Baruch HaShem.

Morning has broken, like a new morning. Songbirds are singing, like the new dawn.
A lovely even haunting refrain celebrating a new day and rebirth calling on aur optimism for life and the opportunity it offers.  Each individual settles into his pattern for the day, his agenda, that hopefully isn't completely driven by someone else's need, reviewed and checked against the clock. Time to go.
Yet for some, this slavish outside world of activity is alien. Their world exists within the head, and concerns thoughts and reflections, prayers and advice, a world where "form" is absolute where perception is everything to the society they live in.
I have been reading a novel set in and about Jewish observance and of Jewish family life in Golders Green. It is a fascinating read, a book full of Hebrew phrases that link the community in a discourse that seems strange and out of date with our own individualistic society and "its" lack of "form" as we continually seek to reinvent our selves in new clothes.

As I read  I was continually seeking out the meaning of these Jewish words, trying to find out their context within Jewish life. As I said it was a fascinating and insightful look into the the ultra orthodox world.  Men, rocking back and forward as they recited passages from the Torah, their hair falling in ringlets from beneath the ever present hat. The white shirt,the black suite, long coat all part of their inter-recognition,  signalling a segregation from the surrounding "goy". The mysticism of the "sheitel" to prevent other males from seeing your wife's hair. The ritual "mikveh" and the "niddah" which signifies the death of fertility and the acceptance that a women's role was, first and foremost procreation. If nature ruled that out, abstinence was a duty.  The fact that unmarried women are not allowed to touch a man (shomer nageah), even a hand shake is forbidden is amazing in our anything goes society. The whole arrangement of boy meets girl is a quagmire of arrangement, The "shadhan", the matchmaker who knows the matches, who belongs in the premier league and who doesn't. The introduction of two young people who don't know each other but are expected to make a choice based wholly on pedigree and certainly, no touching !!! The bazarre segregation of men and women not only in the congregation within the synagogue but in a general social gathering where the males dance together whilst at the other side of a partition called a "mechitzah" the women dance and congregate out of sight. Has veh Sholem
Yes its a rum old world this ultra orthodox Jewish quasi apartheid fraternity and makes one mindful of the pogroms  brought down on the head of Jews, stretching back to time immemorial.
Baruch HaShem.