Tzniut is not about what I wear; it’s about what I share: Parshat Tezaveh
- Dr Tanya White
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Let's talk about tzniut (modesty).
Not the way it's usually discussed — as a conversation about hemlines and necklines, aimed almost exclusively at women and girls. Somewhere along the way, the holistic idea of modesty got reduced to a measuring tape. Because tzniut, at its core, is not primarily about sexuality. It is a posture toward the world. It is the question: how do I define myself? What do I reveal, and what do I hold back — not out of shame, but out of dignity? What is my relationship to the boundaries I impose on myself, and why do those boundaries make me more free, not less?
That question — how self-imposed constraint leads to genuine freedom — is, I want to argue, the central question of the three parshiot we read in the weeks following the giving of the Torah at Sinai. But its origins lie in the first story of humankind.
Eden: The First Clothing
After Adam and Chava eat from the tree, the first thing they do is make clothing. Fig leaves, hastily sewn together — not for dignity, but for concealment. They are hiding. From God, from each other, from themselves. And when God asks Ayeka — where are you? — the answer is revealing: I was afraid because I was naked, and I hid (Bereishit 3:10).
This is clothing as escape from responsibility. The fig leaves are not a moral act — they are a reflex of shame. And notice the words of the Torah: the tree was taavah la'einayim — a delight to the eyes (Bereishit 3:6). The eye reaches for what is pleasurable, what is immediately gratifying, what looks good right now in the present moment. And in doing so, it loses the garden/freedom.
God's response is not to remove the covering but to dignify it — kotonet or, garments of skin (Bereishit 3:21). Real clothing, for a real world. Surviving outside the garden requires what the garden never demanded: knowing when to protect yourself, when to conceal and when to reveal and how to carry yourself with dignity and honesty. The fig leaf was shame. The kotonet or is responsibility. And the Hebrew holds a beautiful ambiguity: or can mean עוֹר — skin — or אוֹר — light. Wear the covering wisely, for dignity rather than shame, and it transforms.
Three Rings of Freedom
The philosopher Isaiah Berlin identified two kinds of freedom: negative liberty — freedom from interference and constraint — and positive liberty — freedom to live a directed, meaningful, self-authored life. Western culture has become expert at the first and increasingly lost when it comes to the second. The Torah, I think, understood this long before Berlin. Getting from the fig leaves to the kotonet or — from reactive shame to dignified responsibility — requires scaffolding. And the three parshiot following Matan Torah lay out that structure with extraordinary precision, each one adding a ring of bounded freedom around the individual.
Mishpatim is the first ring: civil law. The rules that govern how we treat each other — property, injury, the rights of the stranger, the slave, the widow. These are the constraints that make communal life possible. Without them, freedom becomes the freedom of the powerful to dominate the weak. Mishpatim says: your liberty ends where another person's dignity begins.
Terumah is the second ring: civil society, the common good. Here the law is no longer about what you must not do to others, but about what you voluntarily give. The building of the Mishkan is a communal project, funded by free-will offerings, requiring each person to contribute something of themselves to something larger. This is the freedom of terumah — not the removal of obligation, but the joyful embrace of it. True freedom, the parsha insists, is not about accumulating more for the self. It is about learning to give.
Tetzaveh is the third ring: heteronomous law — law that transcends human logic entirely. The precise instructions for the priestly garments, the Korban Tamid, the Ner Tamid — these are chukim, laws whose rationale is not self-evident. They ask something harder than civic obedience or communal generosity. They ask for submission to a framework that exceeds our understanding. This is the deepest ring of freedom: the recognition that I am not the ultimate author of meaning, that there is a wisdom larger than my own, and that accepting its constraints is not diminishment but elevation.
Each ring builds on the last. Civil law protects the individual. Civil society binds individuals into community. Transcendent law anchors the community in something eternal. Together they describe the complete architecture of Jewish freedom — not freedom from constraint, but freedom through it.
