Bais Yaakov “Chessed” Programs

I first encountered Bais Yaakovs’ “chessed” requirements about 20 years ago, when my sister started high school. I remember being angry about it. Their “chessed” assignments were typically helping out women in the community by babysitting or cleaning their homes. This might technically be “chessed,” I protested, but it seemed much like a scheme to provide the community with a free housekeeping service than a way to teach the girls kindness and compassion. Wouldn’t it be better to have the girls come up with their own projects? A group of them could volunteer at a hospital, or a homeless shelter, or for one of the community’s many  tzedaka organizations. These were places of real chessed, which might awaken in them compassion for and kindness towards others.

Later, my wife would tell me how she was required to do “chessed” in seminary in Israel. She told me how she and her friend went to a kollel family’s apartment and tackled a towering pile of smelly laundry. Another woman once told me how in her seminary the “chessed” program was her and her friends cleaning the faculty’s homes.

 I was sorting through some notes today and came across one of these accounts that I had written down. And I had an epiphany - one that seems obvious now. The “chessed” programs In Bais Yaakovs and seminaries weren't really about teaching chessed, about teaching the girls compassion and kindness that would motivate them to help out people in need. The “chessed” programs consisted of caring for children and performing household chores because in the frum community, implicitly, that’s what women are *for.* That’s what it was really teaching them.

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The context of this epiphany was that this morning I was reading a book that was discussing the traditional halachik view of marriage. It went through a bunch of sources that see women's purpose in marriage was/is to serve her husband.