Rabbi Michi, when you say “at least for our times,” do you mean that in the past the other approach may have been “more correct and more reasonable”? Does the Rabbi know of such a period in history, and what data is that hypothesis based on?

With God’s help, 18 Tammuz 5780

To Benjamin,

On the occasion of the 20th yahrzeit of Rabbi Yosef Kapach, of blessed memory, you are invited to read in his book Halikhot Teiman how things were conducted in a society whose way of life was shaped according to the Sages. Men and women lived in separate social circles.

The men’s daily routine included working to support the family, along with fixed times for Torah study and prayer in synagogues and study halls, around which the men’s cultural and social life revolved.

By contrast, the women’s daily routine was devoted to running the Jewish home and raising their children, educating them in Torah, commandments, and good character traits. Their cultural and social life was conducted with their neighbors, with whom they would sit every afternoon for friendly conversation while spinning wool.

The boys and girls married at a young age, and already in their teens they were responsible heads of families. Naturally, the husband knew no woman other than his wife, and the woman knew no man other than her husband. And since maintaining a Jewish home according to the Torah was the center of their lives, the wife valued her husband as the provider for the family, both financially and in Torah, while the husband valued his wife as the one responsible for the home and for raising and educating the children.

Today the challenge is much harder. The age of marriage is much later, men and women encounter countless members of the opposite sex on the street, in their studies, and at work, and in many cases in revealing and provocative dress. Therefore it is important to sharpen the “boundary lines” set by the Sages: to avoid seclusion and physical contact, and to avoid looking and listening for the purpose of enjoying the beauty of the body of someone who is not one’s wife, and to avoid frivolity and intimate “heart-to-heart talks” with strange women.

To the extent that one follows Solomon’s advice to distance oneself from a “strange woman,” the love between a person and “his companion and the wife of his covenant” is strengthened, who is supposed to be “the only woman in his life,” with whom alone he has a mental and emotional bond.

With blessings,
S.Z.

S.Z., I’d recommend focusing on relations between men and women in Europe. The reality in Yemen was never relevant for the overwhelming majority of the Jewish people.

This hypothesis is based on familiarity with the changes that the status of women has undergone (really, not only attitudes toward women). And in particular on the assumption that the Sages were not idiots or simply wicked. That’s good enough for me.

With respect, does the Rabbi mean that the Sages were more open than is accepted in certain societies today, and therefore they were not idiots or simply wicked?

Indeed. And I’ll say more than that: the Sages did not have their own “Sages” to whom they needed to cling. That is what leads conservatives today to stick to fossilized and problematic positions.

If I understood correctly, then we also don’t need to “cling to the Sages” nowadays. For example, hora dancing, line dances Wild-West style, and so on, which were accepted among the cream of Jewish society in the Middle Ages…?

With God’s help, Friday afternoon, “and they stood before Moses,” 5780

To Benjamin — until the eruption of modernity, in Europe too and throughout the Jewish world, men were dominant in the worlds of work, the synagogue, and the study hall, while women focused on the home and raising the children.

Unlike in Islamic lands, in Europe there were situations in which a woman sat in a shop or worked as an assistant outside her home, but socially, men and women lived in separate worlds in social and cultural terms. The only woman in a man’s life was his wife, and the only man in a woman’s life was her husband.

In certain places in Europe there were mixed dances at weddings under the influence of the surrounding non-Jewish culture, but the rabbis in all places opposed this phenomenon, and it passed from the world until it was reinvented with the outbreak of modernity. Even in the time of the Sages there were, under foreign influence, situations of “a male singer and women responding—licentiousness; a female singer and men responding—like fire in flax,” and the Sages fought these deviations.

With blessings for a good Sabbath,
S.Z.

“In all places they opposed this phenomenon” — certainly they did not oppose it. Where did you pull that claim from?
I recommend bringing sources, otherwise the discussion is pointless.

With God’s help, Saturday night, Pinchas, 5780

To Benjamin,

An enactment limiting the mixed dancing that had spread among the Jews of Venice was instituted by Rabbi Judah Mintz and his colleagues in the year 1507. They were discussed by Prof. Reuven Bonfil (Zion 41) and by Prof. Avraham Grossman (Pious and Rebellious, p. 254), who see this reality of mixed dancing as an influence of the permissive lifestyle of Christian society in the Renaissance period.

Grossman writes: “It is hard to assume that R. Judah Mintz and his colleagues did not wish to abolish mixed dancing entirely, both of married women on Purim and of unmarried women throughout the year, but they felt that this was a decree that the public would find difficult to uphold, and therefore they preferred to turn a blind eye, in the sense of: ‘Better that they be unwitting than deliberate sinners.’”

Mixed dancing was also common among the Romaniotes (the Greek-speaking Jews of southern Italy, Greece, and Turkey; see in Prof. Meir Benayahu’s book Ze’evim Torfim et Binyamin, p. 35).

Rabbi Eliyahu HaLevi, rabbi of Constantinople, writes of a sweeping prohibition: “And regarding dances — there has been a great ban for many years, from ancient times, from the teachers of Torah, that no man should enter a dance with women at all… and this enactment in particular spread throughout Israel, with the force of all enactments instituted by the early Geonim…”

In the community of Lepanto in Greece (to whom Rabbi David HaKohen of Corfu responds), a shocking situation is described in which a young man demanded of the “dance arranger” that he bring him a married woman to dance with. “And when all the communities saw the breach that emerged from this dancing, they arose and enacted and placed a complete ban… that none should dance except a man with his wife, and a father with his daughter, and a mother with her son, and a brother with his sister” (Responsa Radakh, section 11).

In Ashkenaz, Rabbi Yosef Steinhardt writes sharply against mixed dancing: “Every rabbi and halakhic decisor in his city is obligated to protest with all his strength and to abolish the dances and circle dances of young men and virgins together, as is written in the Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim (end of sec. 529)… and there is no greater incitement of the evil inclination to sexual sin than this, for at the time of the dances they look and gaze upon the faces of the women and virgins… and sometimes they even embrace and kiss them… and sometimes they sweeten counsel together to seclude themselves for sexual sin… and it is known that unmarried women nowadays are presumed to be menstruants, and one who touches them affectionately transgresses a prohibition… The bottom line is: there is no greater fence against sexual immorality than abolishing the dances and circle dances of men and women together, whether married or unmarried, for there is no greater habituation to transgression than this” (Zikhron Yosef, Orach Chayim sec. 17; cited in Bi’ur Halakhah sec. 339, Yabia Omer vol. 7, Yoreh De’ah sec. 41:3, and elsewhere).

With blessings,
S.Z.

Paragraph 5, line 4:
…, except a man with his wife, and a father…

Dear S.Z., for your consideration:
https://www.sefaria.org.il/Responsa_Benei_Banim%2C_Volume_I.38?lang=he