Rachel Held Evans ("A Year of Biblical Womanhood")

Modesty

"Tzniut is more than just a list of rules about how to dress. It's a state of mind. The idea is to avoid dressing in a way that draws attention to your outer self, but instead to dress so that your inner self is allowed to shine through... (it) is also about how you act . . . you don't want to try to make people notice you or force yourself into the forefront for attention."

...it seems that most of the Bible's instructions regarding modesty find their context in warnings about materialism, not sexuality . . . a pattern that has gone largely unnoticed by the red-faced preacher population. I've heard dozens of sermons about keeping my legs and my cleavage out of sight, but not one about ensuring that my jewelry was not acquired through unjust or exploitive trade practices...

...true modesty has little to do with clothing or jewelry or makeup. The virtue that is celebrated in Scripture is so elusive we struggle to find words to capture its spirit -- humility, self-control, plainness, tznuit, Gelassenheit.

And so we codify. We legislate. We pull little girls to the front of the class and slap rulers against their bate legs and try to measure modesty in inches. Then we grow so attached to our rules that they long outlive their purpose, and the next thing we  know, we're adding leaves to ur tables and cutting ends of our roasts. We cling to the letter because the spirit is so much harder to master.

More often than not, this backfires, and our attempts to be different result in uniformity, our attempts to be plain draw attention to ourselves, our attempts to temper sexuality inadvertently exploit it, and our attempts to avoid offense accidentally create it. . .

It's not what we wear but how we wear it"