“A balabusta takes instructions only from her mother.”
“Gayst du Bais Yaakov?”
“B-b-bais Yaakov? Dort…dort…dort men lernen Chimmish!!!”
Recently I attended a tour of Satmar Williamsburg conducted by Freida Vizel, who was herself raised in the Satmar community. Among the various anecdotal sociological observations she shared during the tour two particularly stood out.
One was how she specifically was Judaically educated: completely sans "original texts". I asked her “Not even Tzenna Urenna?” She said in her schools, not even Tzenna Urenna, although--she clarified later-- "while we did not study from any original Jewish texts, we had Yiddish schoolbooks from which we learned. They were for instance, pieces of history written out in Yiddish, bits about the parsha, etc." Still--when even the classic text-to-eliminate-the-need-for-women-to-ever access-any-other-texts is kept out of the curriculum, that goes even beyond "not study[ing] from any original Jewish texts".
The other—which actually preceded the above anecdote but really provided the explanation for the practice—involved what involved what might illustrate a special method of social control. Ms. Vizel mentioned that it wasn’t a belief or faith-based system that was preached and enforced; instead, her teacher used this analogy: you have a stack of white cups, and right in the middle of it is this blue one—what happens to the stack if you pull out the blue cup?--and, well let Ms. Vizel tell it: "[S]he built a cup tower to demonstrate."
[Ms. Vizel also pointed out that teachers like the tower-builder "weren't anyone but little eighteen year old girls in pretty suits!", indicating that this demonstration wasn't exactly on the level of a Rebbe's psak, and therefore not necessarily all that representative of, for lack of a better term, "Satmar Da'as Toireh". However, "little eighteen year old girls in pretty suits" whose teacher training likely also "did not [include] study from any original Jewish texts" probably don't come up with such trenchant analogies sui generis; the Blue Cups likely have communal legs.]
Immediately a friend I had brought with me asked: why was the cup put in the middle of the stack and not the top?
And I asked: why was it painted blue?
[While we’re using drinking analogs [spoiler alert, based upon one of the Rashis [24:16] to be quoted [or not quoted] below]—a favorite kiruv industry bon mot regarding womens' sexuality is to compare it to a bottle of soda, which loses fizz when you open it. Well—if you wait too long and never open the bottle, the soda STILL loses its fizz. And believe me, even the soft drink industry AND Mayor Bloomberg would agree that expiration dates are a good idea.]
[Not that I’m advocating for either mass soda-bottle openings [especially not on Shabbos, r”l [:P]] or for storing long-past expired dusty bottles of flat Dr. Brown’s that hibernate in your basement from one Pesach to the next as the only alternatives. However: the kiruv industry might want to employ a less tenuous analogy. [If they do I'll stop using run-on sentences [with multiple brackets [what's the halacha about where to put the punctuation?]]]]
[But I digress, as usual…]
Again: why was the cup painted blue?
Suddenly it raised an interesting question in my mind: maybe the Satmar’s particular brand of pedagogy for females dovetailed with what might actually be the ideal Torah approach, if you think about it for half a minute. Torah she-ba’al peh was never supposed to be entexted at all, much less codified; its publication was an emergency measure. Maybe the Satmar method paralleled a “purer” form of transmission? And the “nashim tzidkanios” would be the standard-bearers, because of AND in spite of the restrictions on texts?
I was almost hearing “See? Women ARE on a higher level—they don’t NEED the learning; men do!”
And then I remembered what the linchpin of R' Yoel d’Satmar’s reasoning for restricting women’s education to text-free syllabi: all women were ipso facto “talmidim she’einam kehogen”, or “unworthy students” [cf. TB Berakhot 28b] and therefore precluded from study, because they could ultimately only use their knowledge to conceal illicitness [cf. TB Sotah 21b]. It’s actually a consistent policy: the women aren't chained to a pedestal because they aren't placed on one. However, this obviated my initial hava amina of this being an/the ideal approach.
Underscoring this was Ms. Vizel’s assertion that even faith or belief wasn’t instructed [and, though it might have been unclear whether this was actually a direct result of the sex-segregated pedagogical method, one could infer that the undeniably intensive text-based education of the Satmar male population would include some instruction in belief and faith, so even if only by default, this also could be a uniquely female experience in that—and similar—communities].
