Today's YNet has a feature on super-model Hava Mond, who's Shomer Shabbat, davens daily, and keeps strictly kosher. Frankly, I'm conflicted. On the one hand, she's a Kiddush HaShem. On the other hand, the world she inhabits is very seductive and corrupting (and no, I would not want my daughter to do it). On the one hand, she has strict red lines as to what she will or will not model. On the other hand, what she will model is highly problematic.
One thing, though, I do know. In a country trying desperately to re-judaize, in order to prevent the mass suicide advocated by the cultural left, people like Chava Mond can achieve more than the Amnon Yitzhaks of the world. Certainly, the Torah and the religious community is her lifeline at the precipice of the slippery slope.
7 comments:
What, exactly, do you think she can achieve?
for starters, she can show that you don't have to sell your soul like bar rafaeli
http://agmk.blogspot.com/2007/04/religious-models.html
But isn't this a rather complicated issue to begin with? I mean, you said yourself, Rabbi, that you wouldn't have your own daughter in a modelling career. Is that because of the poor treatment emotionally that many of the girls (and guys, I suppose) get from photographers and critics? Or is it more the question of tzinut?
If it is about tzinut, where is the line drawn? Is wearing a swimsuit in public at the beach or pool permissible, but being photographed similarly is not? Also, assuming we are going from a traditionally Orthodox perspective, wouldn't many of the clothes she has been shot in be considered inappropriate dress?
Personally, I think it is good to have a person like her hopefully redefining what it means to be religiously observant. It wasn't always that tzinut was about wearing three-quarter-length sleeves and skirts that come down to mid-shin.
Anonymous's last paragraph is exactly what I meant to ridicule.
The last sentence or the first one in the last paragraph? Because ridiculing the first is very different from ridiculing the last. If one, then I agree, if the other, then I disagree. :)
anonymous #2- I, of course, meant the first sentence.
Why? Being religious is not some sort of monolithic institution. Simply by the fact that we have various ancestries of Jews makes it so that there are differing views on what is religiously permissible. What makes this halakhah and eating kiniyot b'Pesach minhag?
Furthermore, isn't it important that we impact the youth of this time period to believe that it is possible to be "modern" and still observant? That Mea Shaarim isn't the only example of what it is to be religious? I know that I have been nauseated by the Bleach Patrols that have happened in various parts of "religious" Israel, and it makes me ashamed of being religious sometimes; I do not want to be lumped into a catagory with them. This Chava Mond girl, however, I would be proud to be known as someone like her.
(I am the same person as both of the previous anonymouses.)
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