[Avodah] Tznius

[T613K at aol.com]

From: "Prof. Levine"  <llevine at stevens.edu>
5"



>> Moving from the neck to the feet, one sees the tznius  requirement
that a woman must wear stockings (and not "see through  stockings").
However, this is not universally accepted. According to some  poskim if
a woman is wearing an ankle length skirt or dress, then her ankles  and
feet need not be covered. I once asked R. Avigdor Miller if a  woman
had to cover her feet, and he replied, "We are not noheg this  way."
According to this, a woman who wears an ankle length skirt or  dress
could wear sandals without wearing stockings. <<

Yitzchok  Levine

 
>>>>>
 
 
There is no /requirement/ for women to wear ankle-length skirts.   In some 
communities, stockings are not required.  Nothing to do with  skirt length.
 
It doesn't matter what you find in books or teshuvos, I'm telling you  
reality -- whatever they base themselves on, this is what women do:
 
The RW community tends to davka avoid ankle-length skirts, considering them 
 too trendy and too eye-catching.  They wear skirts a little below the  
knee.  They always wear stockings, but the stockings are not necessarily  
non-see-through.  The degree of thickness varies with the community, the  Satmar 
being most stringent: they require not only very thick stockings, but  also 
a seam up the back of the leg, to make it even more obvious that the woman  
is wearing stockings.  In Meah She'arim, it has to be black tights.
 
RZ in Israel and some Lubavitchers and some borderline RW in America  often 
wear ankle-length skirts, but mainly for fashion.  Most MO don't  consider 
stockings to be a halachic requirement and truth to tell, neither do  I.  (I 
could tell you of at least one other RW rav besides R' Avigdor  Miller who 
permitted sandals without stockings, though he didn't necessarily  think it 
was the most preferred or eidel look.)  The only halachic  requirement is 
that you not dress in a manner that your community considers  un-tzniusdik, 
and for this reason alone, a woman has to wear stockings if she is  part of a 
community that considers that normative.  In contrast to the  requirement to 
cover elbows and knees, the requirement to wear stockings is only  a "das 
Yehudis" kind of thing -- community-dependent.
 
In the past ten or twenty years, there has been a kind of fashion  movement 
among certain groups of RZ in Israel who have been influenced by  the 
chareidi community.  Their conscience no longer lets them go  bare-legged, 
because of the way chareidi women and chardal women dress, but they  don't want to 
wear stockings either, so in this group you do see the pattern  you've 
mentioned -- long skirts with sandals, no stockings.  In America  you rarely see 
this at all.  MO don't wear stockings, period.   They don't wear long 
skirts, either.
 
For myself, anywhere I go where women are expected to wear stockings, or  
where what I wear were to affect my children's shidduchim, I wear  stockings. 
 You may wonder what kind of standard is this?   All I  can say is, yesh 
raglayim ladavar....
 

--Toby Katz
================




_____________________





-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20110617/92846b68/attachment-0002.htm>