So where would the religious transmission come from? What underpins the behavior represented by the pyramid of cups?
In this week’s parsha we may get a hint from the way Rashi and the commentaries explain how Rivkah Imenu may have actually exemplified the blue cup in the stack. Despite her beauty--noted clearly in the posuk--she was singularly chaste, in contradistinction to the locals [Rashi on 24:16]; there's your blue cup. But it wasn't just the locals making up the stack needing to be tumbled: her own family not only featured the paradigmatic Biblical con artist, but a father whose very name implied his defining inclination—“lord of the virgins”—and who was ostensibly slain by the angels before he could solve his dilemma as to whether to exercise his usual droit du seigneur with his own daughter [ironically enough, his own constituents were planning to kill him if he DIDN’T subject his daughter to the treatment he meted out to theirs].
Somehow she maintained her standards to the point that her aforementioned family of criminals was forced to admit through clenched teeth that they were powerless [24:50, 51] to change her personally freely chosen [24:57] destiny even though—after the father’s sudden death [24:55] didn’t provide enough of a hint what the consequences were for interfering—the brother and mother [!] tried one more time to at least slow down the process, and even though they finally realized they couldn't stop her [24:58], they might have been demonstrably upset about being overruled by their little sister [24:59].
Where would the shidduch with Yitzchak Avinu been if she hadn’t been the blue cup that tumbled the stack?
[Parsha PSA re: Rivka marrying Yitzchak at age 3--this particular vort has to be quashed with extreme prejudice from being taught in classrooms, and maybe even from pulpits. As my mara d’asra put it: even Rashi [25:20] doesn’t hold by Rashi. The fact that a children’s book was published with the frum community as its target market with this meme as its central theme—and that some people don’t seem to have an issue with it, don’t seem to understand what the issue might be, or do and deny it--is horrifying. Anyone in chinuch who insists upon relating this as p’shat should be terminated with cause and chased from the field forever. And possibly be subject to a mandated report.]
[And now back to our show.]
What’s even more interesting here, however, is that in lieu of a text-based transmission, there has to be some sort of “mesora” for Satmar women. The numbers don’t lie: the model has proved sustainable for almost 70 years; even if one can claim that the future is uncertain, something has worked until now. Hence the quote at the beginning of this piece: the ultimate preservative; an almost parallel “mesora”.
Or is it?
Back to the parsha: we know very little [nothing?] about Rivka’s mother. From what we know about her husband’s tendencies, her marriage probably did not provide a suitable model for her daughter to follow. Yet we see again from Rashi [24:67] that Rivka’s model was someone she never got to meet: her mother-in-law, whose pre-Sinaitic “Shabbos table” that had disappeared with her passing reappeared with Rivka’s arrival: pace Rashi, “dugmas Sarah imo”.
Like before--where I must clearly reiterate that I am not advocating for a wanton mass-opening of soda-bottles—I am not necessarily calling for a carnival booth of cupstack knockdowns. However—in theory, at least—the Chassidic movement that gets increasingly trenchant in the process of sustaining its model originally started out by tumbling more than a few stacks of cups, and the premise that half your population remains barred from the sources of tradition in the name of sustaining the transformed model might lead to more than one cup wobbling in the stack.
One might deduce from Ms. Vizel’s observations that the transmission for women involves an almost nebulous method of social control with no attendant system of faith principles—let alone access to the texts that codify these principles. One might then wonder where the system of transmission comes from, let alone where it leads. The “anan kashur al ha-ohel” won’t always appear just because most of the cups aren’t painted blue.
Much has been made of the ultimate sustainability of a religious model that depends on increasing strictures and isolation even as it grows exponentially, and there are salient sociological reasons to believe that the jury is out on its ultimate staying power despite the generational explosion. But there is a starker [shtarker?] reason beyond sociology to question the model: the premise itself is tenuous. Ms. Vizel—maybe without even realizing it—illustrated why that is. And it has nothing to do with “modernity”, or the “internet”, or other more tangible external threats: it’s built right into the very model itself.
It IS The Blue Cup.
