The Bakh, Part 1: His Text

לא ילכו בנות ישראל פרועות ראש בשוק אחת פנויה ואחת אשת איש: נראה דנפקא לן מדאיתא פרק המדיר (כתובות עב.) ואיזהו דת יהודית?  יוצאה וראשה פרוע.  דאורייתא  היא דכתיב (במדבר ה יח) "ופרע [את] ראש האשה"!  ותנא דבי רבי ישמעאל אזהרה לבנות ישראל שלא יצאו בפרוע ראש.

 דמדלא קאמר אזהרה לאשת איש אלא סתמא אזהרה לבנות ישראל אלמא דאחת פנויה ואחת אשת איש באזהרה.  מיהו במרדכי כתב ס"פ [סוף פרק] מי שמתו (ברכות סי' פ) ע"ש  "[וכתב] ראבי"ה (סימן עו) וז"ל [וזה לשונו]: "כל הדברים שהאזהרה למעלה לערוה דוקא בדבר שאין רגילות להיגלות אבל בתולה הרגילה בגילוי שער לא חיישינן, דליכא הרהור" עכ"ל [עד כאן לשונו].

ואין לפרש דדוקא בבית ובחצר אבל בשוק אסורה לצאת  דהא ברפ"ב [ראש פרק 2] דכתובות (טו: ) שנינו אם יש עדים שיצאת בהינומא וראשה פרוע כתובתה מאתים ויצאת פירש"י [פירש רש"י] (ד"ה [דיבור המתחיל] אם יש עדים) מבית אביה לבית בעלה ואפי' [ואפילו] דרך השוק 

משמע, וכן נהגו וצריך לומר דבפנויה בעולה קאמר, אבל הבתולות אינן באזהרה. 

The daughters of Israel do not go with an uncovered head in the marketplace,  both an unmarried and a married woman: It seems to originate in what it says in Ketubot chapter “” (daf 72a): “What is Dat Yehudit?  She goes out with an uncovered head.  But that is from the Torah, as it says (Numbers 5:18) ‘And he uncovers the head of the woman’ [context is the Sotah ritual, as explored in these posts].  The house of Rabbi Ishmael says, a warning to the daughters of Israel that they should not go out with an uncovered head.”

Since it does not say “a warning to a married woman”, but rather simply “a warning to the daughters of Israel”, both unmarried and married women are included in the warning.  However, in the Mordechai, at the end of Brachot, chapter “One Whose Dead”, section 80, it says “the Ra’avya writes: ‘All the matters in the warning about is specifically about erva [nakedness], in a matter that they do not usually reveal, but we are not concerned about a virgin, who is accustomed to revealing her hair, because there is no [concern over] improper fantasy.”

And one should not explain that this [that a virgin goes with an uncovered head] is specifically in the house or courtyard, but [her going with an uncovered head] is still forbidden in the marketplace, because at the beginning of the second chapter of Ketubot (15b) it says that if there are witnesses that a woman went out in a hinuma, and her head is uncovered, her ketubah is 200.  [Going out in only a hinuma is sufficient legal evidence that she was a virgin when she married, and therefore gets the higher ketubah value.  This implies that unmarried virgins do not cover their hair, even in public.  For some more about the ambiguous meaning of the term hinuma, see this post]  Also, Rashi explains (in his comment beginning: If there are witnesses) that this means when she goes from her father’s house to her husband’s house, even by way of the marketplace.  This is our custom, and therefore it is necessary to say that the Tur meant a non-virgin unmarried woman [when he said that unmarried women also cover their heads], but virgins are not included in the warning [from the house of Rabbi Ishmael, in Ketubot 72a.]  

This seems pretty lengthy already- so some thoughts about the Ba"kh's position (and the usual information about who he was) will come in a following post.  I will add here that the quotation from the Mordechai comes from his comments on the recitation of the bedtime Shema.  This is a digression based on the principle that he is establishing for what a man may see of his wife while reciting Shema.  In my mind, that almost makes it more reliable, because it isn't on the topic where he might have something to prove, at that point, it's just a good sociological proof, from his perspective.  

More Pictures of My Head

Another round of what I wore, from earlier this week.  (Today is a major push at the moving thing, plus a trip to the gym, and shabbos preparations- not an outfit that's real worthy of being seen, and I'm already all sweaty- we moved the first part of the bed this morning, and will do the rest this afternoon.  On the one hand- it's a lot lighter than we thought, and I can totally do it.  On the other hand- it's awkwardly shaped, of course, and it's fairly hot out.)

This is a mild experiment- I put on a small square scarf, very low down on my forehead, then rolled the front of my larger square scarf a little before putting it on at a normal place on my head- perhaps a little farther back than I might put a scarf to start with, regularly.  Then I folded the first scarf back over the larger one.

