Summertime, and the camping is easy - for some

There’s no need to take your tefillin to the atheist summer camp. Just launched in the UK, Camp Quest UK, modelled on its North American counterpart, offers a "residential summer camp for the children of atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers and all those who embrace a naturalistic rather than supernatural world view."

No Zionist ideology here - rather campers will get lessons in rational scepticism and moral philosophy. The quest for Jewish identity will be replaced by the search for secular meaning. One thing is for sure: the atheist camp will be cheaper than any Jewish camp, and the girls will come with less luggage.

Now that the fasting of Tisha B'Av is over, the folly of summer camp begins. Talking about 'getting the kids ready for camp' is a favourite Shabbat lunch topic, while 'shopping for camp' is a specific activity that Hendon mothers (and yes, I generalise) undertake with a passion usually reserved for, well, things I'm too modest to mention.

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Blaming the world's tragedies on women's immodest dress

In Hendonistan, there's a new message that's been circulated via email and posted on relevant notice boards inside one particular shul [synagogue] (although by the time you read this, I understand the notice will have been taken down). In a paean to Mea Shearim typography, the black and red banner in this popular Orthodox London shul requests that girls and women maintain proper halachic [according to Jewish law] standards of dress in shul. They are to refrain from 'low necklines, see-through and short-sleeve tops and short skirts.' And finally, there is the classic plea 'Please help us to preserve the Kedushat Beit Haknesset.' [sanctity of the synagogue]. Yes, all that holiness resting on the errant elbow of Hendon housewife.
 
In Hendonistan, formerly known as Hendon, large numbers of Muslim women wearing their jilbab and hijab share the streets with young Orthodox women in their swirling denim skirts that sweep the ground. 'At least,' think all the women in sheitels and long sleeves, 'we don't have to cover up ourselves like THEM. We're so NORMAL.' Yes, it's perfectly normal, as some rabbis have cited, to blame the tragedies of the world on the immodest dress of women.

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Recession in a failing religious system

In my real life, I am about to lose my job. Furious networking and frantic emailing have left me little time to write anything other than job applications and embellishments on my resumé (all job offers welcome). However, I have had a lot of time to think about what the recession means for Orthodox women, and how paid employment differentiates the role of women across various segments of the Orthodox community.

In the charedi community, especially in those sections where the men are in full-time learning, women are childbearing and bringing home the proverbial bacon. They generally have relatively low-paid jobs such as teachers, secretaries, beauty therapists or shop assistants that provide the basic infrastructure for a community to function. Rarely are they in business (unless it's sheitels [wigs] or housecoats) and even the recent Israeli initiatives to provide computer training and jobs found that many women were willing to take lower pay for working in an all-female work environment with flexible hours.

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The Tehillim tipping point

In the latest attempt to resolve the 'shidduch crisis,' women across the religious globe have been scuttling to each other's homes to huddle and recite Tehillim (Psalms), entreating God's kindness for a good shidduch [match] for all the single people in their community. In London, one matchmaking organization, Made in Heaven, offers regular classes for women on Shmiras Ha Loshon (not speaking slander) as a means of mystically helping single people.

Women are the corrections of a community: when disasters strike, the rabbis often blame the women for gossiping or immodest dress (gossiping while dressed immodestly is a double whammy). As if women don't have enough to do, now they are responsible for the marital and spiritual well-being of a whole community and have been  instructed to say Tehillim to avert further disasters. What was the Tehillim tipping point? How did these verses come to substitute serious learning and empowerment for women? Isn't it strange that while women's voices are accorded tremendous power to change the divinely ordained course of events, they have virtually no voice in the decision-making process of a religious community?

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God Save the Queen and Hatikvah

It was God Save the Queen that made me giggle. It was Hatikvah that made me glow. But actually, in those few moments between the two national anthems, sung by thousands of Jews at the conclusion of the rally for peace in London's Trafalgar Square, I realized the magic and the madness of Anglo-Jewry. Older British Jews just love being British and they proudly identify with it's pomp and circumstance. Singing the anthem was of course, the right thing to do, expressing our civic duty to show gratitude and appreciation for the fact that Jews have, on the whole, prospered throughout the United Kingdom.

More telling however, was the fact that most of the teenagers standing around me, did not actually know the words to God Save the Queen. Younger Jewish people have a more ambivalent relationship with their British identity - in such a multi-cultural, multi-opportunity land, being British is just one of the many 'Windows' that are open while surfing the net for something else.

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Promoting promiscuity?

The perils of public transport are too much to bear for some of the delicate flowers of northwest London.  Golders Green and Hendon have a seedy side and many anxious parents insist on driving their daughters to and from school to shield them from the sort of people they are likely to meet on the bus en route to one of the religious schools in the area.

I have a different approach - stick our kids on the bus and let them see how the other half lives: girls with skirts up to their pupik [belly button], with pallid skin and  multiple earlobe piercings, smoking nervously and looking pathetic hanging onto the shirttails of smelly, gangly and pimply boys. This has to be the most effective antidote to any frum girl's aspirations to be 'normal.'

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At the gym

If it is desirable to eat and sleep in a sukkah, should one also use the treadmill in a sukkah? 

It's chol hamoed, I'm at the gym and judging by the number of men and women sweating off those extra kugel calories, it's clear that Jews are not obligated to exercise inside a sukkah. 

The housewives' preferred gym in Golders Green is situated in a busy shopping strip, sandwiched between a popular adult education centre and an even more popular kosher restaurant. It has a few advantages over the other more glamorous and cleaner gyms within a short driving distance: fat women are especially welcome, there is a women's only gym room and the swimming pool has hours reserved exclusively for women.

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What will my tombstone say?

I have been thinking about my tombstone. Every year, during these days surrounding Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur I get a little nervous. The words in the machzor make it clear that between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur one's fate for the following year is determined. It's only the method that is yet to be decided. Today, I am healthy, but who knows about tomorrow? Be prepared: it's the Girl Guide in me. I'd also like to save Mr. Blasé the effort and anyway, his punctuation is terrible. 

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Language au pairs

Q. How many Beis Yaakov girls does it take to change a light bulb?

A. 100. One and 99 to say Tehillim.

Women scuttle to each other's homes during the week to huddle and recite Tehillim (Psalms) in an attempt to ward off illness or death or entreat God's kindness for a good shidduch or income. Women are the corrections of a community: when disasters strike, the rabbis often blame the women for gossiping or immodest dress. (Gossiping while dressed immodestly is a double whammy and even worse)

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The pink blackberrys

Frum women dangle. Their car keys, usually attached to photos of their children and grandchildren, their house keys, iPod, supermarket card and gym locker tokens are all hanging off them. In one hand they are holding clunky wallets brimming with credit cards, dry cleaning receipts, parking tickets and cash. In the other, they are clutching onto an important database of sociological data currently held on the SIM card of their mobile phone. Find the phone and you will unlock all the important numbers a woman needs to know: shaytel macher, kosher butcher, mikvaot, rabbi, my cleaner and her sister in Poland

However, one item sits on the other side of the electronic mehitzah - the Blackberry. This symbol of manly achievement eludes most frum women, for it symbolises corporate power and importance. It means you've got a well-paying job.

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