NUM27 Two provisions of the modesty laws with regard to women are so troubling that they divide Orthodox Jews even today. The first teaches that a woman's hair is powerfully erotic; therefore, no one but her husband should ever see it. For "Never even letting the beams of my house see my hair" (Yer. Meg. 1:12), the modest Kimhit merited having seven sons, who all served as high priest in the Temple. A sermon derived from the bitter water ritual during Temple times tests a woman [but never a man] suspected of adultery (Numbers 5:11–31). It allowed the priest to violate tzeniyut [modesty] when judging her: "When the priest uncovers the head of a suspected adulterous he says to her: 'You have departed from the ways of the daughters of Israel, whose habit is to have their heads covered, and you have behaved like the idolatrous women who walk about with their heads uncovered. Here then, be as you wanted to be!'" (Num. R. 9:16). This rule about covering a woman's hair has led many orthodox women to wear wigs in public. Recently Ovadia Yossef, the former Sephardic chief rabbi of Israel and that community's halakhic authority, reacted to the fashionable wigs that some women wear by condemning this practice as extreme immodesty; it draws attention to women in public places. He predicted that both the wig and its wearer would burn in hell and that, should a woman dare to come to synagogue so "coifed," both she and her husband should be excommunicated. The other rule applies to men and says that merely listening to a woman's voice is a grave sexual violation. "Samuel taught: A woman's voice is a gross sexual provocation, as it is written, 'For your voice is sweet and your appearance comely' [S. of S. 2:14]" (Ber. 24a). Thus those who observe this ruling may not attend the opera or theater, or even listen to women on radio, television, or recordings. Of course, you don't need us to tell you that modern women find these rabbinic attitudes regarding women's modesty reprehensible. The rabbis' promised reward for following the laws of tzeniyut, that women would bear prominent male offspring, insults the feminine sensibility even further. How different is the preferred notion of privacy, with respect for the dignity of women as its benchmark. A comprehensive reworking of Jewish modesty is clearly overdue. But this time the leadership must come from our feminist thinkers, who have already demonstrated their creative sensitivity in other areas traditionally restricted to male points of view. We look to them for guidance, to help us refigure reasonable standards of Jewish modesty and demeanor, in speech, interests, and in general behavior of both sexes.