The Three-Year Bamboo

Recently, someone told me a story about the three year bamboo. Apparently, there is a bamboo in China (or somewhere close) that looks like it’s dead for three years. For three years, you water it every day – and nary a leaf sprouts. If you didn’t know you were dealing with a three year bamboo, you’d simply give up and turf it out to the compost heap.
 
But the people who do know what’s going on carry on watering and caring for the plant until suddenly – after three years – it suddenly shoots up overnight, and becomes a lovely-looking amazing plant.
 
I was pondering that story when I looked at the hemline on one of my kids’ skirts. Thank G-d, they also shot up overnight, leaving the ‘generous’ hemlines on a bunch of their skirts flapping around just under their knees. If I had a bunch of cash, I would just run out and buy five more skirts. But at the moment, money is extremely tight, and I’m looking at ditching five skirts and replacing them with one. Maybe.
 
And anyway, even when I do go out clothes shopping with them – and yes, I do pray a lot beforehand that G-d should help us to find something that I, they and He all like – I very rarely come back with something that I’m really happy for them to wear. It’s usually just ‘ok’, at the very border of what I’m prepared to accept.
 
My kids are good girls, great girls, amazing girls. They are holy Jews, they really are. But they are in a social environment where a couple of ‘bad apples’ are spoiling an awful lot of my efforts to get them to dress more modestly.
 
One local kid in particular delights in calling my kids ‘dosim’ – a horrible derogatory Hebrew term for religious people – every time they wear a skirt that’s any sort of ‘long’. I’ve lost count of the number of times that my kids went out wearing something lovely, then came back in two minutes later and changed into something much less lovely just because of this bad apple’s horrible comments to them. It’s so infuriating and upsetting. It’s also all from G-d, so each time it happens, I go to talk to Him about it.
 
“G-d, please help me and my family to dress more modestly. Please help my girls to want to cover everything they need to, according to Jewish religious law. Please help me to find appropriate clothes they’ll love. Please help them to have modest friends. Please arrange for the ‘bad apple’s’ mouth to be sewn permanently shut with aluminum wire…”
 
OK, I made up the last one, but the point is I’ve been praying about the whole clothing thing for years and years already – at least three, and maybe even five or six. I’ve had a few leaves shoot up here and there – like when I persuaded my kids it was a good idea to wear shoes outside on the street, at least some of the time – but overall? Not much.
 
Until I heard the three year bamboo story, I have to admit to getting a bit despairing of it all. After all, modesty is a woman’s most important mitzvah, and I really have tried my best to encourage my kids to dress modestly, without resorting to horrible power-ploy tactics that will just back-fire in the long run.
 
I know you have to practice what you preach, so I’ve worn socks for five years already, and keep my hair covered 24/7, even in bed. I chucked out my long (but figure-hugging) skirts and replaced them with long, flowing things instead. I try to keep any interaction with other people’s husbands (and men generally) to a bare minimum…
 
And yet, I myself am still struggling with modesty. For example, I decided to give myself a hair cut a couple of months’ back which went a bit wrong, and while I’m waiting for it to grow out again, it’s pretty hard to keep it all covered in the back.
 
So what I want to know is why is G-d making this mitzvah so hard, if it’s so important? Why, after all the prayers and efforts and prayers and things bought do my kids still (apparently) having nothing so great to wear?
 
I don’t know what the answer is. It could just be ‘Patience, Rivka’. Kids, like rare bamboos, also need a lot of TLC and watering, and it can take years for any progress to manifest. When I think of what I used to wear at their age, I cringe. Things could always be worse. Much worse.
 
But I can’t help daydreaming of the day when I’ll go shopping with my daughters, and they’ll fall in love with all the lovely, multi-tiered, petticoat-pretty super-long skirts out there. Then I’ll have to switch all my prayers away from ‘let them be modest’ into ‘let me have a million to pay for it all’ instead.
 
 
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Check out Rivka Levy’s new book The Happy Workshop based on the teachings of Rabbi Shalom Arush.