Splitting Hairs
What women’s hair covering teaches us about Jewish law, culture, and change
This week on Madlik we split hairs with Professor Michael Broyde.
And I mean that literally.
For over half an hour we explored an emotionally charged and symbolically loaded practice in Judaism: women’s hair covering. But somewhere along the way, the conversation stopped being about hair.
It became about something much larger.
How does halakha actually work?
Is Judaism governed exclusively by immutable texts and legal precedents? Or does lived communal practice itself shape the law?
What fascinated me most about Michael Broyde’s remarkable new book Splitting Hairs was not his conclusions so much as his method. Again and again, he returned to a concept that I had never fully appreciated: the obligation to defend the inherited practices of Jewish communities.
Not explain them away.
Not tolerate them reluctantly.
Defend them.
Broyde quoted Rav Moshe Feinstein:
“Let me begin with an important rule: . . . All which is widely done even only in one large community of Israel is not in error since certainly it was done based on the rulings of one exceptional Sage, since it is a community of people who observe Torah and its commandments; one must find a reason why they conducted themselves this way, so they should not be considered in error, even if other communities do not engage in this practice.”
Broyde emphasized repeatedly during our conversation that Rav Moshe’s principle applies specifically to Orthodox communities. In other words: when an observant community behaves in a way that appears inconsistent with accepted halakha, rabbis have an obligation to search for a halakhic defense.
Fair enough.
But I could not help hearing something broader and deeper hidden in Rav Moshe’s language.
“All which is widely done…”
“One must find a reason…”
“So they should not be considered in error…”
Hidden in those words — perhaps not even so hidden — is a profound instinct to defend the dignity and honor of Jewish communities themselves.
Period.
Not simply Orthodox communities.
Not only communities that look exactly like ours.
But Jewish communities struggling to preserve Jewish life under radically different historical, social, and cultural conditions.
That instinct may be one of Judaism’s secret superpowers.
And nowhere was this more moving than in the extraordinary responsum of the Ben Ish Chai.
The Ben Ish Chai — Rabbi Yosef Chaim of Baghdad — was writing at a moment of cultural transition. Baghdad was opening itself to European influence. Jewish women were seeing different norms. Families were struggling. Husbands were caught between traditional parents and modern wives. And instead of issuing a thunderous condemnation, the Ben Ish Chai did something remarkable:
He listened.
Writing in Judeo-Arabic for ordinary Jews, he records the argument of European Jewish women in full:
“Look at the women of Europe whose custom is not to hide themselves from strangers. Nonetheless their clothes are orderly; they do not reveal their bodies except only their faces, necks, palms, and heads. It is true that their hair is uncovered and this custom of theirs is not possible according to our laws. But, they have one justification. They say, ‘Yet still, this custom (of having their hair uncovered) was accepted by all their women — both Jewish and gentile — to go with their hair uncovered like the revealing of their faces and hands. It does not cause sexual thoughts in men when they see it with their eyes.’ These are their words which they answer for this custom and we do not have an answer to push away this answer of theirs.”
Read that again.
“We do not have an answer to push away this answer of theirs.”
What humility.
What honesty.
What confidence in the ability of halakha to confront social reality without panic.
During the episode, Broyde noted that later generations may have been uncomfortable preserving this passage intact.
His comment was unforgettable:
“The later generations are always uncomfortable with comments of previous generations. And this is an example of that… when you find venerated people saying things that you think are ridiculous, you don’t share them so quickly.”
That line may explain more about Jewish history than entire libraries of scholarship.
And then there was Rav Ovadia Yosef.
At first glance, Rav Ovadia appears to stand at the opposite pole from the Ben Ish Chai. He fiercely opposed the Ashkenazic practice of women covering their hair with wigs (sheitels). But beneath the halakhic argument I sensed something else: a fierce defense of Sephardic integrity against the Ashkenazification of Orthodoxy.
Rav Ovadia writes:
“The women of our Sephardic communities have always conducted themselves with head coverings that do not resemble hair itself, and one should not abandon the customs of our mothers and ancestors in favor of foreign customs.”
For Rav Ovadia, this was not merely about modesty.
It was about cultural memory.
About refusing to surrender Sephardic authenticity to an increasingly monopolized Ashkenazic definition of Orthodoxy.
Ironically, one of the sharpest moments in our conversation came when Broyde himself attacked the Ashkenazic embrace of wigs.
His critique was devastatingly simple:
If hair is erotic and must be covered… why is it permissible to cover hair with more hair?
As he put it:
“We don’t permit things that should be covered to be covered by something that looks like it.”
In one sentence, centuries of practice suddenly became strange again.
But perhaps the most surprising moment of all came near the very end of the conversation.
After writing a 500-page book on modesty, Broyde suddenly cautioned against confusing modesty with virtue itself.
He recalled a conversation in Israel:
“An eminent Torah scholar remarked to me that the liberalities in modesty rules in our community in Israel comes from the fact that the community that we don’t like — this was a reference to the Arab community in Israel — is certainly more modest than us… You can say many bad things about Israel’s Arab neighbors, but you probably can’t say that they’re immodest.”
That observation stopped me cold.
Because suddenly modesty itself became destabilized.
Maybe modesty is not an eternal fixed quantity.
Maybe it is relational.
Sociological.
Contextual.
Maybe that was the argument all along.
Which brings us back to the title of the episode: Splitting Hairs.
At first it sounds like a joke.
But perhaps splitting hairs is exactly what Jewish tradition has always done.
Taking tiny textual details seriously enough to open enormous conversations about law, sociology, identity, authority, memory, and change.
Not because Judaism is obsessed with minutiae.
But because Judaism believes that inside the smallest details lie the deepest truths.
Check out the Sefaria Source Sheet: https://voices.sefaria.org/sheets/731684
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