This is GQ, not GD or IMHO, so your opinions on other religions aren’t terribly relevant. Your “Why?” has been discussed at length above, but the bottom line is, according to the Torah, G-d does care about how women wear their hair, and Orthodox Jews obviously “truly believe” it. Why? Because the Law says so, that’s why. G-d didn’t, as pointed out above, give explanations for all of the laws, and equating it with modesty, as GilaB noted above, is Rabbinical inference - it’s the best guess for the reasoning behind it.
You sound awfully judgmental here. Some religions (and sects within larger religions) place more emphasis on outward behavior and appearance than others. The bottom line is that Orthodox Jewish thought is apparently not the same as your own thought. These differences are what make the world an interesting and wonderful place to be.
IANAJ, and cannot speak with authority on these matters.
IMHO as a non-religous person who respects others’ rights to believe whatever they want to as long as they don’t thereby hurt somebody else:
Jewish folks follow these rules because they believe that’s what God wants. Just as Catholics used to not eat meat on Friday. Just as some of my relatives believe God doesn’t want them to drink wine. Religion does not have to be logical. You can sometimes find logical reasons that seem to justify a religious rule, but usually that’s not the reason the rule was started.
Are you an expert on the subject that you would have expected to know it?
Married ones only
Because a woman’s hair is considered her “crowning beauty” and, if married, is reserved for only her husband.
Possibly…any of our on-board Muslims care to answer this one? Aldebaran?
Yes, obviously. Or, for a more specific answer, we believe that G-d cares that sex be only within marriage and rules of bodily modesty are there to prevent any breach in this ideal.
Answer a: Because women are not, as a rule, attracted to men because of good-looking hair.
Answer b: Because while there is a passage in the Bible that indicates that married women are expected to have their hair covered, there is no similar passage regarding men.
That’s an eruv(?). It’s not “temple walls,” it’s the walls of your “area.” So what’s an area? Well, the common interpretation is that it has to have unmistakeable boundaries so that you know when you’re inside it versus outside it.
Why do you need this area? Because halakhic law says that you should not travel on Shabbat, and traveling means going outside your “area.” So, if you’re Orthodox and you live in your own house, by strict interpretation you shouldn’t travel outside your house on Shabbat (except to go to synagogue). It’s either travel or travel while carrying something, I’m not certain.
The workaround is that a rabbinic council can declare an eruv to be something larger than just “your house.” I’ve been told that both the New York borough of Manhattan up to the water’s edge and old Jerusalem (within the wall) are both eruvs. That means that an Orthodox person could walk from the Battery to the Harlem river on Shabbat (if she was crazy enough), and Orthodox people can visit each other on Shabbat in Jerusalem and carry food and flowers and whatnot.
Clearly Manhattan has a boundary (the rivers) and Jerusalem has the wall. Other communities wanting to do this have to be more creative. Apparently the little town in New Jersey set up poles with wires (the poles wouldn’t be enough, you’d need wires connecting the poles as well.) I was also told that the Orthodox community of Palo Alto, CA tried to have part of the city declared an eruv by stringing up a distinctive wire on telephone poles, but it didn’t work. Why, I don’t know.
There’s crazy crazy and then there’s silly crazy. Killing people in the name of G-d is just plain nuts. Spending lots of time and effort to worry about carrying on Shabbat seems a bit meshuggenah to me, but it’s not hurting anybody, and nobody is asking me to go along with it. And personally I can understand eruvs a lot better than reality TV.
You’re a bit confused, but understandably so. There are two distinct rules about Shabbat that you’re conflating. One is to not travel outside one’s “area”. That is well-defined (in halacha) as a 2000-cubit radius around the city one lives in, and the city limits are well-defined (in halacha) as the place where houses can no longer be found within 70 cubits of one another.
The other rule is not to “do work” on Shabbat. (The above travel does not constitute “work” and is forbidden by an entirely different Biblical verse.) Included in “work” is not to carry things through a public domain.
The Rabbis have devised certain halachic finesses to allow a Sabbath-observant Jew a little more freedom. Understand, though, that this is working within Torah law, not, heaven forbid, a profaning of it. The source of your confusin is that in both of these areas, the workaround is called an “Eruv.” But it means two different things, depending on the context. The rivers around Manhattan define that “city limit” that applies to rule # 1. However, there is no permission to carry there. The kind of Eruv that would be required to get around rule # 1 is called an “Eruv Techumin,” and for simplicity’s sake will not be discussed here.
The wires-on-poles thing is to finesse the carrying restriction, and is called an “Eruv Chatzerot”. Basically, since the restriction on carrying is on carrying through a public domain, the thing that this structure does is re-defines the circumscribed region as a single, shared private domain. The reason this is not merely disingenuous semantics is because according to strict Torah law, there are certain requirements of a public domain which are actually achieved by very few locations (ownership of the property is not relevant regarding this halacha). Most towns/neighborhoods fall under a category of domain called (in Hebrew) “Carmelit” which the Rabbis had forbidden carrying in as a precautionary rule, but the Torah does not forbid it. The Rabbis, therefore, built an “out” in this rule by declaring that a “Carmelit” that had been circumscribed by walls can be treated as a private domain for the purpose of carrying on Shabbat. Why wires on poles, then? Because an open door can also be considered a wall, as long as it has the proper form of a door…two sideposts and a lintel. That is how the wires (acting as lintels) on poles accomplish this.
This sort of hair-splitting always reminds me of children trying to wiggle through Mama’s rules without exactly breaking them. Where you follow the letter of the law and ignore the spirit.
