I would be remiss not to mention the recent New York Times article about eating disorders among young Orthodox Jewish women. There are many things to be said about this piece, and I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t think that a line-by-line analysis is likely to be very productive or interesting. I’d like to focus instead on one point that appears early in the article:
While no one knows whether such disorders are more prevalent among Orthodox Jews than in society at large, they may be more baffling to outsiders. Orthodox women are famously expected to dress modestly, yet matchmakers feel no qualms in asking about a prospective bride’s dress size—and her mother’s—and the preferred answer is 0 to 4, extra small.
The easy thing here would be to cry “hypocrisy!” Hiding the women and then objectifying them anyway! It would find a gleeful audience too, since everyone loves a religious hypocrite. I’m sure that reading isn’t entirely mistaken, but at the risk of repeating myself, it’s not very productive, and only an ugly kind of interesting.
Traditional Jewish attitudes toward modesty are a complicated thing to discuss, and that complication is compounded by the fact that they appear at first glance to be quite straightforward. Just look at the Wikipedia page on tzniut. As of this writing—who knows what it will say tomorrow?—it contains a collection of technical details about formalized rules of conduct among Jews that is surprisingly comprehensive for a general interest encyclopedia: modesty of dress, covering of hair, concerns about a woman’s singing voice and physical contact between the sexes, all discussed at length. Lots of rules, but nothing complicated about them if you’re good at rote memorization.
Wikipedia isn’t meant to be a reliable academic source, but it does tell us something about what is and is not on the minds of its writers and editors. The people who collectively wrote this article have devoted a great deal of time and effort toward the details of modesty, but the page lacks a more-than-cursory discussion of why these rules exist. All we get is:
In the Babylonian Talmud, Rabbi Elazar Bar Tzadok connected the injunction at Micah 6:8 to “walk humbly (hatzne’a leches)* with your God” as referring to modesty and discretion in dress and in behavior (Tractate Sukkah 49b).
This is not really an explanation, just a quick and dirty citation of a longer passage:
א”ר אלעזר מאי דכתיב הִגִּ֥יד לְךָ֛ אָדָ֖ם מַה־טּ֑וֹב וּמָה־ה֞’ דּוֹרֵ֣שׁ מִמְּךָ֗ כִּ֣י אִם־עֲשׂ֤וֹת מִשְׁפָּט֙ וְאַ֣הֲבַת חֶ֔סֶד וְהַצְנֵ֥עַ לֶ֖כֶת עִם־אֱ•לֹהֶֽיךָ׃ עשות משפט זה הדין ואהבת חסד זו גמילות חסדים והצנע לכת עם אלהיך זו הוצאת המת והכנסת כלה לחופה והלא דברים ק”ו ומה דברים שדרכן לעשותן בפרהסיא אמרה תורה הצנע לכת דברים שדרכן לעשותן בצנעא על אחת כמה וכמה
Rabbi El’azar said: Why is it written “He has told you, O man, what is good. And what does Adonai ask of you? Only to do justice and love kindess, and walk modestly with your God”? (Micah 6:8) “Do justice” means judgment; “and love kindness” means acts of kindness; “and walk modestly with your God” means accompanying the dead and welcoming the bride to the chuppah. Are these not the makings of an a fortiori argument? The Torah said “walk modestly” regarding public affairs; all the more so for things done in private.
This, too, only goes so far. It never mentions the type of modesty that God requires of us, and never ventures to guess why. More to the point, the thing about prooftexts in Jewish legal discourse is that they rarely introduce new ideas. Far more often they are used to support an idea that somebody already accepts. So what is the fundamental reason for modesty of dress in religious society? A religious argument that often makes its way into secular and secular-influenced circles is surprisingly modern in that it wasn’t really viable until the emergence of third wave feminism: By carefully controlling the extent to which their bodies are displayed, women are able to limit the degree to which they are made into sex objects within a culture—the broader, secular one—that is hell-bent on doing so to every piece of flesh available. As with so many other ideas from the Jewish tradition, this interpretation is not universally espoused, but there is something compelling behind it. After all, less than a month ago a Jewish mother made waves by worrying aloud about the alternative in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. There are many worse things in the world than an ideology claiming that when one human being objectifies another, both are damaged.
But I can’t help drifting back to the bit about dress sizes. If—and that’s not a rhetorical if since it may not be true—if the underlying goal is to avoid objectification, then how do we get to a matchmaking system where thinness, and a genetic predisposition to remain thin through the childbearing years, is of such importance? Even setting aside the danger of a particular ideal of beauty encroaching on a society whose phenotypes often don’t match it, it is clear that there’s a disconnect between methods and stated goals. The spirit of the law may have little meaning without the letter, but the reverse is also true. What steps would be needed to bring forward the spirit of modesty?
* There shouldn’t be a glottal stop in the first word. Just thought I’d mention that.
