I just found out that my daughter’s teacher created a Facebook persona (another teenage girl) in order to spy on her students and make sure they weren’t doing anything inappropriate online. I am incensed, and I approached her about this. She claims there were many breaches of “tzniut” and she was just doing her job. I strongly disagree and would like to take the matter to the principal. Thoughts?

 

I. A review of the official religion Orthodox  

     understanding of Jewish law

 

Jewish law is a normative order of three tiers of laws/rules/norms: Toraitic or covenantal law, which is either Biblical law or Oral Torah formulations of Torah, which are the word of God even after the Five Books of Moses were complete [see Isaiah 2:3], Rabbinic legislation, and customary usage. When customs are universally observed, they become, like Rabbinic legislation which was accepted by all Israel, binding upon all Israel. [Maimonides, Introduction tio the Code]

 

Barring emergencies, [Mamrim 2:4], lower grade rules are invalid if and when they invalidate or conflict with higher grade norms. Specifically, man-made conventions, or customary usage, may not override covenant law. Although there are voices in the Jewish literary corpus that claim “that the custom of Israel may override law or is Torah,” these voices are almost always deviating from the Judaism of the Wrtiten and Oral Torah.

 

II. What is the Jewish view of entrapment and   

privacy?

 

The young lady’s teacher is aware of and is competent in decoding the Judaism of the Orthodox street; the teacher is sadly uninformed with regard to the actual details of textually framed and canonically recorded Orthodox Jewish law.

 

1.    bBaba Batra 2b-3a speaks of heqeq re’iah, that there is a Jewish right to expect visual privacy and unwanted peeping is a violation of Jewish law. Similarly, internet spying for anything less than fiscal or physical security would be outlawed by Jewish law.

2.   Leviticus 19:14 forbids the “placing a stumbling block before the blind,” which the Oral Law takes to mean doing an act that entices another to sin. [bMo’ed Qatan 17a, Safra Qedoshim 2:2] Therefore, an entrapment or police sting that entices some one with an inclination to do wrong to in fact act wrongly is itself a wrongful act. Secular law seeks to find guilt and the guilty; Torah law stresses the observance of Torah norms and the avoiding of wrongdoing.

 

3.              When confronted with a sting or entrapment scenario, and one will not suffer legal penalty or risk punitive suffering, one is obliged to enform the target of the sting, as one may not stand idle when the blood/person of one’s fellow is vulnerable, exposed, or otherwise targeted. [Leviticus 19:16, bSanhedrin 73a, and Safra, Supra, that connects these two verses.

 

III. Explain what official religion Orthodox Judaism says about “modesty”

 

In pagan societies, the king is “highness,” the priest is “holiness” and modesty refers to the opiate of the masses who walk humbly for other humans who bereft of modesty  speak in God’s voice. In Israel, Moses was the most modest of all people [Numbers 12:3] even though he was the greatest of all people. [Deuteronomy 34:10] Micah 6:8 speaks of actng humbly before God and, implicitly, defiantly before people who demand deference when cynically they are semantically only asking for respect.

 

It is profoundly immodest  for men to tell women what for women is modest and what is not modest. Just as God asks Adam, “who told you [i.e., how do you know that] you are naked,” we have a rite to ask how any man or wman js endowed with the sacred intuition to determine what is by religious covenant rather than contived convention immodest. Unless a law is explicitly recorded in the Oral Torah, it may not override  the Torah’s concern for human dignity [Kevod ha-beriyyot]. [bShabbat 19b, 81a, 94b] which may, according to Oral Torah law, override Torah law.    Therefore, if a woman is wearing pants cut for women, it does not violate Jewish law [Deuteronomy 22:5, bNazir 59a, bMakkot 20b]. The claim that such attire is unacceptable on modesty grounds is itself both immodest and unacceptable on theological grounds  because the claim is unsourced in the canon  and violates the above cited norm regarding human dignity.

 

IV.                  What Jews should do when the ethic of the human constructed Jewish street conflicts with the eternal ethic of God’s law

 

When at a teacher’s meeting where I was a teacher of Hebrew in a Orthodox Girls High School, the faculty was reminded to strictly enforce the school modesty/social conformity conditioninh/dress code, that the young women’s skirt must hang below the knee, I asked the administrator in charge, “are you really  sure you want me [an adult married man] to do this?”

 

When told by a Yeshiva principal  that my son must grow long sideburns, because it is “halakhah,” I asked the principal for the Oral Torah source and was told “it is brought down [sic] in seforim [sacred books].” I told this administrator that unless he shows me the oral Torah source for this new addition to the student handbook, he now has a problem with me, because I am as an informed parent forbidding my son to comply with this rule of social conditioning.   It is not the job of the school to override the customs, practices, or religious standards of the parents whose children it is, it is his job to educate  but not indoctrinate. The poor fellow seemed shocked that his call for signals of social piety be challenged. However, when social piety is presented as religious principle, a challenge is the principled and pious response.

 

Entrapment violates Torah law as well as human dignity; modesty rules are, when supported by street culture “tradition” rather than citation, euphemistically framed norms of social control that are presenyed as the word of God.   In order to walk modestly before God, people must first walk and talk respectfully, honestly, and truthfully with each other.