One of the boys in our group (let’s call him Linus) was the kind of guy you might remember from your high school days: He was good at completely platonic friendships with girls.
Not particularly hot-blooded or attractive—in fact, he was kind of scruffy and with awful acne—he was comfortable with and accepting of the female personality; he was good-humored and never sleazy.
In other words: totally harmless.
(And no, it wasn’t because he was secretly attracted to his own gender.)
For girls, this made him safe and comfortable to be around.
Anyway, we were seated in the auditorium when the first singer plodded onto stage.
We all stared at the female singer, then exchanged nonplussed looks with each other.
With a solid build and hardly any neck, she looked like Mr. Potato Head in a maroon blouse and denim skirt. Her medium-length straggly brown hair looked like it hadn’t been washed in ages.
She also wore no makeup, which is unheard of when performing on stage.
She slouched in front of the microphone, a morose and bored look on her face.
It was announced that she would be singing, “You are My Sunshine,” one of my favorite childhood songs.
Since this was a jazz performance, I fully expected the cute, light-hearted jazz rendition, à la The Andrews Sisters, although I wondered how this despondent-looking singer would pull that off.
Instead, she closed her eyes and started humming.
And her head started lolling around with abandon as if it might just roll off her stumpy neck at any moment.
(And yes, kind of shocking and grotesque too.)
But her humming…
WHOA.
That was the sultriest humming I’d ever heard and her voice was absolutely captivating—even as a hum.
I looked around to see if I was the only one affected and noticed everyone else gaped-mouthed and looking around for the same reason I was. The boys were either frozen in place or squirming and trying to suppress their sheepish smiles.
Linus was leaning forward, his eyes and mouth frozen wide-open.
Then the singer’s head rolled backwards and her mouth dropped open as the melody burgeoned out of her throat.
It was amazing.
At that point, Linus grabbed the arm of the girl sitting next to him and said, “I MUST HAVE THAT WOMAN.”
Wide-eyed, she looked at him and said, “Okay, Linus, but I’m not her!”
We remained captivated throughout her performance. At the end, the singer slumped back into her morose persona and we gave her a standing ovation.
The guys were all looking at each other with little embarrassed smiles like, What the heck just happened? How’d SHE do THAT?
Linus recovered enough to turn to me and say, “You have to help me find a way to meet her. Come with me backstage.”
And the halachic insight that “kol isha erva” (“a woman’s [singing] voice is unchaste”), which leads to the prohibition of women singing in front of men and of men listening to a woman singing, stands out as one such limitation found unnecessarily repressive by some.
Note: "Erva" is the same word used to refer to body parts that need to be covered (whether male or female), a married woman's hair (which needs to be covered), and a woman's voice, particularly her singing voice.
But there clearly exists a certain power in a woman’s singing voice that is so strong, it can move male emotions in a certain way, even if the rest of the package not only isn’t there, but is even comes off as repellent (as in the case of the morose, greasy-haired no-neck singer above)—and even if it’s just humming.
And that’s all I wanted to say.