Embracing diversity, love and respect despite our disagreements - opinion

One of the great pleasures of my childhood was going to the video store with my siblings. The shop’s walls were lined with classic titles and new releases, and the clerk always had a new video to recommend to us.

Since we only had one TV at home, we agreed to rotate the right to decide on the rental, which is how one day I found myself watching Star Wars.

Today’s generation does not know the struggles of my youth. Not only does everyone now have access to their own personal device, but Netflix and other streaming services offer us new movies and shows based on our previous choices.

Had I grown up as a child of the streaming era, there is little chance I would have watched Star Wars or any other science-fiction movie, for that matter, and I would have been at a complete loss to understand both my husband’s and my brother’s shared over-enthusiasm for the 2015 trilogy. 

As convenient as the recommended streaming algorithms are, however, they are also limiting. Their mathematical calculations are nothing like the video store clerk’s quirks and breadth of knowledge.

Watching movies similar to our previous week’s picks or reading books based on previous reads prevents us from expanding our knowledge and fields of interest. 

Our social media feed works in the same way, keeping us within our web of friends and pumping out posts that we are liable to “like.”

We are rarely exposed to those who think differently from us.

That’s fine for an afternoon tea gathering, but it’s no way to live a meaningful life.

Recently, while studying the halachic discourse on kol isha and whether men may recite the Shema prayer while hearing a woman’s voice, I learned that famous 16th-century sage and halachic authority Rabbi Moshe Isserles (affectionately referred to by his initials as the “Rama”) emphasized that there was no problem with listening to a female voice that one was familiar with.

Our unfortunate reality, though, is that due to extreme and modern modesty laws, there are scores of religious men who hardly ever hear women speaking, much less singing. Of course, men who are conditioned in such a fashion will be distracted by the female voice.

Any person who listens to only one type of voice or one set of opinions will feel their world shake when eventually exposed to “the other side.” 

Recently, one of the guides of a group I spoke to asked me if I thought there was a limit to the equality that Women of the Wall is asking for. 

“I agree with most of what you presented, but you hurt the feelings of women who are not ready to see a woman with a tallit,” he told me. 

In his mind, the “hurt feelings” of someone who is unwilling to see outside the walls of their existence outweigh the sting of restrictions that their hurt feelings force on different-minded people. Sadly, we have seen this story play out before. 

In fact, the price of zealotry, self-righteousness, and the dismissal of other opinions was exacted at the same site where today’s struggle for dialogue and equality takes place. It was baseless hatred, stubborn opinions, and petty politics that doomed the Second Temple to destruction. It was a blinding fear of differences that split brothers and sisters and led to the disaster of Tisha B’Av; a disaster from which we have yet to fully recover, nearly 2,000 years later. 

Especially in a year already stained with the darkest black, these weeks of reflection and mourning should serve as a wake-up call to us. The Jewish people is a family. Like all families, we will disagree. And like all families, we must love and respect each other despite those disagreements. 

The writer is CEO of the Women of the Wall.