The People in Spain

I’ve been working my way through The Garden of Wisdom, Rav Arush’s book explaining the Rabbi Nachman tale of the Simple and the Clever. It’s a great book.
 
In Rabbi Nachman’s original story (in Rabbi Nachman's Stories, translated by Rav Aryeh Kaplan), the ‘Clever One’ leaves his home town to travel around the world and to acquire some worldly ‘wisdom’.
 
One of the places he visits is Spain, home to the Spanish Inquisition, bull-fighting and Franco (ok, for the purists, Franco wasn’t alive in the 1800s when Rabbi Nachman originally gave over the story, but I digress.)
 
Apart from torturing Jews and murdering the native populations of what is now South America, the Spaniards were apparently also very fashionable and stylish. So it is that the ‘Clever One’ picks up many wardrobe tips from his time spent there, and when he comes back home, he puts a lot of time and effort into trying to replicate the ‘Inquisition Chic’ he’s seen in Spain.
 
He has a suit made with a local tailor – and is filled with misery when it’s finished. The super-stylish, super-expensive suit has one teeny tiny flaw in the lapel, a flaw that not even the most eagle-eyed fashionista would notice. But for the ‘Clever One’, that flaw is enough to put him off the suit forever, and fill him with misery and despair. Why? Because even though the people at home are suitably impressed with it, the people in Spain would apparently laugh him off the block (if they noticed the flaw in the first place, which of course, they wouldn’t…)
 
I’ve been having wardrobe issues recently, which I’ve written about in more detail elsewhere. But to cut a long story short, I’ve been really struggling to find clothes that match what’s going on inside myself.
 
For years already, I’ve been trying to ditch the long jeans skirt and sweatshirt look, which tag me unmistakably as an ‘anglo’. But finding a replacement style has been really hard, because they just haven’t been ‘me’.
 
Shirts are just not me. I tried, I really did, but I can’t do ‘top button closed’ without feeling like I’m being strangled, and ‘top button open’ isn’t very modest. I tried the layered t-shirt look, with ‘sleevies’ and ‘neckies’ and all the other stuff that’s meant to fill in all the ‘uncovered’ gaps of whatever I’m wearing – and they do, if you don’t move, bend over or move your arms too much.
 
Once I realized that the gaping holes were always in the worst places possible, I gave up trying to dress like a rebellious teenager.
 
I love pullovers, and I used to wear them all the time in London. But in Israel? In 90 degrees in the shade? I just can’t.
 
I wasn’t having any more luck with the skirts, either. For a while, I had a lovely, amazing, Russian seamstress who was making me the most gorgeous, modest and affordable skirts to order. But we moved away from her two years’ ago, which means this year, I was back trawling through ‘frum’ shops trying to find skirts that either weren’t black, or weren’t skin tight, or didn’t have some fake jewellery appliqué in just the wrong place.
 
Finding clothes that are ‘me’ has been excruciatingly difficult. And then, a few weeks’ ago, I went into a clothing shop called ‘Bat Ayin’, which caters to modest-dressing-headscarf-wearing-not-(outwardly)-chareidi types – and lo and behold, there were at least a couple of things I wanted to buy!
 
There was a great gathered skirt, very floral and full and peasant-y, and also a dress. I haven’t worn a dress for decades already – in London, ‘dress’ and ‘modest’ did not go together at all – but here, in the Bat Ayin shop in Jerusalem, there was a gorgeous, modest, amazing dress that I really liked the look of.
 
There was just one problem with it (apart from the price tag…): if I ever wore that dress in London, I’d be committed. It was straight out of some Victorian novel, or the set of ‘Little House on the Prairie’. All I needed was a pair of hobnail boots and a basket and bonnet, and I could get a walk-on part.
 

It was lovely; it was modest; it was almost affordable…
 
But I couldn’t bring myself to buy it. I couldn’t make the massive wardrobe leap into Israel, and forget about what the people in London (or the people in Spain…) would say if they ever clocked me wearing it.
 
I went home feeling very disappointed with myself, because my soul was ready for the ‘Little House in the West Bank’ look, but my intellect just wasn’t.
At home, I picked up the Garden of Wisdom, and lo and behold, I was up to the section talking about the dodgy lapel and the people in Spain. I recognised myself in an instant.
 
I went to talk to G-d about it all, and I made a decision: the dress was still too much for me, but the skirt? The skirt I was going to risk. I was sick of dressing like an ‘anglo’, and trying to keep up with fashionable trends that have nothing to do with how G-d wants me to dress, and everything to do with making women look stupid, at best, and ‘sexy’ at worst.
 
I wore the skirt for Shabbat, and I made such a heartfelt ‘shechiyanu’ prayer on it when I lit my Shabbat candles (the prayer that you say when you buy something new): thank You, G-d, for bringing me to a place in myself where I’m finally letting go of what the ‘people in Spain’ think of me. Thank You, G-d, for bringing me to a time when I’m really ready to be as Israeli, as Jewish, as modest as I can be. Thank You, G-d, for putting me in a country where there’s at least one place that’s enabling me to dress like ‘me’, the real me, the inner me.
 
Laura Ingles, eat your heart out.