Immersed in poetry ever since I was a child, I realize now that I have always gained spiritual sustenance from poems. As I grew into an adult, the world of poetry – writing, reading, coordinating poetry events, teaching poetry, being mentored by poets – sustained me. But over time it was no longer enough. My writing comes out of an urgency and a joy in language, and poetry friends and mentors provide some sense of community, yet it isn’t a life. Many of my poetry mentors have Christian backgrounds, and Christian messages are embedded in their work and teachings; I became eager to embrace myself as a Jew; my Jewishness was slipping away from me. I was an overeducated poet and an uneducated Jew. I wanted to humble myself before my own religion.
As I became observant I noticed that religious Jews were careful to cover most of their bodies when in public, even in the summer; generally, the women I met dressed fashionably and elegantly but not provocatively. In her memoir, Through the Unknown Unremembered Gate, Emily Benedek writes about spending Shabbat for the first time in a neighborhood in Monsey, New York: “I look at a gorgeous dark-eyed woman with a baby in her arms and elegant clothes, silent, graceful. I see another woman, a blonde, with pale skin and fine features. She doesn’t speak, but her body seems musical, her modesty like a song.” Benedek is noticing a specific approach that can be found among women in religious communities – they take care to honor the gift of the body, and this care manifests itself by highlighting beauty modestly; a certain slant of light gleams through the reticence.
The power of reticence found among women and men who observe modesty in religious communities reminded me of the power of reticence in poetry. I think of the advice that Mary Oliver gave to poets: “Modesty will give you vigor. It keeps open the gates of prayer, through which the mystery of the poem streams on its search for form. Just occasionally, take something you have written, that you rather like, that you have felt an even immodest pleasure over, and throw it away.” Modesty in dress, as well as in poetry, can open up an untapped well. Paradoxically, throwing away a seemingly stunning line of poetry or covering the body can lead to creative or erotic power.
The teachings of Judaism encourage people, especially women, to dress modestly because their inner worlds are considered to be so vivid and rich. The Hebrew letters that make up the word “inside” (bifnim) can also be found in the Hebrew word for “face” (panim). That these two different words are made up of the same letters suggests that the outer and the inner are not opposites; rather, they are intimately connected and actually reveal one another.
Emily Dickinson explores this connection in her poem, which begins with these lines:
The Outer—from the Inner
Derives its Magnitude—
Not only does Dickinson suggest here that the outer draws its grandeur from what is inside (she goes on to write, “The Inner – paints the Outer –”), but she ends the poem with the idea that the mystery of the internal kingdom was not meant to be casually exposed:
The Star’s Whole Secret—in the Lake—
Eyes were not meant to know.
After Eden, it is difficult to discern the divine purpose of the outer world; the purpose is inside, “in the Lake.” What is holiest is secret, and we rush to hide what is most sacred to us; the sages wrote that “what is hidden is blessed.” The Torah is carefully covered in shul. The Tabernacle that the Jews carried in the desert, which represented the dwelling place of God on earth, required special coverings to deemphasize its sparkling exteriors; the coverings allowed the Jews to contemplate the awesome spiritual presence hovering below the surface. Hannah, the future mother of Samuel, prayed for a child by scarcely moving her lips.
The way the Torah itself was written reflects this concept of hiding the deepest meanings. The midrashim, orally transmitted stories at which the Torah’s language hints, often offer the most nuanced textual interpretations. Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, the contemporary literary and Torah scholar, describes midrash as the repressed unconscious of the Torah. “The midrash,” Zornberg explains, “offers an answer to a repressed question.” In other words, midrashim come out of what the Torah cannot say directly. Meaning lies in the white spaces between words. The pregnant silences in the Torah generate the hidden midrash.
God is not seen, but is hidden in the world. In fact, the word for “world,” olam, in Hebrew, has the same root as the word for “hidden.” The world itself, the veil of nature, gives us the opportunity to search for God. And “the veil” over the body, or the coverings we use to clothe our bodies, allows us to experience our internal richness. Isaac Bashevis Singer ended a story with these lines: “There are certain lights that must remain hidden, or else human free will would come to an end. There are certain unions that have no need to couple. There are certain truths that are perceived less the more evident they become.”
And, as Emily Dickinson suggests in the following poem, the truth blinds us when it is revealed:
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind—
I have always applied these lines to poetry, to the idea that when writing poetry we must hide “truth” or emotion in order to provoke feeling in the reader, who cannot be dazzled unless truths are slanted and given gradually. Now I see that these lines can also apply to slanting the truths of the body gradually. A modest poem and a modest woman restrain themselves in order to evoke the wildness of the inner life. When women are attentive to modesty in dress, they are being reticent about a cherished reality. In Emily Dickinson’s words, they “tell it slant.”