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Rav Avi: Hi, and welcome to Responsa Radio, where you ask and we answer questions of Jewish law in modern times. I'm Rabbi Avi Killip, Executive Vice President at Hadar, here with Rabbi Ethan Tucker, Rosh Yeshiva at Hadar, a center for higher Jewish learning based in New York City. The question today is, I think, both a very real and a very live question, and one that is simple for some people and exceedingly angsty and complex for others. So that's quite a lead-in.
Rav Eitan: Okay, good. Hit us.
Rav Avi: So the questioner writes actually three short questions, and I'm going to read them all, but then I'm going to suggest that we really take them one at a time, and hopefully that we'll spend actually a significant amount of time on the first. The questioner writes, can you explain the history and reasoning behind the mehitzah? Question two, why do they vary so much in size and material? Question three, can a man walk over to the women's side to carry a Torah? So we're getting more and more specific. I can almost imagine the person sort of sitting in shul watching something happen and then wondering, you know, I imagine the questions were generated in the opposite order. Like, is that man allowed to walk over here? And why does the mehitzah look the way it looks? And what is a mehitzah anyway? So maybe we'll start, we'll start with that big picture question. And for those listeners who are newer to the topic, maybe you can even start by defining what a Mechitza is for us. And then what's the history? And what's the reasoning?
Rav Eitan: You know, this is something that I've spent a lot of time with and even wrote a book about. And actually, the really interesting thing to note is that the book that I and my colleague Michal Rosenberg wrote was about gender equality and prayer. But we deliberately left the question of the mehitzah, which means just a barrier, it could be a barrier of any sort, shows up as a term all over halacha in different contexts where barriers are relevant. But in this context that the questioner is talking about, means a gender oriented separation barrier during prayer traditionally used in many synagogues to keep men in one section and women in another section. And we didn't talk about that in the book actually quite deliberately, because we felt the questions of equality were not necessarily the same question as separation or gender distinctiveness.
Rav Avi: So give one more sentence on that. What what do you mean by the question of equality in that case? What was the book about?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, the book was about who counts on a minyan who gets to read Torah, who gets to lead the prayers, all the kinds of things that relate to what you might call "citizenship and leadership functions" in shul in prayer spaces. And then there's a question of how people who might be equals, even if they are treated as equals with equal sense of responsibility, access, opportunity in a space, how might you divide them? Right? Like camps, usually divide boys and girls into separate bunks, or many of them do, in some places that's being reassessed. Now, that's not intrinsically a sign of it being more of a camp for one of those campers than others. There's places that have, you know, separate voice choirs based on gender, some do it just based on tonal range. There are all kinds of ways where people who sometimes are participating equally in an environment or a cultural sphere, aren't necessarily always doing it all together without distinction.
Rav Avi: Yeah, it's something I thought about in the in the recent Olympics, right, just when you're watching the Olympics. And when you're watching, you know, I watched it with my kids, who got really into it to just, you know, Oh, is it is it the men's gymnastics? Or is it the women's and men's swimming versus women's swimming? That's an area where we also see that gender divide show up in mainstream society.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. And the question is, then always, why is it there? And this is the question is first question, like, what's the function of that? What's going on there? You know, then the follow up question of, is that how would that separation be compatible with egalitarian practice, if that's, you know, the direction you're going? So we can visit all that, but sounds like we should maybe just review some of the history of this topic in the first place.
Rav Avi: Yeah, I think we're probably starting from a place of assumption that traditional Judaism had gender division. And then maybe we would start from a question of like, why during prayer in particular, do we need some kind of barrier around that?
Rav Eitan: Okay, so let's, let's start there. The first place in our history of text and practice that we really encounter the idea that men and women might be separated in a public Jewish space is in the rabbinic narrative of what used to happen at the water drawing festival, the Simchat Beit HaShoeva, that happened in the ancient temple. And this was basically a huge party that went on during Sukkot, basically, like after the first day of Yom Tov, at the beginning of the holiday was over, they kind of turned the temple into a huge, you know, I don't know if you're British, a Mayball experience where people are juggling torches and all kinds of things they describe going on lots of singing, lots of enthusiasm. You can imagine...
