Friday, October 17, 2014

Henry V & the latest mikveh scandal

Last Shabbat (of Chol Hamoed Sukkot, the third Shabbat of the month), I read prayer #2 in shul (I keep a printout in my tallis bag, sneaky me) and noticed the lines


...Come to us and let our forsaken peoples return to us and gather all our brothers among the Israelites, and return them to the land of our forefathers...
Going back to what my IS friend told me on Aargareezem, that they see us (Jews) as brothers, I looked at this line from the prayer & I thought, the ISs regard us as brothers and pray for us, and how do we see them? Our attitude toward them is like the Duke of Exeter's remarks (in Henry V, Act II, Scene IV) regarding King Henry V's attitude toward the Dauphin:
Scorn and defiance; slight regard, contempt,
I don't know about defiance but we certainly look at them with scorn, slight regard & contempt. Ugh!

I am reading about the latest o'dox mikveh scandal in the US. Yuck! I can't help but think that such a thing could not happen in the IS community simply because the ISs hold that a wife after her seven (not 12!; rabbis made up the extra five days; the Torah specifies only seven days) days of separation may bathe in the privacy of her own home (with only God looking her over) before resuming relations with her husband. It seems to me that the ISs thereby do something radical: They trust the wife & don't make it super-complicated, which in turn requires lots of rabbis to explain it to the rest of us, build & maintain the mikve to exacting specifications, which gives them even more control, Keep it simple and trust the wife. Wow. How radical.

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