Mark Washofsky

importance of restraint in the way we conduct our personal and interpersonal affairs. It is to remind ourselves that freedom is not an end in itself. As Edward Bloustein put it in his discussion of American privacy law,“what provoked Warren and Brandeis to write their article was a fear that a rampant press feeding on the stuff of private life would destroy individual dignity and integrity and emasculate individual freedom and independence.”'*’ The survival of freedom, that is to say, is conditional upon our willingness to honor the essential dignity of each member of our community. Self-restraint, the reasonable limits that we can and do accept upon our personal expression, is the price we pay to secure this end. These restraints are set by our basic sense of self-respect, that modicum of dignity that we demand for ourselves and therefore are prepared to guarantee to others, that we cannot yield or forego and still hope to fulfill our human potential. Dignity is as essential to us as freedom; indeed, we actualize our freedom precisely when we use it within the boundaries dictated by k vod hab riyot. And the respect that we accord to those boundaries is what we mean by“the value of privacy.”

Conclusion. In this article, I have argued that respect for personal privacy is a substantive value in traditional Jewish law as well as in progressive halakhic thought. I have also suggested that, to protect our privacy in the age of the Internet, we shall have to cultivate habits of moderation and restraint(tzniyut) that are vital to the maintenance of our self-respect and human dignity(k'vod hab'riyot). While we should persevere in our support for protection against unwarranted intrusion by outsiders into our personal domain, we must realize that the battle for Internet privacy begins— and will ultimately be decided— at home, with each of us. This is the message of the Jewish legal tradition, a message that ought to resonate with us progressives no less than with our fellow Jews .