Rebbetzin Heller Tznius  given July 1 2007 at www.naaleh.com

We are going to begin on the topic the mitzvah that we are going to be devoting ourselves to for the present, which is the mitzvah of tznius.  We spoke about how Michah when talking about the final reduction of the mitzvah - the channel through which we connect –through which we achieve real goals, the mitzvahs asei, the mitzvahs lo asei, that they are incomplete without tznius.  If tznius isn’t the positive or the negative, what is it?  So what we have is that it is a way to go, a way to walk.  It is going to have components of both.  I am going to take you back to what we said about the positive and negative mitzvoth for a moment.

It says love chesed.  We all have a part of us that loves chesed, isn’t that true? There is something so delightful and so sweet about doing good.  We help someone and they are so grateful, and even if they are not, and especially if they are not, there is a certain level of self – expression that comes forward which can’t come forward in another way, which is one of the reasons people want to marry so badly. Let’s look at the other thing, “do justice”.  When you do what is right, not what is good, but what is right, when we say no to ourselves, say there is a line I don’t cross here, there is a great feeling of achievement there. You have set your boundaries, you have taken charge.  There is a feeling of victory.  Chesed has to do with outpouring and justice has to do with saying no, with setting boundaries, with holding back.

There is something between those two. The thing that is between those two is where tznius resides. What tznius is – it is the ability to say yes and no at the same time. No to superficiality, and yes to inner reality. And if you don’t do that, Michah is saying then you are not turned on. You could be doing chesed, justice, but there is something lacking in the way you walk.

Let’s talk about walking for a moment.  As we spoke about in other classes at least more than once, one of the differences between humans and animals is that humans always have destination. Ideally when you are doing acts of kindness, it is not for the momentary pleasure and thrill of connection, it is because it is taking you somewhere. There is a destination there, you are becoming more, you are drawing closer. And the same thing holds true when you say no, no you won’t tell that lie that will get you money, no you won’t do whatever, you won’t destroy what is precious within you. That is also taking you somewhere, it is taking you closer to Hashem.  The way to walk there also has two facets. There is not being distracted where we are still defined by the external side of reality, by superficiality. And the other is yes, believe that there is something there that should be expressed.  From that perspective, the Gemara gives us examples of what sort of mitzvoth require tznius, and the examples are not necessarily what we would expect. It says for instance going to a funeral, and the other example is dancing before a bride at a wedding. Let’s look at going to a funeral.  It is a mitzvah that requires balance.  On the one hand, let’s look at the funeral. What drives a person to go is that it is not right that this body should just be put into the earth unattended as though it is not a human at all. In fact in virtually every society there is some level of ritualization regarding death.  And there is another part that also says, it is right, it is good, I will do it. The actual decision to attend is coming from inclusion of both parts of self. It is not sheer goodness because you are not required to do this, you are not required to do this to be a good person, but it is not just justice either. It is acknowledgement of the niftar’s humanity that is the chesed side, and it is simultaneously acknowledging that it would be wrong to not bury him with people there in a way that is mubad. Similarly at a wedding there are two things. The kallah is building a home, you want to be there, that is outpouring. And the other side is it wouldn’t be right for her to be alone on this special day. So you have two forces working simultaneously.  And that is where tznius lives. It is repressing on one hand that which isn’t right, isn’t good, is superficial, isn’t what we want to walk towards, and giving spiritual expression to what is real, what is good, what is beautiful that we do want to walk towards in the very same action. So take note of this, it is in the very same action. It is not like giving charity that has only one side of it, although sometimes even charity has two sides. It could be an expression of one’s goodness but also a recognition that this person should not suffer.  There has to be in one act two things that are moving us forward for the act to be called tzanuah. 

From that perspective, realize that there are three levels of tznius. There is tznius of thought, tznius of action and tznius of speech.

