Good Separation

A few years ago, I visited my Hasidic cousins in Boro Park for Purim. I attended with a woman friend who was immediately ushered over to the women's side of the table. I sat with the men, drank, sang, danced, pounded the table, joked, laughed, and had a great time. The male bonding was quite intense. My cousin's friends kissed him, embraced him. The liquor flowed, the musical instruments were brought out amid backslapping, and men pressed together with their eyes closed stomping in rhythm to

wordless melodies.

All this time, my woman friend sat quietly and talked with my cousin's kids and the other women. It irked me that she was kept out of things. I wondered why the women couldn't just get up and dance with us. It then became obvious to me why this could never happen. If women had been permitted to mix with the men, the entire character of the evening would have changed. Either the presence of women in their midst would have transformed the ecstatic gathering of men into an orgiastic rite, or (more likely) it would have worked to tone down the male wildness, to hush the clamorous banging and mute the emotional power of the event.

At that moment, I understood that the effect of the

--the divider placed between the men's and women's sections in (mostly) Orthodox synagogues and at celebrations--was to grant the men a wider range of emotional expression than would otherwise be possible.

Unfortunately, this gain for the men has too often come at a price for women, who are too often denied full emotional and religious expression on the other side of the mechitza. This religious inequality is intolerable and ought to be a matter of concern to men as well as to women. If the mechitza is to have a future, this injustice must be corrected.

The question, of course, is whether it can be corrected so long as the mechitza is retained. If the only virtue of the mechitza was that it served to foster an ecstatic spirituality, this would be reason enough to work to save it. But this is not its only virtue. The mechitza also accepts and builds upon the social reality of gender difference and thus works to create a distinct community of men and one of women that are more cohesive in themselves than a mixed-gender community would be.

A quick glance at the world around us is enough to indicate that community-service groups, leisure and sports groups, and friendships are differentiated by gender. Even the United Jewish Communities--hardly an Orthodox institution -- divides its leadership cadre along gender lines, into Women's Cabinet and Men's Cabinet. Several years ago, the two organizations decided to overlap their conventions on Shabbat. The decision was attended with controversy before and after because of the powerful emotional forces on both sides for maintaining the gender barrier and for eliminating it.

Personally, I have come to feel that there is a quality of community enjoyed by men and women who pray separately that cannot be attained in mixed pews. Mixed pews lead couples (or families or extended families) to sit together. This may make sense to those who have little opportunity for prayer or ritual at home, but for me it undermines the most important community making that can occur in the synagogue. The mechitza breaks apart the ordinary family units, and thus is able to foster a cohesive community that connects across familial and generational lines.

Mixed pews create another, more insidious problem, perhaps inadvertently. By favoring the family unit, mixed-seating synagogues make single, widowed, or divorced congregants feel more alone. The 1960s slogan, "The family that prays together stays together," expresses a Protestant conception of the religious life. By contrast, the mechitza breaks the family unit apart in order to constitute community on a different basis. By separating family members according to gender, opportunities for fostering individuality and community are increased. Congregations can become something much larger than a network of families; they can become networks of individuals, of friends.

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