Rav Avi: It does sound fun. I think that's a loss that we let this go by the wayside.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, I mean, the rabbis say anyone who didn't actually experience the Simchat Beit HaShoeva has never experienced a joyous event. So they felt similarly. You can imagine, this is a place everyone wanted to be. And irrespective of gender, right? People wanted to be there. They describe what used to happen there. And what's interesting is from the outset, the assumption, we don't know if it's normative, religious, if it's cultural, conventional, but the assumption is men and women are separate from one another. That is to say, the women are hanging out with each other, the men are hanging out with each other. But the text is trying to figure out how was the division of space managed. And here's the interesting story it tells. It says, at first, what happened was, the women were up close, they sort of had the better seats, as it were, they were inside, and the men were outside, seemingly behind them. And the text says under that arrangement, what ended up happening, this will be an important term for us, they could not avoid being in a situation of Kalut Rosh.
Now, what's Kalut Rosh? Literally, it means like lightheaded.
Rav Avi: Yeah, lightheaded?
Rav Eitan: Right. But here, it means sort of not serious, or excessively informal frame of mind, or potentially a little lascivious. The word Kalut Rosh, sometimes just has a connotation of not giving something it's sort of due in terms of reverence. We are after all, standing in the temple here.
Rav Avi: It's like the opposite of gravity.
Rav Eitan: That's exactly right. Koved Rosh is the opposite, which means heavy headed. But it means like, oh, you take it with some weight and gravity. Exactly. And sometimes Kalut Rosh has the connotation of maybe crossing lines of impropriety, and maybe even sexual impropriety. But we'll, we'll unpack that as we go.
Rav Avi: So it's like things are a little out of control.
Rav Eitan: Something was not right.
Rav Avi: They were a little loosey goosey. That's like, maybe a good translation.
Rav Eitan: Exactly. Though we don't know from this text, were the people themselves feeling uncomfortable? Or was it just some sort of or court or Jewish authority saying, I don't like what's going on here. And then they made a decision, the women will be outside, and the men will be inside, that is to say, just reversing their proximity, as it were to the stage. Now, the only way that would be a corrective would be if you imagine, essentially, the problem was, the men were like pushing forward. They were they were manspreading, perhaps, into that space. And as long as fine, maybe if we put the women behind, like they won't push forward, and that will keep them together. But it didn't work. They say this still led to Kalut Rosh. And so then they say, we're building a balcony up top, and the women will be in the balcony up top, and the men will be downstairs. No explanation at that point of why they did not put the men in the balcony up top and the women downstairs, another ambiguity in the text. But what I like about this text is two things.
One, it actually tells you directly what the problem is. The problem is Kalut Rosh. Now, as we said, might still have to define that and that might not be totally clear. But we're after a situation where this will be more proper, more serious, more with a proper frame of mind. That's the first thing the text is helpful for. The second thing I like about this text is, it indicates a kind of responsive halacha to facts on the ground.
Rav Avi: How do we get from the crazy party carnival to the minyan in our shul?
Rav Eitan: Okay, great question. So in some ways, it's the next line in the Talmud that pushes us to that. The Talmudic sage Rav is bothered by the building of a balcony in the temple. He quotes a verse in the Tanakh that says, what do you mean the temple is described as having been dictated in full blueprint from God through prophets to what it's going to look like? You can't just make like a capital renovation to the temple. And so Rav says, well, they must have been following some understanding of an imperative that the balcony was fulfilling that was like part of a kind of core Torah or prophetic imperative. And he describes this scene, a kind of mysterious scene in the book of Zechariah, where the prophet is imagining some future time where there's going to be some massive calamity happening to the Jewish people, and the entire people are in mourning.
And Zechariah describes the image of that national mourning as all the different clans of the people came out to mourn, tam levad, alone, uneshehem levad, and their wives alone. That is to say, a gender separated picture of mourning, and interprets that as, well, if in some future time, in the time of mourning, where you're not worried about the language he uses is the yetzer hara, which is more explicitly the evil inclination as relates to sexual impropriety, where that's not preying on them, because they're in a state of mourning, it's a future time, etc. And nonetheless, you have to separate men and women. Well, all the more so, when there's a big party, you will have to separate them.