Let’s talk about thought first. What would be tzanuah thought? What would that be? So again it would be in one flash you want to move your mind (and remember you are where your mind is) so that is moving you, towards seeing beauty, goodness, fairness. And on the other hand your mind is simultaneously giving you a message and that message is but don’t do what is not right, don’t be part of this. The Gemara provides us with an interesting example of a person whose mindset embodied this. That person is Rachel Imeinu when she decided to give Leah her sister the signs that she made up with Yaakov. Let’s review the story quickly. As soon as Yaakov escaped from his brother and took refuge at his Uncle Lavan’s home, he met Rachel. He immediately knew that she was his ivuk, that she was the one who could take all of his powers and give them arms and legs and make it happen. He asked when he spoke about wages with Lavan, he asked to marry Rachel and Lavan consented in return for seven years of work. However there is another character in the play. Leah, Rachel’s elder sister, although they were twins so we are not talking about elder by 25 years. Her elder sister was a visionary, she wasn’t practical the way Rachel was practical. It says that her eyes were weakened from her weeping. What was she weeping about?  She envisioned herself, and when I say envisioned I mean in the spiritual sense as well as in the physical sense, that her fate would be entwined with Yaakov’s elder brother, the elder sister for the elder twin, the younger sister for the younger twin. She was sure that is how people would see it and she couldn’t bring herself to foresee a life with Esav. Now she had depth of vision because remember at that time if you look at the two young men, Esav by far seemed like the better catch. Remember, people have this picture of Esav, Yaakov’s brother, that they get from children’s books – Yaakov is around five years old, he has on a kipah and payos and he looks very sweet and in these same pictures Esav is around 35, and he has armour and looks like a gorilla. It is not how it was. They were the same age. Yaakov looked naïve and unworldly because he was in a certain sense, not in a negative sense, but through choice. Esav looked pious and worldly. Now for him the piety was a disguise, but who could see through it?  He knew all the right questions to ask, how do you tithe salt, and how do you tithe straw.  He looked okay. But he had the added advantage of being worldly. So if you weren’t Leah, you would say oh that is a wonderful idea, the elder should marry the elder and I guess the younger will manage with the younger.  But what she saw ws that she saw through almost all of the disguise which almost nobody did and she recognized that Esav is evil, that whatever good he has is so entwined with his desire to conquer, so entwined with his ego, that there is nothing holy there.  And she wept. So you have Leah the visionary, and Rachel with her feet on this world trying to effect good.

Lavan, of course, had two interests in Yaakov not marrying Rachel as they had made up.  One advantage was that if he arranges things so that Yaakov can’t marry Rachel who he wanted so much, he might be able to get more work out of Yaakov.  And I am sure that some of you who work in finance have seen this scenario, not that anyone should ever see it but it is not an unusual scenario, you have two people who want to close a deal but one wants to close it more. You negotiate, you set a price, you are sitting across from the other side at the table and then, the pen is in hand and he will add on another $5000. Have you ever seen this? This happens in the business world a lot. Yes, let’s shake on the property, the negotiations are done, the contract is drawn. And that will be $5000 in addition and some fictitious nonsense will be brought into play. Why is the person asking for $5000 that wasn’t agreed upon? Because he knows he can get it because the other guy really wants to buy. And at this point, after the negotiations and after the contract was settled, he is not going to leave the deal for $5000.  That is what he knows.  Is this honest business practice? No. It is horrific. It is dishonest and corrupt. But does it happen? Yes. So Lavan, who said yes work for Rachel for seven years knew also that if he would not give Rachel to Yaakov, Yaakov would discover that it is Leah, he would get more out of Yaakov because Yaakov wants Rachel.  Yaakov is going to give more for Rachel. On a simple level that is what is going on.  On a deeper more sophisticated level, what is going on is Lavan, who is a profoundly brilliant man, who used all of his brilliance for evil in every possible way, realized that what Yaakov could build with Rachel would put him in the shadows. He wanted to ruin Yaakov’s life, it wasn’t just get more work out of him, he wanted to ruin his life by having him marry the wrong woman. So the great plan was that on the wedding night, remember there was no electricity in those days, the bride, who would be heavily veiled , would really be Leah instead of Rachel.  Now Yaakov suspected this may happen so he made signs with Rachel. We don’t know what the signs actually were, there are various opinions about them, signs that symbolized later mitzvohs, such as Shabbos candles whatever the signs were. What did Rachel do? At the last moment, and this is not what she planned, what she planned to do when she made signs with Yaakov she was sincere, she intended to keep the plan, but when it came to the crunch, the part of her that is tzanuah, that says Leah is a wonderful person, she doesn’t deserve public humiliation, I can’t be part of this, it isn’t right.  This is tznius in thought.  Yes she could see Leah’s preciousness in depth and beauty, no she is not going to allow her to be shattered. She realized that and she gave Leah the signs. So thinking like that, which takes a person above rational thought by the way, not below, above, that is tznius thinking. 

