The internet is filled with things. Here is one of them.
Kol Isha: Forbidding Women's Voice2025 Dec 24womenofthewall.org.il Kol Isha (literally: voice of a woman) is a Jewish teaching which says it is forbidden for men to hear singing from a woman other than his wife. Some even take it further, and say it is forbidden to even hear a woman speak publicly. The root of this prohibition is extracted most ridiculously from a single line in Song of Songs where Solomon praises his lover's voice, which the rabbis of the Talmud (Berakhot 24a) then take to mean that a woman's voice constitutes nakedness.
it's difficult for me, as a Reform Jew, to take this seriously. It reads like a gossamer-thin chain of tenuous logic backfilled in to explain after the fact why women are treated as second-class citizens. But (unfortunately) a Reform Jew's outrage doesn't stop religious zealots from using this restriction to silence the voices of women. Luckily we have organizations such as a linked Women of the Wall who are capable of arguing Jewishly, from an orthodox perspective, against teachings such as this.
Kol Isha (literally: voice of a woman) is a Jewish teaching which says it is forbidden for men to hear singing from a woman other than his wife. Some even take it further, and say it is forbidden to even hear a woman speak publicly. The root of this prohibition is extracted most ridiculously from a single line in Song of Songs where Solomon praises his lover's voice, which the rabbis of the Talmud (Berakhot 24a) then take to mean that a woman's voice constitutes nakedness.
it's difficult for me, as a Reform Jew, to take this seriously. It reads like a gossamer-thin chain of tenuous logic backfilled in to explain after the fact why women are treated as second-class citizens. But (unfortunately) a Reform Jew's outrage doesn't stop religious zealots from using this restriction to silence the voices of women. Luckily we have organizations such as a linked Women of the Wall who are capable of arguing Jewishly, from an orthodox perspective, against teachings such as this.