Passover may be called the Holiday of Freedom, but we ought to call it the Holiday of Food. The entire ritual of obsessive kitchen cleaning followed by cooking mountains of food, eating specified dishes in huge quantities until the wee hours, and then struggling to rid our bodies of the effects of these binding traditions, is not exactly the kind of lifestyle that your personal trainer would prescribe for healthy living. But for Orthodox women, this entire food-focused ritual has extra baggage, not only because women in Orthodoxy remain the primary arbiters of kitchen-stuff but because the holiday involves another significantly pressurizing aspect of celebration: getting dressed for synagogue.
This is the life of the typical religious woman at Passover. Spend an entire week in the kitchen, trying to create a non-bread area of the kitchen while feeding kids who are on vacation and still hungry and still want cereal and pasta, cooking for a series of massive dinner parties that take place over anywhere from one to three days without using any takeout and without being able to even shop for extra eggs along the way, then sitting for Seder and fulfilling the obligations to eat and eat and eat – in which, for a woman, this is the first time she has sat down in days, making eating the most relaxing activity available – and then waking up the next morning to fit into the brand new high fashion expensive but body covering while body flattering outfit, and doing the same for the daughters. Talk about pressure. But for a woman, it is all pressure around the body.
There are probably some differences in this description between Israel and the States, or between New York Orthodoxy and the rest of the world. After all, New York is much more fashion conscious than elsewhere, plus women’s budgets are likely to be much higher there than elsewhere. (Although Yediot recently ran a magazine story about high fashion Israeli chains geared towards Orthodox women – “Just because we are religious, it doesn’t mean we don’t want to be fashionable,” one 20-year old was reported as saying.) And certainly this is not to deny that trend in which women no longer bother with all this cleaning and just go away for a week (though less so with the economic crunch). And of course, there are the “odd” ones among us whose husbands do their fair share. (As my niece said at her Bat Mitzvah, looking straight at my husband, "Sure, there are some men who know how to cook, but let's face it....").
Yes, let's face it: This is the classic Orthodox Passover experience. It's all about women doing food, and this is fairly universal. The femaleness of the culture can be evidenced by the avalanche of classes pre-Passover advertised for women only on how to do “proper” or “efficient” or “stress-free” cleaning, or like the rabbi’s speech we heard a few years ago in which men were urged to appreciate their wives at the seder and find little ways to help them, or at least buy them flowers. Yes, in Orthodoxy, Passover is still the holiday of women’s work, especially around food and body.
Meanwhile, the juxtaposition of cultures of food and body – cook well and in excess and look thin and pretty – puts enormous strain on women and girls. It should hardly be surprising, then, that according to one recent study of Orthodox Jewish girls in Brooklyn, one out of nineteen girls had an eating disorder, a statistic 50% greater than the occurrence of these disorders in the general population). “Jewish rituals and festivals, so intertwined with food and lavish meals, may interact with the problem of eating disorders,” says Esther Altmann, in My Jewish Learning, “In many homes, a weekly Shabbat meal is no different from a Thanksgiving feast that others partake in annually. Even Yom Kippur, a day of fasting, may be viewed as a holiday about food in abstentia. Furthermore, within halakhic Judaism, food is highly regulated: blessings are recited before and after meals, hands are washed ritually before bread is eaten, and Kashrut laws define permissible and non-permissible foods--in ways which may not be so psychologically different from the way an anorectic regulates her eating by eliminating food groups such as carbohydrates and fats.” According to Dr. Ira Sacker, reported in the Forward, who has 25 years of experience treating anorexic and bulimic patients, Orthodox girls use obsessive and compulsive eating habits to quietly gain some control and ownership of their lives.
Moreover, the pressures to get married young, to have many children in quick succession, all while remaining attractive and youthful, put even more pressure on Orthodox women. “In a community where couples get engaged after only a handful of dates, it’s no wonder that undue emphasis is often put on the physical,” says Tamar Fox, in a blog on Jewcy.com. One religious woman reported a conversation she had recently had with a young man looking for a wife, regarding a date he had recently been on. According to DovBear, the man said although his date was nice, she just wasn't a size 2!
