To the Doctors Slated to Speak at the Puah Conference on Fertility and Halakhah:

Dear Sirs:

Reports have it that some of you, members of the medical profession and scheduled  speakers at the upcoming Annual Puah Conference on Innovations in Gynecology and Halakhah, have decided not to appear because women are not featured as speakers at the Institute’s event.

Media reports have claimed that participating doctors have been threatened with boycotts by their colleagues.

Putting aside the Bolshevik non-democratic and possibly criminal aspects of those alleged threats, an example of how freedom of speech is being destroyed in the name of gender rights, it is important to analyze just what is happening to our country when whether women appear on stage has become an issue overriding the goal of the conference itself.

I wish to suggest that if the above is true, you and your threatening professional colleagues are in danger of losing sight of your goals and priorities. Please take a minute to study the issue.

Your mission, as doctors, is to bring medicine’s advances to the entire world. That is what you became a doctor for, that is why some of your fellow physicians go to Haiti, to darkest Africa, to development towns, Arab villages and to the Israeli army.

Bringing these advances to all segments of the world’s population entails respecting all kinds of customs which are strange to you and with which you do not agree, even things of which you disapprove strongly – unless they are criminal – and that is true in any part of the world where you practice medicine. Even here in Israel.

Doing that means meeting the people you are going to help on their own terms, because your overriding mission is to bring them top medical care and that is the only way you can reach them. Your mission is not to reeducate them, you are not the “Great White Father” and they are not the “White Man’s Burden”, and even though their stringency may infuriate and repulse you, it is not your mission to change it.

Your mission is not to advance women’s rights either.

Your mission is to practice whatever medical specialty you represent and to make its possibilities known and available to as many people who need it as you can. You have been blessed with the ability to do that.

How wonderful it was when the Puah Institute opened its doors and religious and even ultra religious families found an environment in which they could feel comfortable dealing with an issue as sensitive as infertility! (It is no wonder that since then, many non-religious families feel the same about Puah).

How terrible if instead of concentrating on reaching more members of the group that now has a place to receive that help, an issue whose resolution in favor of women speakers would de facto close the doors to members of the group that needs it most, has become the focal point.

Puah helps more women than Kolech, the women’s organization fighting the conference, does. It doesn’t help them with screaming media headlines, it helps them with the real issues of rights that affect most women’s lives, the ones that don’t reach the newspapers, the ones about which they cry and pray. There are plenty of gynecologists, men and women, who realize this, and don’t care if that means the women among them will not be able to appear on the stage. They would rather the husbands of the women treated by Puah Institute continue to come to be helped by modern medical discoveries, so they and their wives might become parents, with G-d’s help.

How wonderful it would be, if in the Jewish state, you, our respected doctors, would have the courage to say: This is not my way of life, it annoys me greatly, but it is not the issue here. In the Jewish state, Jews can keep whatever stringencies they choose. It doesn’t affect the fact that I want to bring my knowledge to them – I don’t want to penalize them and make them second class citizens with substandard care and nowhere to turn. I want to show respect for their customs and let them benefit from what I can teach them.

In spoken Hebrew, “fisfus” means missing the mark – and missing the point. Israel is doing that now, because its strident feminists are clouding the issues of freedom of religion – and any other value for that matter – if they in any way seem to affect their ideas of women’s role in any sphere. The buzz word for this is “exclusion” but that of course is not the case – the feminists would have women included even in places where the women themselves would not like to be.

Do not let the strident voices of Kolech – an apt name, if there ever was one – and other NGO’s confuse you. Women have equal rights in Israel, they serve in every possible capacity, but not everyone has to interpret equal rights the way some women’s organizations do. There are even women who consider being “excluded” by sitting on separate buses a right to which they are entitled. It is not a good idea to decide for other people what they are supposed to want.

Think how wonderful Israel would have looked, had the IDF said that religious soldiers, who have the right, privilege and obligation to fight for their country, can do so as the Maccabees of yore did, without abrogating any of the stringencies of the level of  halakhic lifestyle they choose – obviously, in non combat situations only.  Halakhah itself posits that the commanding officer is in charge during combat, not the rabbi, as in this situation he is the expert who decides matters of life and death, and his word is law. 

In daily situations, the IDF could have said, freedom of religion is the most basic right, above the right of women to force their performances on those who exclude it halakhically.  So  if religious soldiers want to be separate from women soldiers, so be it. If they do not want to hear women singing, it is their decision and has nothing to do with excluding women – and, the army could say that “exclusion” is actually an idiotic assertion in this case and shows us how even our innovative army has fallen prey to the well-orchestrated feminist mantras. The soldiers, after all, are excluding themselves.

How the Jews of the world would have been proud to say that this is their army, the army of the Jewish state, where soldiers can be as religiously stringent as they please. How much it would have done to bring all kinds of Jews together by showing how the Jewish army has respect for Jewish observance.

And if not for the actions of fanatics on the hareidi end of the spectrum and some women on the secular end who wanted to stage provocations, the issue of separate buses would be the same non-starter.

So please keep your eyes on the mission with which you have been entrusted and may you add to the Jewish people’s joy in bringing children into this imperfect, but wonderful world.