Asking to taste the girl's cooking before agreeing to a shidduch

what part of my post said i looked at my neighbors? I guess if you can’t disagree with the content, you make up something i didn’t say.

I have to laugh at you calling me a liberal. I am so far from liberal that I couldn’t even name their leaders. I would love to help you understand where you get that highly false impression tho, if you can step back for a second and listen because you arent the only one who misthinks that.

There are posters here who are very extreme in their views and are often harsh in their tone. I believe that they are so used to being in homogenous settings that they do not realize just how harsh they are sounding. When I try to defend the words of the person they are attacking, i am often confused by you and others as defending the persons views. I am not. Just doing damage control. perhaps you cannot imagine why i would defend a person who i disagree with. sometimes i’m just disagreeing with the harsh or incorrect attitude even tho i personally follow the same doctrine. you misread that as disagreement with the lifestyle. Or perhaps you are telling me that the fact that i think your harshness is wrong is, in and of itself, liberal. I doubt it, but who knows.

I can’t imagine that was explained well enough to be clear. I used to care that i was misread but honestly, i know who i am and i know what Torah requests of me and i am not going to stop defending people who are hurt just because others cant separate the two.

I think if the girl is expected to support her husband in kollel by working, then HE should do the cooking, and the girl should first sample his food before agreeing to date.

The Mitzrim forced our men to do women’s work and our women to do men’s work. Nowadays the feminist lecture us that there is no such thing as men’s work or women’s work. It’s all an equal partnership.

see, joseph, that is where you are making false assumptions. it is true that feminism is saying that there are no men’s or women’s jobs, but it is not true that this has any connection whatsoever to that.

I agree that in Egypt we were tortured thru being given the other gender’s work. You are the only one who has decided he knows, moshe mi sinai, what work belongs to who. The partnershp we were talking about has no shaichus either. It doesn’t mean cooking is a partnership, it means that if the husband is home from 1-3 and from 6-8 everyday, but the women works until 6:30 (supporting him in kollel), why would he not WANT to make supper? Does she have a chiyuv? Maybe it is her “job” but as partners who share in each others burdens he may have decided on his own that he will prepare dinner. I don’t know if you have ever had serious morning sickness while nursing a baby and caring for toddlers but I have, for many years, and taking out the garbage would not even be on the list of physical possibilities. Should we hire someone or insist that i take it out anyway? That is what we talk about when we say partnership.

I agree with you completely that men should be filling male roles and females the female roles, (I would be ecstatic to quit my job and stay home doing laundry) but Gd has also commanded certain levels of honor and respect between human beings and people who work together sometimes share burdens.

Oy, Syag, have you read the entire thread? I specified from the outset that husband and wife should help each other. And every now and then that’ll mean the husband does the dishes, for example. But that doesn’t detract from the fact that certain functions are men’s jobs while certain functions are women’s jobs.

I’ve long advocated wives remaining SAHM.

The mother is the akeres habayis, staying home and watching the children, raising them together with her husband. What are the men’s jobs and what are the women’s jobs are the same they’ve been throughout the course of human history. It is obvious, common sense and well known.

Kach hi darkah shel Torah – pas b’melach tochal.

Joseph

I was going to ask Syag’s question in a different way

Are you of the belief that a man’s job is to sit and learn all day? Or do you believe that the husband should be working to support his family?

If the former, where, exactly, do you think the money is coming from?

If the latter, then maybe your position makes more sense, though I still strongly disagree with it.

The prevailing position in the yeshivish world nowadays is that the wife should work to support her learning husband. In that scenario, while the wife is still the one who raises the children, the husband needs to contribute a lot more, just for the sake of practicality.

From HaGaon HaRav Avigdor Miller zt’l:

“The woman’s career and happiness are in her home – absolutely and entirely. Her husband, her children and her home are the expressions of her personality and her free will, and they are her chief forms of serving Hashem. The modern wife with a college degree and a job in secular professions is a misfit even in a non-Jewish home. The ideas of revolt against a husband’s authority and the unrealistic dream of equal leadership in the family, lead only to unhappiness and failure, and very frequently to divorce.”

Nobody disagrees with the fact that it is better to have the mother home to raise the kids full time. But in a situation where you cant have that AND a Kollel father and husband at the same time, which of those two has to fall by the wayside? The answer is, you take whichever you think is MORE important: a mother always being home or a father who is the biggest talmid chacham he can be.

Someone in Lakewood once expressed to Rav Schenuer Kotler ZT’L about how if he stays in Kollel his children will be deprived of many things they would have otherwise. Rav Schenuer responded that providing them with a father who is a Talmid Chacham is more important than any of those things. And he should think hard before depriving them of that.

Yes, a woman’s place is at home. But also yes, the type of home you are supposed to have is a Torah home, a Torah-husband and Torah-father at its helm. The question is, if you can only have one of those two positive elements of a home, which is more important? The answer is having a husband and father who is a Talmid Chacham, or better yet, the biggest Talmid Chacham he can be, is the more important of the two. So if you can have both, fine; if not, then we choose learning. This is not considered making a “compromise” in religion, since either way you will have to give up something – the only question is what has to give.

Rav Miller said if a wife is working she should give her paycheck to her husband. He also wrote:

“There cannot be two kings. The marriage relationship is two-fold. 1) The wife is submissive. This is not only Jewish but natural. There can be no harmony when there are two commanders. Without this indispensable condition, the home is disordered. “Arrogance is unbecoming a woman” – Megillah 14B. For a man it is not an ornament, but for a woman it is as if she wore a mustache. 2) The second, but equally essential foundation: a man must always demonstrate respect for his wife. This is “the way of Jewish men that… honor and support their wives in truth” as stated in the Jewish marriage contract. “He honors her more than his own body” – Yevamos 62B, Bava Metzia 59A. He is the captain, but she is the First Mate whose counsel is respected. She cannot be made a doormat, she need not beg for money, she deserves some assistance in the house chores, and the husband sides with her against his kin. He must express frequent appreciation and give words of encouragement, and he should remember his wife from time to time with gifts, big or little. Husband and wife should always say “Please” and “Thank You” and never forget to be always polite to each other.”