The Bet Din ruled against this, with startling force. Imagine, they ordered him to divorce his veiled wife, and he hadn’t even asked for that. Good for the Bet Din. So we DO TOO have some competent authorities.

No, Judaism is not a mental illness. It is a major civilisation and the source of much that you see around you. Shabbat Shalom.

Look at kashrus for Passover for instance. For example, once, I asked a Rosh Kollel in Flatbush once about the whole “no processed food” thing some Hasidim take on during Passover. He responded with a story of a woman who had asked him if she could eat her Seder meal in her dining room. She had forgotten to wash the walls for Passover.

“The walls?” the rav asked.

“Yes, can I eat there even though I didn’t wash the walls?”

“Were you eating on the wall?”

“No, of course not.”

“So why are you asking?”

“It’s Pesach!” was the reply.

“No you don’t have to wash your walls”. Of course she did anyway, and if she had students (b/c as we see above, Rebbetzin Keren is not a rabbi), chances are, she’d tell them to wash their walls too. And once enough women are doing it, it becomes “tradition” or “what the velt does” or “how the velt fiert zich” and then things get codified.

There is enormous peer pressure among these “sages” to not be caught out – not be seen as more lenient that other prominent rabbis. So they repeatedly fall into the trap of being manipulated by “askanim” – fanatical “community leaders” who often misrepresent the situation to get a Rabbinic signature on a ban.

This is what happened with the ban on Rabbi Slifkin’s books about evolution – people who had never read the books condemned them.

This of course could cause a reverse reactionary backlash, and rabbanim could begin (gasp!) relaxing standards…

Regarding the commenter from Muqata who said that, “[if] the Rabbanim are pushed by radical women into mandating this, Judaism will be permanently changed.” Well, since when have radical women ever succeeded in pushing rabbanim into anything? If someone has an example, please share. I don’t know much about the history of this and am wondering how many times women have managed to exert their influence on the Israeli Rabbanut in such a fashion?

Mi kaf regel v’ad rosh is from my bar mitzvah haftarah. How fortunate we are to live in an age where an article in an Israeli newspaper begins with Isaiah’s turn of phrase!

I stopped reading at that point, though, figuring my mood could only go downhill from there…