Dear Matzav Inbox,

The Navi Michah gives us one of the most quoted, and least understood, summaries of what Hashem wants from us: “הִגִּיד לְךָ אָדָם מַה טּוֹב וּמָה ה’ דּוֹרֵשׁ מִמְּךָ כִּי אִם עֲשׂוֹת מִשְׁפָּט וְאַהֲבַת חֶסֶד וְהַצְנֵעַ לֶכֶת עִם אֱלֹקֶיךָ” : He has told you what is good: to do justice, love kindness, and walk modestly with your G-d (Michah 6:8).

We tend to read v’hatznea lecheches as a dress code. But tznius was never primarily about a hemline. It’s the instinct to keep something private because it’s precious, not shameful, but because some things lose their kedusha the moment they become public property. A chuppah. A private conversation between spouses. A family’s pain. Tznius is the recognition that not everything sacred needs an audience.

That is the tznius we, as a klal, are forgetting how to practice.

A generation with no delete button

We live inside a machine engineered to extract the private and reward its exposure. Every platform runs on the same transaction: give us something raw that used to belong only to you, and we’ll give you attention in return. An entire generation has been trained to believe that an unshared experience is an unprocessed one, that pain doesn’t count until it’s posted, that a simcha isn’t complete without a caption.

We used to understand that some rooms have doors for a reason. Now we build content out of what used to happen behind them.

The podcast challenge

Nowhere is this clearer than in the explosion of frum podcasts and inspirational content. And the honest place to start is with the good. These platforms have brought real Kvod Shamayim into places it never used to reach, a person driving alone, a teenager scrolling at midnight, someone sitting in a hospital waiting room. They’ve given people who felt alone a sense that they’re not the only ones. They’ve turned commutes into chizuk, made Torah hashkafa accessible to people who would never have opened a sefer, and given ordinary people the courage to share nisyonos that used to be carried in total silence. That is not a small thing. It’s a genuine kiddush Hashem, and it deserves to be said plainly before anything else.

The challenge isn’t the impulse. It’s what happens when a business model built on engagement meets material that was never meant to be engagement in the first place.

A podcast needs episodes. Episodes need hooks. Hooks need drama. Even content that begins with good intentions, as chizuk, can get pulled toward its most “shareable” version: a dramatic thumbnail, a scandalous title, because a modest telling doesn’t perform the way a scandalous one does. The very platforms built to spread Torah values can end up structurally pulled against one of the most basic of those values, that not everything needs to be said to everyone.

This isn’t a claim about any one podcast or story; it’s a claim about the pull of the machine itself, a pull that even the most well-meaning creator has to actively resist. An audience fed a thousand hours of content this week needs something sharper next week. That’s what oversaturation does: it raises the threshold of what people are willing to expose, of themselves and of each other, just to be heard, even on platforms that set out only to inspire.

The cost we don’t see

Tznius protects the individual, but it also protects the tzibbur. A community that consumes an endless stream of other people’s private pain slowly loses its own capacity for privacy. We start to feel entitled to know, to feel that a family’s struggle is ours to have an opinion on, because it arrived in a well-produced 45-minute episode.

Chazal tell us Bilaam, looking down at the tents of Klal Yisroel, could find nothing to curse, because the entrances didn’t face each other. מַה טֹּבוּ אֹהָלֶיךָ יַעֲקֹב, “How goodly are your tents, Yaakov,” came from the fact that we historically built our lives so we weren’t looking into each other’s windows. That was never coldness. It was the thing worth blessing.

What it asks of us

To walk modestly with G-d doesn’t mean walking invisibly. It means knowing some things are between you and Him, or between you and the people closest to you, and that this isn’t a deficiency to be fixed with more disclosure. It’s the whole point.

Klal Yisroel’s beauty was never that we had nothing to say. It’s that we understood some of what we carry is holy specifically because it’s unseen. That instinct isn’t old-fashioned. It’s part of our DNA, baishanim, rachmanim, gomlei chasadim. As Chazal teach us, “אֵין הַבְּרָכָה מְצוּיָה אֶלָּא בְּדָבָר הַסָּמוּי מִן הָעָיִן”, “Blessing is found only in that which is hidden from the eye” (Taanis 8b). May we be zoche to internalize that truth, to guard what deserves to be guarded, and through that zechus, be zoche to the ultimate brachah, bimheirah b’yameinu.

Larry Brigson

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