Encore Archive

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(In the fall of 1978, Sh'ma ran a series of articles on the contemporary relevance of the Jewish virtue of tzniut or modesty. Over the next three weeks, we will reprint several of these articles on what remains a timely topic.)

Modernity Must Make Room for Modesty

Zalman Posner (Sh'ma 9/161, November 10, 1978)

The preservation of Judaism in an overwhelmingly dominant non-Jewish world is usually phrased in terms of Shabbat in a Sunday society, or education in Judaism competing with the limitless opportunities America offers, or coping with the inevitable influences Christianity exercises, and of course, inter-marriage and assimilation. There may be other insidious influences, susceptibility based on unfamiliarity with Jewish values, not even realizing that Judaism has something to say on the subject. Where Judaism might present a perspective to challenge what happens to be acceptable, instead Jewish values are corroded, with effects possibly as ominous as assimilation.

The prevalent culture has little patience with one of these values, and the Hebrew word for it is virtually unknown to the American Jew - tzniut. It has overtones of modesty, concealment, reserve, privacy, inwardness. Tzaddikim who were circumspect in their piety, or philanthropists who avoided ostentation in their giving, were lauded as tzanuim. More commonly the quality was associated with women, but its standards apply to men as well.

Briefly, tzniut is expressed in modesty of dress, of conversation, of personal habit, and particularly in reference to relations between men and women. Tzniut indicating restraint and control; its antonym might be hefkerut, abandon, "ownerlessness." It is noteworthy that modern Torah scholars have placed the importance of tzniut, especially for girls, higher than indispensable institutions like yeshivot; the latter are to be sacrificed if necessary to preserve tzniut.

Tzniut Is Regarded As An Obsolete Vestige

The concept of tzniut is alien to the temper of the day. At best it might be regarded as a quaint vestige, obsolete, frustrating. Let it all hang out. We seem to be surrounded by non-tzniut. Family newspapers and news magazines, to say nothing of books, apparently find everything is fit to print. Drama critics who once fought for freedom of expression now mourn that the stage is on the verge of total lack of restraint.

So lack of tzniut is not a single instance, but a chain of events, a Gresham's Law, an erosion of standards, without our even being aware that something is happening, and we cannot protest, because we become targets for the worst of pejoratives - "Victorian" and "prudes." Oh yes, there are protests for privacy to be sure, and properly. Credit companies and government and computers invade our privacy - but don't current standards of non-tzniut as well?

"Turn off the switch or stay away from the movie, or cancel your subscription" is the retort to the protester. First of all - if there is no alternative - then ok. "Do not bring foulness into your homes" is not bad advice and it comes from Deuteronomy. Perhaps we might disengage from the unacceptable elements of the culture, declare our independence, be free in a meaningful way by making our own judgments.

But disengagement is not immunization. When air is polluted we cannot stop breathing. This is the atmosphere in which we all live. Not all are prepared to refuse to have television in their homes, or avoid theaters. For a great many people, never exposed to any other values, the existing atmosphere is all they know, with its expectations, implicit or declared, and how many can defy these?

Fashion Poses Problems For the Modest

Institutionalized anti-tzniut is matter-of-fact in today's climate, an environment developed. A protest is not only a matter of being an individualist, I am afraid that there are no options because there are no alternatives offered. The coed dormitory is the way it is, and dissent is recognized by ridicule. "Arrangements" are touted and marriage denigrated. Hesitation and opposition are dismissed as moralism and relegated to the Thirties or some other antedeluvian decade.

The adherent of tzniut expresses commitment by manner of dress. Sleeves, height of hemlines, necklines, material, fashion, all are determined by considering tzniut. Tzniut, as noted, applies to men no less than to women, and some men's fashions are not consonant with the principle, but the problem of tzniut in clothes is not terribly oppressive. No trouble getting a suit, but when designers go off on a creative binge, women must search for a decent dress.

This concern with clothing is not an obsession with the petty. Clothes are symbols, and we would do well to examine the reality they represent. A loose morality, without restrictions, with emphasis on "freedom," with permissiveness and even pressures toward laxness - expresses itself in the sort of clothing abhorred by tzniut.

We may say that clothes do more than reflect, they can create a mood. There is no question that many choose non-tzniut for rather innocent reasons, simply because of stylishness. Still, the one who makes an effort deliberately to find tzniut clothing may well find that he/she is encouraging a tzniut mood as well and may find it easier to maintain standards represented by tzniut. This point should not need belaboring nor, I hope, need it be spelled out.

Tzniut Preserves Individual Integrity

Today it is possible that tzniut gives the individual autonomy, the capacity for making choices and decisions based on principle, the ability to be critical. It is not for the sake of being different, a small virtue, but for preserving the integrity of the individual, his person, his way of living, for tzniut is more than a way of dress, it is a life-mode, and its values are not intended to be limited to the Jew.

The disagreement between adherents and rejectors of tzniut is not over a bit of cloth. The tzanuah will be conscious of fashion, if she so pleases, but her standard is not exclusively the fashionable. She can refuse to wear what does violence to her dignity as a woman.

What do I mean by tzniut as a "life-mode?" It is more than "quantitative" tzniut, for example sleeves of a minimum length. It is an attitude, perhaps illustrated by Isaiah in Chapter 3, describing the ways of the "daughters of Zion." (By the way, isn't this also part of "prophetic Judaism"?) The instances he cites are not innately brazen, but they bespeak an attitude the prophet denounces, a lack of tzniut, an "un-jewish" life-style.

The life-mode of tzniut is a life lived by a moral code that refuses to countenance what may be popular at a given moment, even if it is the contemporary one. It reflects itself in a particular kind of relationship between husband and wife, between them and others, between men and women in general. There is evidence of disillusionment with the casualness of relationships and concern only with one's own "happiness" and "fulfillment." Tzniut is the ultimate foundation of the family and, as noted earlier in the stand of yeshiva heads, it may be the bedrock of Judaism itself.