Bonus Links! (and a quick explanation)

BONUS LINKS:

Editing the previous post forced me to take out two worthwhile links, which I include here, with only a little context.

1: "On the other hand, womengirls in America seem to be the victims of an early sexualization. . . "

2: ("For God's sake, Alvy, even Freud speaks of a latency period.")

3: . . .greeting the boyfriend. . .

4: . . .Ogden Nash poem about baby girls and their future husbands. . .


QUICK EXPLANATION:

Sometimes I'll link to a dictionary definition of a word I use. I've been told this is patronizing. I just think they're cool words with cool definitions, and so I link 'em. I invite this (small) community to chime in and tell me if I'm being condescending. See, there! I did it again! Bwa ha ha ha!

Have a Gut Shabbos!

--FrumDad.

Girl, You'll be a Woman Soon...

I've mentioned that I get to do some wake-up stuff with Rachel, but G's definitely in charge of dressing her. Rachel doesn't necessarily enjoy the process of getting dressed and I have a fashion sense we can just call lackadaisical (think "straight guy" without the benefit of "queer eye"), so if left to my devices Rachel would end up pretty much in a diaper and maybe one of my old sweatshirts. (Easy to put on, totally wash and wear. I'd cut the sleeves and maybe tie it in the back so Rachel could have some use of her limbs, but otherwise it's perfect.)

Rachel has, B'H, like, a ton of fabulous outfits, and G does a great job dressing my daughter.

Usually.

A few days ago I came downstairs to see that Rachel's wearing this pink spaghetti-strap halter dress thingie. (Kind of like this dress
except less sweetness and light and more h00chie mama.)[fn1]

[fn1:] I'm trying to avoid showing up in this search. This search is only a little better, which is why, if I do reference it again, I'll just call it HM.

I don't bring this up to talk about fashion choices. The fact is the dress looked really cute on Rachel. What bothered me, I think, was the admittedly small HM factor. Now before anyone gets all in a tizzy, I realize that Rachel is less than a year old and could care less about the clothes we foist upon her as long as they taste good and don't bind.

(And aren't too hot. That's a new thing Rachel does, trying to get out of clothes that are too hot. But she doesn't understand the mechanics of clothing yet, so she just pulls the fairly resilient cloth away, leaving these cute-if-you-don't-work-for-Child-Protection-Family-Services lines on her body where she's effectively embedded the seams into her flesh before one of us realizes what she's doing. I digress, but it's my daughter and my blog and I can do that if I want to.)

And I'm not worried that somehow we've set her on a path of wanton licentiousness. Halloween's not a Jewish holiday at all, but I think I can cite the precedent with safety that despite the occasional costume, few kids grow up to be jack o-lanterns, lions, flowerpots, or God forbid! Barney. (Yes, I realize that sentence was entirely gratuitous and included solely for the purposes of having those links. I'm feeling a little whimsical today. By the by: most clever baby Halloween costume in recent memory.)

It just brought home to me the amazing and terrifying fact that my little girl is my little girl. And I'm going to be raising her, for the foreseeable future at least, in the United States of Scantily Clad America.

(The "scantily clad" link is just Safire on the hyphenation, and not worth the buck fifty; you can look here instead.)

There's an obligation in Orthodox Judaism called "tzniut," which translates (poorly) to "modesty."[fn2] The obligation devolves on both men and women, but the nature of the world we live in today makes it seem as if the burden falls more on women, and I'm willing to talk about it in that context for now.[fn3] It is for reasons of tzniut that Orthodox girls and women wear clothes that are significantly less suggestive than the majority of clothing worn by women today.[fn4] Now, at less than a year, Rachel's neither obligated under those rules nor do they have any real applicability; she neither picks her own clothes nor understands anything about social context and messages. But looking at the outfit Rachel was wearing I realized that the same outfit (in a larger size, of course) would be inappropriate for her in a few years.

[fn2:] Read more at Torah.org (part 1 and part 2), or Aish

[fn3:] It's important for me to note here that (a) married women covering their hair is not the same obligation as tzniut, and (b) tzniut is not about protecting men from their evil thoughts. I get really bothered by those misconceptions.

[fn4:]It is also for reasons of tzniut that Orthodox women don't wear a burka or other kind of full-body covering. The ability to express oneself (as represented by the uncovering of the face and hands) and the ability to make oneself beautiful and attractive are inherent in tzniut as well.

