Boaz's message to Ruth has become the all-time motto of the
Bais Yaakov movement:
"My daughter, do not go to glean in other fieldså"
A Letter to Our Jewish Daughters
Please listen, my Jewish daughters, for you may be among the
last ones left.
"The last ones of what?"
I will tell you and you will be very surprised and may even
want to throw this letter away, but please wait until you've
given me a chance to explain myself.
You may be among the last real women left on this planet.
What a silly statement! There are plenty of women around
— at least half the population of the globe!
Yes, there are those who look like women, at least on the
outside. But not on the inside. Please allow me to
explain.
The famed Women's Liberation Movement was supposed to bring
total equality to women. In fact, as I was told by one of the
top writers for the Wall Street Journal, the Women's
Lib Movement was designed by business leaders as a way to get
women out of the home and into the labor force. They needed
more workers for their factories, so they invented an
ideology that made being in the home bad/inferior and being
at work good/superior.
Suddenly, all the positive attributes of being a woman were
now labeled inferior in relation to the largely male
attributes that dominated the work place. A woman's
remarkable capacity to nurture, to do chessed, to
help, was dismissed as being superfluous. If she really
wanted society's approval, she needed to work like a man. She
needed to join the fight for economic success and superiority
called by man, "the rat race." Women's Lib gave her the right
to join the rat race — except she could still wear a
pink ribbon.
Women may have worked in the past when circumstances demanded
it, but it was seen as a measure born of necessity —
not as an ideology to be pursued.
Women all over the world have been infected. They still do
not get equal pay and they never will, because it isn't
economical. And they have been taught to despise everything
that they always excelled in. Some have even become better
men than the men themselves!
So this is why I said that you are perhaps the last ones
left. Your values and perceptions are formed by G-d's Torah.
You are not the products of whatever nonsense the modern
secular society happens to favor at a given time. You know
the greatness of the Matriarchs. The chessed that
Jewish women did throughout history. They are the ones who
nurtured the Jewish home. They are the ones who determined if
a child would grow up properly, if a husband would grow into
his potential.
The world is based on men building their homes which then
form the basis for society. But you may be the last ones left
who really know and appreciate this. Other women may still be
housewives and homemakers — but they feel guilty,
inferior. they think that if they were really good, they
would be `out there' in the working world.
It is up to you to resist all attempts to subvert your belief
system. You are the remaining example to the rest of the
world of what real women can aspire to: to be partners with
Hashem in caring for His world.
With hope,
A rabbi who cares for you
From Jerusalem
