Wolf: The Torah ideal isn’t for the man to be dominant and the woman submissive.
Torah: ????? ???????? ????????????? ?????? ???????? ?????
We’ve covered this before. That’s not a statement that things *must* be that way. In the same Parsha it also says ???????? ???????? ???????????? ?????????? ???????? ???????? ??????. Does that mean that a woman can’t have painkillers during childbirth?
It doesn’t matter how many other sources you bring because I can see with my own eyes that there are successful couples where the marriage works even though it isn’t in the dominant male/submissive female paradigm. Saying that it must be that way for the marriage to be successful is false — and it doesn’t matter how many sources you bring to the contrary because the evidence of my own eyes and the experiences that I personally have gone through are more convincing to me.
However, I will throw you a bone on the matter. Many of those sources you brought were written at a time and in a culture when, perhaps, the dominant male/submissive female paradigm was dominant and expected. But today, the culture is very different than back then — and people’s expectations of themselves, their spouses and their roles in marriage have shifted significantly since then. So, I’ll grant, it’s possible that the statement that a marriage must work that way was true in certain times, certain places and certain cultures — but in the America of today, it is not.
You can decry it. You can wail and gnash your teeth about it. You may state that it’s a betrayal of everything the Torah holds dear — but it doesn’t matter. You can’t change people and their expectations by whim. You have to deal with the reality as it currently exists and, as it does, your preferred paradigm for marriage does not have to be the only one for a successful marriage.
The Wolf