Cover yourself!
So if there are ‘devout’ people around, then anyone living or working or exercising or playing sport in a building near them has a responsibility to make sure that the devout people don’t see anything that they (or, really, some of them) don’t like. Even if that means that a subset of the devout people can see what the other people are doing only by going outside, around the corner, into the alley, where they peer into the windows – it is the responsibility of the horrible non-devout people next door to wear armour or paint their windows black or turn all their lights off, because after all what right does anyone have to wear shorts and a skimpy top for athletic purposes if there are devout people nearby? No right at all of course. Devout trumps non-devout. Right? Right.
Some members of the Avenue du Parc YMCA are upset with the centre’s administrators, who allowed windows on the building’s west side to be tinted in order to placate leaders of a Hasidic synagogue across the alley. The Y members claim the tinted windows compromise the building’s interior lighting and make it hard to practise tai chi and yoga.
Oh grow up. For heaven’s sake. So the Y is a little darker than it used to be; get used to it.
Members of the Yetev Lev synagogue, on Hutchison Street, paid for tinted windows at the Y after they complained their children and youth were unwittingly watching too many women in various states of undress work out at the gym. The congregation’s rabbi said public nudity is not acceptable to his members, nor to any religious Jew.
Public nudity in the sense of inside a building, next door to another building containing people who ‘unwittingly’ watch women in various states of undress. Right; well that makes sense. It’s perfectly fair, too.
But some people just won’t see reason.
[N]ow the windows have opened up a rift over whether the institution went too far to accommodate a minority. Some Y members have circulated a petition demanding the opaque windows be removed because they not only deprive the room of light, but allow a religious group to impose its ways on the majority.“It’s like getting us to wear a veil. Since we represent temptation, we’re being asked to hide,” Renée Lavaillante, who started the petition, said yesterday. “We shouldn’t have to hide in order to exercise in Quebec. We’re a secular state, and shouldn’t hide ourselves for religious reasons.”
It’s also like ordering you to go to the back of the bus – but hey, be reasonable; the back of the bus is a perfectly nice, homey place. Settle down, get comfortable.
The Hasidic community says it is not out to stop women from exercising the way they like. Members just want to find a way to maintain their strict traditions in a secular world, and felt the windows – for which the congregation footed the $3,500 bill – were a reasonable solution.
Of course they were! Perfectly reasonable! Hey, if a neighbour of mine decided he couldn’t stand the possibility of getting a sight of me reading a godless book (which he couldn’t, because I live at the top of a hill and my windows face into thin air, but never mind), of course it would be perfectly reasonable of him to demand that I have the windows painted black, especially if he footed the bill. Why should I mind a darkened living room if it makes a neighbour happy? I’m not so petty, I assure you!
“We have a belief in being dressed modestly, and we want our kids to see women dressed modestly,” Mr. Weig said.
Not just in our own living rooms, but also in their living rooms. We want our kids to see women dressed modestly, therefore we think we have a right to demand that all women everywhere ‘dress modestly’ according to our definitions and no matter where they are. We don’t want much, do we.
Serge St-André, director of the YMCA branch, said the Hasidim’s request had been submitted to an advisory committee, which judged it to be reasonable…“We are geographically at the junction of several communities, and the YMCA has to take on the colours of those communities,” he said…“We try to be responsive to the requests of the community. It’s a challenge to satisfy everyone.”…a Y member walked up to say he objected to the windows. “We can’t let ourselves be imposed upon by extremist religious groups. What’s next? Separate gyms for women and for men? Wearing long pants and long sleeves to exercise?” Outremont resident Robert Dolbec asked. “They [the Hasidim] should cover their own windows. I respect their right to practise their religion, but not their right to impose their religion on us.”…The frosted-window kerfuffle is just the latest flare-up between the fast-growing Hasidic community in Outremont and the larger secular community that surrounds it. In the 1980s, Outremont passed a bylaw banning the wearing of bathing suits in its public parks; the law was struck down as unconstitutional by Quebec Superior Court in 1985…Asher Wieder, a rabbi at the Yetev Lev synagogue, said he hoped the window row would be resolved peacefully. “We felt the way we worked it out was very fair. They still have light in the room and we help our children keep their traditions and religion,” he said. “I think it’s a good compromise.”
They don’t have as much light, but hey, that’s what ‘compromise’ means. So if that neighbour wants me to paint my windows black and I agree to paint just half of the windows, everybody is happy. Compromise is great.
Don’t look?
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscontent.php3?artid=13308
http://www.cjnews.com/viewarticle.asp?id=10615
“It’s like getting us to wear a veil,” Renee Lavaillante, who started the petition, told the Toronto Globe and Mail. “Since we represent temptation, we’re being asked to hide,”
This may be a bit far fetched on my part. But my experienced intuition tells me that Ms. Lavaillante’s real beef is directed somewhere else, somewhere a lot more formidable and implacable than the Satmar Chassidim and their pre-emptive ideas about preserving their boys’ modesty. But it’s so much easier to vent and stir up symbolic trouble with hapless Jews involved. It is so easy to back Jews against a wall and make them defensive (as evidenced in the second article I linked). I suspect it’s a cowardly kind of political posturing by the valiant Pilates afficionada. She won’t risk exposing herself to a real confrontation with the increasingly aggressive demands for religious accommodation made by Muslims in Montreal.
