Classically Abby - March 14, 2023


Why Modesty Actually HELPS Women： Faith Talk With Elisha Krauss

Topics
modesty in priestly garments
Hosted by
Abby Shapiro
Mentioned
Torah Chris Rock Aaron Bella Thorne Al Kohanim
Elisha Krauss On Feminism, Homeschooling, And The Importance of Conservatism ⧸⧸ Ep. 9 Nikki Phillippi On Being Cancelled, Miscarriage, And Living Life On Her Terms ⧸⧸ Ep. 10

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

178.89

Word count

1,657

Sentence count

91

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this week's episode, we discuss the importance of what the High Priest wears in the holy tabernacle, and why it matters to God. What we wear matters. And why is it important that we dress modestly?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 This week's Torah portion is Titzaveh, which means command.
00:00:04.720 The Torah portion also is the Parsha in Hebrew.
00:00:07.860 So in this week's Parsha, Chabad.org says,
00:00:11.500 God tells Moses to receive from the children of Israel pure olive oil to feed the everlasting flame of the menorah, 0.61
00:00:17.780 which Aaron is to kindle each day from evening till morning.
00:00:21.600 Now, here's where we get into the meat of the Torah portion.
00:00:24.560 We're talking about the priestly garments and everything that the priests wear in the tabernacle.
00:00:31.620 So the priestly garments to be worn by the Kohanim, that's the priests, while serving in the sanctuary are described.
00:00:39.560 Al Kohanim wore the katonet, which is a full length linen tunic, linen breeches, a linen turban, a long sash wound above the waist.
00:00:47.980 In addition, he also wore an apron like garment made of blue, purple and red dyed wool, linen and gold thread,
00:00:55.140 a breastplate containing 12 precious stones inscribed with the names of the 12 tribes of Israel,
00:01:00.280 a cloak of blue wool with gold bells and decorative pomegranates on its hem and a golden plate worn on the forehead,
00:01:06.600 bearing the inscription holy to God.
00:01:08.760 There's also a section including the detailed instructions for the seven day initiation of Aaron and his four sons into the priesthood
00:01:17.000 and for the making of the golden altar on which the incense was burned.
00:01:21.560 So this is the portion of the Torah.
00:01:24.820 We're kind of going through a couple sections in Exodus that are much more law focused and a little bit less story focused.
00:01:31.340 So my question is, why is there an entire Torah portion dedicated to what the high priest wears?
00:01:39.260 Why are his clothes important?
00:01:41.040 Who cares?
00:01:42.260 Why?
00:01:42.840 Why did it even matter?
00:01:44.440 Because it did matter.
00:01:45.660 If he didn't wear the right clothing in the holy temple, he could be killed when he entered the holy of holies.
00:01:51.340 Like it was possible that God would be like, OK, you're done.
00:01:54.200 So why is that?
00:01:55.360 So this to me relates a lot to what I talk about on my channel regarding modesty.
00:02:02.200 Our bodies are not entirely separate from our souls.
00:02:05.540 Sometimes people think that our bodies hold us back or that the physical world inhibits our holy ascendance and closeness to God.
00:02:13.120 But the truth is, is that our bodies are the gateway to being able to experience God's presence.
00:02:18.880 By dressing in the holiest of garments when working in the tabernacle, as close to God as any person could be, the high priest is elevating his soul through what he wears.
00:02:30.780 So what can we learn from this?
00:02:33.340 What we wear matters.
00:02:34.840 Wearing clothing that glorifies the body as separate from our souls or focuses on the sexuality of our body rather than its beauty as gifted by God takes us further from God's presence.
00:02:46.100 When we dress modestly and beautifully, we are glorifying God's name.
00:02:51.060 We are using our physical presence on earth to bring us closer to God.
00:02:54.640 And that's a huge blessing.
00:02:55.860 But I'm interested to hear your thoughts because modesty is a little bit of a touchy subject nowadays.
00:03:01.620 And I also am very clear on my on my channel, on my podcast, that modesty for me, what it looks like for me as an Orthodox Jew is very different than what I expect from like the average person.
00:03:15.000 I'm just like, if you can cover your cleavage, covered the bottom of your butt cheeks and cover your midriff, we're good. 0.59
00:03:21.620 Like you're doing good. 0.84
00:03:22.760 But I'd love to hear your thoughts on modesty.
00:03:25.980 And I mean, if it relates to faith for you.
00:03:29.840 Yeah, I think there's a much like my political views.
00:03:33.700 There could be the religious perspective and then like the scientific, like cultural perspective.
00:03:37.920 And I think culturally for young women specifically, and there's this mom that I follow on Instagram.
00:03:45.260 She had this whole thing about because her son like went to an eighth grade, like homecoming dance.
00:03:49.500 And she's like the way that some of these girls were dressed and then how the mothers are like, oh, you know, well, everybody's doing it.
00:03:55.260 So how do I tell her no?
00:03:56.680 And she so then she started posting like all these pictures of like Chippendales type people. 0.82
00:04:02.000 And she's like, is this who you want to roll up and be like, well, you know, my son's in a thong because everybody's doing it.
00:04:07.700 And like if boys were doing the same thing, how would people react?