Dressed for Dignity
Which brings us back to the clothing.
The garments of the Kohen Gadol — made of gold, blue, purple and crimson, adorned with precious stones bearing the names of the twelve tribes — are described in more detail than almost anything else in the Torah. And their purpose is stated simply and beautifully: l'chavod ul'tifaret — for honour and for splendour (Shemot 28:2).
This is the precise opposite of the fig leaves. Adam and Chava used clothing to hide. The Kohen uses clothing to reveal — to embody, visibly and publicly, his role, his responsibility, his belonging to something larger than himself. The garments are not for vanity. They are a statement: I know what I am here for, and I am dressing accordingly.
It is no coincidence that the first act commanded of the priests in the Mishkan is to kindle the Ner Tamid — the eternal light. When we learn to wear our or as dignity rather than defence, God responds in kind like when he clothes Adam and Chava in Eden. We build the skin; He supplies the light.
This is also the deepest meaning of tzniut. Not concealment for its own sake, but a deliberate, conscious relationship with how I present myself to the world. The psychologist Donald Winnicott wrote about the tension between our true self — the authentic inner core of who we are — and the false self we construct for the world. The danger, he argued, is when the false self takes over entirely, when the performance becomes the person. But Winnicott was equally clear about the opposite danger: the belief that health means total transparency, the complete exposure of the inner self to anyone and everyone. That, he argued, is not authenticity. It is a failure of boundaries — and ultimately, a failure to protect what is most precious in us.
We live in a culture that has confused oversharing with honesty. Social media has made the exhibition of our most intimate selves not just possible but expected — our anxieties, our relationships, our grief, our joy, all performed for an audience. This is not freedom. It is a different kind of enslavement: to the gaze of others, to the need for validation, to the compulsive unravelling of our rudimentary vulnerabilities. It is תאווה לעיניים – desirous to our eyes.
Tzniut, understood properly, is the Jewish answer to both extremes. Not the false self that performs and conceals, but not the unguarded self that exposes everything either. It is a discipline of discernment — knowing what to reveal and to whom, what to keep for those closest to us, and what belongs only to ourselves and to God. It asks not merely how much am I showing? but how much of myself I reveal and the choice of who has truly earned the right to see it? And in that sense, tzniut is not a women's issue. It is a human one.
As we approach Purim — the festival of costumes and concealment — this dimension becomes especially sharp. Purim plays with the boundary between inside and outside, between the person and the role, between hiding and revealing. Esther uses her royal garments not for self-advancement but to save her people. Haman is given the king's robes and is consumed by them — the clothing becomes the man, because there was nothing deeper underneath, the external self defined the internal self. When Mordechai tears his clothing at the palace gate (Esther 4), he is sending Esther a message as much as expressing his own grief: do not let the garments define you. You are not the Queen of Persia — you are Esther, with a people and a purpose. That is why, when royal robes are later placed on Mordechai himself, he wears them without being consumed by them. He knows exactly who he is underneath.
The question Purim presses on all of us is the same question God asked in the garden: Ayeka — where are you? Under the costume, under the role, under the persona you present to the world — who is there? Are you using the material of your life to hide, or to build? To cover up, or to transform?
The Parenting Dilemma
I want to say something vulnerable about parenting, because this is where all of this lands for me personally.
Our culture tells us that freedom means removing constraints — that the loving parent is the permissive one, that rules crush individuality. But what I have learned — slowly, and often by getting it wrong — is that children without structure do not flourish into freedom. They flounder. The boundary is not the enemy of the self. It is the condition for it. The garden only works because of the tree.
Mishpatim, Terumah, Tetzaveh. Civil law, civil society, transcendent law. First you teach a child the rules, then you teach them to give, then — if you are very fortunate — you teach them to live for something they cannot fully explain but cannot live without.
That is the road from the fig leaves to the priestly garments. From shame to splendour. From hiding to l'chavod ul'tifaret.
Shabbat Shalom
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