My wife and I recently spent Shabbos in Tiveria at a Shabbaton for close to 150 female university students who have been studying weekly for the past few months under the aegis of the Nefesh Yehudi organization. The question-and-answer session on Leil Shabbos lasted until 4:00 a.m. To my surprise — remember this was the same week Yair Lapid’s Channel 2 piece on Ramat Beit Shemesh went viral — the first question asked was: Why do most chareidi women wear sheitels? Later Mrs. Kosman a veteran of many such Shabbatons told me that is always the first question.
What the students wanted to know was: Why if the point of covering one’s hair is to signal one’s status as a married woman and to avoid attracting male attention is so much money lavished on sheitels that look “natural” and in many cases far better than most women’s real hair? (I should add that many interesting responses were offered to the students’ question about sheitels and it is by no means my intention to enter into a halachic discussion of preferred forms of hair covering.)
Behind the students’ questions lay a perception that finally helped me understand a phenomenon that has bothered me for some time: Why does it seem that after every communal tragedy the response is invariably to call a tzniyus gathering for women with proclamations about sheitels? Gedolim past and present have attributed various tragedies to failures in mitzvos bein adam l’chaveiro and Rabbi Aharon Leib Steinman has called many times for strengthening of ourselves in this area. Surely then failures in tzniyus cannot be the source of every communal tragedy.
Even the greatest figures rarely have the clarity to link a particular tragedy to an event or iniquity. Tragedies are at most occasions to reexamine our lives and ask how we can become more worthy of Hashem’s protection. So again — why the stress on tzniyus?
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