00:04:12.080 Right.
00:04:12.460 They'd be like, oh, they're so creepy.
00:04:14.080 They're so predatory. 0.61
00:04:14.820 But like when young women do it, it's like supposedly no big deal when we over sexualize them. 1.00
00:04:20.120 Um, so I think that secularly and culturally, we have studies that show that women who are promiscuous, that women that dress a certain way, um, net have negative experiences with their own self-esteem, their own self-worth, their self-consciousness, like so many things, depression, anxiety, they tend to be more promiscuous. 0.89
00:04:42.360 They tend to have then more physical and emotional ailments from, from that like activity and secular studies showing like that is not good for women. 0.99
00:04:52.620 Um, and I love that, even though I would take it from the Christian perspective of, um, being complete in Jesus and our body being a temple.
00:05:01.760 And my mother, like kind of hounding that into me as a kid of like, it's not just your outward appearance that, that you're exuding and representing, you know, your faith and your family, but it's like what you choose to put in and do with your body as well.
00:05:16.600 Like, um, whether that be destroying your lungs through smoking or using recreational drugs or overusing alcohol or choosing to be morbidly obese.
00:05:26.520 One of the seven deadly sins, right.
00:05:28.600 Um, of how we are supposed to take care of our temple.
00:05:32.860 And that includes like what we're putting out in the world.
00:05:35.700 And I think that I like to look nice.
00:05:39.140 I want to look like sexy for my husband and pretty on camera, but there's like a lot in between in there that it's possible to be feminine and attractive and classy and not dress like, you know, people that you see on OnlyFans.
00:05:58.200 Right.
00:05:58.960 Exactly.
00:05:59.660 And it's so sad because it's like Instagram and OnlyFans in many ways are indistinguishable, except one is free and one is not.
00:06:06.320 Yeah.
00:06:07.380 I mean, if, if you look at like, when I remember like reading about the description of OnlyFans and what people wouldn't, would not be doing over there and like Bella Thorne and some other people were like, well, I'm going to go over there.
00:06:17.260 Cause at least I can make money.
00:06:18.560 And I'm like, how is that any different than like what their car car Jenners do? 1.00
00:06:22.180 I mean, how is it any different than, you know, what a lot of celebrities are posting on their Instagram?
00:06:27.460 And by the way, they're still making money for it because as Chris Rock said in his latest special, that's the number one way to make money is show your.
00:06:37.060 Yeah.
00:06:37.460 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:06:38.700 No, it's funny.
00:06:39.280 I have a friend on Instagram who has talked to me.
00:06:43.380 We've talked to each other about this because we're both more like traditional.
00:06:46.760 We both are modest on our Instagram posts.
00:06:49.620 And we've said, you know, if we just did this, if we just exposed one area of our bodies, we would go up 200,000 followers the next day.
00:06:59.160 Like, but we would never do it because to us, it's not, it's a hundred percent not worth it, obviously.
00:07:04.620 But even more than that, it's just not, it's not good for you as a person and people who, you know, look, I am very used to being sexualized on the internet at this point.
00:07:15.820 It really doesn't matter what I post.
00:07:17.620 But at the end of the day,
00:07:18.480 Yeah, it doesn't matter what I post.
00:07:21.380 It doesn't matter how covered I am.
00:07:22.600 It doesn't matter.
00:07:23.440 But at the end of the day, the people who are going to sexualize me, who are choosing to sexualize me, the trolls would sexualize me no matter what.
00:07:31.160 But that doesn't mean that I have to then lean into it and give them an opportunity to see things that are, to me, precious and to my husband, precious and private.
00:07:42.740 And it means that that's what I don't get about the Emily Ratajowskis or, you know, even like the Lena Dunham's of the world.
00:07:50.140 They're like, well, it's my body.
00:07:51.980 And I, if I control what's out there, then I have control.
00:07:55.940 And, and it's like, but then why are you revealing that intimate part of yourself?
00:08:00.960 Like why it's just like revealing intimate information.
00:08:03.520 Right.
00:08:04.940 And another thing that, you know, Chris Rock said in his special, it's like, well, I can do this in like this, a sex act on somebody and not have not never call her back. 0.99
00:08:14.140 I mean, it's crap, but it's funny because it's true. 0.98
00:08:16.880 But he's like, I remember how many women whose hands I've held. 0.99
00:08:20.680 Right.
00:08:21.480 And it's almost like, if I were a public school teacher teaching sex ed, I would just like clip that and be like, so yeah, maybe you should be careful of who you're engaging with.
00:08:30.960 And who you're showing your body to and who you're giving yourself to, because no offense to men, they really don't care and have one track minds and they will remember whose hands they held or who they told they loved for the first time.
00:08:43.960 But they're not going to remember you for the hot bikini shot, other than it being a brief moment of like sexual pleasure for them.
00:08:52.540 Yeah.
00:08:53.000 Yeah.
00:08:53.360 And I think that right there is exactly it.
00:08:56.740 And the thing that we should all keep in mind moving forward.
00:08:59.640 Thank you.