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Wendy Shalit
A Return To Modesty | PAGE 1, 2
A modestynik is my word for a modern single young woman raised in a secular home, who had hitherto seemed perfectly normal but who, inexplicably and without any prior notice, starts wearing very long skirts and issuing spontaneous announcements that she is now shomer negiah, which means that she isn't going to have physical contact with men before marriage, and that she is now dressing according to the standards of Jewish modesty. She is the type of woman who, when you hear about how she is living her life, might cause you to exclaim: "Yikes! What's her problem?!" Hence, among those who do not know her, she is usually known as an abusenik, a woman you know has been abused, even though she insists she hasn't been. Otherwise, you figure, why would she be so weird?
I first heard about these modestyniks from grandparents' pictures and hushed voices in the backseats of cars. In my freshman year I became friends with an elderly couple who had retired in our college town. It turned out that they knew my grandpa and grandma from way back, so I saw a lot of them between classes, when I would hear many funny stories about my grandparents. One night after dinner they brought out some pictures of one of their granddaughters, and this turned out to be my formal introduction to the modestyniks. She and her husband were Orthodox Jews, they explained. Then they offered me the first picture -- of the granddaughter with her then-fiancé.
What a curious picture. Although the blissfully betrothed were grinning very widely, unlike most engaged couples they didn't have their arms around each other. Here were a young, beautiful brunette and a tall and handsome man standing extremely close together, but they weren't touching each other at all. Indeed, if you looked at the picture closely, you could trace a thin blue line of sky between the two of them. How strange, I thought: If they didn't really like each other, then why in the world did they get married?
Fortunately my friends spoke up. "See," said the grandfather, pointing at the photo, "they observe the laws of tznius." I said, "G-d bless you!" He said, "No, I didn't sneeze: tznius means modesty, They observe the Jewish laws of sexual modesty."
The second picture was of the wedding. This time the young couple weren't looking at the camera but at each other. Specifically, he was gazing down at her and she up at him. Now they were embracing each other very tightly. Upon seeing this particular picture, I felt tears float up to my eyes. I hoped the next photo would arrive soon enough to distract me, but unfortunately it didn't quite, and I was left blubbering for an excruciating eight seconds. "I don't know why I'm crying, I'm so embarrassed! I don't even know your granddaughter!" Somebody handed me a tissue, and then I was ready for the third and final picture.
In this one the granddaughter was on the beach holding a little baby boy -- only now her modestynik smile was twinkling under the brim of a black straw hat. "That's for the head covering" her grandma piped up proudly over my shoulder. "A married woman cannot leave her hair uncovered."
That's how I learned that there are different stages in the life cycle of a modestynik. No Touching, Touching, then Hat. Okay, I figured, I could remember that. I made a mental picture, like that second-grade diagram which helps you remember how a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, and then I knew that I would never forget it. No Touching, Touching, Hat. Got it.
Once I learned how to identify one modestynik, I started to see them all over the place. It seemed every Jewish family had one. And even if a person didn't happen to have a modestynik in his or her family, then at least they knew of one -- and more often than not, two or three.
I picked up New York magazine, and they were writing about the modestyniks, too:
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Though boyfriends would occasionally grumble about my "hangups," I never gave much thought to what I would come to know as my sexual repression. I just assumed it was my peculiar problem, something to be sorted through privately, something of which one is ashamed. When I began to hear about these women, though, I started to think that maybe my "problem," such as it was, was not a problem at all but about something else entirely, something that could even be valued. Could I have been a modestynik all along and not known it?
Alas, I had to conclude that no, I couldn't be. I certainly wasn't shy or quiet, and that's what modesty really means, right? The whole women-should-be-seen-and-not-heard philosophy? That's what I associated it with. Furthermore, I didn't have any hats back in my dorm room. There were only two non-weather-related hats I had ever owned: a purple cone hat, from when I went trick-or-treating as a purple crayon, and a black cap with horns from when I sang the part of a little devil in a Lukas Foss opera. Somehow I didn't think those hats would count with whoever was in charge of the modestyniks.
Nevertheless I was still fascinated, particularly with the way others would react to them. People around me were saying that these modestyniks were really abuseniks: This one was "obviously very troubled," and that one seemed to have a "creepy" relationship with her father. Or the more poetic version, whispered in a sorrowful tone: "She is turning herself into the kind of woman her father could never touch." Or "Maybe she just had a Bad Experience." Either way, whatever her problem is, "why doesn't the poor girl just get some counseling already, and then she won't take it all so seriously?"
Now that I knew what was really going on with these modestyniks, I started to worry about them. All these women, and all sexually abused by their fathers! But that's also when I began to get suspicious. If all modestyniks were really abuseniks, I asked myself, then why were they so twinkly? Why did they seem so contented? Why were their wedding pictures so viscerally and mysteriously moving?
I really became intrigued when I offhandedly mentioned my interest in the modestyniks to a middle-aged man at a cocktail party, and he screamed at me, turning almost blue: "They're sick, I'm telling you! I've heard of them with their not-touching, and they're sick, sick, sick!" Someone later informed me that this man had been divorced three times.
I began to perceive a direct relationship between how much one was floundering, sex-wise, and how irritated one was by the modestyniks. After all, if the modestynik is just one more abusenik, she is less threatening, clearly, and isn't that rather convenient, if the poor thing can only be pitied? There is a certain note of wistfulness in the resentment directed against the modestyniks.
N E X T_
P A G E .|
Modestyniks everywhere
- - - - - - - - - -
I'm not alone!
THEN I STARTED TO HEAR ABOUT THE MYSTERIOUS MODESTYNIKS.
"Oh," I said, a bit offended. For I was Jewish and I certainly didn't know about there being any Jewish modesty laws. I was a bit of a know-it-all, but about Judaism, I figured my parents were Jewish, I was Jewish, and I could recite a few blessings, if pressed. I even insisted on becoming a Bas-Mitzvah (subject to the commandments), in a ceremony at the Reform temple my parents belonged to, so there were official people who had actually seen me be Jewish once, and they had already given me their seal of authenticity. But no one had ever told me about any modesty laws.
"A teacher of mine told me that if you touch before you're married, a curse is put on your children. But a blessing is given if you're careful," says Chavie Moskowitz, a 20-year-old Touro College student from Borough Park, who with her straight red hair, chocolate-brown suit, and matching brown suede pumps looks more like a young Wall Street executive than like a God fearing bride-to-be. But on this moonlit Saturday night, standing on the outdoor esplanade of the Winter Garden, Chaim Singer, a 24-year-old yeshiva student from Kew Gardens Hills, proposes to Moskowitz, who, bouncing on her toes, gleefully accepts. Instead of embracing her fiancé, she blows him a kiss.
All around me I started to hear, and read, about young women who were observing Jewish modesty law, not touching their boyfriends and suddenly sporting hats. And all with the same blue line of sky between them and their fiancés. All with the same modestynik twinkle at the end. It was like an epidemic.
I was fascinated. First, because although I had certainly been touching my boyfriends, I wasn't -- how I wish there were a more elusive way of putting this -- having sexual intercourse with them.
