The Privacy Outdoors

There seems to be a consensus among folks who write about homes these days that privacy is (a) a modern value; (b) a modern luxury; or (c) at the very least, a modern amenity.

Perhaps because of the necessary modesty of the pre-modern home (few rooms serving multiple purposes for assorted occupants with little visual and aural barriers) there was an assumption of an accepted, or at least acquired, immodesty of spirit.

But I don't fully agree. We know from the midrash that the rabbis of old valued modesty of person and modesty of household. They cast their imaginations back and tell us that even in the trek through the wilderness, the Jews so valued modesty that they situated their tent openings in such a way that neighbors could not see directly into each others' domains.

And the gemara hailed one woman as being so pious that even the rafters of her house never saw the hair on her head (that is, she always kept her head modestly covered, even in the protected space of her home).

Privacy, so it seems, was always desired, even if not always readily available indoors. It was no doubt hard to finagle in the crowded, well-used square footage of older homes. So where could privacy be found?

One obvious answer is in the cover of darkness, the blanket of sleep, and the feigned deafness of fellow housemates. (Not unlike the way many of us live in apartments these days.)

But there was another way as well, that many of us in the more populated areas of the world have lost. Nature. The great outdoors. Woods and meadows and beaches and glades and gardens.

The rapturous biblical Song of Songs knows of this: "Come, my beloved, let us go into the open; let us lodge among the henna shrubs. Let us go early to the vineyards, let us see if the vine has flowered, if its blossoms have opened. If the pomegranates are in bloom, there I will give my love to you." (7:12-13)

If the indoors was often where we felt exposed, it was the outdoors where, at times, we could be free.

In a dense world that is getting denser all the time, it is hard to imagine that the commons was a place that could hold our secrets. (Though I imagine folks in Wyoming, with just over a half a million people settled across just under 100,000 square miles, might know the isolation of open spaces.)

But it was. We may never be able to feel the power and gifts of nature that our ancestors felt. We may never be able to conjure up what it felt like knowing there was still earth that had not been discovered, places that had not been settled; a "there" that had not been mapped.

We may never surmount the claustrophobic feeling we get when we think of how people have filled the banks and crevices of this tender planet, and peppered the world in volume, construction and waste.

But we should not project such feelings back onto our ancestors, who had a different relationship with relationships, with the gifts of the commons, and the shared-yet-private outdoors.