And then I had lighting issues with the webcam.  So- here is approximately the same pose, several  times over with various adjustments.  (So that you can enjoy my very minor trials and tribulations.)

And then, from the back it's just a regular old bun:

I'm always confused about the use of fringed scarves.  A lot of people really like them- but I'm always afraid that they look messy.  (It doesn't stop me from wearing them anyways, when I have them- this scarf, for example, was a birthday gift.)

In Coming Attractions: I have a post on the Ba"kh in progress, you should finally see some halakhic content here again either later today or (more likely) early next week.

Weddings: The Bride

I spent some time, before my wedding, contemplating what I should do about covering my head at our reception.

I thought about leaving my veil on- but it was fairly large, and I thought it would get in the way of dancing.  (As to why I still had my veil over my face on the way Out of our wedding- well, I was too distracted to remove it, and no one else noticed.  In fact, it turns out that my husband kissed me under the chuppah through the veil...)  

I considered going bareheaded for the reception, but that felt very strange and pretty wrong to me.  I'd been wearing some sort of head-covering (kippah/scarf/cap/etc) for 6+ years by that point (only last summer), and  being at a significant event without one- especially when there would be eating, brachot, and divrei Torah involved- did not feel appropriate at all, for me.  So I ruled that out pretty quickly.

I briefly also considered finding a white scarf or crocheting a cap or kippah for the reception.  This would have made putting a hair-do together rather complicated, but it was my default option for a while.  (This would have been one more project for an already DIY heavy wedding.  I made the centerpieces, kippot for our guests, and sort-of-matching kippot for our immediate families, besides starting and not finishing an atarah for my husband's tallis, which was our huppah.)

Then I went to a friend's wedding, who also wears kippot/small scarves.  Her sister had put together a scrap of the lace from her dress (removed during alterations) with a shiny hairclip, and she wore that in her hair as a  kippah during her reception.  When she offered to lend me some things they had gotten for their wedding and weren't going to need afterwards, I asked if I could borrow that as well.  She was happy to loan it, and I did indeed wear that all day- I had the hairdresser put it on when she did my hair, and put the full veil over it, and only removed the latter after the ceremony.  It gave me a great chance to enjoy having my hair out for that last day, and also feel like I was covering my head.

 Here it is under the veil, at the chuppah.

And here it is actually serving its function, during the dancing.  

What did you do with your head/hair at your wedding?

Quick Picture

More verbal content will be coming soon (I'm working on a post about some halakha, but as we're moving, the books I need to reference are over at our new place- but we don't have internet there yet.  I also have one about my wedding in the works- you may see that sooner).  Instead, today will be a quick picture, for now...

Talk to you more soon!

Personal Connections

After taking yesterday mostly off from moving (I packed a few boxes of clothes, but that's about it- my husband's winter things fit in 1 box- that's about as much space as my sweaters, and I'm far from a clothes horse), today, we jump back in.  So I put on a favorite scarf- it's one that had been my mother's, but she didn't use it much, and gave it to me at some point.  Nothing fancy- but the connection makes me feel good, and capable.  The perfect thing for today.

Do you have any head gear that gives you a pick-me-up from its associations or source?

Double Trouble Shabbat

We managed to get pictures of both my head-do's for shabbat this week, since I somehow managed to still be all "coiffed" at the end of shabbos.  However, those daytime photos come at the end of a day with a Lot of walking in it- we walked to have lunch with friends about 4.5 miles south of us, and then decided that hey, let's walk back too, instead of hanging around until the end of shabbat.  So- be merciful on the little strands of hair that are yearning for outer space, in those photos.

Night:

This was me going rather wild- there's a small scarf tied as a headband underneath it all, which you can barely see in these photos.  Then I put on a long rectangular scarf (blue and silver), and a folded smaller one  (pink and purple) around that.  I took a third scarf (light blue and black) and wrapped it around my bun once.  After that, I made two braids, each with one tail of each of the three scarves.  It was a lot of fun, but might have been a bit too much- I think I'd skip defining the bun, the next time I want to do scarf-braids.  On the other hand, as someone who lived in braided hair for years and years of my youth, it's fun to have some again, once in a while.  This was enough fun that it was totally worth it.

Day:

For daytime, I was more moderate than for Friday night.  I used two rectangular scarves, with one tied regularly, and the other sort of scrunched up, then tied a little behind it.  I twisted the tails together, and wrapped them around my bun. Then I topped it off with a dollar-store scrunchie.  I really liked the effect, and it brought together all the colors from my outfit.  (You can also see the progress of our packing and move in the background.  Sorry it's so chaotic.)