Looking down at Rachel, I was glad of the whole tzniut thing, because -- having given it some serious thought -- I really believe that it's a mechanism of inculcating into both her and her peers both a respect for women and an appropriate awe of their beauty. I'm not saying it's a perfect system, but it helps, a lot. I think the tzniut requirements help raise sexually healthy and secure and responsible kids, in a world with P4ris Hi1ton(see fn1) and the recent madness in Westchester, I think that's a critical job.

Of course, there are a million women out there who do not adhere to the laws of tzniut who are just as well-adjusted and whole, and carry the same self-respect as those who do. And I'm sure that in the world of Orthodox Jewish women there are some pretty stunted young ladies, even though they did grow up with tzniut.

Which made me wonder what the secret was. What is it that's bound up in tzniut that I think lends itself to raising the sexually healthy kid? What can be left out of raising a daughter with tzniut that can twist it on itself and produce an unhealthy woman? What is it about the women who I respect who didn't grow up with tzniut that enables them to be sexually healthy women?

I realized pretty quickly that I already had the answer. I've been throwing around the term "self-respect," and I realize that the secret is the respect part. There will be those among you to whom this is glaringly obvious, but for me, even though I feel I grew up in a great home with amazing parents, parent who did in fact give me this, it was never explicit, it was never discussed. It was just how you treated people, especially your own children, or your own parents, or your own siblings.

So I'm not saying that without this mini-epiphany I wouldn't have been able to teach this to Rachel; I'd like to think I would. But that doesn't make it any less of a mini-epiphany.

I remember when Rachel was born, one of my first thoughts was, "where am I going to learn about girls? I barely understand grown-up women!" I had a similar thought just then, looking down at Rachel in her little skirt. Where is Rachel going to learn self-respect? Where is Rachel going to learn how a man is supposed to treat a woman, what a man is supposed to be, and what she can expect for herself.

At this point the answer isn't that hard to guess. Me.

When I was single, I used to always joke that on your first date with a woman her father was in the car with you, whether you could see him or not. I just never realized the deep truth in the joke.

Me. I'm going to have to treat her with respect, make her know she's beautiful, make her understand how to treat men and how men are allowed to treat her.

If I do that right, it doesn't matter what she wears. And I realized that that's why the laws of tzniut don't apply between a father and his daughter. (Though as she gets older it might, and rightly so. . . that's a different post.) Because tzniut is, in a way, a function of communication, a way of her telling the world how she wants to be dealt with, and a method of requiring that kind of respect and awe from the rest of the world.

But she doesn't have to wear modest clothing to demand that respect from me. I'm obligated to treat her that way even if she's in her underwear, or naked, or whatever. Because as much as G loves her, this is something that only I can teach her, and that obligation rests on me regardless of her situation, or her clothes.

So that was a pretty sobering moment, looking down at my little h00chie mama.

I didn't make a big deal of it, but I think I'm going to ask G not to put her in that outfit again.

--FrumDad.

UPDATE: I could have skipped this post and just linked to this article, which I just found. (Gotta love that Google!.) I go hot and cold on Rabbi Boteach, he says some good things and then pulls some odd schtick, and I'm not endorsing him here. But this article, at least, I can vouch for.

Oh, yeah, and...

I almost forgot.

Happy Father's Day.

It's not such a big deal to us frummies; Thanks and recognition and honor to your parents shouldn't be a once-a-year thing, so every day is Father's Day and every day is Mother's Day. But it's still a warm tingly feeling. This will be my first one where I'm an actual father.

I'm thinking maybe I can just get Rachel to give my gift to my father, and leave me out of it.

--FrumDad

Me Llame Lame-O.

I've been a busy little blogger this week, but not on my actual blog. Most of the time I should have been working on my post for this week I spent commenting on other peoples' posts. (If this were a blog of a different color, I wouldn't be ashamed of the manner in which I've comported myself in this thread.)

I had planned on staying late at the office today and post, but I jsut got a call that means I'm going home in the next half hour or so. It's good stuff, but it requires my physical presence.

So, just call me Lame-O, for another meta-post rather than an actual post. Maybe Sunday or Tuesday (Monday's busy!) I'll try to revamp the look of the blog, and the sidebar. But, y'know, maybe not, too.

Have a good weekend, and a gut Shabbos to those to whom that's relevant.

--FD

PS: I don't know if my Spanish is correct. I could have titled the post "Je m'appelle Lame-O," but then I'd miss out on the cool visual alliteration.

PPS: There's gotta be a word for that, when the words don't actually start with the same sound, even though they start with the same letter. Anyone know?

