`Resolutely secular.”
That’s how Randy Cohen describes the philosophical approach he brings to “The Ethicist,” the highly popular question-and-answer column he writes each Sunday for The New York Times Magazine and which, since April 10, has appeared on Tuesdays in the Tribune’s Tempo section under the title “Everyday Ethics.”
In a recent column, Cohen gave a “resolutely secular” answer to a correspondent who posed this question:
The courteous and competent real estate agent I’d just hired to rent my house shocked and offended me when, after we signed our contract, he refused to shake my hand, saying that as an Orthodox Jew he did not touch women. As a feminist, I oppose sex discrimination of all sorts. However, I also support freedom of religious expression. How do I balance these conflicting values? Should I tear up our contract?
Cohen’s answer, in short, was yes, tear up the contract. The woman is “entitled to work with someone who will treat you with the dignity and respect he shows his male clients.”
At least among those who chose to express themselves in writing, this went over like a lead balloon.
Tim Bannon, the editor of Tempo, said the column generated a reader response here notable for its quality, if not necessarily for its quantity. He said he received about 20 letters that were generally “long, thoughtful and well-reasoned.”
That was nothing compared to what Cohen himself got. In an e-mail exchange and a telephone interview, he said he received more than 1,000 e-mails–“far more than [for] anything else I’d written.”
Besides the mail, Cohen said, he and his editor met with a delegation from the union of Orthodox congregations. In the end, he said, “I don’t think I changed many people’s minds, but I think I changed their tone.”
My friend Rabbi Ira Youdovin, who first called my attention to this particular column, was highly critical of Cohen’s analysis.
“That the Orthodox Jew would not–in fact, could not–shake the woman’s hand is decidedly not an instance of gender bias,” Youdovin, the executive vice president of the Chicago Board of Rabbis, argued in an e-mail. “Orthodox Jews, both men and women, are forbidden by their modesty ethic to touch a member of the opposite sex. It works both ways.”
In Youdovin’s view, then, the absence of an invidiously discriminatory intent and the fact that the stricture against touching the opposite sex applies equally to men and women takes the curse of intolerance off the real estate agent’s action–and merits for it the tolerance of his offended female client.
In Cohen’s view, none of this matters. What does matter is that the agent treats “a class of people [as] untouchable.” No appeal to religion can take the curse off such behavior. Or as he wrote in his column, “[S]exism is sexism, even when motivated by religious convictions.”
Obviously, this kind of thinking has implications far beyond the ranks of Orthodox Judaism. Catholics, Mormons, Muslims and God knows how many other religious groups have restrictions and categories and orders premised on sex, sexual orientation or some other characteristic that, by strict secularist lights, is simply and unacceptably discriminatory.
Are we ready to see all of those distinctions declared intolerant and therefore intolerable? Should I complain to the manager of the Starbucks in Evanston where the young Muslim server puts my change on the counter instead of putting it in my hand and risking contact with a strange man? How understanding of the rules and requirements of others’ religions can we be expected to be? And where are we to obtain such understanding?
My heart puts me on Ira Youdovin’s side in this debate. There has to be room in our society for people and behaviors founded in religious belief–even if they appear to outsiders as mere foolish crotchets.
But my head tells me that Randy Cohen has it right, that in the last analysis separate really is inherently unequal and inequitable, that “resolutely secular” is the only viable approach to these matters in a pluralistic society. He has it right–and he has the momentum of history on his side.
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E-mail: dwycliff@tribune.com
