Considering the frequency of harassment and other improper inter-gender conduct in workplaces the political world and wherever power imbalances between male superiors and female subordinates exist one would think that a man’s efforts to follow guidelines akin to the halachos of yichud would be appreciated by all. But according to a recent article in National Journal one would be wrong.
In a Journal survey several female Congressional aides “reported that they have been barred from staffing their male bosses at evening events driving alone with their congressman or senator or even sitting down one-on-one in his office for fear that others would get the wrong impression.” Other congressmen have implemented rules like a “seven-to-seven” policy which prohibits staffers of either gender from arriving at the office before 7 a.m. or leaving after 7 p.m. without express permission.
What’s interesting is how negatively this has all been received. Undoubtedly as the article observes “the lack of access has meant an additional hurdle in their attempts to do their jobs much less further their own careers. And in many instances it forced them to seek employment in other congressional offices.”
But the men who institute these rules have precisely two choices. One is to simply decline to hire women which is quite obviously both socially and politically unacceptable — and illegal too. The other is to set down rules that will thwart temptation protect their employees and forestall rumormongering.
What they can’t do but it would seem some insist they do anyway is to ignore basic human realities and live instead in a gender-neutral or genderless pretend-world. The writer quotes one Debra Katz a Washington D.C. employment discrimination attorney who opines that “the practices are clearly discriminatory… You’re not being perceived as a professional.” No Ms. Katz you’re being perceived as what you are which is a woman.
“So much happens in creating trustful relationships ” attorney Katz continues “and if you can’t develop a trustful relationship where you’re having some one-on-one time as the men apparently are getting — I can see many reasons why this is a terrible idea….” Ay there’s the rub… the men are getting an unfair advantage.
Yes it’s all so unfair and when Ms. Katz gets her turn to create a universe she’ll know better than to create different genders and the natural inter-gender dynamic to which that gives rise. But in the meantime having such safeguards in place sure beats the alternative the sorry fallout from which fills the daily papers.
It’s no wonder that every example cited in the article of a Congressman who had created such safeguards was a Republican. The great chasm between right and left after all is in essence one between utopianism and realism between imagining people — whether Middle Eastern dictators or decent but flawed Americans — to be what we’d like them to be or accepting the reality of what they actually are.
Beyond liberal utopianism however there’s probably also an element of the difficulty some women have seeing things from a man’s perspective. While one former female staffer said her boss’ rules were “a reflection of his personal and religious values… and I appreciated that he was earnestly trying to be respectful of me too ” Maine’s Senator Susan Collins said it had “never occurred to [her]” to avoid having male staffers drive her around the state because “the idea that we wouldn’t be alone in a car together is laughable.” Could the fact that she’s the boss have something to do with it?
Collins said the idea that her male colleagues would be so concerned about working closely with their female aides “implies that a man and a woman can’t have a completely professional proper relationship. That’s just stunning.”
What’s even more stunning still is that a US senator finds that stunning.

YALE MEETS HOME DEPOT With college graduation season in full swing Washington Post editor Carlos Lozada writes that two new anthologies comprising commencement speeches by liberals and conservatives respectively “offer a revealing comparison of how [speakers of each political persuasion] perform in this springtime ritual.” Lozada concludes that although liberal commencement speakers far outnumber conservative ones at top American colleges the latter give better commencement addresses than the former based on five criteria. The first of these is that while left-leaning speakers “tend to address graduates as members of a group usually a generation and call on you to act as a group as well as part of an activist community or movement ” conservative speeches “are more likely to address you one-on-one focusing on people more than movements.”
The recent speech by Yale University’s president to his school’s Class of 2015 is a good specimen of the genre. The gist of his remarks was that “your purpose in life as a graduate from Yale is simply this: to improve the world. In the Jewish tradition this is called tikkun Olam literally to repair the world.” What he finds so attractive about this is that
it is possible to embrace this life mission in so many ways: When you start a new business that employs people and contributes something new you improve the world. When you serve others with great distinction in one of the professions you improve the world. When you pursue an academic career in order to light fires in the bellies of the next generation of college or high school students you improve the world. When you inspire others by creating a beautiful work of art you improve the world. When you build a service organization and you listen to and collaborate with those who you would like to help you improve the world.
We’ve noted before that the concept of tikkun olam as he presents it really doesn’t appear in Jewish tradition at all with the only usage that even comes close being one that refers to the Messianic era and reads in whole l’sakein olam b’malchus Shakai with the emphasis on those all-important last two words. But even if we were to grant his use of the term what’s missing from his talk?
What goes unmentioned is that the primary means for fixing the world in Jewish terms is through the arduous and decidedly unglamorous moment-by-moment work of repairing the olam katan (world in miniature) that is man. Tikkun olam appears almost nowhere in Torah literature while the concept of tikkun hamiddos is ubiquitous. And it is only when each individual each world-unto-himself strives to refine his character reign in his ego and sublimate his physical drives and become the elevated being he’s capable of becoming that the larger world comprised of those smaller ones can achieve its tikkun.
As long as one hasn’t embarked on the lifelong mission of ennobling one’s middos to contribute to the world in the ways Yale’s president mentioned — business and the professions academia artistic pursuits and community service — is mostly a hollow charade. We all know of people who have excelled in one of those areas but who are tyrants to family friends and employees — and we rightly think of them as hypocrites with distorted priorities.
But let’s put aside our own self-improvement and focus on opportunities for “repairing the world” at large. The speaker ranged far afield into academia and the professions and the arts to find such opportunities — when the single most important and effective arena for such repairs is “home improvement.” It is in our little corner of the wide wide world within our own family if we’ve been so blessed that each of us can affect the most long-lasting and effective repairs.
Can anything else we do for anyone else possibly “contribute something new” in the way bringing children into the world can and can anything be a greater opportunity to “serve others” than tending to the needs of those children and our spouses parents and siblings too? Isn’t teaching the young souls entrusted to us to be good responsible productive people the epitome of “lighting fires in the belly”?

WRITE ON TARGET William Zinsser a writer and renowned teacher of writing whose On Writing Well was a best-selling primer of word smithery died earlier this month. I note his passing because like many who ply the writing craft I owe him much not only for his guidance on the brass tacks of the discipline but also for sharing his inner writer’s life. When he wrote that “the product any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about but who he or she is” or that what keeps him reading about a topic he never thought would interest him is “the enthusiasm of the writer for his field ” those things resonated with and influenced me.
The New York Times’ obituary summed up Bill Zinsser’s central message to writers:
His advice was straightforward: Write clearly. Guard the message with your life. Avoid jargon and big words. Use active verbs. Make the reader think you enjoyed writing the piece.
Okay three out of five ain’t bad (ah but which three…?).
And then there’s this sparkler in On Writing Well’s chapter about punctuation: “There’s not much to be said about the period except that most writers don’t reach it soon enough.”
I suppose that makes it three of six. —