Rav Avi: If you'll permit me to leave the gender question aside for a second, which may sound ridiculous. The idea of like adding stadium seating, or like adding the balcony to the temple, actually, like I kind of love, I was thinking, I just read this article about Billy Joel, who is ending this, you know, decades long residency that he's had at Madison Square Garden. And he talked about like, there are artists that are stadium artists, like there are people who hold enough importance that they fill stadiums. And, and I kind of like that image, actually, of like turning the temple and what's happening there into like, that kind of gravitas of needing to have a balcony. It adds, it's like, you know, if you're not a concert person, or you're not a sports person, maybe like the opera house, you know, it's like rooms that have balconies have like a gravitas and an importance. And I could see, if I leave the gender segregation part aside, how having the structure of the balcony could lead towards some of that, like reverence that you're describing.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. And the idea that then the gender distinction is one of the key ways, it seems, according to this text that one accomplishes that, can lead you now to two possible ways of reading this Talmudic text, right? One is, it's about what it's about, which is the biggest party of the year in the holiest place on earth. And that doesn't really spread to anywhere else. And Rav at the end of the Sugya gives an explanation of how they justified building the balcony and the temple. But otherwise, you know, this is not an imperative that plays out, or maybe put more to the point, this is a concern of avoiding Kalut Rosh, which you want to in certain like highly aggravated context, pay attention to. That's the narrow reading. There is a broad reading, though, leaning into this image of the future gender segregated mourning, where you would say, well, if in the place where you would least think you need gender segregation, you need it, according to this prophetic vision, and where you have it, well, then that would extend to all other areas of gathering in life. And actually, this then becomes the text for learning, not about separation at the temple, not about separation in the synagogue, but separation in life.
Rav Avi: Everywhere.
Rav Eitan: And you in fact have texts that say this directly. You have early medieval texts. This one is found in versions in the genizah, in early halakhot, talmudic rulings in the land of Israel. They get a question like, oh, can men and women dance together? And the answer is, no, of course not.
And they quote this passage in the Talmud. And then they go on to say, they can't be together anywhere. Like, even when you're having a meal, when you're doing anything that's a public gathering, there needs to be separation.
And so in a certain way, if we just jump to some more contemporary practices, there are Jewish communities where it is, it's not just separate seating in the synagogue.
Rav Avi: It's separate schools, right?
Rav Eitan: It's separate schools at the weddings, at communal banquets, in all those spaces. And in a way, that's a very natural translation of this Talmudic passage read broadly.
Rav Avi: Yeah, right. It becomes a division that's much bigger and much more extensive than the synagogue or certainly the size of the mehitzah.
Rav Eitan: Right, this is where, right, the balcony, if you follow that model, which many synagogues did, in other words, assuming you extrapolate from the architecture of the temple in this context to the way a synagogue should be set up, and you assume, well, yeah, so the women should be in the balcony, one of the effects of that is on the ground floor, there's no separations, right? It's just simply a male space where things happen in a very logical way. And by the way, there's certain practices that are organic parts of the synagogue service that do not work well with a divider. Hoshanot on Sukkot, the circumambulations of the bima that are done with the lulav and etrog, those are designed, conceived of with free movement in a circle around the entire space. If you've chopped that space in half, it doesn't really work. And if you're at places that have separate seating by gender, but are really invested in trying to include women in Hoshanot, they either have to create two parallel circles happening on different sides of the synagogue, which is not really the aesthetic of what Hoshanot is about, or they have to do all kinds of crazy acrobatics to work with their altered space.
Let's just take one step further on the expansive reading of the Talmud, where we say, I don't know, what I hear from the end of that text is even in a time of mourning, therefore, in any context whatsoever of gathering, there needs to be separation. I want to emphasize that it's still a discussion, though, about attaining a certain result. That is to say, it is not a kind of formal arbitrary requirement of, well, there must be a wall in the middle of the synagogue, or there must be a balcony, even if, yes, there must be a wall or a balcony, and that's your perspective.
Rav Avi: There's a, so that.
Rav Eitan: So that. The principle is, we're avoiding kalut rosh. We are trying to attain tzniut, certain norms of propriety, and that's what we're getting at.
And you get a glimpse of the understanding of this in a marvelous way, where in 16th century Poland, the Levush is confronting the fact that earlier texts said that men and women should never sit together at a wedding. It's one of the things where you're supposed to have separation. This happens in the Sefer Hasidim in the Middle Ages. And the Levush kind of picks his head up in 16th century Poland and says, all our weddings are mixed seating. It's just like, that's what we do, and no one has ever said there's anything wrong with that. And he says, well, it must be, we've gotten used to it.
In other words, to us, the environment of the mixed seating at a meal is no longer something that's creating the impropriety that the Sefer Hasidim was worried about. וכיוון דדשו דשו. And once the people got used to it that way, they got used to it, they got inured, and essentially, that requirement no longer applies.
