By Erica Brown

When Moshe descended from Mount Sinai with the tablets of the law, his face was so radiant with light that people cowered before him. The Torah describes that Moshe, therefore, donned a veil or “masveh” in order to cover his face:

Whenever Moshe went in before the Lord to speak with Him, he would leave the veil off until he came out; and
when he came out and told the Israelites what he had been commanded, the Israelites would see how radiant the
skin of Moshe’s face was. Moshe would then put the veil back over his face until he went in to speak with Him
(Exodus 34:34-35).

Moshe only exposed his face when he entered into the divine presence. Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra explains the function of the veil as an instrument to protect the light and to keep it private from the eyes of the masses unless he had to speak with them or to God. The veil did not prevent him from hearing or speaking; it simply preserved the holiness of his state and kept it both intimate and dignified.

In many ways, one can compare the role of the “mechitza” or partition to Ibn Ezra’s image of the veil. The midrash mentions that men and women were separated when receiving the Ten Commandments at Sinai. Both genders were present but stood apart. Historically, the origins of the “mechitza” date back to the Temple and can be found in the mishnayot of Sukkot (5:2) and Middot (2:5) in describing the separation of men and women for the Temple celebrations on the intermediate days of Sukkot. The Talmud furthers the discussion of separate places for men and women in the Temple during times of prayer. Traveling through rabbinic literature of the medieval period, we have many repsonsa dealing with the “mechitza”, and recent archeological finds in Europe confirm that many synagogues had no such partition because women simply did not attend synagogue. Perhaps the mechitza ironically began to signal the appearance of women in the synagogue. Nevertheless, in the early nineteenth century, the mechitza stirred a spate of controversies for the Reform movement; this wall of separation was viewed as a barrier to equal rights in the synagogue and came to represent more than a partition to some. It became a barricade. I do not want to elaborate on the controversies surrounding this particular practice but to raise sensitivities to those who do pray in synagogues with mechizot. Generally, in Orthodox synagogues, the bima is in the middle of the men’s section and the mechitza stands to the side or the back of the men’s section, if no women’s gallery exists. Often what comes between the men and the women in such a setting is not a wall of silence but a wall of male speech. Men often become oblivious to the fact that their talking creates yet another partition, separating women from properly hearing the Torah reading or the recital of prayer. The mechitza which should serve as a means of creating a dignified, if separate, space for both men and women, has often had the opposite effect. It has often made men insensitive to the spiritual needs of those who sit on the other side of the wall.

The profundity of this psychological separation became apparent to me on a Shabbat speaking engagement many years ago in a synagogue far from home. I was waiting for afternoon services to begin when two men, separated from me by a thin piece of wood topped by glass began to speak about me. “Where was I from? Where did I study, teach?” It was obvious that despite being physically visible and within hearing range, I became invisible because of the wall between us. I felt that the psychological barrier was far thicker than the “mechitza” itself. It was as if I weren’t there. There they stood chatting in what they considered to be the back of the synagogue but it was, in actuality, the front of “my synagogue.” What came between myself and the person chanting the shemona esrei of Shabbat minha was one thin wall and another far thicker one – two men reviewing the week’s activities, the stocks and my lectures.

There is a physical wall that separates men and women whose origin lies in the preservation of sanctity and dignity in a holy setting. But another wall has been created alongside it that leads to indignity and a lack of sanctity for women who come to synagogue to pray – the invisible wall that can be many men deep. It separates women from the words they came to hear. The architecture of most synagogues does not resemble the “separate but equal” justification we have so often heard bandied about to preserve the status quo. While we cannot always rearrange the synagogue set-up, we can raise male sensitivities to the additional wall of talk between the “mechitza” and the bima. We can ask, at the very least, that the invisible, psychological wall need not still stand. We can hope that, just like Moshe’s veil was there to protect the fragile and intimate relationship between himself and divine presence, that the “mechitza” can serve the same purpose for those who stand on both sides of it. Robert Frost wrote in his famous poem “Mending Wall,”
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.
If it is true that good fences make good neighbors, as Frost’s poem contends, then let us know what we are walling in when we create mechitzot and what we are walling out. And – once the fence is up – let us be better neighbors.

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