On Hats and Hindrances

The day I took off my hat I felt liberated. After four years of marriage, during which time I accumulated an extensive array of berets, caps, scarves, snoods, and other popular and not-so-popular designs for hair-hiding, I walked out of my apartment with my own long brown mane completely exposed. I felt ten years younger. And I had the tingling sensation that I could actually feel who I was, once again -- rediscovering that part of me, that fresh and vivacious young woman who had somehow gotten lost beneath layers of cloth -- on the head, the arms, and the legs. I didn't even realize how missing I had been until I found myself again.

The day I took off my hat I felt liberated. After four years of marriage, during which time I accumulated an extensive array of berets, caps, scarves, snoods, and other popular and not-so-popular designs for hair-hiding, I walked out of my apartment with my own long brown mane completely exposed. I felt ten years younger. And I had the tingling sensation that I could actually feel who I was, once again -- rediscovering that part of me, that fresh and vivacious young woman who had somehow gotten lost beneath layers of cloth -- on the head, the arms, and the legs. I didn't even realize how missing I had been until I found myself again.

Obviously this was a decision long in coming. The ambivalence I felt when I donned my first hat as I left my wedding stayed with me. Although my original reason for covering my hair was rooted in my commitment to full adherence to the religion -- a desire to lead a more pious life -- even back then, this particular act was one of the more difficult ones for me. I was not unfaltering, as I so tried to be. This ambivalence expressed itself in a continuous loosening of the act -- first leaving out a fringe, then exposing the ponytail, then just putting a hat on my head with my thick, mid-back-length hair sticking out. Until finally I decided, that's it.

It happened almost innocuously, though Jung would claim that nothing is by accident. When Shabbat guests arrived one Friday afternoon, I opened the door in a huff, wiping my hands on the dishtowel and juggling to try to make my friends comfortable while not burning the soup. It was only ten minutes later that I realized that I wasn't wearing a hat. And not only did my friends not seem to notice or care, neither did I. That's when I realized that the whole practice was something of a pretext.

We were taught in yeshiva, when I was an 18-years-old, somewhat independent-minded and good-hearted yeshiva-girl, that the practice of hair-covering was a chok, an indisputable and inexplicable law, like the red heffer. Later on, other teachers gave other explanations. One said it was to "save" your most intimate parts for your husband. Another said that it was a symbol of woman as forbidden to other men. There was a notion floating around comparing hair to genitals and voice, those parts of woman's physicality that must be obscured from contact with weak and sexually uncontrollable Jewish men. With our hair out, we were told, we should feel as if we were standing naked. Others taught that this is simply the law as it has been passed down, that a man is allowed to divorce his wife for burning the soup and exposing her hair. Certainly, this rabbi said, we would not encourage our boys to do such a thing, but nonetheless, law is law. We shouldn't seek to understand, we should just do.

Nobody told us that we had the option of not doing it. There wasn't even a discussion about how we might feel in this practice. In the places where I learned, person's experience was irrelevant -- only obedience mattered.

Not only were experience and choice absent from the discourse, but the entire discussion of women's hair covering treated women and their bodies as objects. Whether our hair is somehow our husband's property, or simply another piece of our bodies that is subject to the male gaze so adored by Jewish sources, the discourse is one of women objectified. But of course, I didn't fully understand that until after I took my hat off. Because when I did, I listened to my inner voice, and it was telling me that I wasn't naked after all.

I was reminded of the time, at the airport on the way to making aliyah -- back during our first year of marriage when I was still idealistic about halacha and other things -- when we were stopped at JFK security. Something was setting off the metal detector. I emptied my pockets, took off my belt. It still went off. Finally, the security guard said, "It's coming from under your hat." Torn between guilt, shame and fear, I recalled the metal barrette that I used to hold up my long hair. The guard said, "Take off your hat." I meekly resisted, thinking about ways to explain to them how uncompromisingly important it was for me to keep that hat on. Yet, the guards were resilient. And so, although there was a voice inside demanding religious freedom and insisting upon the importance of my modesty, the dominant voice at the time said, what's the big deal? Indeed, I took off the hat, took off the barrette, went through security, made Aliyah with my hat on, and didn't think about the incident again. Until that Friday afternoon, when the dominant voice truly took over, and I left the head covering for good.