Rav Avi: It's a really interesting text. There's something in this text of, that you're saying, oh yeah, like a wedding is a quintessential place for gender separation, that I feel like has snuck through history, even into, you know, not only egalitarian communities, but like really communities that are not halakhically minded or don't think of themselves as halakhically minded, that still want to have like women, want to dance with the bride, and men want to dance with the groom, like the sort of separate dancing. So there's something about weddings that, you know, certainly heterosexual weddings I'm talking about, that give people that instinct of wanting to separate, but also interesting to know that sort of, yeah, and then we can go sit with each other, also could become normal.
And then maybe when something's normal, it's not a problem anymore.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, that at least seems to be the way the Lavush is processing his environment. I'll give you one other example, again, not from the question of mixed or separate seating vis-a-vis gender, but another issue of kalut rosh, of what it is to have a proper or improper frame, which I think helps anchor a conversation that is about what's going to best get us to the goal. And then we can reflect on that here.
So, the Tzitz Eliezer, contemporary posek, Rav Eliezer Waldenberg, he is dealing with the question of, is it permitted to install a microphone in a synagogue for use during the week? He assumes it's not allowed on Shabbat, but he's asking on a Tuesday, okay? On a Tuesday, is it appropriate to have a microphone in a synagogue? And he's not actually even really talking about leading services. He's talking about having the microphone for like speeches and classes in the Bay Knesset. And he says, he starts off by saying, I think this is a problem of kalut rosh. Actually, the microphone he assesses will create a certain degree of almost informality or a sense of it not being a holy space in the same way. And then he gives an incredible narrative of what we've all experienced at bar mitzvahs where like some kid finds the unattended microphone. And goes in and screams something into it.
And then everyone turns their head up, and he describes this playing out. He's like, when you install the microphone, it sort of sets up the possibility for certain kinds of undignified behavior. But then, wait for it, he says, but on the other hand, if you have a lot of people in the shul who don't hear so well, and by not having a microphone, actually all that's going to happen is when the person comes in to teach Torah, they're not really going to hear what's going on, They're going to start talking to each other. It's going to become a more informal place by the fact that he doesn't have a microphone. Well, then you probably should have a microphone.
And what I love about that shuva is he's saying, step one, what's the goal? The goal is the Beit Knesset is a serious, elevated space that commands people's attention and feels sacred.
Then we got to figure out, is the microphone going to help or hinder that goal? And on some level, there's a humility in his formulation of, I don't know that I can 100% tell you for every synagogue, what that answer is going to be.
Rav Avi: And so then what we could take away from that is, to translate it back to the mehitzah question might be, we want to create holy, sacred spaces, and looking individual community by community, will the mehitzah add to that sacred feeling in the room, or will it detract?
Rav Eitan: That's exactly what I want to say. Let's be clear, the Tzitz Eliezer, for sure, in practice, in theory, 100% thought that every single synagogue should have a mehitzah and it should be divided by gender. I'm not marshaling him as support for that particular question. But I do think he models in discussing kalut rosh, which is, after all, the thing we are talking about when we talk about the mechitza, the way we should think about this.
And here's the way I would put it. Sometimes when people ask me questions about this, I'll say, the only thing I'm dogmatic about with respect to the mehitzah is not being overly dogmatic, which is to say, there are actually very different needs, very different communities that produce very different, I think, appropriate responses to this question. So just to lay it out: for some people who are more like the Levush's description of mixed seating at weddings, when it comes to their general lives, their prayer lives, the way they were raised, for any number of reasons, actually, the time they feel a synagogue is the most sexualized, the most bizarre in terms of its arrangement, the least serious place that feels like a locker room is when there's suddenly a barrier going up and people are sorted by gender. There are communities where the introduction of a mehitzah can and does, for certain people, as they report it, make the shul a less serious place, encouraging certain kinds of talking this and that, never mind the ways in which, if you're living in an environment where you are not assuming that heterosexual attraction is the only form of attraction, that there is more complexity in terms of how families are arranged, and then the whole presumption that even if you are going to sort people, the sorting mechanism is men and women.