Let’s give an example on our own level and then we will go on to tznius in speech.  As we say all the time we are where our mind is, that is where you are. So let’s say you know someone who is socially awkward and very needy.  There are two ways that people relate to these types, both negative. One is patronizing and sweet and the other is distance. It is possible to go a third path.  Find what is precious and real and good about the person and don’t let anything cross that line where that part of that person is shattered. So what does that look like when you do it?  One of my daughters –in-law works in a kindergarten and the assistant’s assistant is an adult who is developmentally retarded. She is sweet and good but she is not bright, she is like possibly a five year old. But she is bright in one way, which is in her ability to see sweetness and goodness in the world, she is very optimistic, very happy. So it is clear that , not necessarily consciously, a decision was made to see that part of her and to value it and to not let anybody degrade that, not trivialize that, and not patronize her. When they say Leahala, which is not her real name obviously, which picture do you like the best, look there are 24 pictures every child made one, which one is the nicest, and she will pick one, and they say you know you are right because usually she is, and it will be sincere and real.

Let’s move on to the next level of tznius which is tznius in speech. Speech is very important because since it involves both the body and the mind, it crosses both sections, it is really where the self could be observed.  We think of our self as being just mind, because that is the part of us that creates awareness, but our bodies speak very loudly, and when you say my foot hurts you know what your body is saying.  And with speech both of them have a voice, the body, the mind and the soul. What is tznius in speech?  The example of tznius in speech is Esther. Let’s look at Esther after she was chosen Queen of Persia.  Mordechai instructed her, don’t talk about yourself, don’t tell them who you are, don’t tell them anything about yourself. His reasons had to do with protecting the Jews and his calculations proved right. But she was in the palace 9 hears before the Purim story began to unfold. How many people think sincerely that you could not talk about yourself for 9 years?  How about 9 months? How about 9 days?  How about 9 hours – that might even be mission impossible, we have to go down to 9 minutes.  What did she talk about?  What she did, the Gemara tells us, is that she had seven serving women, she named them after the days of the week in order that she should know when it is Shabbos. But she didn’t call them Sunday Monday Tuesday which would have been acceptable in Persian society because the slaves were considered to be property.  She named them after things that were created on the different days, flower, light, etc. and she would talk to them about life and its meaning, what we really want, what we really are, and in the end all 7 of these girls converted.  Do you think it was her intention? It was not her intention.  Her intention was to keep Shabbos, but her reality, and her tznius in speech, when she looked at those girls what came forth was that she sees their beauty, and she could help them discover which lines not to cross. Through her own not crossing lines.

Someone asked a question:  Are we saying tznius is a balance?
Yes, that is what we are saying.

Now let’s look at the third kind of tznius.  The third kind of tznius is tznius in action. Interestingly the example of tznius in action is not a woman even though for reasons we have to talk about later, we say there are ten portions of tznius and women have nine.  The man was Shaul, the first King of Israel. What did he do that was so tznius?  What I would have thought that this would have gone back to his selection to be king when he literally hid in order to avoid the honor of being selected, but it is not that. Much later in time, when he was involved in wars, when he was embattled, he took care of his physical needs (what today we would call going to the bathroom) in a cave within a cave. He was too modest to possibly take care of his needs in front of other people. Now men are not as modest as women and wartime is war time but this is who he was, he was a person of a certain nobility. What he was saying yes to by going to this trouble is the self that I am in front of people is not the animal side. The self is the spiritual side, that is the self that I activate with people.  I take care of the animal side privately.  So he is saying no to animalism and yes to spiritual self presentation. That is what tznius in action is about.

