'Reclaiming Dignity': A look at 'misunderstood' Jewish modesty - review

Traditionally, books about Jewish modesty have focused on prescribing and proscribing the dress and behavior of Jewish women. One best-selling guide, originally published in the late 1990s, features diagrams of necklines, skirt hems, and hair covering, intended to demonstrate appropriately modest dress for women.

Reclaiming Dignity: A Guide to Tzniut for Men and Women is something completely different. Comprised of two distinct sections, it is presented from an Orthodox perspective, yet contains much universal wisdom.

The first part, some 200 pages long, is divided into a few dozen personal essays on the general topic of tzniut (modesty). Taken as a whole, they demonstrate that tzniut is a Jewish value more about the nature of one’s soul than about one’s external appearance.

Almost all the essays were written by Jewish educators such as Sivan Rahav-Meir and Rebbetzin Tziporah Heller-Gottlieb, as well as lesser-known personalities. They cover a much wider range of topics than skirt length, such as the current social implications of tzniut in the Jewish world.

Examining tzniut in the modern day

A few essayists take on the issue of tzniut in a culture where oversharing, particularly on social media, is commonplace.

Educator Shevi Samet focuses on how social media trends, left unexamined, can lead to breaches in tzniut: “Over-sharing is so rampant on social media that the line between appropriate dissemination of personal information and too much sharing isn’t just blurred, it’s often indistinguishable.”

Essays about teaching tzniut to the next generation include this gem from Rifka Wein Harris, mother of four teenage daughters: “My proposal is that we teach ‘tznius’ (Yiddish variation) not by shining a spotlight on the way teens present themselves to the outer world, but by building up their inner sense of self, until their feeling of intrinsic worth is so bulletproof that they do not need constantly to broadcast status updates to the world, whether in texts or fashion choices.”

Rabbi Shaya Karlinsky echoes this emphasis when he quotes Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe’s teaching that a Jew who is working on spiritual growth must focus on building an “inner world.” The current focus of Western culture on externalities and making our lives public on social media operate against the goal of spiritual growth by emphasizing the wrong things.

“When our approach to tznius focuses primarily on the length of women’s skirts or sleeves, we are missing the deeper issue,” Karlinsky claims.

Rabbi Yitzchak Shurin of Midreshet Rachel v’Chaya in Jerusalem acknowledges that some of the added strictures that have been introduced in recent years are because “Orthodox society tries to push back at what it views as  ‘a society that is promiscuous and in moral decline,’ by making laws of modesty stricter, and the separation between the sexes ever more clear and defined.”

He describes how this “reaction” has backfired, causing men to develop “an unhealthy attitude toward women.”

In place of ever-tightening restrictions, Shurin refreshingly recommends that the Orthodox world reconsider the issue and “develop a curriculum for teaching modesty to schoolgirls, making sure that it is truly based on sources from hazal [Jewish sages] and not fabrications and whims of extremists.”

He admits that “One of the areas when adding to halachah [Jewish law] can be problematic is the area of modesty for women.”

Among the nearly 30 voices, each reader will naturally find some that resonate more than others. Each writer conveys a substantive view of tzniut, presenting it as a quality of one’s personality as a spiritual being, not merely a measure of which body parts are covered.

THE SECOND section of Reclaiming Dignity is a halachic analysis by Rabbi Anthony Manning, who considers that “Tzniut is a much misunderstood concept.” Among other topics he discusses is tzniut as a reflection of our relationship with God.

Originally from the UK, Manning lives in the Gush Etzion community of Alon Shvut and serves as a co-director of Midreshet Tehillah in Jerusalem.

For those interested in scholarship and primary sources, Manning’s chapters are heavily footnoted. In addition, he consistently emphasizes the principle of bein adam le’chavero – how our choices and actions impact those around us.

Reclaiming Dignity: A Guide to Tzniut for Men and Women grew from a small project in memory of editor Bracha Poliakoff’s mother into an important contribution to the Jewish world. 

The writer is a freelance journalist and expert on the non-Jewish awakening to Torah happening in our day. She is the editor of Ten from the Nations and Lighting Up the Nations.

• RECLAIMING DIGNITY: A GUIDE TO TZNIUT FOR MEN AND WOMEN
• By Bracha Poliakoff and Rabbi Anthony Manning
• Mosaica Press
• 630 pages; $30