Getting my head and hat on straight

A few weeks ago in Hebrew class we watched- as a treat- an Israeli movie called Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi. It was about a teenage boy who has a crazy family and everyone thinks he is an idiot but he is actually a dyslexic math genius. It is a odd little coming of age story. I give it a solid B grade. There is a little swearing and some funny crude comments by his crass older brother, and yes, there is some depiction of teenage sexuality complete with nipples.

A very sweet lady in our ulpan from Missouri was about to get up and leave after the first set of comments about the brother's "attributes." With an embarrassed laugh she said "OK that is enough for me" and grabbed her books. Our teacher, assured her that the bad stuff was over. But it wasn't, and before long, this nice lady, who works for the baptist interfaith centre, got up and left. Everyone has their own limits to what is acceptable in movies and this clearly was well past her limit of sexuality, especially teenage, unmarried sexuality. I felt bad that she was told that the bad stuff was over and it wasn't. I chalk it up to our teacher not really understanding what was so offensive about the movie to an evangelical christian.

This story probably doesn't seem all that surprising to you. But the shocker for me was who didn't leave. Of all the students in the class, she was the only one offended by the content of the movie. This included a scarf wearing muslim, and a black-kippa white-shirt wearing Jew.

So now that I have had a little kick in my ignorant pants, I can say that people need not be so afraid of others who wear their religion openly in their clothes. I think people sometimes fear religious clothing as representation of a movement of religious fundamentalization, a loss of rights and freedom of speech. From this anecdote, it seems the prevailing sentiments against Muslims in the world and orthodox Jews within Israel has it wrong. The anecdote seems to say that the people we most need to worry about would be western Christians wearing jeans and a tee-shirt.

I am not saying that scary fundamentalist movements in Islam, Judaism or in Christianity don't exist, but I am saying that if we are taught to not judge a book by its cover, we should not judge a person by their head covering.