A rabbi once used Barbra Streisand to teach us girls about voice and sexuality. It was bad. Really bad.

Thinking about Barbra Streisand's influence on music and culture, I remembered a story from my yeshivah days that I would rather forget.

I have been listening to a lot of Barbra Streisand recently. It’s my personal way of celebrating her 80th birthday. Plus the current brouhaha over Funny Girl also got me into a Streisand mood. I can easily get lost in her voice — which is a good thing right now. In fact, music is one of the only tools I have right now to pull me out of the dark despair that sometimes engulfs me as a result of the state of the world. Good music and playing with my granddaughters, those are the two things that allow me to forget about things like, say, the end of democracy, the end of the planet, or the end of food. And music is less exhausting.

I was listening to “A Piece of Sky” on a long car ride recently, marveling as usual about not only her incredible vocal range and power, as well as the unparalleled talent needed to get through such a complex score, but also just the way she elicits every emotion possible from the music. I’ve heard the song a thousand times, often trying to sing along whilst forgetting that such a thing is physically impossible, and each time, it moves me as if I’ve never heard it before. When she belts out at the end, “Papa, watch me fly,” I feel like I’m flying, too. She connects with that place inside of me where I still believe that flying is possible. I still cry when I hear it. I’m crying when I’m writing about it….. I read recently that she describes herself more as an actress than as a singer, and that singing is just a form of acting for her. I found that description absolutely fascinating, and so enlightening. She uses music to move us through narrative, story, and the human experience, truly.

As I contemplated this enormous gift of being able to move another person through voice, I suddenly recalled a conversation about Barbra Streisand that I had with a rabbi-teacher when I was a teenager. The class was about kol isha, the halakhic prohibition against women’s singing. It was during my post-high school yeshivah experience. If I recall, some of us in the class were arguing about the merit of such a thing. In modern Orthodoxy of the 1980s, kol isha was a newish innovation. I grew up singing in choir in elementary school, and girls were still singing in school plays in the schools and camps I went to for high school, though such things are no longer done in a lot of modern Orthodox settings anymore. The memory is sort of etched in a moment of religious-cultural transition in American Orthodox history. Which would explain why this rabbi was trying to get us to be more “strict” than we had been until that point. Plus, it was part of that whole post-high school “frumming out” process that we were expected to go through.

Anyway, this rabbi was trying to explain to us the merits of not singing. And we were resistant.

“Trust me,” he said. “Women’s voices are sexual. Your voices can affect men.”

And then he said, “If you’ve ever listened to Barbra Streisand sing, you would understand.”

Oh my God.

Okay. So that happened. Our rabbi basically told us that he gets a hard on from listening to Barbra Streisand.

As I recalled this, I had a lot of thoughts about what was wrong with this whole exchange. (It was a LONG car ride….) Which I’m going to share with you.

And then I’ll tell you how I reacted at the time.

And if you stick around till the end, I have a special present for you.