So now let’s talk about how this plays out.  The place where tznius is hardest to find an address is in the relationships between men and women. On one hand we want connection and meaning, and on the other hand there is a lot of superficial pizzaz that gets in the way. And it is different for men than for women. Let’s talk about men for a moment. When a man, who is supposed to find a woman so he can build with her, listens to his body’s dictates rather than his soul, what will he look at?  He will look at a woman and see her as an object that can give him pleasure. Does this happen?  Of course.  Are women objectified?  Women are objectified all of the time.  And this sometimes even passes as love in our society. He might say I love how you look. He doesn’t love how someone looks, no one can. He loves the way he feels when he looks at her.  Who does he love?  He loves himself. It is like saying I love bananas.  There is no empathy and affection toward the banana.  Men are programmed to hunt.  When their desire to find the other half goes wrong, they hunt from woman to woman, and this is the word they will sometimes use, they talk about their conquests. Let’s forget for a moment about women who are victimized by this. Let’s focus on the man himself. Is it good for him? We would say no, it is not good for a man to be exploitive, it is not good for a man to hunt. It decreases his spiritual integrity. It corrupts the part of him that says build into something that says take.

Rav Dessler would say that there are only two kinds of people, givers and takers. The givers are the ones who have spiritual consciousness because the soul loves to give, and the takers are the ones who are doomed to physical consciousness, they are doomed to being barely animals because the body likes to take. So when men hunt, and let’s forget about the effect of their hunting on the women, when men hunt it is self destructive. In order for men not to destroy themselves but to say yes to their honest desire to build, we have two interesting halachot. The first is peruu revu, be fruitful and multiply. He has to find a woman with whom to build. He has to marry. And in fact  an unmarried man could not be a member of the san hedron, he could not be a Kohen Gadol, he has to marry because part of human experience in a spiritual sense is building and that takes place through marriage.  He has to marry on one hand.  On the other hand there is another discipline which in halacha language is called shmirat aynaim, which literally means guarding the eyes. What does that mean?  What that means is that men aren’t allowed to look at a woman in a way that objectifies her. So you could see you have two men looking at the same woman, one is ‘seeing her’ because he is not blind and he can identify her and the other is gazing at her, looking at her, fantasizing about her. On the outside they look the same, nobody could tell who is who and it doesn’t have to take place visibly by the look on their face. He could just be thinking, what a body and nobody would be the wiser. But he has changed and this change is so huge within him that it says a man who takes pleasure in a woman who is not his wife obviously even in her hand, or her finger, he needs cleansing, and if he doesn’t do teshuva he will experience the cleansing in Gehinnim because exploiting another human being is that damaging to oneself.  So because of this there are all sorts of halachot that are relevant for men, they are not allowed to look at everything, they are not allowed to be everywhere. They can’t go to the beach, to every movie, read every magazine, go to every art exhibit, go to every vacation spot. If they are being real. There is a lot of restriction here.

Women are not like men.  I know that this is a chiddush, none of you has thought about this in your experience, but no, women and men are different. Amongst the difference is that men exploit and women, and this is painful to say, women enjoy being prey sometimes.  Women will purposely do what they have to do to be prey. Where does this desire come from?  The Ramban points out that in the worst possible situation, a man knows, since men and women both have sexual desire, a man knows that his sexual desire can be fulfilled by force. A woman also knows, and this is engraved in our subconscious, that the only way she can get her desires fulfilled is by making some man want her.  So because of this from before a woman has any conscious awareness of her sexuality, you see this with little girls sometimes, it is engraved. They want to be attractive. We want to be attractive.  We want to be attractive prey, we want someone to say, you look marvelous. You look great.  Is this good for women?  Women don’t hunt. Women become prey. Is it good for women to be prey? So the Ramban maintains that some women will lower themselves to being even less than slaves in order to attract a man. We see this all over the place.  We see a woman’s entire self-esteem hinging on their body image which in turn hinges on their ability to attract. I would imagine that most of you know someone who has an eating disorder. This comes from our society’s track record in saying you have no value unless you are attractive.  It is not good for women. It is not good for women to be in a race that they are going to lose. If you had a 7 year old sister it is reasonable to say wow in another 10 years you are going to be so gorgeous and she will feel good.  Could you say that to your 17 year old sister?  That she will look still better at 27? That is pretty iffy. You certainly couldn’t say that to your 27 year old sister. At a very young age we begin fighting the inevitably lost battle of the self against perceived beauty of youth, which we have to lose because none of us stay young for very long. Women despise themselves and do terrible things to themselves. You know when it hit me home the hardest, a number of years ago they had a Time Magazine – it was the 60th anniversary of the liberation from Auschwitz – they had pictures of concentration camp inmates on their cover, and they were not thinner than the models. That is something. It is not good for women to want to be prey. It leads to all of the disorders and all of the pain involved in body image and it leads to worse. It leads to women themselves not believing in their own value. So the halacha is to say no and yes. No to superficial self definition and yes to being a person with a rich inner life. A person who could attach herself to something bigger than herself. As we find that the women accepted the Torah with more readiness and enthusiasm than the men did.

