What is marketed as tradition by the wedding industry could better be called the traditionalesque -- a pleasing melange of apparently old-fashioned, certainly nostalgic, intermittantly ethnically authentic practices that may have little relevance to the past or future and are really only illustrative of the present in which they emerge. Tradition is one of those words like homeland or motherhood, that is most frequently invoked when what it represents is under threat, or is in abeyance; and the emphasis placed upon the notion of tradition by the wedding industry pointsI have a hunch my reading audience is mostly male and not particularly interested in how bridal services are marketed , but I offer the quote because I think Mead's term (my wife and I were debating if she coined it or not) traditionalesque can also be used to describe the culture and practice in vogue in large parts of Orthodoxy today. I can walk into just about any synagogue in my neighborhood and find people engaged in an odd hodge-podge of practices and dress in an effort to capture some of the flavor of tradition they were either not brought up in (esp. in the case of BTs) or which they have morphed into something the grandparents or great-grandparents they are trying to emulate would only be confused at seeing. It's the quaint fuzziness of an imagined past that has been created and marketed as "frumkeit".
to a contradiction at the industry's core: The imperitive of economic expansion demands the introduction of new services and new products, but those services and products must be positioned not as novelties but as expressions of enduring values.
A local Rav who teaches in a girls' school recounted in a speech that he was once asked by a girl if wearing a certain dress or accessory was halachically permitted. His response, which drew approval from the audience, was that as far as he knew "the Chasam Sofer's mother" would not wear such a dress -- case closed.
If you close your eyes for a few seconds and allow your mind to wander you probably can conjur up some image of what you think the Chasam Sofer's mother looked like (let's be real -- it's probably something like your grandmother). Unless you are a very special person, if you close your eyes and allow your mind to wander I doubt you can conjur up the details in Shach and Taz that may address an issue in Yoreh De'ah.
The reality of halacha is tradition; "what the Chasam Sofer's mother wore" is traditonalesque.
Like the bride who overspends on her dress and accessories because the industry tells her that this is what "traditionally" brides have done, in our world the newly minted observant or newly more observant, the MO high school kid who "frums out" in Israel somewhere, the parents of girls in the shidduch circut who are under such pressure to conform and fit in -- in all these cases and more a manufactured set of do's and don'ts that are a fictitious (mis)representation of mythological past have become hallmarks of "tradition" that is a more cultural myth than a directive from Sinai.
"Never mind that their ancestors who came off the boat at Ellis Island from Lithuania wearing regular suits and hats and never had long peyos and a scraggily beard"
ReplyDeleteI have photographs of my family in Lita, taken in the 1920's. Those born in the mid 1800's all have beards (some even scraggily ;-) ) None are wearing "regular hats", they all sport the the traditional Russian kasket. Payes are not ling, but clearly visible.
changed the post slightly in light of your comment, though the substance remains the same.
ReplyDeleteI'm still not sure what you point is. Is it not a fact that Eastern European Jewish males wore distinctive clothing, had beards, payos, long coats etc?
ReplyDeleteSurely the reason these were abandoned, to the extent they were, was due to poverty/assimilation/secularization? What exactly do you find objectionable in newly frum(er) people attempting to recreate the past?
Because the past being recreated is a product of imagination and marketing and no more -- it is a collection of inessential qualities irrelevant to the substantive essence of Judaism yet are passed off as a substitute (and in fact as more essential) than the real thing.
ReplyDeleteYou know Reb Moshe's teshuva about whether we must wear distinctive clothes. He says that while there are medrashim that say that this was a zechus of Klal Yisrael in Mitzrayim, that was only because before Matan Torah our distinctiveness consisted only of those superficial things. Now, that we have taryag mitzvos that distinguish us, it is no longer vital that we dress and speak in a distinctive manner. The logic of the teshuva goes hand in hand with your thesis.
ReplyDelete"Never mind that their ancestors who came off the boat at Ellis Island from Lithuania wearing regular suits and hats and never had long peyos and a scraggily beard"
ReplyDeleteWho told you their anscestors were from Lita? Maybe their anscestors were Chassidish?
Since you are citing history, contemplate the fact that during the Holocaust, some 100,000 Jews were killed in Lithuania but some 3 Million were killed in Poland. Should give you a clue as to the relative size of the Jewish communities in the two countries.
Well my ancestors came from Lithuania and Germany. The men shaved and wore the style of suits of their contemporaries. But what Chaim was really driving at was, say, someone with this type of ancestry decided to go "traditional" and abstain from cutting a boy's hair until the age of three, he actually would be deviating from his own minhag. That would be a traditionalesque thing to do.
ReplyDelete(Now I will point out that it was fairly common to keep a boy's hair long until the age of 3 or even 5 in Europe and and even America up to the beginning of the 20th century. However, if one wants to be consistent with that tradition, which was not a religious one but across the board, then one would have to also dress those boys in dresses. You can check it out by observing portraits of very young boys from that period.)
The upsherin was limited to a particular area but has been adopted by many Jews who cannot trace themselves back to that area because they find the practice appealing. The little boys look so cute in their curls. It is a nice way to mark a transitional point (which used to include "breeching" -- a boy's first pair of breeches given once he advanced beyond the age of dresses). It is another occasion for a party, which can provide parnasa to caterers, entertainers, and photographers. And so this quaint custom is adopted just like brides don white gloves to match their vision of what a Victorian bride would have done.
"Since you are citing history, contemplate the fact that during the Holocaust, some 100,000 Jews were killed in Lithuania but some 3 Million were killed in Poland. Should give you a clue as to the relative size of the Jewish communities in the two countries."
ReplyDeleteThe area frum Jews refer to as Lithuania is a larger than the current boundaries of the Lithuanian state.