Restrictions on Women Singing

Restrictions on Women Singing regulate women’s voices across family and religious settings, making song permissible only within narrow limits and, for girls past the age of twelve at school, forbidden altogether. The rule shapes both Bubby’s guarded musical life and Devorah’s experience of prayer, where the loss of melody turns participation into an outward performance.

Household Rules and Concealed Music

When Zeidy is away, Bubby hums while preparing food, identifying the tunes as Viennese waltzes or Hungarian rhapsodies connected to her childhood memories of Budapest. She stops when Zeidy comes home. Devorah understands that singing is permitted in front of family, but Zeidy encourages it only on Shabbos; he teaches that music should otherwise be avoided because the Temple was destroyed, except on special occasions.

Bubby’s musical life is therefore conditional rather than absent. She sometimes plays a cassette of her cousin’s wedding music on the old tape recorder Devorah’s father gave her, keeping the volume low enough to hear anyone approaching. At the slightest creak in the hallway, she switches it off. The watchfulness surrounding this small pleasure makes the rule audible through what Bubby must conceal as much as through what she sings.

Voice, Inheritance, and Family

Bubby connects her vocal inheritance to her father, a Kohain whose lineage, she says, reached back to the Temple priests, known for beautiful, deep voices. Zeidy, by contrast, cannot carry a tune, though he loves the traditional Shabbos songs his own father sang in Europe. His flat, loud singing overwhelms other voices until the melody is difficult to distinguish; Bubby smiles at his efforts but has long since stopped trying to sing along.

When Devorah tells Bubby that she has been chosen for a solo in the school choir, she wonders whether her own clear voice came from Bubby’s family and hopes to make her proud. The moment places Devorah’s voice within a family history of musical ability, even as the rules governing women’s singing restrict where that ability can be expressed.

School, Prayer, and Devorah’s Disengagement

At school, the prohibition tightens after girls pass the age of twelve: they may no longer sing at any time. When they were younger, special tunes helped Devorah remember the prayers. Without those melodies, prayer loses its joy for her. She cannot read or speak Hebrew quickly enough to keep pace with the class’s rapid recitation, so she moves her lips and occasionally makes sounds to appear to be praying. Under the overseer’s watch, she goes through the motions but feels no connection to the words.

The rule sits within a wider difference in religious practice. Girls pray at home or at school, and their prayers are not regimented in the way the men’s prayers are; Devorah observes that only the men’s prayers count. The prohibition on singing thus affects more than musical expression: it removes a means by which Devorah once learned and felt prayer, while leaving her to simulate participation in a setting where women’s worship is already treated differently.