How do we do this practically?  There are halachot, just as there are halachot for shmira aynaim.  The halachot are not long and difficult.  There was a book published a number of years ago by Rabbi Falk – 700 pages. If you were to look at the halachic sources you would get not even two pages.  What is this?

What it is that nowadays, due to the values that society has imposed upon us, and let’s not fool ourselves, we bring in their values with the air we breathe, every detail has to be spelled out because we don’t like modesty.   So I will give you an example of what I mean. In the society in which we live, we do admire chesed.  Chesed is in. So one of the offshoots of chesed is hospitality. One of the laws of hospitality is greet your guest pleasantly. Now no one has to tell you that pleasantly means smile and make eye contact.  Don’t close the door on your guests face, say come in .  When they come in smile. And you won’t have idiot questions like, how wide does the smile have to be, is this enough? Or does it have to be really wide?  What if you have funny lower teeth that don’t show when you smile, how far do you have to go? So the reason why no one will ask those questions is because we aren’t doing battle with ourselves about chesed. We all know how to greet a guest.

With tznius we do battle all the time because we  don’t like it.  There are three reasons why we don’t like it. The first reason is that we live in a society where non-tznius feels normal. It feels normal.  So the question that I get most typically is that I believe in tznius but there is nothing untznius about the way I dress why do I have to dress according to Jewish law? And the person whose talking could be wearing what in today’s society would be something that passes for decent, a short sleeve tee shirt and comfortable pants, not too tight. A reasonably modest outfit. What is the problem?  The problem is of course desensitization and lack of value. I am not making this up. There is a tribe called the Ughs. They live in Uganda, there was a book about them called the people of the mountain that was popular a number of years ago, and in their culture, what is normal for them as hunter-gatherers, is to abandon anyone who can’t keep up the pace of the trail. So they move from here to there, hunting, gathering, old people, babies, they fall behind and if they can’t catch up they are abandoned. And being abandoned in the rain forest is death. So do you think that anyone who abandons their mother or their father, their child, do you think that they think of themselves as  a murderer? No. They are doing what is normal. So I want to point out that normalcy is an over-rated virtue. The fact that something is normal doesn’t make it good, it just means that is what the social contract is about because lots of people do it. In the Ughs it is normal to abandon anyone if they can’t keep up. A woman can go into labor and her baby doesn’t come soon enough, she may not be able to keep up with the trail if they don’t happen to be stopping for the night at that point.  The fact that it is normal does not make it good.  It was normal to be a nazi in Hitler’s Germany. It was normal. Today in Hamasistan, otherwise known as Gaza, the children n are educated to believe that their own death is something that they should anticipate with joy as long as it is against us, and this is normal to them. Normal doesn’t mean anything because there is no person called society, some wise Minerva-like person.Society is just a collection of people with all of their individual and collective imperfections. Since we live in a society where women are prey, it feels normal to be prey, just like in Ugh land it feels normal to be a passive murderer. Just like in Nazi-land it felt completely normal to surrender your friend to the Germans.  It felt normal to people.  Don’t give too much stock to normalcy. It is not what being Jewish is about.

Avraham was called Avraham HaIvri which means literally Avraham from the other side because he was on one side and the whole world was on the other side.  Being Jewish is weird. That is how it has always been and that is how it always will be. If that is what gets in your way with being tznius, try to retain that. You have to decide who is going to write your script. 