Please don’t get me wrong here. I’m not unsympathetic to the principle being flouted by the YMCA insurgents. I’m just wondering why they choose to wage this mighty war on this inconsequential matter rather than take on the big guns of intolerance towards women.
(Ophelia, this is not meant for you. I know you are a mighty warrior across the board. Bless your atheistic heart!)
What I liked is this remark…
Rabbi Asher Wieder says: “Their windows are basically [on] a lane, where traffic is, during the day, and even at night, trucks, deliveries, garbage removal. So really, there’s no view for them.”
So the Rabbi basically thinks he can decide whether or not someone’s view is worth looking at!
It’s a strange, strange world.
And a timely reminder of why it is so dangerous to compromise on these issues.
I would agree with OB on this one except that she substituted the word “demand” for “request” and since that makes an awful lot of difference in how this case feels, I can’t be sure she even has her basic facts right much less her judgment.
Plus the sarcasm is tiresome.
Sorry, OB, I’m in a blunt mood today.
And don’t blame the Jews, for Chrissakes: the article says “Some members of the Avenue du Parc YMCA are upset with the centre’s administrators.”
Blame the Christians.
Oh that’s quite all right, David, feel free. If you’re in a blunt mood, let rip. Got any advice about my windows?
‘So the Rabbi basically thinks he can decide whether or not someone’s view is worth looking at!’
Yeah. And a helpful observer thinks he can decide how much light people need and want and get to have:
‘B’nai Brith Canada legal counsel Steven Slimovitch’ said ‘“Was the space rendered any less comfortable? Can they not work out there any more? No. If it had been, for example, a sewing class that was held there that required a lot of natural light, it would be a different story.”’
But it’s not a sewing class, you see, so if the neighbours decide the workers out have to have less light so that men and boys won’t be able to spy any more, why, that’s how it has to be.
“And don’t blame the Jews, for Chrissakes”
I beg your fucking pardon? Where did I do that?
I think that’s the lowest anyone has ever stooped around here.
Noga: “Not really. The rabbi was pointing out that the claim about the frosted windows preventing a view was not done in good faith.”
You, to be blunt, appear to suffer from the same problem as the Rabbi: using your own standards to decide what someone else should (or should not) want.
If the Rabbi was concerned about the view, they should have covered their own windows, not somebody else’s.
Maybe someone should invent a religion which wants to see women dressed immodestly. It could be quite popular.
I was under the impression that millions worshipped the Great God Porn via the interweb every day….
Halleluiah for this great liberation, and an end to the days when supplicants had to be inducted via a tattered copy of Hustler, passed around in reverent secrecy at the back of the School Bus….
It reminds me of a joke I will cut very short, but concerns the copper called to the house of an old dear who’s complained about naughty goings-on in the house opposite, which can clearly be seen. ‘But I can’t see a think, madam,’ he says. ‘The house is too far away and you really have to be quite tall to see over the sill.’ ‘Ah,’ she says, ‘but if you climb on top of the wardrobe and use these high-powered binoculars …’
And so it should remind you of that joke. It reminds me further of how the Goons on 50s radio in England would sometimes use the punchlines (only the punchlines, which contained zero smut) of dirty army jokes, only for the BBC to get letters of complaint from little old ladies who couldn’t have possibly found anything offensive about it unless they’d already known the whole joke themselves.
Without getting long-winded about the eruv business, I recall someone intelligently pointing out at the time that the eruv itself is merely a symbol (of city walls). So, if the eruv allows them to imagine there are city walls around them, can’t they just as easily imagine an eruv?
Of course, they would be able to do that if a sufficiently authoritative sage had said so when these things were being codified. Just as prayers have substituted for animal sacrifice, outside the most benighted ultra-orthodox areas.
Yes, but against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain…
A god deciding to create people so gullible that they believe in him despite his rigging things so that it looks like he doesn’t exist is what? – evidence for his existence?
“Maybe someone should invent a religion which wants to see women dressed immodestly. It could be quite popular.”
Try paganism. Actually try any religion, but don’t expect them to be as honest.
Bob-B “Maybe someone should invent a religion which wants to see women dressed immodestly. It could be quite popular.”
According to Madeleine Bunting, that is yer materialist atheist religion.
No,no,no NO!
Who wants a religion with women dressed at all ….
– And what’s with this modesty thing, anyway?
As Piet Hein once put it:
“Speaking of successful rackets,
Modesty deserves a mention:
Exclamation marks in brackets
Never fail to get attention.”
(!)
‘The problem surfaces when the young men wander into the alley on their study breaks, she contended in an interview with CBC.
“They smoke, they take a break, five or 10 of them at a time. . .” ‘
[Last Updated: Tuesday, November 7, 2006 | 8:13 PM ET CBC News ]
Now, here is a question which only a health fascist — or someone who watched his father die of emphysema — would ask:
Why is the YMCA accommodating smokers?
