Beth Shalom
Oceanside Jewish Center

Finding the Middle Ground In Defense of Modesty
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Parshat Bishlach / Tu Bishvat
February 7, 2004 / 15 Sh'vat 5764

Although I was no more than nine or ten at the time, I clearly remember it as if it were yesterday. And though I didn't understand what was happening, it made a deep impression on me.

We were visiting my grandmother who lived in Williamsburg, not far from Marcy Avenue. She was a simple Sephardic Jew from Turkey, and her neighbors were all deeply religious Satmar Hasidim from Hungry. Still, grandma was proud to maintain cordial relations with her neighbors; she was often invited to their weddings and Simchas.

As my mother and I left her apartment one day we waited patiently for the elevator to arrive. When the door opened we immediately walked in, not thinking about who else might be riding the elevator. There stood one lone Hasidic man. We were between him and the door so he couldn't get out before it closed. I remember this distinctly. His eyes opened wide in panic as he realized that he was alone in the elevator with a strange woman (I didn't count since I was a minor.) He immediately turned his back to us and stood facing the wall until we arrived at the lobby.

What I encountered that day, long ago, was something called Tzniyut, or modesty. Among some religious Jews, not only is fraternization between the sexes strongly discouraged, but a man and a woman who are not married are not allowed to be alone together in a confined space. In addition to this, there are strict standards of dress by which Orthodox Jews abide. The body must be covered and hidden.

We see images of Orthodox Jewish women with long dresses and sleeves covering their arms. We see women in Borough Park or even in the Five Towns wearing Sheitels, or wigs, and hats so that their hair will not be alluring to strange men. It all seems very strange to us, almost Victorian. We shake our heads and wonder when "those people" will stop living in the "Middle Ages." They are so prudish.

But before we pass judgment on those who are different from us, let's consider the opposite picture: Super Bowl Sunday.

If there is one thing that people will remember about this year's Super Bowl it will not be who scored the last touch down, but rather Janet Jackson's breast. In what must have been no more than a few moments exposure (pardon the pun) Ms Jackson had a portion of her dress torn off by heart throb Justin Timberlake during the half time show revealing her right breast. If you missed this little performance – which was easy to do - you could watch it over and over again on the news or you could log on and down load this image as wall paper for you computer.

Was it an accident? That was the sixty four thousand dollar question that everyone was buzzing about earlier in the week. It would seem not, especially when you consider that Mr. Timberlake just finished singing, "I'll get you naked by the end of this song."

The real issue is not Janet Jackson's public exposure but the bigger picture of what the Super Bowl represents: the lowest common denominator in our culture, highly charged images of sexuality with scantily dressed women dancing on a field in front of thousands of so called fans who have had too much to drink.

And then there are the commercials: what are we to make of them? We were privy to a series of degrading images which were highly charged, sexual images or crass bathroom humor. And all of this took place during a family program. Wall Street dictates what is in good taste and what isn't. They've decided that the core audience watching the Super Bowl is young males between the ages of 18 to 24 and so Wall Street caters to them. Yet how did you explain to your ten year old son or grandson what Viagra is or why there are so many commercials during the Super Bowl for Budweiser Beer?

We are confronted by two opposite images, both equally offensive from my perspective. And the truth is they are not so different from one another. One disparages women's very presence as an "Ervah" as sexually suggestive, and the other demeans women by turning them into a commodity to be bought and sold.

It seems to me that we need to return to this concept of Tniyyut but we need to redefine it in terms of our own society and the twenty first century. Certainly the images that are invoked by Meah Shearim or Borough Park don't work for us today but neither should the images that we are exposed to on television and in the movies these days.

Tzniyut is an important and central concept in the Jewish tradition. But there is nothing prudish or demeaning about this attitude toward the human body either. The Talmud writes that there are three things that characterize the Jewish people: they are kind, they are compassionate and they are modest. Shaina Handelman in her essay "The Paradoxes of Privacy" writes that there is nothing puritanical or repressive about this idea. By modesty we mean that it is our job to elevate the human body and to treat it with respect and reverence. And we do that by recognizing that it is not to be treated as an object or exposed to the entire world.

Ms Handelman compares the human body to a Sefer Torah. The Torah scroll is dressed and covered with a beautiful mantel. When we begin reading it, we uncover it and expose the text. But when we are finished reading the text between Aliyot, what do we do? We cover the scroll so that it is not left exposed. We do this because we believe that the text contains a high level of sanctity.

Similarly, writes Handelman, the human body is holy and is therefore covered under normal circumstances. It is not a "piece of property, or an object to be disposed of casually; it too is an integral part of the sanctity of person, the Kedusha of the Jew." We only reveal our bodies, then, in the most intimate and sacred moment in our lives to those with whom we have a sacred bond. Sex is not dirty or demeaning. It is holy and it should be trusted as such. Privacy is an expression of respect.

As the centrists of the Jewish world, I believe that Conservative Jews need to redefine modesty in new and contemporary ways. What was immodest or improper for our ancestors 100 or even 50 years ago may not be immodest for us today. Certainly I don't consider a woman's voice raised in song to be immodest. On the other hand, we need to fight the tendency to objectify the human body and demean human sexuality as a source of derision and a means of making money. And we need to protect ourselves from the type of images and attitudes that have become all too prevalent in today's society.

And we need to ask ourselves: whose raising our children? Who is teaching them what to value and how to respond to the world? Are our children being raised on the values that are dictated by Wall Street, or are we teaching our children that the human body is sacred, that we must learn to value people of the opposite sex, and we need to see sexuality not as the fulfillment of an animal desire but as a divine gift and mystery to be treated with reverence and respect.

I've never been much of a football fan. But I am even less of a fan than I was a week ago. I certainly wouldn't suggest that we need to throw out our televisions and stop attending movies. But I do believe that we need to do so more thoughtfully and with more discretion. What we put into our heads is just as serious as what we put into our bodies and those images which we see on MTV or hear on the radio or look at on line stay with us and affect us in ways that we can't even begin to understand.

Do you allow your children to attend or rent R rated movies? Do you discuss the sometimes sexually explicit humor that they see on television almost every day? Have you taken the time to discuss what your children do at parties and how they treat their friends of the opposite sex? Do they understand what safe sex is and that the only safe sex for teenagers is no sex? These are not just important family issues. These are deeply Jewish issues as well.

We can't ignore them any more than we could ignore Janet Jackson last Sunday Night.

Shabbat Shalom