There are other problems with this – fear ofj rejecttion. You know how people say just because everyone is after you doesn’t mean that you are paranoid, maybe they are really after you? People are afraid if I dress like THAT, like the very frum, people will see me as self-absorbed, different, weird, rejective and they will treat me badly.  And you know what? It could happen.  Such things have happened.  I want to share with you something not about tznius directly but it is about the fear. We have a family friend, a man, who was traveling in South Africa. Some of you may have heard him speak, Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb. Brilliant fellow, he is a logistician and he is a Chassidic man, so he wears the whole outfit.  He is in South Africa and he had a Jewish driver who was taking him on a long drive from Johannesburg to Cape Town. In the middle of nowhere the man stops and says I don’t like how you dress. Now remember he is speaking to a logistician, so he says, well it can’t be the color black is something that bothers you, you have black shoes, you are wearing black socks.  The driver says no it is not the color black, it is the way you look. The Rabbi says, let’s talk about this and he took him down item by item, and the driver agreed that there was no individual item that he found offensive until finally the driver, who was Jewish, said it.  You look too Jewish!  So this is really the issue with tznius.  When you dress tzniusly, you look too Jewish for some people’s taste. You don’t look cool enough, you don’t look like you are a card-carrying member of a society that has values that are antithetical to Judaism.  You look too much like you.  What tznius then  becomes is a self-esteem issue. You can either say – I want you to picture something – go back to movies you saw when you were kids  that have themes of the great White Explorer, like a doctor who goes to Africa to conduct tests in deep dark Africa. Picture someone with a pith helmet and jungle outfit – a doctor or missionary- going out to do good, finding adventures, and eventually surviving until the next half hour segment of the show next week.  You could picture this? Notice that he doesn’t think for a moment about the fact that he is who he is. He doesn’t consider a moment taking everything off and putting on beads. The reason is that he likes himself as he is, he doesn’t need to be what other people are, because his own regard for himself is sufficiently developed.  The secondary issue with tznius, the discomfort of being different and anticipating a negative reaction which you’ll get, is that you think that the negative reaction is important. It is negative.  It is not important.  If you hold yourself in decent esteem, it is not important. You will see it as the other person’s problem.  But if you don’t, the battle towards tznius will be uphill.

The third issue, and it really is the least important issue although people sometimes think that it is the most important one, is physical comfort. Surprise, surprise. Having your body covered in the summer puts more clothing on you than if you don’t have your body covered in the summer. So the reason I am putting this as last is that the fact is that our bodies are just pretty rapidly (not very rapidly) adapting to however we dress. For instance, we all wear underwear, but no one ever gets so hot in the summer that they say oh I am so hot I have so many layers, there is my underwear, etc.  You live with it because this is how you have lived since you remember yourself. It doesn’t bother you, it is not something you think about. Observably in warm climates, there are many societies in which women are completely covered and they are used to it and it is okay. That is not the issue. The issue is the rejection and the strangeness. And the only real way to deal with it is from within. You have to decide where you stand. So in this case, you really are either on the boat or off the boat.  Either you are raising people’s consciousness by your example or you are not.

We have a lot of battles within ourselves over this. We have the battle of cool, I want to be cool.  And who decides what is cool. People will say that tznius is repressive.  Repressive of what? Of their desire to be somebody else.  It is hard. What are the actual laws. The laws are not complicated as we said before. 

Question: Are we saying that tznius is totally in relationship to men? So if we are in a total girl environment and we are wearing short sleeves it is okay?

Answer: No we didn’t say that it has anything to do with men. We had distance and an imprint on women no matter where they are.  That they want to be prey. Women who are alone (this is subconscious, it is not in relation to men, this is why I mentioned that little girls feel this way.) are still in a never ending beauty contest. It is as strong in a women’s environment as it is in a mixed environment. It has to do with body image being part of how women portray their validity on a human level. It has nothing at all to do with men.
There are halachot because you are not going to get the results, not the lack of consciousness, but the result of bad tznius when you are alone or when you are with other women, the halacha is not as strict, so yes you could wear short sleeves in an all girl environment or whatever. But the same way that if you were in an all girl environment you would still want some level of personal dignity and privacy, you have to set your lines somewhere, so even though the halachot doesn’t set a clear line, you have to set a line.

