Hello, and apologies for the delay in posting! The following post was written on two sides of the Atlantic – enjoy!
It’s summer in DC, and the streets are sweltering. Temperatures routinely soar to over 90 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity is ever-present. As a recent arrival from the perpetually-rainy UK, I have been taking full advantage of this situation, adopting a daily uniform of t-shirts and short shorts and hitting the local swimming pool in my brand-new bikini. I enjoy the feel of the sun on my bare arms and legs. Yet sometimes, I can’t help but feel self-conscious, even strange, in what for many people constitutes perfectly normal late-August attire. Clothing which, only a couple of years ago, was unthinkable for me.
First, some background…An important concept in Judaism is that of tzniut, or modesty. This concept originates from the biblical verse, ‘It has been told to you, o Man, what is good, and what the Lord requires of you: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly (or ‘modestly’) with your God’ (Micah 6:8). The rabbis of the Talmud interpreted this ‘walking modestly with God’ as encompassing modesty in personal conduct and dress. Today, many Jews, particularly Orthodox Jews, are meticulous about wearing only ‘modest’ clothing, i.e. clothing that does not reveal much of the body. Although standards vary greatly even among Orthodox Jews, they are often stricter for women than men, and it is not unusual for Orthodox women to wear only skirts that cover their knees and tops that cover their elbows and neckline.
My introduction to the world of dressing ‘tzniusly’ (to use the anglicised idiom) was a gradual one. Like many British Jews, I grew up in a ‘traditional’, moderately observant family who attended an Orthodox synagogue. With the exception of synagogue, for which I always wore a skirt and covered my shoulders, I was free to dress pretty much how I wanted. I knew that more observant girls dressed a certain way, but felt no need to ‘dress up’ in order to express my Jewish identity. In my early teens, I felt most glamorous in sleeveless tops. However, when I attended an Orthodox summer camp at the age of 14, there were several rules about how both boys and girls were supposed to dress, including one that instructed girls to cover their shoulders. Never one to challenge authority, I reluctantly obliged. However, after the two weeks, during which I revelled in the daily prayers, the soulful singing, the ruach (spirit)-filled Shabbats, were over, and having previously read a little on the merits of modest dressing, I decided to try an ‘experiment’ and keep covering my shoulders. Maybe, I thought, the added coverage would cause people to focus more on my personality than my physical attributes, enabling me to be my ‘true self’. This experiment would last for the next eight years.
As I got older, I viewed Orthodox women who covered up as truly beautiful. There was something innocent and pure about their way of dressing that I found fascinating. However, outside of an explicitly religious environment, it was not until the age of 19 that I decided to try this for myself. As a university student who had spent her teens slowly growing in her religious observance, I felt nervous and insecure in my new practices, particularly those, such as keeping more strictly kosher, which affected my social life. Adopting long sleeves and skirts as my uniform of choice would, I felt, help me to express my newfound Modern Orthodox identity and fit in with my more observant peers, as well as maintain consistency in my observance. After all, how could I eat vegetarian (i.e. not strictly kosher) food in my college dining hall if my clothing indicated I belonged to a group who didn’t do that sort of thing? By the time I attended a Chasidic seminary in Israel at the end of my first year at university (albeit one which did not actually enforce a dress code) I had decided to take the plunge and become a full-time ‘tzanua’ – skirts, long sleeves, and all – and took satisfaction in having ‘completed’ my transformation into an Orthodox woman.
At first, I was perfectly happy with my new look. I felt like my outward identity finally matched my inner one. Walking down the street in Oxford, I felt proud to be different, proud to be identifiably Jewish (not that most people would probably have noticed, although there was one bizarre episode involving a rather eccentric gentleman who excitedly declared that I must be a ‘Hebrew’ and that he found modest skirts ‘more attractive’). I spent my second year of university living in a house with other Modern Orthodox Jews where I did not have to worry about whether I could keep Shabbat and the laws of kashrut. The way I dressed was the final piece in my newly-observant puzzle, and I didn’t see it changing. Ever.
However, as they say in Yiddish, ‘A mensch tracht, un Gott lacht’ (‘A man thinks, and God laughs’). After nearly a year, I realised that I was starting to fall out of love with modest dressing. Whereas previously, I had thought of tzniut as a way of drawing attention away from my body, empowering me by preventing others from viewing me as a sexual object, I actually came to think of my body as much more sexualised because I was treating it as something that needed to be hidden away. (Having a boyfriend who found seeing my shoulders a novel experience certainly aided me in this discovery!) I was becoming less and less connected from my actual reasons for covering up and focusing more and more obsessively on the act of covering itself. When getting dressed in the morning, I would agonise over finding a top that covered my collarbone and making sure my knees could not easily be seen, even though I did not see this as an obligation to begin with. To make matters worse, whereas my bright yet modest summer wardrobe had attracted admiration from my seminary friends, back at university, I was deeply unhappy with the way I looked. Whilst I know many Orthodox women who manage to combine modesty with great fashion sense, a lack of time and funds meant that I was sadly not one of them. I mostly improvised with the clothes I had, meaning that my look ended up more frumpy than fashionable. I remember looking longingly at a beautiful pair of cornflower-blue jeans in a magazine and realising with a tinge of sadness that I’d never have any reason to buy them. In short, I no longer felt like myself, and I no longer knew why I was continuing with something that made me feel unhappy rather than empowered.
The final straw came one summer’s morning as I picked out my clothes for the day. Already clad in jeans and a long-sleeved ‘shell’ top, I searched my chest of drawers desperately for something to wear over them. The only thing available was an old smock dress. I didn’t know what to do. I knew it would look awful, but there were no other options. Then, in the midst of my anxiety, my ever-practical other half made a simple suggestion: ‘Why don’t you just wear the jeans?’ I’m not sure what persuaded me to give it a try, but I left the smock dress in the drawer and felt…Normal. A little self-conscious, yes, but not immodest. Not irreligious. Just…myself. Strolling past Oxford’s canal, I felt freer than I had in a long time. It would take another two years, and a lot more soul-searching, before I would go back to uncovering my shoulders, but when I finally let go of this first and last part of my modest dressing experiment, I felt more excitement than regret.
Today, my attitude towards covering up for religious reasons is somewhat conflicted. It angers me when religious groups, Jewish or not, reduce women’s morality to the amount of skin they choose to show and, on a fundamental level, it’s hard for me to see practices that both sexualise and attempt to hide women’s bodies as anything but patriarchal. That said, my own experiences with tzniut emphasised to me the many diverse reasons why women choose to dress the way they do. No-one forced me to dress a certain way – it was a decision I made myself. A woman is not necessarily oppressed just because she wears a long skirt, a wig, or a hijab. Furthermore, it would be wrong to claim that imposing ‘modest’ dress is the only way to use clothes as a means of controlling women’s bodies and self-expression. The recently-suspended ‘burkini ban’ in France highlighted how forcing women to wear less can be as degrading as compelling them to wear more, and, as a cartoon that’s been doing the rounds on social media illustrates so well, our bodies are subject to policing and sexualisation whether we wear burkhas or bikini tops. So, to my fellow ladies, I say, head to the pool and have fun – whatever you choose to wear.
The Desert 