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Sep. 14th, 2014 08:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretHere, wrestle with a dating etiquette dilemma thing I faced on Thursday.
It was another match from that Jewish dating site designed to mess with my head. I showed up at the restaurant about ten minutes early. While waiting, a guy comes up to me and says that the shul a block away is short for its minyan, and will I join them? In general, I find this a very difficult request to turn down, because it means turning down fellow Jews when they need help trying to fulfill a Mitzvah. On the other hand, the prayer service will be twenty or twenty five minutes long, and I have to figure that making your date wait that long is not exactly the recipe for a good first impression. On the first hand, maybe this will show my commitment to Judaism? Hard to predict.
I called her up and told her that if she didn't mind, I was going to go help these people make a minyan. She said she didn't mind, so I went, and met up with her half an hour later after the service was finished. (The extra ten minutes was because I was actually person number nine, and we had to wait until they tracked down person number ten) Still not sure it was the right choice. I mean, I suppose it was: I would have felt a lot worse if I had turned down the request and they had been unable to make the minyan. But I feel it was a rude thing to do to my date in any case.
Also tied in with my complicated feelings about mechitzas. Obviously I could have invited her to come to the service, too, but she wouldn't have been counted in the minyan and the shul has a crappy white curtain in the corner with enough room for a couple of women to huddle behind in the Beis Medrash where they hold afternoon and evening services, so I really didn't want to suggest it. I hate that just because we don't count women for the minyan, so many shuls make their space so unwelcoming to women who actually do want to pray. But I felt like a sexist going off to pray with the menfolk without at least offering the invitation for her to participate, and probably it was in fact a sexist thing for me to do. *shrugs* I don't know.
It was another match from that Jewish dating site designed to mess with my head. I showed up at the restaurant about ten minutes early. While waiting, a guy comes up to me and says that the shul a block away is short for its minyan, and will I join them? In general, I find this a very difficult request to turn down, because it means turning down fellow Jews when they need help trying to fulfill a Mitzvah. On the other hand, the prayer service will be twenty or twenty five minutes long, and I have to figure that making your date wait that long is not exactly the recipe for a good first impression. On the first hand, maybe this will show my commitment to Judaism? Hard to predict.
I called her up and told her that if she didn't mind, I was going to go help these people make a minyan. She said she didn't mind, so I went, and met up with her half an hour later after the service was finished. (The extra ten minutes was because I was actually person number nine, and we had to wait until they tracked down person number ten) Still not sure it was the right choice. I mean, I suppose it was: I would have felt a lot worse if I had turned down the request and they had been unable to make the minyan. But I feel it was a rude thing to do to my date in any case.
Also tied in with my complicated feelings about mechitzas. Obviously I could have invited her to come to the service, too, but she wouldn't have been counted in the minyan and the shul has a crappy white curtain in the corner with enough room for a couple of women to huddle behind in the Beis Medrash where they hold afternoon and evening services, so I really didn't want to suggest it. I hate that just because we don't count women for the minyan, so many shuls make their space so unwelcoming to women who actually do want to pray. But I felt like a sexist going off to pray with the menfolk without at least offering the invitation for her to participate, and probably it was in fact a sexist thing for me to do. *shrugs* I don't know.