with the assumption that millenia worth of tradition is completely rotten.