“We’d appreciate you not rubbing your good fortune in our faces while we keep hoping for a new government that will grant us Sundays”
After reading Elisheva Appel’s excellent column about the rising standards within our community, and how new means of attaining all trends for low cost may be harming us, not helping us, I wondered if she hadn’t gotten it backwards. If everything in this world was created for Bnei Yisrael, perhaps it’s our desire for gashmiyus that brought about websites like Ali and Shein.
We’re so superficial — and we’re suffering for it. Shidduchim is just one more example. A letter in the main magazine about shidduchim and the Words Unspoken in the same issue both bemoan the reality of a society that rejects a wonderful marriage candidate in a less-than-perfect package. My Israeli daughters actually asked me if the black shoes with the white soles that every single American seminary girl wears are part of their school uniform — so yeah, maybe we are over-emphasizing conformity.
I wonder if the way we’re doing some things in our schools isn’t inadvertently encouraging our kids to be so superficial. When we tell girls, “You can’t wear this, you can’t wear that, this bag isn’t okay, those shoes are a problem,” we’re teaching them it’s all about the way you look on the outside. It’s a subliminal message that the outside is what counts.
Not that I think we should let girls wear whatever they want, and do away with all the rules. But maybe we can rethink the way we go about it, so our girls really understand that they want to give the most attention to what’s inside of themselves.
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