Getting back to where we were. What are the actual halachot?  There are a few. Cover your whole body except for your face and neck, lower arms and lower legs.  Then we get into the nit picky. You know, where does your neck begin. So personally I believe in the ask a four year old. There are people who say this neckline is not too low.  It is like very decent.   Ask a four year old, is this called neck?  What would the child say?  No this is called chest. Is this called neck?  No this is called shoulder, and you know what? This is called back. If a four year old will call it neck, it is neck.  If a four year old won’t call it neck, then it is a different part of your body.  Lower arm means where the lower part of your arm is.  This is upper, this is lower. Lower leg begins where the knee ends and even in earlier times people were already game playing with us, so in Mishna Brurah what you will see (you can find these laws in simon ayin vav) is the part of the body that people call knee (kuf nun yud aleph) in our language. It is not that difficult or unclear. The reason why you need a 700 page book is because we don’t like being covered because it is antithetical to being prey. So we tend to let people, us, say that the real me is what you see with your eyes.

It is possible for a person to be within the law and not be tznius at all.  Picture someone who is wearing a slinkly black silk dress that is stuck to her body like a second skin with rhinestones that spell out take me take me. Technically, someone might say, well where does it say in halacha that you can’t …it doesn’t . Tznius is a midda that is expressed through halacha, it is not a halacha alone.  It is a midda that is expressed through a halacha, like chesed. Let me explain this to you. When you are talking about how much grape juice or wine you have to drink for Kiddush, you are talking about a halacha. The halacha means the way to walk – you want to walk towards proper observance of Shabbos, there is a proper way to do it. The way to do it is through making Kiddush and there is a definition – it requires this much wine or grape juice. It is not a middah. It is a mitzvah. Tznius is a midda. It finds expression through halacha, but it is a midda. Everything that your common sense tells you is true. Too tight is not tznius. Too short is not tznius. Too suggestive is not tznius no matter if you are covered or not. The 700 pages tell us how not to play games. We shouldn’t need to be told how not to play games. Don’t dress ostentatiously, b’emett, if you have any idea of having an inner life, why would you even dream of dressing ostentatiously?  And if you are in a glass bottom elevator hold your legs together, why should anyone need to be told this?  It is a reflection on our dishonesty with ourselves that we need a book such as this.  There is nothing wrong with the book, there is something wrong with our attitude towards ourselves.

Another issue that people have with external tznius is that it is possible to be tznius externally without being tznius internally.  It is unlikely for the other to take place but it is certainly possible for this to take place. We have to talk about the relationship between external and internal facets of mitzvah observance. Three is a mitzvah in the Torah that you might be familiar with, which is the Pesach offering. The Peach offering that the Jews had to give in Mitzrayim before they left, there was a lot of personal self-sacrifice.  They had to tie a sheep to their beds for three days, thus endangering themselves because in the Egyptian pantheon of beliefs sheep were right up there. Then it had to be slaughtered, its blood put on the doorposts. And finally it was offered and eaten but there were laws about how to eat it. One of the laws was you can’t break the bones. Don’t break its bones. Why not?  Among the reasons that were given in the Talmud is that a free person doesn’t have to gnaw around every possible bone.  He can take nice slices and if some is left, then some is left. In Sefer HaChinuch the author talks about this in depth and he says it is not the only halacha but all of the halachot concerning Pesach take us in one direction – experience liberation. Feel free, don’t feel petty, don’t feel constrained.  He says the more you do on the outside, the more awareness you develop on the inside. And I am sure that some of you have discovered it in the frame of what I call the 80% rule. Do you know what I call the 80% rule? Commit yourself to anything, it doesn’t matter what. Let’s say you commit yourself to learning the history of Eretz Yisroel. So you buy books, Rabbi Wein’s tapes, whatever.  Whatever you set forth to do, odds are you will do around 80% reasonably well. So the more you set your 80%, your 80% will be wherever it is. Let’s say you are going to read 8 books listen to a whole series of tapes and take copious notes.  80% of that will be here. No that is too high, that is too hard. So I will plan to do the 80% to begin with and not plan on mission impossible.  You know what will happen?  80% will then be lower.  This is why dumbbing down curriculum didn’t work in the 60’s when curriculum was dumbed down to fit the the tragic results of bad education for minority groups, they still only picked up half of what they were given. If they would have been given twice as much they would know more than the core curriculum of the 60’s.