I May Have Seemed a Bit Cavalier Last Knight

In an email exchange about my last post, it was pointed out to me that it might not be so easy to dance about throwing away a thousand dollars for some families who can't afford to do so.

Which is exactly my point. My family can't afford to do so. I mean, it's not going to break us, but I'm not exactly biddy biddy bum all day long, either. I said that it would cost over a thousand dollars to replace the sheitels and falls, etc., but not that they'd be replaced anytime soon. If we were in a position for G to just run out and buy new sheitels to replace the ones we're discarding, I'd be less impressed with how she dealt with the whole situation in the first place. Instead, G's got the one sheitel, a few snoods and some tichels.

What I was trying to get at -- and apparently I didn't make it all the way, at least for my interlocutor -- is that there was a hardship in doing the thing I was doing, but that somehow the hardship was subordinate to (or perhaps subsumed into) a bigger, more powerful joy. Connected with the understanding that the joy somehow requires the hardship.

I'm sorry if I came off as cavalier about the financial repercussions of the whole wig situation, or about the financial situations of some of you out there in blogland. Such was not my intention.

--FD

[Update: I fixed the links that were all keflooey. Sorry. Thanks to DRiches for alerting me to the issue.]

Avodah B'Simcha (Service In/With Joy) and Shaitels.

Almost every morning, when Rachel wakes up, I try to be the one to go in and get her from her room. I tell G that this is so that she can get a few extra minutes of sleep, but truthfully I'm greedy for the three or four minutes I get to spend with her while she's still a little groggy and very snuggl-able. She's also much more cooperative about getting her diaper changed (a) if she doesn't see her mother (a/k/a food!) when she's hungry and (b) when she's still kind of asleep.

We have a little morning ritual, Rachel and I. By the time she's made enough noise to wake us up, she's usually standing up in her crib, on the side of her crib near the door. We keep the door open a crack, held there by a burp cloth on top, so what I'll do is stick my fingers in the crack and wiggle them a little, which tips Rachel off that I'm there. She stops squeaking and I come in. We talk for a few seconds, mostly, "Good Morning! Did you have a good night!?" That kind of stuff. Then I pick her up, and as I say Modeh Ani I lift her, first to my eye level and then up above my head.

All of which is prelude. Rachel is, B'H (Baruch Hashem = Thank God), a healthy and wonderful baby girl, and being one of those, she's getting bigger every day. If I had to estimate her weight, I'd have to guess about 25 pounds. And getting bigger.

So G knows about this, and yesterday morning she watched us. And she joked that it was going to be harder to lift her up like that when she's older. I joked back that it would be really hard when she gets to be sixteen. It was funny.

But, as I am wont, I started thinking about it. As one friend of mine used to quote, "we laugh because it's funny, we laugh because it's true."

The fact is simple; Rachel will never get big enough that I won't be willing to carry her. Okay, that's not precisely true -- I'm sure that some hot summer walking around the city I'll be right there with all the other parents on the "no way am I carrying you, you can walk" conga line. But setting aside those moments of weakness, there's never going to come a time when Rachel needs me to carry her that I won't be willing to, or (I honestly believe) that I won't be able to. Even now, there are times when I'll have been carrying Rachel for a while and my arms (I'm not too proud to admit) will be getting tired.

But there's a sweetness to it. And I don't put her down not only because if I'm carrying her that long there's probably a reason, but also because of that sweetness.

She's getting heavy, sure, but it's the sweetest heaviness; a burden (of only the physical sort), but the sweetest burden.

If the point of these musings is to examine what it is that being a father is teaching me about being an Orthodox Jew, and what being an Orthodox Jew is teaching me about being a father, then this is a moment where each informs the other.

There is a moshol (parable) that I don't remember precisely, but it deals with two men carrying two equally weighted suitcases, one of whom thinks his suitcase is full of rocks and the other is aware that the suitcase is full of precious gems. At the end of the journey, the one with the rocks is exhausted, and throughout the journey he is always just this far from dropping the suitcase and quitting; the one with the jewels is just as physically exhausted, but feels it less, and is never close to quitting.

