I was in Grade 5 at school when all the girls and some of the boys were starting puberty. Our bodies, emotions and perceptions of the world were changing. I remember an exercise in the school playground that a teacher asked us to do. It made me react badly and question my sanity and that of those around me.
The teacher asked the girls and boys to pair up, hold hands and run across the basketball court one pair at a time. I looked over at my partner Shane, thought about holding his hand (with all eyes on us) and I simply refused.
While other the other boys and girls completed the task, Shane and I were left standing alone. Everyone stared. The teacher called my mother, I was handed a detention and still made to do the exercise later in the day.
Even at the time of this incident, I wondered why had I reacted as I did? Was I a prude, mentally undeveloped or just plain stubborn? After all, it was just a stupid handholding thing, wasn't it?
I more or less forgot about the incident but it passed through my thoughts years later, when as an adult I started to seek spiritual answers to some of life's questions.
Before moving to Israel, I went to Syria whre the women dress so guardedly, sometimes only showing their eyes. In the markets of Amman and Damascus I noticed an unusual phenomenon - although the women were mainly covered in fabric to hide their physicality - these same women were haggling over the prices of provocative lingerie.
"It is known," commented my friend Cara, "that religious Arab women dress modestly in public but sexily in their homes - only their husbands see them in revealing clothes."
How different from the culture I had grown up in, where fashion is about pleasing the crowd.
I decided to read what the Qur'an (Muslim Holy Book) had to say about modesty and found these words,
"Say to the believing man that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that will make for greater purity for them; and Allah is well acquainted with all that they do. And say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty; and that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what must ordinarily appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty except to their husbands..." (Qur'an 24:30-31)
Then I turned to Judaism, also a religion built on precepts of modesty or "tzniut" in Hebrew.
Once inside the religion, I learned some special things about Jewish modesty customs and came to learn that modesty may be a self-preservation mechanism and a way to reach one's spiritual goals.
Before that, I'd been to gurus and peace circles along my travels, but couldn't shake my doubts as I hugged strange women and men hoping to find acceptance. Why was it when I was looking for nirvana, it felt like the men in the group had a different agenda -a sexual one?
Religious Jewish men and women do not touch unless they are married. That includes kissing and handholding and most certainly any other kind of physical contact. The women also cover themselves with long skirts, elbow lengths shirts and refrain from speaking with men of the opposite sex.
The bottom line in Jewish modesty, is that sexual energy is a strong and powerful force and has to be applied in the right measure and context for a person to grow into his or her potential.
Jewish teaching is that sexuality is not energy one should play with or exploit, but reserved for the one you love at an appropriate time.
One of my religious friends told me about how he felt toward his late wife. By not talking with or relating to other women besides her, he said, she became the doorway to everything female: his archetypal woman. Literally and metaphorically, he only had eyes for his wife. How many married women would like to hear that?
Another friend told me how she had decided to stop hugging male friends as is common amongst spiritual-community type people. She said on one occassion the male friend that she hugged hello to, actually got an erection and that was the last time she offered more than a cheek to a male friend.
The Hebrew concept of modesty is no doubt heavily connected to spiritual elements.
The religion teaches that each person is a pure and G-d given soul and by maintaining a sense of purity or innocence we can have a truly spiritual life.
In many ways, the entire Jewish faith is built around precepts of modesty and the culture is explained well by the secular author Wendy Shalit in her book, Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, published by Free Press in 1999.
"In today's world from anorexia to date-rape, from our utter inability to feel safe on the streets to stories about stalking and stalkers, from teenage girls finding themselves miserably pregnant to women in their late 30s and early 40s finding procreation miserably difficult, this culture has not been kind to women. And it has not been kind to women at the very moment that it has directed an immense amount of social and political energy to 'curing' their problems," said Shalit in an interview with CNN.
Shalit's book has not been published without controversy, most notably in The New York Times and Hustler magazine. Shalit however has also earned a large following of women who do not identify with the sexual revolution their parents carved out for them.
To help others find their modesty within, Shalit has started up an online support forum: http://www.modestyzone.net/.
There, about 20 women writers from all ages and backgrounds voice their opinions as to why they have chosen a life more modest than that given to them by mainstream culture and education.
Columnist Mona Charen calls the online resource, an "antidote to the vulgarity that is shoved in our faces from magazine covers, television, raunchy radio, movies, and TV shows."
On my own journey I decided to try dressing like a modest religious woman. I covered my body from head to toe in fabric but in that dress code I felt discriminated against. Eventually I returned to secular dress, mainly jeans and t-shirts. Though I still have appreciation for modest religious dressing, what I have discovered, is that it is good to be me, to be comfortable in what I wear and to know that it is in my heart that I hold my spiritual values. It is not what I wear that matters so much as what I feel when I dress and that I feel authentically true to who I am.
Amazon.com is currently listing Shalit's book - Girls Gone Mild: Young Women Reclaim Self-Respect and Find It's Not Bad to Be Good.