Welcome to Emotional Wellness Daily, a project of SIMHA the Sephardic Initiative for Mental Health Awareness.
As we know, a man has certain responsibilities to his wife, as enumerated in the Ketuba.
One of them is to clothe her; to buy her clothing.
The Rambam discusses this in Hilchot Ishut chapter 13, Halacha 11. He says that a man must buy certain things for his wife. He says, “The wealthier he is, the more has to spend.” What's the purpose of giving her these clothes and dressing her up? “So she can go visit her father's house, to visit a mourner's house or to go to a house of a party.
A lady has a need to go visit her family to go to mourner's home and to go to parties. Why? “To do acts of kindness to her friends and relatives, so that they should come to her.”
That means a lady needs to socialize. The purpose for the clothing, says the Rambam, is to enable her to socialize. Furthermore, the Rambam says a little later, that if a man makes a vow that his wife cannot go to a party, “Either he should undo his vow, or he has to divorce her and give her ketuba.” Meaning, he can't force her to stay in this situation. Why? “Because it's like he put her in jail.” Not being able to socialize is being in jail.
We see from this, the depth of understanding that our rabbis had of the psyche of people in general, and specifically of women. It’s not, ‘Go to the party,’ just to go to the party, but rather, ‘Go to the party because that way they'll come to your party,’ which means human beings seek connection.
They need to be connected to people. When a person is at home without any connections, it’s like they're in jail. Rav Wolbe writes, in his sefer describing marriage, that when a house doesn't have visitors, something's wrong. We are supposed to be connected to others. This is an important concept.
I quote Rav Wolbe a lot because I learned a lot from him on these topics. He once quoted the following very interesting study:
They took different animals, elephants, alligators, tigers and bears, and figured out how large the infant animal is and how large the animal actually grows to, and they came up with a formula of how many months the gestation period should be, based on the difference between the size of the animal when it was born and the size at full maturity.
They had a certain algorithm that worked, but an exception to the rule was the human being. Based on their algorithm, a human being should have an 18 month gestation, not a nine month, in order to fit their formula.
What was the reason for this aberration?
Rav Wolbe explained that it really wasn’t an aberration. In truth, man
has an 18 month gestation period. Nine months are spent in the womb, and nine months are spent outside of the womb. For the first nine months of a child's development, they are developing their social skills and their ability to connect. That happens after they're born. A cow doesn't need that. A lion doesn't need that. But human beings are creatures of connection. That’s l what makes them healthy, that's what make them successful.
So they're being trained and developed in connection, by their mother’s smiling and cooing to them, and all the other stimuli that happens in their atmosphere.
This is extremely important and healthy for us and for others. And that's why we're suffering from so much mental health challenges now, because Covid took away our connection.
Human beings need connection. They need socializing like they need air, and telling someone not to socialize, keeping them away from such situations, says the Rambam, is like putting them in jail.
Furthermore, they need clothing in order to feel good about themselves when they go to these social events. This is real stuff. We have to understand that it’s human nature. That's the way we work and that's the way we thrive.
Have a wonderful day.