For anyone who hasn't heard about the whole sheitel (wig) controversy raging through the Orthodox Jewish world right now, this article or this one runs down the basics. If you don't want to read them, then here's the very distilled version: Married Orthodox Jewish women cover their hair. A very popular means of doing so is with wigs (a/k/a sheitels), some of which are made with human hair, much of which is collected in India, some of which is collected as a part of a Hindu religious process -- exactly which part of what process is the crux of the issue. If it's the wrong part of the wrong process the women in question (and their husbands) are not allowed to even have the hair in the house, let alone wear it. The community thought it had settled the issue (to the effect that the wigs were okay to wear) but recently it seems the research done some years ago might have been incorrectly premised and so. . . uncertainty.

A truly fabulous comprehensive review and discussion of the issue is ongoing at Frumteens (which is not just for teens). It's spun a little out of control, as is the way of the web, but the Moderator there does a good job of keeping things on point. It's also very long, but the first page alone is well worth reading.

In any event, there was (and continues to be) a minor hue and cry over the intricacies and implications of the whole sheitel question, and I'm not interested in getting into those details. I want to tell a story about my wife, G.

When the whole brouhaha started, a lot of people were really worried about a lot of things, including how much this was going to cost (sheitels can be fairly expensive) and how difficult it was going to be to go out in public with other forms of hair covering.

G, however, made a quick call to our Rabbi, made a few calls to the people from whom she bought her various head coverings, packed up a little box with one of her sheitels and a fall (a sort of half-sheitel for use with hats or headbands), and told me to throw them out. We didn't bother burning them, just put 'em in the dumpster and away they went.

As I was walking to the dumpster, I had the brocha of being conscious of the sanctity and beauty of my holy wife. A little while later I read this post by Cookie over at Heimishtown, where she writes, "I don't think the chance of possibly being party to idolatry is worth my vanity." That was pretty much my wife's thinking, too, and I felt really honored to be her husband at that moment.

I'm walking to the dumpster, knowing that replacing what I'm about to throw away will cost upwards of a thousand dollars.

And I started to dance. Just a little skip and jig kind of dance, not the big ole funky chicken, but still. . .

Carrying Rachel, carrying jewels, getting rid of a thousand dollars that I'm not supposed to have: All reasons to dance, all reasons for joy.

Burdens of a sort, but the sweetest burdens.

--FrumDad.

Lag B'Omer: Loving the Individual

Over Shavuot, we ate one of our meals at the home of a family I'll call the Alters. We're very close to the Alters, and we've spent tons of time with them, but over this past holiday something I've been noticing a lot sort of crystallized for me, and reminded me of something I'd heard on Lag B'Omer.[fn1]

[FN1:] The 33rd day of the counting of days between Passover and Shavuot. (Link, link, and link.)

I realize that Lag B'Omer was back on May 9th this year, which makes this less than entirely timely, but bear with me.

I'll do the shtickle Torah first. I'm going to simplify it for context. We are taught that in the days of the Bar Kochba revolution (around 6 C.E.) 24,000 students of Rabbi Akiva died of plague in the first 32 days of the count between Pesach and Shavuot. There are different understandings of precisely what brought this on, but they all run to the general idea of a lack of sufficient respect between the students. Now, you have to realize who these people were. They were not just some bunch of guys, these were students of Rabbi Akiva, one of the greatest Torah scholars ever. So it's to be assumed that these people were not running around actually being rude to each other or snubbing each other. One way to understand the "lack of respect" among them was that they saw each other as fungible units. Each a great Torah scholar but none of them unique and particularly necessary to the project. This perception would even extend to themselves, seeing themselves as no great shakes. Once they started treating each other from that standpoint, they broke the unity that is one of the aspects of Jews that Hashem loves the most.

That's an important little jump, so I'm going to reiterate it. Once they started to see each other as fungible, and essentially all the same -- once they stopped seeing each other as unique -- they failed to maintain the unity that is so precious to Hashem. It's a little counter-intuitive, since you'd think it was the other way around, you'd think that seeing everyone as some sort of fungible unit would increase the sense of unity.

But that's the lesson. You can only be really unified if you recognize and appreciate the unique talents and skills (and weaknesses) of every individual in the group.

The plague stopped on the 33rd day of the Omer. After the plague took all his students, Rabbi Akiva taught five more students, who became some of the most powerful and erudite Torah scholars the world has ever seen. One of these men was R'Shimon Bar Yochai, who, years later, was forced (with his son) to live in a cave and emerged from that cave on this 33rd day of the Omer with the Zohar. [fn2] (That he also died on this day is related, but too much to go into here.) Under a method of figuring that I don't want to explain here, the 33rd day is the day that reflects "Hod Sh'be-Hod," or Recognition squared. It's connected to the idea of thanks (Todah) and praise (Hoda'a) and turkey (Hodu). Actually, I'm kidding about the turkey, though it's not inappropriate that it's served on Thanksgiving. Point being that Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai was "fixing up" or making up for the mistake of the R'Akiva's original 24,000 students, because one of the essential teachings of Rabbi Shimon touches on the essential uniqueness of every individual Jew, the special and irreplaceable role they have in the overall plan.