I'll say one of the most interesting other Talmudic texts is the Beit Knesset, the Synagogue of Ancient Alexandria, we are told. It seems this is talking about all men. They sorted themselves by profession! Like the blacksmiths all sat in one place, and the cobblers sat in another place. You can come to a place where you say, I'm on board with koved rosh. I want the synagogue to be a serious place
The introduction of a mehitzah or the presence of a mehitzah is working against that. And look, I want to emphasize, I think the opposite is equally true, which is to say, there are many people for whom actually not only is the gender divide important, meaningful, encouraging of a certain kind of propriety and formality, but the absence thereof does not allow them to freely inhabit the space in the same way. And again, to the extent someone reports, and not just as an odd individual, but a group of people creating something together where, look, this is actually an arrangement that is going to enable us to lean more fully into this as a sacred experience.
I think that has to be taken seriously and is, of course, continuous with the way our ancestors prayed and us and many people today still have as part of the range of their prayer experience. So that feels important. There is that last little bit that we talked about in the run up here, which is, well, everything we've said so far is kind of coherent for either deciding that, well, the gender distinctions in public space are no longer really activating us in the same way.
We've gotten used to it the way the Levush got used to mixed seating at weddings, and that just sort of spreads to everything. Or the sense that like gender in public spaces is a real thing and should be all over the place. How do you get to a place of the synagogue is particularly important.
So for my money, there's two basic ways of getting at that. One is, you know, the synagogue is, of course, a mikdash me'at. It's like the temple, even if it's not the most sacred space on earth, it is the most sacred space that Jews step into.
Rav Avi: Yeah, that feels intuitive to me.
Rav Eitan: And to the extent you wanted to sort of construct a graph where the more sacred the space, the more on guard you are about things that even otherwise, like, you manage and are fine, you can imagine putting that into the beit knesset, into the synagogue space specifically. And that is to say, like, a davening space is, like, particularly allergic to impropriety, even of the slightest level or some kind of informality, assuming those variables stack up. The other text, I think, is kind of a provocative way to think about this, like, it's quoted in the Shulchan Aruch, and many, many people, including myself, have violated it many times: The Sefer Chassidim says, you shouldn't kiss your kid in shul. And what's going on there? The idea is the synagogue is actually a place where we are trying to align ourselves vertically with God, as opposed to in our horizontal relationships with other people. And I think there are people who are like, listen, I don't even have a second of a thought of I'm in the office, I'm on the subway, I'm in the street, whatever it is, the blended environment by gender. I'm not thinking about it for one minute.
But I actually get tremendous power out of stepping into a space. Almost the shock of the gender separation is a help to me of sorting myself out to a different kind of arrangement. Now, if you're just there and then talking nonstop in a very informal way with all the people on your side of the mechitza, then you're obviously not living out that piece of it.
Rav Avi: It's both directions. Not every community that doesn't have a mechitza has this problem. And not every community that has a mechitza is cured of these problems.
Rav Eitan: So I think there's a way to make the range of practices we see as legible, whether it's communities that really don't have gender separation in life. And that includes the synagogue communities whose entire existence is anchored around gender separation in the public space, including the synagogue, and communities that synagogue is sort of treated differently from everything else.
Rav Avi: I just feel like it's worthwhile and maybe necessary to clarify that when you say you're not dogmatic about the mehitzah, that's because you are able to imagine a community where there is both a mehitzah and women counting in the minyan and women participating in the service. hat when many people picture women in the balcony and men downstairs, they feel like that's saying, yeah, the congressmen get to be on the floor, and the spectators are upstairs watching in the gallery. That's not the picture that you're saying you're agnostic about. It's just the question of, where do you take your seat when you go to sit down at the end?
Rav Eitan: That's right. To maybe put it even sharper, it's because I can imagine a downstairs section that is entirely women running the entire service with the men being up in the balcony.
Rav Avi: Or a mixed section even on the...
Rav Eitan: That's right. But it's dependent, absolutely, on the question. This goes back to the comment that I made earlier about the book, when we were addressing questions of citizenship and leadership and who has a role. And there we were really laying out strongly and passionately, but I also think with intellectual honesty, here's what we think is the case or the basis for thinking about egalitarian prayer. We did not want to include with that what felt like it was a companion, but not necessarily identical question of as you say, where do you take your seat? But that backdrop of laying out that case or that vision and understanding that to be possible is what I'm suggesting for me and maybe for some of our listeners can free you up for a sort of broader understanding of what the range of human experience might invite on this.
