for women

This is an advertisement for an event in Netanya that will be hosting the Shalva Band. Looks exciting. the event is free to the public, sponsored by the Iryah.

hattip to SK on Facebook

The funny thing about the ad is that it is missing the two main faces of the band - the singers, Dina and Anael.

Presumably, the target audience for this event is not any of the residents of Kiryat Sanz, the haredi hassidic neighborhood of Netanya, as they would not attend such an event anyway, let alone for a band with female singers. Despite the target audience not being a haredi one, the city people running this still felt it necessary to cut out womens images from the ad. And we are talking about Netanya, not Bet Shemesh, Jerusalem, Beitar, Bnei Braq or Modiin Ilit.

The funnier thing about this is that by taking Dina and Anael out of the picture, people might think this is an all-male band. Even if they are familiar with The Shalva Band, they might think, because of the advertisement, that only the male band members will be performing at this event. That means people who do not want to hear women singing will show up to this event thinking it is an all-male performance and end up hearing The Shalva Band in all its glory.

This seems to qualify as an example of the law of Unintended Consequences. I might also call it a חומרה המביא לידי קולא, a stringency that brings about a leniency, but not printing women's images is not even a chumra, just some strange hassidic hanhaga that has taken off and gone viral.

President of Israel, Reuven "Ruvi" Rivlin, has a nationwide musical program planned for this coming Yom Haatzmaut. Rivlin is using Koolulam to put together a mass singing event which will be videoed and broadcast on Yom Haatzmaut.


To that end, someone asked Rav Aviner about the Koolulam experience and how to relate to it from a halachic perspective.

Here is an example of the most recent Koolulam event, from the Shneider Children's Hospital in Petach Tikva:

and here is my favorite of the Koolulam events, their rendition of Matisyahu's One Day:


So someone asked Rav Aviner about Koolulam events. The initial question asked was if it is kosher, to which Rav Aviner replied it is definitely not kosher and the two problems with it are mixing and mingling of men and women along with mixed singing.

The follow-up question was if it is done in a shul, with men and women separated, is it ok then? Rav Aviner said that would take away the mingling, but would add a problem of doing something improper in a shul and damaging the kedusha of the shul. Regarding this question, I do not know why they asked about doing it in a shul rather than just a gender-separate event anywhere.

Q: What about if they sing "holy songs"?
A: Even worse. Any sin while connecting it to kedusha is worse.

Q: Men cannot hear women sing but what about if it is a lot of women together or many men hearing many women?
A: Even worse, as the sin is magnified by so many people..

Q: what about the fact that at the Koolulam events it is unifying people among the spectrum of Israeli society?
A: unity is good, but not through sin

Q: So how should we unify?
A: have separate Koolulam events for men and for women. And, real unity isnt created by a passing experience. Real unity is created through service in the IDF, mesirut nefesh for each other and for klal yisrael.

Q: And in our daily lives [how is unity created]?
A: helping others, doing chessed. that is true love.
source: Kipa

The main method of creating unity is through army service? Army service, like any difficult/challenging/dangerous experience will be a bonding experience and create some sort of unity, but is that really the main or only way to create unity, discounting all others? Especially when you don't want half the people (the women) to serve in the army, and many others also do not, such as Arabs and Haredim, among others. It creates a bond, and perhaps unity, but only among those serving together in the same unit.

I am not sure what the premise was for asking if hearing women is still a problem if it is many men listening to many women. Why would the number of men listening change anything?

I do not know why they did not ask about the common hetter of "two voices cannot be heard", meaning with so many people singing together, you aren't hearing anybody's voice, or anybody specific's voice, thus it is allowed and not kol isha. I also don't know why they did not ask about the men singing as well and thus not hearing the other women singing. Either way, Rav Aviner very well might reject those hetterim and say it does not matter, or he might say even if such a hetter could be valid (in some circumstances) it is still inappropriate and still mingling of men and women,but it still should have been asked. I think they are more relevant questions than, for example, asking about doing the event inside a shul.

Chief Rabbi Rav Yitzchak Yosef in his weekly shiur gave some instructions to soldiers as to how they should behave in a situation where they must be present when kol isha is involved.

Rav Yosef said that soldiers in such a situation should lower their glasses, so as not to look at the women singing, and pick up a sefer and bring it close to the eyes and read from thee sefer in such a public way that everyone can see they are not listening to the female singer.

Rav Yosef pointed to himself as an example, saying he himself has done this.
source: Kikar

Rav Yosef's instructions are very well and good, except for two problems:
1. not all soldiers have glasses to publicly remove
2. most of the time soldiers are not carrying seforim, nor are they able to even if they would want to. Perhaps during downtime on the base they might have access to a sefer and be able to follow Rav Yosef's instructions in such a scenario, though I don't see such a scenario happening. If they are going to an official ceremony, which is where these problems usually happen, the soldiers will not be carrying seforim with them.

Rav Yosef should give them some more realistic, or plausible, instructions that will actually be helpful.

I was at an IDF ceremony yesterday and among the various units participating in the ceremony were a couple of Haredi units, and probably other religious units (and definitely religious soldiers) as I saw many kippot among the soldiers.

At the end of the ceremony a recording of Hatikvah was played and the singer was a female.

I just want to point out that nobody walked out of the ceremony - none of the Haredi soldiers or the National Religious soldiers. We heard in the  past in the news about times when they did, and many people get upset about such news reports, so I thought it noteworthy to point out that it probably happens more frequently that when stuff like this happens nobody walks out and nothing noteworthy happens.

One of the boys did tell me that they were surprised as normally the army avoids using female singers when the Haredi units are involved, but nobody was going to walk out because of the mistake.

Adina Bar Shalom, the famous daughter of Rav Ovadia Yosef, yesterday went on air talking about Haredi women, the now defunct female council of Shas, and most interestingly, I think, of men going to performances with women singing.

Bar Shalom said that regarding the issue of "kol b'isha erva" people have gotten very extreme over the years. She explained that a woman cannot get on stage and sing and dance in front of men who are there to see her. But, if she is there singing as part of a choir, as part of an orchestra, then a man can sit and listen to her sing, as long as he is not focusing on her and not watching her in a longing way.

Her statement has caused quite a ruckus. While the opinions are numerous as to what is and is not a problem of "kol isha", she is right that the ultra-Orthodox community has gotten very extreme about it.

It has been pointed out that Bar Shalom's psak is in opposition to her father's psak that was written in his sefer prohibiting kol isha if one even just knows what the woman looks like from having seen a picture. His psak is despite the fact that he himself was famously a fan of the Egyptian female singer Umm Kulthum and would listen regularly to her songs. There is some debate as to whether or not he later retracted this psak, and there is also some debate whether the original psak was more limited than how it is being made to sound and he was prohibiting it specifically during tefilla (shma and shomeh esrei) or by limiting it specifically for those who would be aroused by the specific singer.

As well, it has been pointed out how a slew of other gedolim throughout the years have prohibited kol isha in even the most minute way.
sources: Srugim and Kikar

There are two points in all of this that I find particularly interesting:
1. Adina Bar Shalom issued a psak, in some way, and was not afraid to take a position against well known rabbis. If she issued the psak it was surely because she assumed people would take her seriously and listen or at least debate the issue.

and even more interesting is:
2. people took her seriously.
I don't mean she should not be taken seriously, but I am intrigued by the fact that some people did not just brush her off, call her modern or anything like that, say she is just a woman and doesn't know or cannot have a say, but they took her statement as significant enough to be worth responding to at a halachic level.

Is that itself progress?