In the matter of tzniut, the first question is theological. Why were we fashioned with bodies – when the Creator could have made us of souls alone? What is the purpose of our physicality; what manifestation of holiness does the vessel, the kli, of our bodies make uniquely possible?
I contemplate this question almost daily, fascinated by the relationship between a commodified perspective on women’s bodies – dressed, designed, and made up, and now injected, reshaped through surgery, and objectified, if not debased, by much of popular culture – and my religious responsibility to my body, the necessary medium without which mitzvot cannot be undertaken nor kedusha revealed and released into the world.
The corollary to this intriguing paradox is that anyone who ignores, neglects, or – has ve-halila – abuses her body is tarnishing the vessel and desecrating the work of the Creator. We are rightfully protective of any means that enable us to exalt and beautify the Name. Our bodies are the most indispensable vehicles of all.
Rather than pretend we do not have bodies, then, we ought to engage in hiddur mitzvah in our relation to them, marveling not only in their function, as we do in most – although clearly not all – birkot ha-shahar, the morning’s first blessings, but in our bodies’ enhancement, as we would for any liturgical kli, whether the rimonim that adorn the Torah’s handles or the scent of the etrog.
Yes, there is a place for the quality of tzniut, but not as a coercive idea that represses and inhibits 51% of the Jewish people. Which is not to say that I’m applauding the vulgarity of our age, the style of dress – or undress – to which my grandparents’ generation taught me to apply the term prost. But the opposite of tzniut is not bad taste. Rather, like the sequestered impurity of tum’ah, tzniut is a complex religious category that seems, in contemporary life, to have lost all its other applications except in relation to women.
And let us not be naïve. A mental survey of the number of social exhortations regarding tzniut to anyone except young women is unassailable evidence that most strictures are not about all women – but are almost exclusively directed at the young. Rather than help young Jewish women view their bodies as exemplifications of the Creator’s work, the edicts further objectify them, reifying their bodies solely into potential temptation for young Jewish men.
True Tales
Maaseh Alef: The literature of a Modern Orthodox summer camp, sent in advance to parents in order to communicate the camp’s standards:
Dear Parents: Please help us support the values of camp by ensuring that your children dress with tzniut. This middah applies equally to boys and girls.
Girls: Please do not bring the following items to camp: dresses or tops with spaghetti straps; tank tops or halters; any sleeveless or cap-sleeved shirts. Shorts and skirts must be knee length when seated. No bikinis or two-piece bathing suits; one-piece bathing suits only.
Boys: No tank tops are permitted in the dining room.
Maaseh Bet: The Israel program for Modern Orthodox teens that, in its clothing list, insists on only one-piece bathing suits for girls – and then compels the girls to swim in their clothes, even when there are no bystanders, for the entire length of the trip, while the boys are permitted to skinny dip when they are alone.
Maaseh Gimel: The following text from a Web site about tzniut:
In the more liberal Modern Orthodox community, women have a more relaxed dress code, and often wear sleeveless shirts, shirts with low necklines, or tight pants, and cover their knees with opaque tights, skirts, or sometimes pants. Stricter Modern Orthodox practice is for sleeves to reach the elbows and shirts to cover the collarbone, skirts to cover the knees, and to eschew pants in the presence of men. In the Haredi community, all married women cover their hair whenever non-family members are present. Women cover their elbows; wear skirts which reach a few inches below the knee, often mid-calf; generally avoid skirts with slits, preferring instead kick-pleats; cover their collarbones; wear stockings and closed-toe shoes; avoid certain colors, especially bright red. In some communities such as the Haredi community of Jerusalem, women wear loose vests over shirts.
Men must wear shirts, with sleeves. Modern Orthodox men will wear shorts, but Haredi men will not, and many will not wear short sleeves at all.
Like so many seemingly min ha-shamayim values from the immutable heavens, tzniut is hypocritical in relation to gender. It is also both culturally conditioned and age dependent.
When my grandmother was a girl, a woman’s revealed ankle was scandalous, as was the relinquishment of hoops in floorlength skirts or of stays in Edwardian bodices. When she was a young woman, “bobbed hair,” cut to chin length or shorter, was incendiary. In the spring of 1925, there was a riot in London because a woman wore a dress with transparent sleeves. Ma’i ka mashma lan? What do we learn from this?
So much for absolute yardsticks. As for age: By the time she reaches middle age, a woman is highly unlikely to wear spaghetti straps or miniskirts with bare legs. When we talk about tzniut, then, we talk mostly of constraints imposed on young women.
And yet when I see young Jewish women in their radiance, when I behold their physical beauty, I am suffused with the glory of Creation. When they are evidently able to savor their bodies – by the way they dress and ornament themselves – I am all the more joyful. My women friends and I vividly recall our youth, our inability to enjoy the loveliness we could not then see: What bizbuz, squandering.
Please do not look to me, then, to enforce ever stricter communal norms that disguise or shroud the bodies of the young. The beauty of the young is miraculous. Let them embellish their bodies, if it gives them pleasure, enjoy their bodies for what they can do, for their well-being, and, yes, for their capacity to draw the eye of the world, and, some day, their beloved re’im ahuvim.
Dress is also a form of self-expression. How puzzling that each one of us is unique, bearing the once-only stamp of Infinity, and yet, increasingly, the observant Jewish community asks young women to dress alike, in an immediately recognizable “uniform.”
Should our world nevertheless wish to level new stringencies upon young women, I hope that tzniut’s wardens will not cite fidelity to a more conservative past. Last summer I watched the recent documentary about the Rav, in which Dr. Tonya Soloveitchik appears at a dinner, decades ago, as the quintessence of dignity and grace. She is wearing an elegant black sheath, neckline and arms covered in what appears to be a single layer of sheer black chiffon.
Today, in mass communal regression, it is no longer possible to imagine transparent sleeves at an institutional dinner, to picture an honored woman leader dressed as the Rebbetzin was.
We began with a theological question: Why bodies? One response can be found in Shir Ha-shirim, Solomon’s Song, which chooses physical beauty of all possible metaphors to express the passionate love between God and Israel. Hinakh yafah ra’ayati. Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Hinkha yafe dodi. And you, my love, are beautiful.
Unlike the dress codes of summer camp, the Song of Songs is an ode to mutuality; the ardor of a young woman for her lover, expressed as praise of his beauty, and his for her, embodying in language the great love between our Liberator and us. Notwithstanding the ArtScroll translation, which bypasses the ravishing, terrifying metaphor of Shir Ha-shirim by pretending that its allegorical interpretation is a translation, in this holy text a young woman speaks to us directly. Here we find her portrayed as a dove in the cleft of the rock, so often quoted as an image of tzniut. But we can find her as well, in much more intimate detail, with her chosen one, both enticed into deepening love by their beauty, and finding each other’s bodies wondrous because of their love.
Across the history of our people, this young woman does not let the guards deter her from the fulfillment of her quest. She is telling us something important, something we – the elders, the guardians – seem to need to relearn continually: The escalating severity of tzniut in our day is not religion; it’s sociology.
Behold the young women – and relax.