I Forgot To Name This Post

These photos came out a little bit washed out, but give the general idea.  There's a bandanna as a base layer, with a full-sized tichel over it, starting farther back on the head.  I took one tail of that scarf and looped it up crown-style, and took the other and wrapped it around my bun- sort of a gentle compromise between the two styles.  I like how the bandanna underneath gives the back of the tichel a little bit of loose volume.  It's a nice little change of pace for someone with very fine hair.

You've been seeing a lot of the same colors lately, because, between the heat and moving, I've been wearing t-shirts a lot lately, and I have only a few of those- about enough to get me through a week without repeats...  Several of them have the same/similar sorts of colors.  The result is fairly obvious, I guess.

A Pop of Color, and Some Thoughts

Today we're starting our moving process.  We're moving just a few blocks away, so we're not renting a truck, etc, and instead are doing this in stages.  How many stages is yet to be determined.  We've acquired a hand-truck to help- but it will still be a ton of shlepping.  We'll see how this works out.

So my head-covering is fairly simple- it's going to be a hands-on kind of day.  On the other hand, I wanted to bring the colors from my t-shirt and my skirt together, somehow.  So I threw this together:

I just tied a scarf, as usual, then took a second one (in this case, a fairly thin one, since I wasn't looking for so much extra bulk), and wrapped it around my bun once to anchor it/shorten it a little so that it matched the length of the tails of the other scarf, then twisted them together, and wrapped them around the bun.

The result: what looks like one, plain scarf in the front, but provides a little surprise of color in the back.








And now for something completely different: I was reading a blog post reflecting on how socially important it is to be beautiful- but not to look like you care about it/work for it too much.  This is no surprise, I'm sure.  But it brought up all those questions about how I use appearance, and what sort of message this kind of blog sends.  On the one hand, for me, this is a hiddur mitzvah.  On the other hand, does it take head-covering and make it something more about attractiveness than about the religious and spiritual aspects of the practice?

I try to strike a balance, but given that a lot of my reflective capacity  has been involved in considerations about work for next year and moving, this week, there have been a lot of style posts, and certainly very little halakha or serious reflection.  Life tugs in different directions, and it needs to be able to adapt.  Still- I don't want this blog to turn into just a "how to make your head look pretty" blog- that isn't quite the point, for me.

Making Use of Narrow Scarves

Between a conversation with a friend and a forum I read, I've recently encountered several people trying to figure out how to use narrow (meaning not wide enough to cover the whole head in one pass) scarves to cover their head.  Here are a few of the "work-arounds" that I've figured out, so far, for making use of a scarf that isn't quite wide enough to easily cover your whole head.

1. You can loop it around your head twice, so that the first time covers the front, and the second loop sits farther back on the head and covers the back of your head/your hair.  This is a little hard to keep on if you tuck it in at the back, though.

2. Use it as an under-layer or over-layer with a larger scarf.  As an under-layer, it frames your face, but isn't being asked to provide full coverage.  As an over-layer, you see the whole scarf, but there's another scarf providing the extra width.  If it's missing only a little bit of width, you can use a wide headband in front, instead of another whole scarf, also.  You have to make sure that this doesn't slip, though.

3. Make it into an accent-scarf: Use another scarf to get the functional stuff done (wrap it, normally, around your head), and bunch up, fold, or twist the narrower scarf, and tie it, like a headband around your head.  You can then take the ends of the two scarves and twist them together to use around your bun or the top of your head, or layer them individually, alternating. Even more options include braiding them or letting them hang loose down your neck.  Similarly, you could wrap the large scarf around a bun, and use the accent scarf to go around the bun, or to cross it (as in my recent posts from this week).

3b.  Another use as an accent scarf is to tie a larger scarf as usual, then twist its tails with the accent scarf, and bring both ends up as a crown.  (I think I should do this again soon, so I can add an illustration.)  This is particularly good for scarves that are both narrow and slightly shorter than the usual.

4.  If you have a cap or large kippah, you can wrap the narrow scarf like a turban/headband, with the cap covering the center of your head, like this.

What other ideas can you add to my list?

What I Wore: Quick Colors

Sorry this is just another, quite simple "What I Wore".  Things have been sort of fretful around here- a possibility (which has come through, it seems) for full-time, rather than part-time work for next year (which had been all I'd managed to line up), and needing to find out if it was possible at this point.  So- here's a belated post for the day.  Perhaps tomorrow will produce something more thoughtful...

So here's a quick way to add some additional color and height to a regular bun-style.  It also adds some definition to your bun.   Tie your scarf as usual, then take a thin scarf, wrap it around your bun, starting from the top, cross it below the bun, and wrap it around the top of your head.  If it's long enough for the ends to come all the way to the back of your head, tie them there.  Otherwise, tuck them under the first scarf, so that they stay securely in place.