The Institutionalization of Personal Choice

Frum Jews have always been governed by laws and rules. These laws and rules touch on all aspects of life. But despite their thoroughness, there has always been a great deal of leeway for personal choice. In addition to the laws we live under there have always been community standards or community minhagim that we have generally abided by. There were, however, any number of minhagim because of the number of communities. And a whole lot of those minhagim have waxed and waned over the centuries.

Today, however, we are seeing something new that has arisen. There is a push to institutionalize the practices of Klal down to the smallest item, such that personal choice is being pushed out of existence. There have been communal minhag changes that boggle the mind of anyone with even a modicum of common sense. And we are all at fault for letting this happen.

Once upon a time what you could afford monetarily was a measuring stick for what you would do. Those with more money made weddings with more people in attendance, at least sometimes. And those with less money put up a chupah and got married without all the extras. Once upon a time a Bar Mitzvah was an aliyah for the bar mitzvah boy--maybe--and shnaps and cake in shul at minyan, if you could afford it. Once upon a time summer camp was the purview of the rich. Once upon a time you lived where you could afford to live and you furnished with what you could afford to furnish. Once upon a time what you wore was a matter of what you could afford to buy. Not anymore.

Today we are seeing an institutionalized list of must have/must do items, regardless of personal feelings or money available. The fanfare surrounding an engagement and wedding has created some real resentment in some people, but for the most part everyone complies with the l'chaim, the vort, the showers, the shabbos kallah, the aufruf, the elaborate and large weddings, the sheva brochas and the myriad gift expenditures for choson and kallah, not to mention the "must provide" items for the home. Bar Mitzvahs? Also a multi--affaired rite of passage, from breakfast given in school on the day a boy first lays tefillin, to a seudah "boh b'yom," to a shabbos kiddush in shul, to an elaborate seudas mitzvah around the same time.

Dating has become highly regimented, from the resumes that have to be submitted by both sides to the allowable number of dates, to the duration of those dates, to what is permissible to talk about on those dates, and certainly to who is acceptable for a date. No seminary for the girls and no year in Israel learning for the boys? Tssk, tssk, not done. There is a hierarchy that has been established with sitting and learning boys on the top, and anything else is second best. Independent thinking is so not encouraged when it comes to dating and getting married.

Head coverings for males and females, and yes, they are both included here. Tichlach and hats and sheitlach for the women, in multiples. Yeshivas that make school rules that mothers cannot come to pick up their children wearing tichlach. Society yentas who have declared wearing a tichel outside in the street as not acceptable. Thirteen year old boys who have purchased for them a Borsolino for everyday wear and another one just for Shabbos wear. And a year later, when their heads have grown bigger the purchases can be repeated. And then repeated and repeated again.

Schools that are so worried about their kavod that they cannot allow or tolerate anyone in the school who will not be a perfect exemplar of what the school wants the public to see it as. Like early factory assembly line plants, the schools want all their finished products to be identical. They "lay down the law" on everything from shoe style to what kinds of barrettes a girl can wear in her hair, from what activities a child can participate in outside of school to which types of people a child can associate with. Not content with dictating what children can or cannot wear in school, they extend those rules to what a child can or cannot wear when out of school. Imagine the horror! A young single girl wearing a ponytail and a denim skirt walking around outside; truly world-destroying behavior. Nor are the schools content with merely manipulating all aspects of a child's in-school life; they also dictate to families what they are and aren't allowed to do, say, and think. The push for seminary and learning in Yeshiva in Israel? A "direct order" from the high schools. And the punishment for not obeying this order? It's going to hurt for shidduchim, hurt reallly badly.

The style police are also out in full force. Your house had better look the "right" way, your clothes had better conform to what this gestapo has declared is acceptable, and you'd better be members of the "right" shul, in the "right" neighborhood, with the "right" friends and indulging in the "right" activities. And, of course, you had better be a member of the "right" family.

There is a bare tolerance in some circles for the idea of a man's working to support his family, with a concomitant push to indoctrinate the boys while in yeshiva that working somehow makes a man less "choshuv" than those who do not work. There is a stigmatization of the working women of Klal, even though in many cases they are the sole support of their families, or the only way that a young family can afford to pay school tuition. There is a changing of traditional family raising patterns so that parents are not only expected to raise and provide for their own children while young but must also provide and pitch in when these children get married and have families of their own. Retirement is viewed as an un-Jewish idea: older people have to stay in work harness until the bitter end.

This substitution of institutionalized behavior for personal choice hasn't enriched Klal in any meaningful way either. There are far too many people who have said "No!" to this infringement into private decision making and have taken their disenchantment and themselves all the way out of the frum world. There are people who simply cannot take the artificially imposed stress and choose to leave yiddishkeit rather than make themselves ill trying to fit standards that make no sense to them. There are families suffering from any number of ills, financial and otherwise, because they can't cope with the "communal requirements." Along with the loss of personal choice has also come a loss of common sense.

And one side affect, I would hope not an intended one, of this constant feeling of having to be just like everyone else is a raising tide of kinah. If you buy into the idea that you have to be just like everyone else, then seeing someone else with something you don't have raises jealousy to the flash point. When institutionalized "equality" replaces common sense and personal choice then there is no way to point out that people have different amounts of money, which will affect what they may or may not do. Kinah has always been with us, but never to such an extent, and never so entwined with the idea of entitlement.

When "they" push to institutionalize areas which have in the past been a matter of personal choice, no matter who "they" are, they are not doing Klal any favors and are laying the groundwork for some severe eruptions coming soon down the road. I'd venture to say that some of the financial woes that face Klal today are directly correlated to this idea of institutionalizing the minutiae of personal thought and behavior. Those who push for this institutionalized behavior have given little or no thought to the cost to Klal of this behavior, not the emotional cost and certainly not the monetary cost. To the outside world Jews are seen as being really smart about money--if only that were true right now.

I would like to add this caveat before finishing off. Even those of us who see that the way things are being run right now are not beneficial are not always helpful when we bring up the issues. Why? Because sometimes the discussion focuses on one practice alone. Excoriating people for the wastefulness of lavish weddings and pointing out that they could afford to send a child to Israel if they didn't make that lavish wedding does not deal with the idea of personal choice. Assuming that money is actually available to pay for either the wedding or the year in Israel, how that money should be spent should be a matter of personal choice. But when people feel forced to provide both the wedding and the year in Israel and have the money for only one or for neither, then we are coming closer to the heart of the problem. No one should feel forced by societal expectations to have to make either of these choices. It's not for any of us to stigmatize the choices that someone else makes freely: it is for us to discuss that such forcing is going on.