One day, shortly after I had put my hats back in the closet, I was at a wedding where one of the bride's close friends, a young twenty-something woman wearing a long skirt and a hat covering every strand, was dancing wildly. As the music continued, she took off her shoes, arms flailing, kicking up, sweating and smiling in love and friendship. And then it happened. Her hat fell off. Suddenly, the arms came down, she stopped dancing, the smile was replaced by a frowning blush, and she practically crawled to the edge of the circle to replace her hat. Sometime later she returned to the circle, part of her vigor diminished, but she kept on dancing anyway. Watching her, my heart ached.

Why must we feel shame, I thought, seeing her hair? She didn't feel shame at having her stockings exposed. So why her hair? This woman felt shame because she had been taught that she was supposed to feel shame when her hat was off. That shame reflected an acceptance of socially determined norms. Like Archer in Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, we live in societies that make determinations about right and wrong, and very few people have the courage and independence to challenge those norms without feeling that shame. For this poor woman, taking her shoes off was "okay", but taking off her hat wasn't. So it was not about some objective form of exposure or modesty. It was about what she understood as acceptable and what not. I realized then how very socially constructed our practices are. We feel shame when we are told to feel shame, we feel pious when we are told we are acting piously, and we shake our heads in disapproval when we see people going against our societal conventions.

Taking off my hat was a watershed for me. Hat off, I found myself looking around and seeing Orthodox Judaism differently. Where once I bought into the whole way of thinking that women's status in Jewish law is a reflection of their more "spiritual" level and their greater moral responsibilities, I found myself doubting that whole line of thought. Instead, I looked around and saw a lot of women covering themselves up, almost hiding. I saw women who were expected to feel embarrassed to see their bodies. Like that famous story we were once taught about a woman who merited extra rewards in the world to come because she even covered her hair even in bed. I began to look at this whole corps of Jewish texts that shape our view of ourselves. And I began to wonder, are these texts, indeed, making me more pious, more religious and divine or is there something else at work here?

That something else to me is human interpretation. So much of what we do in the name of religiousness or Orthodoxy seems to me less about Godliness and more about what men would like to think is Godliness. And that has a lot to do with how they would like to see their own society, particularly women around them. So if men have this picture of their world in which women are silent and invisible, so be it. The amorphous corps of Jewish legal texts we have come to call halacha is full of human assertions about what is right and wrong for women to be. And I have come to see all these claims not as Torah but as an instrument of male power over female beings.

Head covering has become a lens through which I see the way women are treated in Jewish law. Whether it's marriage and divorce laws, with the torment of agunot, the mechitza, rules of inheritance, exclusion of women from prayer and religious accreditation, or the notion that a woman's voice is sinful, they all become the same issue: what Jewish women are expected to be. For me, the oppression of women in Judaism -- like in so many other societies throughout the ages -- is not only a major failing of halacha, but as a mark of Cain, a stain on the garment which makes it entirely unwearable. How can I justify adherence to a set of codes that keeps women as secondary beings? And while the Orthodox community paints itself as somehow superior, immune to such mundane phenomena as "sexism", it remains mired in the swamps of these antiquated and anachronistic legal texts, so very reluctant to admit that it, too, oppresses women. All the apologetics in the world about women's "higher" spiritual level cannot change it.

In fact, I feel that language often used to convince women that their inferior status is "better" is merely another tactic for maintaining the status quo of gender relationships within Orthodoxy. Say women are "better" when you mean "different" for the purposes of exclusion, and the subjugation remains hidden. Say women are more "emotional" when you mean less intelligent, and women may not realize what is being done to them. There are so many ways to hold a person down. We experience these exchanges all the time. If we express anger and the listener says, "Oh, dear, you must not be feeling yourself today," we have just been silenced in a sweet voice -- and convinced that our anger is forbidden. If a woman's husband says to her, "You don't want to drive, you don't want to shop, don't bother yourself with all that, and I'll do everything for you," her hands have been tied in the guise of supposed love that is really control.