[FN2:] Which is only in the most tangential way connected to that snake-oil Kabbala Center garbage.

The lesson being that when we fail to recognize -- in ourselves and in each other -- the essential uniqueness of ourselves, we can't be really unified. If I think of you as just like me, then (a) it doesn't mean anything that I care for you, and more importantly (b) once I realize that you're not just like me, and I will eventually have to recognize that, I'm going to stop loving you. Rather the way to connect to someone is to recognize the greatness inside of them, the special role they have in Hashem's big plan.

Think of all the army movies you've seen. There's always that big guy who carries the machine gun, and the smaller guy who carries the radio. What would happen if you gave the big guy the radio? Well, he'd be wasting his potential and not serving the army as best he could. (Assume, of course, that his size precludes him from being a radio and communications super-genius. I'm talking movies! Of course real life is more complicated.) What would happen if you gave the radio guy the machine gun? The radio guy couldn't hump that gun into the bush and back.

But have each soldier recognized for his individual skills and strengths, and you've got a fighting force to be reckoned with. (Or do a search for "fist" on this page.)

This was all brought home to me with some clarity at the Alters. (Remember the Alters? It's a post about the Alters.)

The Alters have a fair passel of children, keyn yirbu (may they continue to increase!), and each of them is really a special kid, but I want to focus on the three oldest boys, Binyomin, Sholom, and Yehuda. B, S, and Y were born third, fourth, and fifth respectively. The three of them are each great, but each very different. And something I've always really liked about the Alters is the way they accommodate each child's interests and needs, always making an effort to make sure that each one has the chance to shine in their own way during any larger-group interaction. The one that's really into the intellectual complexities of Torah learning gets to "schlug it up" (fight it out) on whatever topic of Torah is floating around at that meal. The one that's more musical and personable gets to ply his charms, and usually sing or play for the guests. (No instruments on Shabbos and Yom Tov, but other times.) The one that's got a tremendous EQ, but (for exactly that reason) can be bullied if you're not careful, will get spoken to more softly than the others, and drawn out some.

There's a concept in the Torah about educating children "b'darcho," which translates as "in their path.", and the Alters have it down pretty well. I don't know to what extent this is done consciously, but in any event it's a tremendous thing they're giving their children.

Usually, the boys are just regular boys. Some of the time they're involved in what's going on, some of the time they're in their own little brother-world, some of the time they disappear from the table on half-hour "getting more soda from the basement" trips. No biggie.

But this past Shavuot there was a sort of serendipitous conspiracy of events and moods, and the boys stayed at the table the whole time, and I got to watch them interact with the guests (of which there were many) and each other. What I saw was that they themselves had picked up this idea from their parents. They treated each other with the same respect for the individual strengths and weaknesses in their interlocutor, and they treated the guests, even the strangers, with a respect that was so non-obsequious and unforced that it could only be sincere.

It was beautiful, and inspiring. It is a gift I hope I can give Rachel, and in fact that I hope I can give myself.

It kind of surprised me a little, too, because I've spent a lot of time recently thinking about Rachel in terms of potential. And I realize that this sort of "Hod" that I'm talking about requires, yes, a recognition of potential, but also a recognition of accomplishment.

I read a book a long time ago that summed this up nicely. Called The Sterile Cukoo, I remember one bit from the book, and (oddly?) only that one bit.

The two protagonists are in a graveyard. And one, noting an occupant thereof who died young, comments at the waste of so much human potential that it represents. The other (I think the male) is a little bit upset, disagreeing, saying that it's not the waste of potential but of accomplishment that's saddening about the place. He asks something along the lines of, "Do you think that [name on gravestone]'s mother cared that he could have been the next Einstein, or cured some terrible disease? Or does she miss him because of who he had already become?"

I think it's a critical lesson, and while I hadn't forgotten it, per se, I needed the reminder. I need to look at Rachel for the wonderful sweet excellent funny amazing little girl she already is, instead of thinking about the wonderful sweet excellent funny amazing righteous kindhearted woman she can become. Only by focusing on the former, I think, can I successfully help her become the latter.

--FrumDad