Rav Adda was willing to take a public stand and a major risk to prevent indecent behavior in his community. He was happy to lose a large sum of money to remind Jewish women of the traditional expectation of modesty, even though the non-Jewish women in the town were becoming less modest.
Mainstream society actively tears down existing boundaries between decent and indecent. We live in a time with minimal respect for traditions, so it is impossible to appeal to tradition to influence behaviors.
However, not everything is morally acceptable just because there are some people who push society to accept their desire as normal. This leads us to the critical question: who gets to define normal for you?
This is the question of who sets the frame you live in. For conventional Jews, God sets our frame through the Bible and traditional Jewish practice. We know what is decent and have objective moral standards. I won’t tell you to become Jewish or even religious at all, you don’t need that to be a moral person.
However, you need to be the one who decides for yourself what is normal, acceptable, and decent to your own moral sensibilities. Be keenly aware of when outside actors want you to stifle your natural objections to their behavior, or want you to start becoming outraged by the things they want to vilify. Things that you didn’t think were bad at all.
If you are a moral person, why let others define and frame what is moral for you?
This is a struggle if you are living in modern society. Many agendas want you to accept their version of moral and decent as your own. They want to program you to think and act in lock step with their narrative, to accept what they believe is fine and decent and to be offended by what bothers them.
How can you identify this? The more aggressive a group is in attacking anyone who questions their behavior, the more they demand exemptions from criticism, then the more they know deep down that their behavior is wrong.
Some groups and lifestyles want zero criticism, and try to ruin the lives of people who speak out or question them. They cannot tolerate critique because they realize subconsciously that their ideology has no real moral truth and their behavior is truly immoral.
If someone you interact with demands a total exemption from criticism, or responds aggressively to critique, then there is something really wrong with that person. Maintain your chosen boundaries of right and wrong, your own frame and interpretation of what is appropriate behavior for you and those around you. Don’t be swayed by the media promoted framework of “morality”. There is no real substance to it.
Any serious student of history can tell you that in a totalitarian society, the first thing the dictator does is stamp out any criticism of their regime, while massively promoting his own narrative through propaganda. If the dictator can co-opt or corrupt the media to make it appear that he enjoys wide support, then use the media to denounce critics as foreign agents, anti-social, or mentally ill, then it is easy to sway the minds of the masses to evil and immoral acts.
A major tool used in this is outrage. Evil regimes desensitize people to stifle their natural outrage at human rights violations, claiming that discrimination and dehumanization of critics of the regime is needed for public safety. Then by indoctrinating the public to feel outraged by the people the regime wants to denigrate, totalitarians can turn can easily turn gullible citizens against their fellows.
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