You know, like obeying the command “don’t touch the cake” by scarfing it down while holding your hands behind your back.
I think we all better hope G-d has a sense of humor.
An integral part of (Orthodox) Jewish belief is that the letter of the law is the spirit of the law. That’s why so much of the Talmud is centered around textual analysis of scripture.
For some reason this reminds me of the story I heard that at one time – possibly during the Middle Ages – some Catholic clergy declared rabbits to be fish and therefore o.k. to eat on Friday.
These posts bring to mind a former customer of mine. Years ago this middle-aged woman shopped in my store, and she always sported a rather odd-looking wig. It was boxy, very squared-off, and not even close to her natural hair color. It was so obvious it was a wig, because it only covered the top two-thirds of her hair. Turned out she was the wife of a rabbi, so I assumed the wig was an affirmation of some tenet of her faith. My co-workers and I always wondered why the wig was not made to be less obvious. A neighbor of mine told me the wig was probably made out of horsehair, and this style was more common back in the day. Any info in this regard? If she was trying to be modest, why wear something that was bound to draw attention? Or was this something completely different from what has been discussed here.
Back in the day, a good wig was almost impossible to get, and even more ridiculously expensive than it is now. (Custom ones now can run two or three grand, so you can imagine.) There are certain rabbis that hold that a wig is the best form of hair covering, and so women who followed these rabbis wore what wigs they could get, which were mostly pretty poor. You’ll only see very elderly ladies who are very set in their ways wearing such things now.
StarvingButStrong, G-d definitely has a sense of humor. To quote Kevin Smith, one only needs to look at the platypus to know that.
Does a married woman pay special attention to her real hair to make it as beautiful as possible for her husband? Are cutting, styling, or coloring permitted?
There were bonfires in Brooklyn yesterday, with hudreds of wigs being tossed into the fire. Couldn’t help thinking, “might have been nice to donate them to a center for women going through chemo . . .”
I wonder if sanitary issues might prevent “recycling” of wigs, Eve - how would one make a wig sterile for re-use by someone whose immune system is likely already challenged?
But burning the wigs to be rid of them? Why would that be necessary? I can’t imagine the smell…
All Hindu ceremonies require some sacrifice. The most common sacrifice, especially when an individual is performing a ceremony at home (Hindu religious ceremonies may be performed anywhere – any place may be consecrated – and by anyone, not just priests), is the burning of incense. When visiting a temple on an otherwise ordinary day, the most common sacrifices are money and flower petals.
In a public ceremony, especially one on a particularly holy day or specific religious occasion, it is usual to sacrifice flower petals and food (fruits, nuts, and milk sweets or rice-and-lentil preparations). After the ceremony, the god or goddess consecrates the food and returns it to the worshipers as a blessing (blessed fruits, nuts, and milk sweets are called prashad, blessed rice-and-lentil preparations are called bhog) and it is to be consumed as a prayer. (All eating must be done after the ceremony is finished. Eating is considered a spiritually unclean act in Hinduism, so anyone intending to perform a religious act must remain ritually clean by fasting from dawn until the ceremony is completed.)
Religious ceremonies for more specific situations require more specific sacrifices, such as the cutting of hair. This is most common as part of the ceremonies required following the death of a parent. When someone dies, a living relative (preferably a son) must perform certain rituals to ensure the fate of the dead person’s spirit. These rituals can be long and exhausting (lasting for days) and require complex sacrifices, such as the cutting of hair. People entering a religious life (depending upon the sect) are often required to shave their heads completely (except for one lock) and keep it that way. Shaving the head in requirement of such an obligation is considered a religious act.
The most powerful form of sacrifice, for the most dire ceremonies and penances, is, of course, blood sacrifice. In the ancient stories, the most powerful Hindu ceremony was the horse sacrifice, which could only be performed by very powerful people, because it required the military conquest of every place the horse wandered before it was sacrificed. Everyone knows about the thag cult in the 18th century that performed sacrifices in the form of ritual murder. But human sacrifice has never been a part of mainstream Hinduism and blood sacrifice today exists in mainstream Hinduism only in the form of the sacrifice of goats at the Kali temple in Calcutta.
No. It would be a mitzvah to give a wig to a poor woman undergoing chemo who couldn’t afford one, but not that wig. Idolatry is forbidden to everybody, Jew or non Jew, and nobody’s supposed to use idolatrous things, so giving the woman that wig would be leading her to sin.
Eve, Captain Amazing answered your question, but I felt it would be best illustrated by Biblical precedent:
I Samuel 15 - G-d, through Samuel, orders King Saul to destroy the Amalekites and anything associated with them. Saul executes the war, but saves the choicest of the cattle and sheep, thinking that it would be better to sacrifice them to G-d than to destroy them wastefully. Samuel informs him (verse 22): “Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the voice of the LORD ? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.”
The charitable instincts you reference are indeed very nice…but that’s not a proper source for giving. It would not be a mitzvah. Other wigs can be donated to chemo patients…these, G-d says to destroy.
Sunfish:
I do believe that fire is the recommended form of destruction for anything combustible. I’m aware that stone idols are to be pulverized and the dust thrown in the sea (or any natural body of water). Not certain what the recommended method of destruction is for metal objects.
My (limited) understanding is that while wearing a sheitel, like wearing a kippah, is halachic, it’s not strictly a mitzvah. It’s more a very old custom (IIRC, older for women than for men). As such, I’d suspect there’d be considerable dispute as to whether the origin of the hair used in a sheitel is germane. Right? Wrong?
