Is Annika Sorenstam Par for the Course?
By Rabbi David
Eidensohn
The Gallup Poll (
I do not approve. I
also do not approve of a culture and society that leaves women without
children, without husbands, with a fifty percent divorce rate for first
marriages, and a good chance of battling your ex for years in divorce court.
Annika Sorenstam does not have the opportunities that my
daughters in my community have. My daughters do not need to prove themselves
among men. They are happy as women, as mothers, as wives. They have four
(still-married) parents and a large extended family and supportive community to
support them somewhat through life. A girl today has parents who may or may not
speak to each other, years of study in public schools where girls are toys, and
college where date-rape is part of life. What can girls do except try to become
men? What a tragedy. Can a woman, even the strongest woman, really become a
champion in physical sports? We set them up for frustration. The issue,
therefore, is not whether Annika Sorenstam is right or wrong. In the secular
world women are valued as toys or men, thus she has little choice but to
compete with much stronger men. Some women are valued for acting like men, as
when women box each other, trying to smash the other’s brain into oblivion.
When Maureen Dowd of the New York
Times complains that ABC television has only dysfunctional family and gay shows
and that she has nothing to watch, we know that we are in trouble. I think that
Ms. Dowd, who wrote about her single status and vulnerability in such touching
tones, would appreciate seeing my daughters. My
daughters never learned to hate men. When the two sets of parents, my
daughter’s and their son’s, decided that this was the best match, we set things
in motion, and did whatever we could do to encourage the marriage. There is
such fear in a girl or boy to make a marital commitment, unless they are
stupid. They need structure. They need the comfort of family bringing them to
the wedding canopy. When we walk our children to the marital ceremony, and
everybody watches us, believe me, we deserve the honor.
We had a lot to do with this ceremony. There is, however, another aspect of
this honor. We are responsible for the selection of the partner for life, and
we are responsible to keep things going.
I don’t like to compete with my wife about anything. If we
have to compete, we are not going to do it married. The Talmud says that a
husband and wife are really one body, one person. When the saint of
Girls know
all of this better than I do, unfortunately. They see
their mothers, their older sisters, their older friends, and see things that I can’t even imagine. And there is
nothing they can do about it. Society has ditched them, and decided that they
must become men. Secular girls are not only on the wrong side of the road in
the gender wars, even biologically, it seems that germs prefer girls over boys. According to the
The above
CDC article quotes the CDC that “nearly half of
I recently had a very rewarding discussion with a troubled
person in which we discussed the Four Women. Who are the Four Women? In my
community, a man and a woman have only one sexual partner and one close partner
for life, unless divorce or death intervene. In other cultures, such as
When a man
marries, he may need four women, because even decent men have strong biological
urges that cannot be readily denied. In biblical and
traditional family communities, one woman must suffice, but it is not so
simple. Therefore, in some American family communities, there was a ritual that
when a boy reached a certain age, his father and elders of the community
introduced him and his friends to prostitutes. By being inclusive, the elders
of the community guided the young man to sow his oats and eventually to marry
and participate in the community. In communities such as mine, when such is
proscribed, a boy or man who slips can be so damaged that he may feel like
leaving us completely. In those communities where prostitutes are not readily
available, there is a great danger that married people will commit adultery. Of
course, those who go to a prostitute don’t want to stop there, and if they can
find a free married person, they are unlikely to refuse. Thus, there is no
clear way to family propriety, unless, as in my community, you rigidly divide
the sexes from childhood for an entire lifetime, and work very hard to make
marriages work, something that sometimes involves many helpers in the
community. Some societies, however, swing between their genes and their morals,
like tennis balls.
Speaking of
genes, Time Magazine of
The
enormously powerful sexual genes tell us what to do, but we can refuse their
message or modify it, and in the process, we revamp the gene itself! Thus, let
us take two people, male or female. They enter puberty and the genes empower
the reproductive faculties. One person heeds the call of nature and becomes
profligate. The genes sense the message, and power on the call of nature until
the person is completely tied into extreme schedules of sexuality. Another
person senses the genes and their dispositions but refuses them. He sends the
genes back to the drawing board to cool it, and they do. He keeps his sexuality
in check until the right time, when the genes will be instructed to flow full
force.