Hilarious; absolutely hilarious.
Why indeed don’t they paint their own windows? Because, I suppose, that would make them painfully conscious of the fact that they are a minority with moral views the rest of the world ignores, whereas, like all such religious groups, they prefer to think of themselves as allied with the Almighty Lord of All. So why do they have to bend themselves out of shape?
Sorry, I realize that the Y was not visible from inside the synagogue; the male students could only see the female exercisers from outside. So painting their own windows would not have solved the “problem.”
So the problem, as others pointed out, was that the synagogue leaders had insufficient control over the lascivious interests of their students. Therefore, the Y had to darken itself (for which the synagogue paid, nicely enough).
My point is still: I suspect (though I may be wrong) that what really bothered the synagogue leaders was that the Almighty Lord of All was apparently not sufficiently powerful enough to make everyone conform to their ideas of morality.
Noga,
Okay, but there’s a big difference between saying you don’t buy the story and making flat assertions about what really happened. I submit that you don’t know what you claim (via those flat assertions) to know. I submit that you don’t know, for instance, that ‘it’s a made-up controversy’ or that the ‘woman who started it is not acting in good faith’. Suspecting isn’t knowing. Notice you move from the present indicative in one sentence to the conditional in the next – from ‘is not’ to ‘it would not have’ and ‘could it be that’. Conditional is argumentative, and fine; indicative indicates firm knowledge.
Apart from anything else, it’s confusing; I thought you might have actual inside knowledge.
I couldn’t agree more with your last reply to Noga, OB.
Noga: “If the demoiselle who started it was really concerned about women being oppressed she should have picked on a more pertinent, tougher example, a real issue of women oppression. As it happens, she looked around and found an excuse and an easy target.”
The woman (mind you) was reacting to something that affected her and her group at the Y, not looking for a grand ideal to defend, although one’s freedom is a big enough ideal to fight for.
Noga: “Does it really seem to you that a person would complain that their view of garbage trucks collecting garbage is being obstructed?”
Well, if their view is obstructed by trucks in front of their windows, then the trucks make it even more difficult for anyone in the synagogue to see what’s going on inside the Y.
Noga is right, though, when she says, “It is a frivolous argument, as sanctimonious as it can get.” Frivolous and sanctimonious on the part of those who asked and paid for the frosted panes.
Noga, in the other thread I wrote “You seem to know a great deal more about the details of the current case than I do” because the way you presented it indicated that you had sources (not general about relationships between orthodox Jews and the surrounding gentile population, but specifically about the details of this individual case) not available to the rest of us. Now it appears not to have been the case (please, please correct if I am wrong) and you must surely see that you expressed yourself in a way that led to misunderstanding not just on my part. Of course you’re not on trial here, but how can we discuss anything with the fairness to which I assume we all aspire if it is unclear whether statements are informed speculation or based on specific established facts that are known to you?
Stewart: I cannot be responsible for the way you or others choose to misread my straightforward comments.
It was, and is my opinion that the ladies of the Y were NOT acting in good faith. By “good faith” I mean, take up a public fight because they felt demeaned by the PRINCIPLE underlying the frosted windows in the gym. That they felt their worth and dignity as human beings was being questioned here. The principle of women oppression was only one adventitious excuse they gave for their fight. There were others: the quality of light, the view, both of which quite shaky:
– frosted glass filters out some percentage of light but does not cause any darkness (assuming that the Y was indeed relying on daylight for its lighting purposes),
– and the view was that of garbage bins.
No one disputes the right of anybody to a garbage bin view but it does strain one’s belief in such a right becoming a cause celebre.
They gave too many reasons where only one genuine complaint, grounded in principle, should have sufficed. Had they been acting in good faith.
I cannot be so gullible as to believe this was a genuine outburst of feminist angst. When you remove all reference to the place and its history, you may make a case for it, as I said. But not when you know the context.
This article from Austin Cline on Agnosticism / Atheism, reports and analyses the story in cool and fairminded manner, while eschewing the context I was speaking of:
http://atheism.about.com/b/a/258504.htm
Oh, dear. You really don’t get it.
“I cannot be responsible for the way you or others choose to misread my straightforward comments.”
Sorry – yes you can, and you have to. You can’t make factual statements that you don’t in fact know to be factual statements. Nobody misread anything, you miswrote. Think of yourself as writing for a newspaper, if it helps: no editor is going to let you say ‘X did Y’ when that’s just something you surmised.
“It was, and is my opinion that the ladies of the Y were NOT acting in good faith.”
But – read carefully – you did not say it was your opinion, you simply stated it as fact. Look again at the two passages I quoted.
Sorry, but this is really elementary stuff.
Hmm. I shouldn’t have said ‘have to’ – obviously you don’t have to do anything, though I can always delete. But it is at least a matter of epistemological etiquette. As Stewart and I both said, it is simply confusing to present surmise as fact.
I would have voted to paint naked people on the windows.