an inconceiveable situation;mitzvot

[Judith R Cohen <judithc...>]

> > Otherwise, among many other things, you could have the State--the
> > government--dictating all sorts of things to Jews and other religious
> > groups regarding religious practice, in synagogue/churches/etc. and
> > elsewhere.  An inconceivable situation.

somewhat offlist I guess, but I'll get back on topic, in response to
Robert Cohen, the situation isn't that clearcut. At least in Canada two
major law/constitution issues have been seriously raised:

Sikh boys carrying a ritual knife to school, in the same year a kid was
suspended for bringing a tiny white plastic knife to cut his lunchtime
bagel with (ah! there's the Jewish connection, now I have to find the
music connection for this message);

and, very seriously indeed, African Muslims practicing clitorodectomy
wanting the religious right to practice it on little girls born or now
in permanent residence in Canada.

So "dictating all sorts of things" isn't that clear an issue.

And to go back to the original question, in fact perhaps cancelling a
WRITTEN contract for a woman singing, in which nothing had been
specified about the presence of men ,  (it would be hard to deal with an
oral one) WOULD be a basis for recourse to the law.

It is of course kind of depressing to imagine a contract in which one
were told that one's concert could be cancelled at the last minute if
even one kol isha-observing man happened to want to come. Unless, of
course, the contract specified you'd be paid anyway. But then - why do
we DO this? Not to get rich, certainly, but because we love singing, and
in the case of, I think iot's safe to say, the women singers on this
list, we also alll have a strong commitment to singing and sharing
Jewish song and culture.

In fact, re Alex's (Alex J., not Alex L.) last message, in which he
doesn't really seem to understand what I was saying but perhaps I wasn't
clear - 

why on earth was it not a mitzva for a woman to sing - AND NOT ONLY TO
WOMEN UNLESS THAT'S THE SINGER'S CHOICE -ransmitting what are in fact,
largely, the songs with which Jewish women have trnasmitted their
culture through the centuries.

> the woman there had no mitzva to sing,
> >while the men had a mitzva not to listen.

If it's a mitzva to be mean-spirited and selfish about women's
performances (i.e. not just leave if one doesn't feel it's kosher to
hear), but NOT a mitzva for a woman to sing these songs to men and
women, (and really, comparing us singing Yiddish or Judeo-Spanish songs
to Marilyn Manson or Madonna strikes me as spurious at best) - then the
"official" defintion of mitzva would not be something I'd be interested
in transmitting to my children.

Not everything is "law", or, as the saying goes,"written in stone."
Judith

>   The First Amendment
> guarantees freedom of religion; that takes precedence over Title VII, and
> it should.
> 

finally, Richard, re walkmen and "sodomising" the langauge (an odd
choice of words), my remark was tic (tongue-in-cheek). Judith

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