I almost feel lied to. During my 15 or so years in Orthdox yeshivot, I think I was being molded into a woman that doesn't exist. A woman who is so pious and self-yielding that she has no sensitivities, no needs, no desires, no need for voice. The quiet piety of this mythical figure bears the colossal burden of supposedly keeping the Jewish people alive. But this woman does not exist. Where are we? Where is the real life thinking, feeling woman, who experiences herself, who is in touch with her own humanity and needs? Is there room for her within all this dictated behavior?

Our tradition, written and enacted by men, controls and manipulates us no less than other traditions. By telling us that it is our obligation to cover ourselves in the presence of men, it deprives us of self-knowledge by making our experience with our bodies about men, not about us. Women as sexual objects, women as responsible for others' actions, women as blamed and guilty, women as invisible. The messages tied in with head covering reflect an understanding of woman as different than man, a sexual object, subject to male gaze, fulfilled only in marriage, whose body is designed for the fulfillment of male desires. Moreover, while the man has urgent, uncontrollable sexual needs, the woman's job is to suppress her own needs and cover her body lest she become the sinful temptress. Woman as ultimately responsible for man's transgressions. As if we didn't have enough guilt.

A recent shocking recent expression of this male-centered perspective on female body was the resistance of religious councils in Israel to allow breast cancer detection information to be placed in the mikvas out of concern for "modesty". Although the men finally relented, the struggle highlights the extent to which religious life takes this distorted male position.

This, then, is the message we get as religious women. In the religious educational system, the foremost institution for constructing social norms, women's appearance carries with it expectations of submission. Girls in yeshiva -- as I once was and perhaps still struggle against -- discuss with one another how they are going to cover their hair when they are married. In the delusion of choice, we would sit in classes and discuss the particular ins and out of how, why and how much. But the choice to not cover is not really a choice. Sure, some students may privately articulate their own plans for not covering hair, but that is considered in the yeshiva world to be outside truly acceptable behavior. We as girls were told rather than heard. We were lectured to about how their adherence to subservient forms of behavior represent God's will via halacha. Be good, be quiet, do for others -- and of course, cover your body at all times, no matter what --and we will thus be serving God. A social construct presented as if it is couched in the unshakable unquestioned truths of the universe. A very powerful influence indeed.

I took off my hat so I could see myself. So I could hear myself. The more I have come to see and hear, the more I have been able to perceive what happens around me. It saddens me to see so many women silent, obedient, and covered. Jewish tradition ought to be full of life, energy, spirit, and woman. Instead women are busy serving others' needs, serving the needs of a society fixated on self-perpetuation and resistance to change. It is so very, very sad. I have taken off my hat, and now I am looking for the Judaism that I once loved. So much of it seems covered in the ugliness of control and subjugation. I keep looking. I find comfort in Shabbat, in song, in friendship and study. But more than anything, I want to help other women find themselves. For I can no longer love a Judaism where women are absent. That is just not my Judaism anymore.

I would also like to see religious schools help girls take ownership of their bodies. It means running and sweating, and doing yoga. It means having frank discussions about sex, allowing the girls to engage in what Michelle Fein calls "a discourse of desire", and acknowledging their own sensations and emotional flows of energy. It means allowing for conversations about Jewish life that not only consist of the "how tos" of halacha -- how to cover your hair, how to prepare for the mikva, how to serve your husband -- but that allow for an encourage a discussion about the emotional impact of observance. How do these young women experience their behaviors, their expectations, their Jewishness and their womanness? The notion that there is room for personal experience within practice is still relatively new to Orthodox Judaism. And yet it is so vitally important for the health of our daughters -- and sons, as well.

Head covering is not just about hair. It's about women's relationship to the society around her. The time has come for us to begin to view women in relation to themselves, not just in relation to the men around them.