Rav Avi: Maybe we'll tackle just quickly the sort of more technical, probably easier maybe questions that were tacked on the end here of why do these mechitzot look so different from each other? And are people allowed to cross them? Like how important is it that you don't cross them?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think we can answer it pretty quickly. So the different models here in a way of talking about separation lead different rabbinic authorities to focus on different types of separation as sufficient. So you think about like a balcony, that seems like a super extreme division, and you have some rabbinic authorities that will read that and say, yeah, that's what you need.
Something where there's total separation, and maybe even the men can't see the women, right? And that'll lead you either to balconies or to mehitzot that go above people's heads. On the other side of this, you have another passage in the Talmud where they're separating men and women for another context that seems like it's another different kind of public space, And it's said that Abaye and Rava set up like kinds of plants to create some kind of distinction. You can clearly see through those. And so you'll have other authorities that will say it's perfectly fine for it to be see-through. It's fine if it's not even completely solid as long as you can't e asily walk through it.
Rav Moshe Feinstein was famous for saying that as long as it's ten tefachim, as long as it is about three feet tall, so it basically creates a barrier that you can't walk through, no problem. So they're focusing on different pieces of the story and building principles of what kind of construction does that require.
Rav Avi: And what about the permeability? You were saying that you can't walk through is important. I guess, you know, almost every community you can walk around it. That's how people get to the other side.
Rav Eitan: That's right, exactly. So there, the relevant precedent going back to the temple is, you know, we know that women brought sacrifices in the temple, and they had to come and be present for them, at least for a number of them, like a nezirah, someone who took a Nazirite vow, which the Torah is explicit. A man or a woman can do that.
You refrain from, you know, defiling to the dead, getting haircuts, drinking wine. This was something that women did. And at the conclusion of that process, they have to bring a whole sacrifice. And they went into the part of the temple where the men and the kohanim and the priests are there.
And you have some questions that come up in the Talmud about, even at one point, it's like, isn't the kohen have to like, touch the woman's hand to help like move the sacrifice around? And the answer is, you don't worry about impropriety for a sha'ah kalah, for a brief moment. And in that sense, that to me is the relevant thing. If, for instance, you had, playing out our thought experiment, an egalitarian prayer space in terms of participation, but that had separate seating, yes, could the female gabbai go into the men's section to offer an aliyah? Or as the questioner asked, can the men bring the sefer Torah to the women's section? Anyone ho permits that is saying, yeah, it's one thing to say, where are you sitting for two hours? It's another thing to say, I'm passing through, we don't worry about passing through, not a solid basis from those and other sources. Maybe to pass the Torah, maybe to pass a child, I feel like that's, that's a common scenario.
Rav Avi: I really appreciate this. I think this question is going to mean very different things to different listeners. I think there are listeners for whom they probably shrug like, oh, yeah, I always kind of wondered about the mechitza. That was interesting.
And other people, the mechitza may really be a point of, of pain or concern, because of any, any number of life experiences that you mentioned along the way, or just because it feels problematic. You know, it feels distracting, it feels at odds with what they're trying to look for and create in a prayer space. And then probably there are listeners who feel sort of deeply uncertain, maybe they think one thing and feel another thing in either direction. It's helpful to have sort of a fuller picture of what we're trying to do.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. And I think if I could almost crystallize what I hope maybe listeners would take away across the spectrum, is the mehitzah has been and remains in many ways, like a very political item. It's a thing people feel like, oh, this identifies me as this or is that or is not this. And I think as we often do on this show, we're just trying to recenter people, could we think about, well, what's this actually about? And could we get back to the substance of thinking about it? And then there might be a range of responses. But I think we always feel that tends to be a much more helpful way of talking about these things that can hopefully reach a broad audience.
Rav Avi: I'll end with a funny story. I was a part of a leadership team of a minyan at some point in my life that had separate seating but no mehitzah. Like there were separate gendered seating, but there was no physical barrier.
And the person who was in charge of the like Gmail, email account for the Minion at some point came to a meeting and started complaining, you know, the Gmail ads on the side of my email every day are like, did you want to buy a machita? We have machitas for sale.
Rav Eitan: Hire that marketer!
Rav Avi: Here's a discount code. And she was like, no, we don't want a mehitzah! Stop telling me to buy a mehitzah.
But in all seriousness, I would say, we hope for everyone that wherever it is that you are praying, whatever community is right for you and or whichever choice is right for your community, that you are able to find a place of seriousness in your tefillah and to find a place where you can go and feel that depth and gravity to the holiness of what's happening in prayer and that the setup of the room, regardless of what it looks like, helps you get there.
Rav Eitan: Amen.
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