Men and
women have genes. Some respond to their sexuality by being active, even as
children. Others abstain. Each of these people update their genes, turning them
on or off or modifying their response through constant nurture and actions.
Women have female genes and men have male genes. As women must become men in
the secular culture and even in other areas, their nurture may change their
behavior, their fantasies, their identity and arousal, and if so, are they
still “women”? A woman who talks like a man, works like a man, thinks like a
man, dresses like a man, identifies with many manly attitudes and behaviors,
and has only a discredited female model to consider for her femininity is a
poor excuse for a woman. When such a “woman” deals with a man, is this polar
attraction or repelling of like charges? More and more, men are afraid to be
men, women are afraid to be women, and they conflict because nowl male/female is not a polarity, so marriage is almost
unthinkable. That is where we are going.
The Gay
Lobby thrives from this erosion of gender clarity. If marriage is “one man and
one woman”, do we not declare that men are not women? Do we not defy the
biological man or woman to have meaningful sexuality with the same gender/sex?
How then can we erode the differences between male and female in business and
sport?
A man’s
interest in a woman involves ego and sensuality. These may clash. For instance,
there is a woman who can strengthen a man’s ego, but she may not be the right
one for him sensually and of course, a sensual woman may not please a man’s
ego. Sometimes, a woman can be both sensual and sexually arousing. Sometimes
she is neither sensual nor pleasing to his ego. Maybe he married her for other
reasons, to please his parents, for her money, because he wanted to suffer,
etc.
Thus, a man
may marry a woman who has serious problems because they make him feel superior
and his ego is stroked by her infirmity. Then, he gets to a point that he feels
that this is not enough, and there are problems. The woman also marries for
various reasons, and sometimes her perspectives change as she matures and
divorce threatens. She no longer receives from her husband the satisfaction
that she used to.
Freud once
said that since marriage cannot be of equals, someone must dominate, and it
might as well be men. If Freud is right, and he is, that marriage cannot be the
relationship of equals, how does equality for women affect marriage? It
destroys it. We thus, in America, are powering women up the economic scale,
training them to be men, even while we position them to lose the most basic
needs of a natural female, a strong, masculine and caring husband, and children
who live in a home of two parents. Two equal parents cannot live in the same
home, usually.
We can fool
women into joining the army and finding out what war is really like. We can cheer
women when they take on men in physical sports. We can tell women to become
rich and powerful in the financial sector and sacrifice maternal need and
children, even marriage. But if we do, our families will decline, as they are
declining, and women will suffer as few generations of women in history have
suffered. No society ever denied a woman her most basic womanly needs. We do
this in
In the
Orthodox Jewish community, all marriage rituals are big deals and the community
participates. The groom is told that he is a “king” and is serenaded into the
synagogue down the streets of the community on the Sabbath before his wedding.
The bride sits like a queen before the wedding, and dozens, even hundreds of
people ask her to pray for so and so the sick one, so and so who can’t get
married, etc. The wedding is wild with dancing, singing and swarms of people,
even not family and close friends, who come to dance, sing and wish everyone
well. Every day for a week after the wedding, the couple is
feted and dined with speakers, music, levity and fine food. The parents
are thereto assure that the first years are supported and without undo stress.
My daughter just had a baby, which means that she went off to relax for a week
(after the first week that she rested in my house) in the most relaxing
environment. She deserves it, absolutely, and if she did not get such support,
raising a large family would be quite difficult. When one child needs a rest,
they just ship off the children to a sister, a parent, or a friend. It isn’t
enough, but it is something, and it makes the difference.
In our
community, a person is a person, not a thing. We have no female toys. We have
no gender “costume parties,” and faking it with drink and “fun,” unless they
are for natural fun, such as on the holiday of Purim when people wear masks.
Do you see that golf club swishing
through the air, smashing a hard white ball? On the hard white ball rides a
fragment of womanhood. If you listen carefully, you will hear it cry.