126 Richard Rosenthal
better, it becomes a symbol of modernity and of the non-Jewish world out there. It must be eliminated before we can make our way back to virtue. To quote Rabbi Waldenberg again:“As a matter of fact wearing trousers brings one to abominations, more so than wearing short dresses. As we know the licentious women stand in the middle of the street or on its corner with other licentious women like them and come close and rub themselves against others by way of the trousers, something that would be impossible in skirts.” If I am reading this correctly he is referring to prostitutes seeing using trousers to ply their trade.
We have a similar responsum from Rabbi Isaac Jacob Weiss. a He adds some information we had not heard before. The prohibition begins at bat mitzvah and not only applies in public but also when a woman is alone at home with no men present or when she hides the offending garment by wearing it under her clothes. With this, trousers have become demonized. Perhaps we can tie this together with a comment of Rabbi Feinstein.” Asked how children might be taught to understand the commandment of not cross dressing, he answers that children are not obligated by the prohibition. Their mothers should use care in the way they dress them. When the feeling of shame develops in children, they will learn to dress properly. Wrong, inappropriate clothing is connected with shame. We blush in our shame knowing we have done wrong: toilet training, sexual education, and proper clothing have all become one.
Daniel Sperber has shown us the many faces of minhag. It can begin in the world outside the Jewish community or within it. It has its source in misreading of text, adoption of pagan custom, adjusting to the general society. It is alive, changing all the time. Sometimes it looks forward, at other times it tries to preserve the way of the past. It is a way of dealing with the multiple social pressures on Jews . Halakhah seems at first the opposite of minhag. We hear the repetition of the same text through the generations. But they do not lead to the same conclusions. The law is always shaped by the decisions of the judges. The writers
of codes and the answerers of questions shape it. In our time,
traditional decisors have tried to shape the world in their own image by the decisions they reach. In the traditional decisions, as in the liberal ones, the world view of the writer is decisive.