You know, I'm not against modesty as an attribute. It's an incredibly important thing to have, and obviously something everyone should try to strive for.
That being said, this is not modesty. This is psychological warfare on the human condition.
I've got a pretty poor opinion of many elements of Orthodoxy as a whole right now. I've come off of a year full of pretty awful experiences, most of them caused by girls who thought they were too frum for me, so you can understand my distaste with the whole idea. Not that I'm justifying it, just telling it like it is. But it's in this atmosphere that I'm starting to learn where I stand on many important things, and "tznius" has always been an interesting question to me.
Frankly, I've always found the skirt and sleeves thing pretty ridiculous. Being a boy, it was never accurately explained to me in school why girls were forced to dress the way they did, while boys had a much laxer dress code. In my enlightened adolescence, I now know that it is due to the Jewish requirement for people to be modest- and that is part of how women have to do it. It's considered vile, uncivilized, and unbecoming for a Jewish girl to expose her elbows, knees, or neckline.
So, why not just wear a burka? Shouldn't that be considered laudable, the greatest geder one can imagine? No? Burkas are too far? So why draw the line here exactly?
Oh, I'm sure you've got scriptural sources. I can't wait to see those. You know what? Spare me. You give me one way to read those psukim, and I'll give you five more. I can do that all day. Of course, my word doesn't count as much as the 500+ year old rabbeim you're going to cite, because they're...older? When it comes down to it, the Torah is the Torah, and every opinion you'll ever see on how to read it is just a slightly more educated guess, each with its own author shoving some kind of personal ethic into the mix. It's just too bad that the one document we are supposed to base every facet of our lives around is so terribly vague about everything that we can't agree on a single word of it.
I guess what bothers me most about all this though, is that it stinks of people missing the point. It's a recurring theme I seem to find in my religion, where focus tends to be drawn to something which should be secondary. For example, in my Israeli yeshiva, a speaker was brought in to discuss the obligation of lulav and esrog around Succos time. "Finally!" I thought to myself, "I've always wondered what the heck this is really about. Maybe someone is finally going to explain it to me."
I was disappointed when the Rabbi spent a whopping one slide on the source of the mitzvah (a pasuk- lovely), and proceeded to spend the next hour or so telling me how big my esrog had to be, and how long the lulav had to extend, and how many leaves had to be on the hadassim and aravos.
I just sat there in the back of the Beis Medrash, visibly distraught, wondering what the heck was going on. How can you expect me to do these outlandish things without fully understanding why I'm doing them? Shouldn't the more important facet of this practice be the why, not the what? Does no one else have a problem with this? Hello?
As Jews, we spend a heck of a lot more time talking about the whys than the whats. Obviously the "whats" have a great deal of significance, but shouldn't they take a backseat to understanding why you should be doing them in the first place? Take tznius for example- everybody knows the whats of tznius. There are fuzzy boundaries at the edges, but most people agree on the skirt-sleeves-collar thing. But have these girls who make themselves dress this way everyday ever questioned the whys involved? I guess for most people, "the pasuk says so" is good enough. Personally, I find living my life following a strict regimin of rules for a reason like that to be quite dreary, following the rules for the sake of the rules themselves. Surely there must be more?
Now on to modesty. I don't have to tell you that there are plenty of skirts which are more revealing than a pair of pants. Or that even when skirts are lower than knee-length, I think we've all been in situations where pants would simply be more...modest. I can't tell you how many girls I've seen sit on a couch or a chair, and futilely try to pull their skirts over their knees so there isn't a clear shot to their crotch (this usually fails, maybe on purpose for all I know). The point is, if you're talking about covering skin, you can't get more coverage than pants. As for the argument about seeing the shape of the legs as you do with pants, I don't even know what to do with this. Girls have legs! They're there, trust me we all know it. If you're attracted to a girl, a skirt is not going to prevent that from happening. I think this rule is arcane, and in serious need of an update. Of course, updates are heresy, so good luck with that. But here, let's talk about the specific length, in inches, that your skirt and sleeves must be. Because that is something we can explain.
Fact is, when it comes to the laws of tznius, if you're looking for logical explanations that can hold their own in the real world, you're going to have a tough time. The same goes for a married woman's need to cover her hair. I've actually heard that this doesn't really apply until after the woman has had sex, and we just don't make the single girls cover it because we don't want them to be embarrassed (this of course makes me wonder what kind of single girl would have premarital sex, but be worried about her hair being covered).
Now I am at a bit of a disadvantage here, because obviously a girl's hair is attractive, and covering it up definitely puts a damper on that effect. No, my problem here is a bit different- more like, why? How must these women feel, knowing that they are complying with a law specifically designed to make them less pretty? That they're fulfilling the will of God by making themselves more ugly? Why does this sound so Taliban to me? Hey, I've got a better idea- let's take all the energy we're putting into enforcing and educating girls about this rule, and instead put it towards internal morality. Is this rule in place to prevent adultery? Maybe emphasize how bad that is instead! And then they wear wigs? So you can cover your hair and still look pretty? Does this make sense to anybody else? This loophole is one of the most bizarre, most widely accepted rules in the entirety of halacha, and there's certainly no one rushing to explain it.
Whether or not you agree with anything I've written thus far, you have to agree that if you're going to convince children of something, the above story is not the way to do it, a story which by the way would not seem even slightly out of place at my old high school, or the one my sister is currently attending. Scaring the shit out of these girls to make them wear floor-sweepers and baggy sweaters is not a good way to set their moral compass. Maybe instead of telling them that they'll be boiled alive in the afterlife for exposing their knees to the general public, emphasis what it means to be modest, and why it's important and valuable, on the inside if not the outside. Although the way I see it, if a girl is internally moral, she'll be externally moral as well. But I guess that hasn't really been tried in the Bais Yaakov system.
