The Chief Rabbi of Kfar Chabad, Israel Rabbi Mordechai Ashkenazi released a letter a few days ago banning women's wigs if the hair is longer than the top of a woman's shoulders, and he also banned long hair for single women and girls. This has upset large swaths of Chabad. But is Ashkenazi really wrong?
The Chief Rabbi of Kfar Chabad, Israel Rabbi Mordechai Ashkenazi released a letter a few days ago banning women's wigs if the hair is longer than the top of a woman's shoulders, and he also banned long hair for single women and girls. This has upset large swaths of Chabad. But is Ashkenazi really wrong?
First, here's a rough translation of Ashkenazi's letter written on Monday, January 28 (the original is posted at bottom):
16 Shevat 5773 [Monday, January 28, 2013]
To the administration of the Beis Rivkah Seminary Kfar Chabad:
I would like to warn about the prevailing trend of immodesty with regard to the type of wigs worn by married women:
1) Leading rabbis, headed by the Rebbe, preferred covering the head with a wig instead of a tichel [a type of cloth or knitted covering] due to the fact that the wig covers all of a woman’s hair including the sideburns.
2) Obviously, this only applies when it is clearly visible that the wig is a head covering and not the natural hair.
3) Therefore, all wigs with long, loose hair – even more so when they are made of human hair that is meant to look like the woman’s own hair - are not permissible to be used as the hair covering [required by Jewish law].
4) Since this is connected to serious transgressions [including] revealing the uncovered hair of a married woman and other prohibitions [that come from that] such as licentious thoughts of [sexual] arousal both in regards to married and unmarried women, I am therefore of the opinion that the administration of the school should take a strong stand and educate [Bais Rivka students] according to the halakhic ruling of the rabbis, that the length of the wig should not go further than [the top of a woman’s] shoulders and that the [hair of the] wig should be pulled back [in a ponytail or a bun] and not [be allowed to be] loose.
5) Also it is apparent to me that the hair of unmarried girls should not be too long and should be pulled back, like our sages have ruled is the appearance and modest form.
In the merit of being stringent about righteous and modest appearance, the girls should merit to build hasidic homes for the generations to come, and we should be able to greet the Messiah and say: "Look at what we have grown."
Rabbi Mordechai Shmuel Ashkenazi
Chief Rabbi and Av Beis Din of Kfar Chabad
The reaction on a messianist Chabad news website, Chabad.info, was almost uniformly hostile to Ashkenazi while reactions on other Chabad news blogs was more tempered, and the blog posts themselves much more supportive of him.
The basic halakha, however, is clear.
Wigs that significantly improve on a woman's natural hair are problematic; wigs that are long and flowing are forbidden by most poskim, rabbinic decisors of Jewish law.
Even those that hold that no head covering is necessary in the US or Western Europe (Rabbi J.B. Soleveichik, for example) rule that the hair must be short and conservatively styled.
So Ashkenazi is correct about the very long wigs – especially about the very long human hair wigs.
But he's wrong in asserting that "the" reason the Rebbe "preferred covering the head with a wig instead of a tichel [a type of cloth or knitted covering] due to the fact that the wig covers all of a woman’s hair including the sideburns."
The Rebbe also preferred wigs because it made outreach work easier and it made it easier for newly Orthodox married women to agree to cover their hair, and he made this clear.
However, Chabad's halakhic history is ban wigs as a halakic head-covering for married women altogether, as the the Tzemach Tzedek, the third Chabad rebbe, did.
There have only been two out of the seven Chaabd rebbes who were also poskim, decisiors of Jewish law. Chabad's founder, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, who was trained in non-hasidic yeshivas, and his grandson the Tzemach Tzedek. None of the other were poskim, and the Rebbe was very clear that he himself was not one.
So Ashkenazi is wrong to give the Rebbe's preference for wigs the halakhic import he gives it. The fact is that the rabbis who were "led" by the Rebbe are almost exclusively Chabad rabbis who rushed to create rulings to support the Rebbe's publicly stated opinion. In other words, the arrow was shot, it struck the barn and lodged there, and the rabbis rushed up, drew a target around it and called the Rebbe's shot a bullseye – hasidic halakha at its finest.
But what about unmarried girls and women? Why do they have to make their hair short and unattractive? You would think the opposite should be true – and it was.
As haredi society has grown, as hasidism has replaced halakha for many haredi Jews, modesty standards have become much more strict, and this is an example of that.
The truth is that women are viewed as the cause of men's sins. Women are the enticers, the flighty, barely human beings whose smell, whose looks, whose voices, and whose hair lures men to sin.
That is the essence of the the Jewish laws governing women's modesty.
Would you have become hasidic or haredi (or stayed hasidic or haredi if you were born into a hasidic or haredi family) if that truth had been taught you?