This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary Rosh Yeshivah Rabbi Jonah Rank, has been sponsored by Elliot Eisenberg in honor of Lisa Eisenberg.
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As an increasingly balding person, I have survived the better part of a decade without enlisting the services of a professional barber. For the most part, I am capable of trimming whatever shortening of (what passes for) hair seems necessary—and I am grateful for my family’s tolerating my occasional requests to evaluate whether I have kept my hair in check. This homegrown approach that I have developed for my hairstyling has also humbled me into accepting the occasional hair snipping performed by a child under the age of 10—a powerful trust exercise if I ever needed one.
Haircare—my own or anybody else’s—hints at the larger contexts of our lives. We may find our hair to be less groomed when life is overwhelming, and our hair may come closer to our idealized visions of ourselves when granted the luxury of free time. Moreover, we may find that our hairstyles change, not necessarily immediately but gradually, as our life circumstances change. In “Hair: From the West to the Middle East through the Mediterranean,” the French anthropologist Dr. Christian Bromberger observed that
changes in hair usually coincide with changes in status, such as a first job, marriage, the birth of the first child… or an appointment to high office. (The Journal of American Folklore, Fall 2008, p. 392.)
Within the Jewish tradition, hairstyling (or the lack thereof) has sometimes reflected ritual or other spiritual demands. For nearly two thousand years, rabbis have generally prohibited mourners from shaving (Babylonian Talmud, Mo’ed Katan 14b). For approximately three millennia, the Torah has instructed men not to round off the corners of their head hair (Leviticus 19:27)—thus prompting sideburns to grow into sidelocks. And ever the Torah articulated how Israelites could opt into becoming Nazirites—dedicating themselves to God by abstaining from a variety of worldly pleasures—no razor would reach a Nazirite’s head; instead, “גַּדֵּ֥ל פֶּ֖רַע שְׂעַ֥ר רֹאשֽׁוֹ” (“the wildness of his head hair would increase”) (Numbers 6:1–5).
Parashat Emor, which opens with special laws about the mourning practices of the Israelites’ priests (Leviticus 21:1–5), specifies that, when mourning a close relative, the priests could not cut their hair so closely as to become either bald or marked with bald patches (21:5). In modernity, when so many of us seek spiritual meaning—and believe that God cares more about our insides than our outsides—one may wonder why the Jewish tradition warns us so much about parting with our hair. Our modern question requires some ancient answers.
In his Anchor Bible commentary for Leviticus 17–22, Rabbi Dr. Jacob Milgrom (1923–2010) emphasized that, by enjoining priests to hold onto their hair, our religion was able to avoid devolving into a “cult of the dead” (p. 1802 and elsewhere). Rabbi Milgrom wrote:
A polemic may underlie these verses against the Egyptian cult, which was obsessed with death and the afterlife and which contained in every temple a cadre of special priests involved in the funerary rites. (P. 1796.)
In contrast, the Torah’s prohibition against its priests encountering dead humans to whom they were not related (Leviticus 21:1–4) meant that the ministers of the ancient Israelite religion could barely officiate at funerals or ritually venerate dead Israelites in their holiest precincts.
Many ancient people, upon hearing of death, world separate themselves from their hair. The Greek geographer Herodotus (c. 484–c. 425 B.C.E.) recalled that the Persian general Mardonius and his whole army, in mourning the Persian cavalry commander Masistius, cut off their hair—plus the hair of their animals (Histories 9:24). The prophet Isaiah testified that, when the Moabite people gathered to mourn, they would become bald-headed and excise all beards (Isaiah 15:2). The Israelite prophet Jeremiah, himself a priest, envisioned the destruction of the Philistine people as the remnant among them mourned with their very bald heads (Jeremiah 45:2).
But what pushed the absence of hair to become a symbol of grief? Rabbi Milgrom concluded that, because “hair continues to grow throughout life (and appears to do so for a time after death), it was considered by the ancients to be the seat of a man’s vitality and life force, and in ritual it often served as his substitute.” Backing up his theory, Rabbi Milgrom offered some evidence in the form of an artifact:
A bowl dating from the ninth century B.C.E. found in a Cypriot temple contains an inscription on its outside surface indicating that it contained the hair of the donor. It was placed there, if the reconstructed text is correct, as “a memorial” to [the Semitic goddess] Astarte, as a permanent reminder… of the donor’s devotion. (P. 1802.)
We are our hair (or our baldness, if that be all the good Lord provides). Moreover, we are heirs to a Torah that teaches us to choose life (Deuteronomy 30:19). Yet there are and will be times when our hair can use a trim. Thus, when the Iberian rabbi Maimonides, near the end of the 12th century, examined whether priests may serve in the Temple with messy hair, his French contemporary Rabbi Avraham ben David retorted that priests needed haircuts every 30 days. (See Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Bi’at HaMikdash 1:10.)
According to the ancient religion, contact with a deceased human corpse could transmit the sort of ritual impurity that would invalidate the sacred work of the priests (as per Numbers 19:13). Therefore, our spiritual forebears uplifted the living by keeping their priests apart from death and by having the priests keep their hair more on than off—limiting the priests’ ability to mourn like their ancient neighbors. The burden of remembering the many complex laws of ancient Israelite ritual, together with the great personal sacrifices that had to be made by absenting themselves from mourning friends and other non-relatives, rendered the Israelite priesthood appropriate ‘just for the family.’ This was not a life to choose, but one people were born into. The whole package of priesthood was far too much to teach anyone not already upholding these complex laws of purity on a daily basis. Ancient Egyptian priests, on the other hand, required minimal training and would only perform their ritual duties for just a few months at a time—often in service of the dead. (See Serge Sauneron, Priests of Ancient Egypt, pp. 16, 15, and 6.) To maintain purity, to promote the sanctity of life, and to remain constantly present for the lay Israelites who needed them—excepting a few trims here and there—the Israelite priests kept themselves and their hair right in place.
In the absence of a Jewish Temple for sacrifices in Jerusalem nowadays, our relationship to our hair has evolved. Personal, professional, social, and cultural expectations have introduced us to different hairdos, yet our religious proclivities may ask us to consider different hair duties. I still believe that God cares far more about our inner spiritual lives than the errors we inevitably make in the physical world, but I am grateful for this divine gift of human hair (however little it may be on my own head). Through our hair, which may continue to grow even after we no longer can, we remember that there may yet be pieces of ourselves—stories, relatives, values, students, friends, and legacies—each of which may outlast us.
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