This is the Orthodox version of the Hollywood tabloid, in which every ounce of a woman's/girl's flesh, covered or not, is a subject of debate and evaluation. According to Abraham Twerski, author of the book The Thin Within You, which focuses on general eating disorders, it is common before a shidduch date for the man to actually call up the women's parents and ask for her dress size. “If it is anything over an eight, forget it,” says Twerski. Knowing that they are picking a partner for life, some men even go as far as to ask for the mother-of-the-bride's dress size, in order to guess what the girl will look like at 40 or 50. To top it all off, argues Sacker, having a family member with an eating disorder can make siblings less desirable for marriage, a situation which encourages family members to keep such situations secret.
Yet, while Orthodox women’s lives increasingly revolve around food and body, the growing incidence of eating disorders in the Orthodox community is often swept under the rug. Women are told to dress “modestly” as an “antidote” to the problems of body that exist for women in the secular world – as if putting on layers of clothing is healthy for a woman trying to experience her own body. In a chilling interview in the Jewish Journal, Gila Manolson, a Jerusalem-based speaker and author and self-proclaimed expert on body image, claims that the Jewish concept of tzniut (modesty) is the most powerful antidote to this problem.
Women who possess tzniut have their physical privacy protected; they are simply not on display for ogling or judgment by the public’s critical eye. The beauty industry feeds off women’s insecurities, so the biggest enemy to that industry is a woman who has a healthy soul image and who carries herself with modesty.
Laws of modesty protect women? I vehemently disagree. Excess layers of clothing do not protect women from the imposed sexualized gaze upon their bodies, especially not the way Orthodoxy is practiced. When girls as young as five are told to cover up because men are looking at them, this is not protection but over-sexualizing. One first grade girl, for example, was reported to have been asked to switch schools because she lifted up her skirt. Protection? Hardly. It is depriving girls of the freedom to freely be who they are, even when they are merely children in play. It is internalizing the obsessive male gaze, not protection from it. In fact, I argue in my doctoral dissertation (presented at the 2006 Kolech conference) that skirts and hats subject girls and women to a double male gaze — the gaze of secular society, of the fashion and Hollywood dictates, alongside the gaze of religious men.
The skirts thus intensify women’s self-consciousness about their bodies and their sense that their own sensuality and physicality is owned by others, in two worlds. It becomes a case in which women are constantly aware of the fact that every exposed inch of skin is subject to gaze — one of the “threatening” secular society and one of the religious men around her. Putting women behind a curtain of clothing does not remove the gaze but makes her suffer for it.
Manolson, in clinching the entire female persona of excessively other-centered, lacking her own sexuality, experiencing through others, effectively non-existent Orthodox girl/woman, adds that women should be more altruistic activity. “There’s nothing better for self-esteem than doing something for someone else. After a while, you’ll be able to radiate happiness,” she said. More altruistic? Cooking for an army each week while having an endless string of children isn’t altruistic enough? When is it going to be legitimate for Orthodox women to do what feels good to them? The language of desire, of comfort, and of self-care is completely absent from Orthodox women’s socialization. I'm all in favor of social activism and compassion. But to claim that altruism is good for a woman's body image is mixing up issues and just constructing a proper Woman who has no life or experience of her own.
The language of women’s body needs to be reconfigured in Orthodoxy. Rather than making the dubious claim that layers of clothing protect women from the male gaze, let us educate men to stop gazing and start treat women with respect. Let us stop punishing women while excusing men’s mistreatment of women and other vices. Rather than saying, the wild dogs are out so let’s all hide, let’s say, train the dogs and then we will all be free.
Women need to be socialized into feeling their own bodies and experiencing their own comfort, liberating themselves from the self-consciousness about male gaze. This is women’s freedom on Passover: the freedom to feel and own our own bodies, freedom to be themselves. And men should be encouraged to respect women’s comfort, just as they expect to live comfortably in their own bodies as well. As writer Donna Lou Bush suggested, "More of us [should] say, ‘This is my body -- deal with it’."
[Thanks to Keren Copperman for helping prepare this article.]