Question:Our natural feelings are so associated with societal norms, how are we expected to develop these sensitivities
Answer: I have good news and bad news for the asker of this question. First the bad news. You won’t ever develop these sensitivities completely. How so? Our sense of what is normal is frozen over in ice and then cemented in somewhere between the ages of four and seven.  What that means if you have a person who grew up in an extremely violent environment, they could choose not to be violent, but violence will never come to seem abnormal to them. Similarly, when you grow up in the society in which we grow up in, extreme lack of tznius will never feel completely abnormal, we will never be completely sensitive.  We are not going to have it.  I will tell you what it is like when people have it. I have a friend who is a Yemenite. She was telling me about the day her parents came to Israel.  Her father and brothers had never seen a woman who was uncovered. They were in the airport and when they saw women who were dressed normally by the standards of the time, this was 1951, they realized that all of the Messianic hopes they had in the Jewish state of Israel were shattered. This is not. Ze lo Ze. We don’t feel like that and we are not going to. What can we aspire to? What is the good news? The good news is that the more you develop your inner self then the more you are going to, by the nature of things, feel uncomfortable with undue superficiality and ostentatiousness. What that means, the more you develop a self that is secure in spirituality, the less important your sense of esteem will be in the sense of tie in to body image.

I will give you an example of what I mean. If we can visit people, if we were to visit Rebbetzin Kaniefsky, she certainly dresses with appropriate and valuable tznius. But what you see when you see her isn’t the dress she is wearing or the scarf on her head, you see her warmth. You see her personhood. This is what draws people to her like a magnet, this is why she has a waiting room which when she gets up there are sometimes 80 or 90 people waiting to see her, because her inner reality shines forth to the point that her outer message isn’t what we absorb except to see that it is a reflection of the inside.

That does happen, the day comes when the gap between the inner image of self and the outer image of self narrows to the point that your own taste is to be more refined. This does happen, but non-tznius never feels abnormal.

Question: What about some women here in Israel who seem to be going to the other extreme of covering themselves too much, wearing shawls and head scarves that look bizarre and attract attention? Is this a corruption of modesty or something to be emulated?
Answer:  It is tricky.  I have a friend who has friends in this group. Where are they coming from?  I don’t know anyone in this group head on so I am relying on other people’s views of this.  My external view of them is what is going on here?   It is conspicuous, it seems bizarre to me. I will share with you two things.  First of all, sociologically, who are these women? Most of these women are in Beit Shemesh, most are Sephardim, not all of them, most of them are Baale Teshuva.  They are coming from absolute rejection of everything they view of what led to their own personal degradation  in the secular society. Or to put it in the words of someone who put it in a much less pompous way, look at what people look like? I want to balance the scale by going to the other extreme.  I want to know that I have maximized my tznius, this is the good side of this. And there are people who are doing this L’shaim shemayim, and with that intent, it is good. There is something inherently corruptible about this though. What is the bad side of it?  The bad side of it is the yeled tov problem. My son was just telling me this. He is a chossid of the Ezras people, their Rebbe is Reb Usher Freund.  A very interesting eclectic person, a person with enormous depth and piety. There was a couple who was not of this group that came to him for marriage counseling, the husband was a Chassidic man, the wife was also of that group, and they came wearing the whole outfit.  As it turned out in the course of the counseling session it came out that the man was genuinely abusive. Reb Usher said the first thing that you need to get well, because this is an illness, you have to trust that this is how things are. You are abusing your wife. This is what is going on, stop saying because. Next step, if you recognize it then there is some good in it, this will cause you to move forward.  Have emunah that it is good that you have to confront this part of yourself.  What should you do?  The first thing is stop wearing Chassidic clothes.  They let you take shelter.  You can look in the mirror and say I am a pious person, I am a good person on the basis of your clothes. Take them off. Wear ordinary clothes.  There are people who are wanna be’s . They want to be very very good because they think that they are very very bad. And they take shelter in this kind of superficial modesty. You have two very different kinds of people in that world. And you have people who are combinations of both.

So certainly for us there is no reason for us to judge them or to judge anybody.  And if we feel in a need to judge we should judge them favorably. And assume that they want to bring greater balance and modesty to a world that is extremely corrupt. But for yourself, should you imitate it?  You would have to be very sure that you were coming from a good place in order to do that.

Any more questions?  Then we will conclude for this session and we will be talking about the implications of this in other areas next time.  Have a good week and try to have all of the tznius questions that you may have and this will take us to some women’s role questions as we will be talking about kol isha, yechud, and more.