Re: kol isha--redux!

[r l reid <ro...>]

Note: my point is the the last 2 paragraphs.  You can skip the 
two between here and there.

I dropped off the list because I'm overly annoyed with the 
perpetual kol isha discussion (will all those whose minds
have changed as a result of kol isha discussions on the
jewish music mailing list please identify themselves...
[sound of crickets chirping,  a train in the distance,
the gentle woosh of cars on the highway three miles away in
the silence of the night.] Thought so.) and eight months later 
it's still going.

So why not get my licks in too?  For all the sources in the article,
(and lets be fair, the article was written for educated Jews, so
it was not the job of the article to explain who each authority
was and when he lived), I find one striking omission, even granting
that we are (thank God) rabbinical Jews, not Biblical Jews.  

In Exodus 15, starting at verse 20, we have the recounting
of Miriam's leading the Israelites in song, instrumental music,
and dance.  Actually the Isaraelites are identified by the pronoun 
"them", which loses gender specificity in English.  In the Hebrew
in verse 21 the phrase is "vata'an lahem Miryam".  "lahem" is
the third person plural *masculine* pronoun, and in Hebrew if
the object described by that pronoun is mixed gender, then the 
masculine pronoun is used.  

It could not have been simply a women's group because then the pronoun
would have been lahen, not lahem.  Far smaller points of practice
than this have been determined on even less that the difference of
a single letter, a nun vs a mem.  Yet this "smoking gun" is never
brought into the argument.

roger/ronan reid
who thinks women's voices and physical attraction are two of God's
greatest gifts to humankind and no amount of assimilation of
Christian Testament prudery will convince me otherwise


-- 
r l reid        ro (at) rreid(dot)net

Az mir vil shlogn a tsimbl, gefintmin a shtekn.

---------------------- jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org ---------------------+