The new me.

So, I LOVE covering my hair.

I’ve been married for almost six months now. Other than cohabitating with a man and moving to Australia, covering my hair is really the biggest change to my everyday life.

In practical terms, this means it now takes me an extra 5-10 minutes to get dressed (and considering that it only used to take me about 5-10 minutes total, that’s a significant time increase of 50-100%). It also means that every day, I get to choose a pretty, brightly-colored scarf to wind around my head. It means I never have to worry about how my hair looks, or whether or not it’s clean. I just have the one hairstyle now. Very occasionally I’ll wear my hair down with a hat, but usually it’s just the messy bun sticking out the back of my scarf - easy peazy! That simplifies things!

In more spiritual terms, it means my long, beautiful, cascading golden curls (Read: crazy yellowish brillo pad mass of knots) are now for my husband’s eyes only. No man outside my immediate family will ever see my full head of hair again, assuming I continue to cover into the future.

I love that!

Here’s a fun fact about me: I love privacy. Just adore it. Give me walls, curtains, shades, fences, all manner of things separating me from the rest of the world, and I am happy. Part of this is my innate introvertedness and general suspicion of humanity, yes; but part of it is just loving feeling free to be me. Knowing no stranger can look in on my life or my body without my permission. It makes me feel cozy and protected and empowered to do whatever I want within my private domain. My space is delineated from your space, and my space is mine.

Now I get to gather my hair, quite literally, under the veil of all that is private to me and my home life. It’s mine and Phil’s, just ours.

The concept of hair covering interested me long before I became religious. Like most other people, I thought it was misogynistic and backwards and a sign that Jewish women were oppressed, blah blah blah. I had no intention or remotest thought of ever doing it.

My first real exposure to it apart from popular culture and a sort of general knowledge was in Tzfat, where I did Livnot in 2009. Different groups of Orthodox women have different and unique styles of hair covering, and the one in vogue among the spiritual, hippie-dippie crowd in Tzfat was a weighty turban-like affair that wrapped around and perched atop the head elegantly in a way that often seemed to defy physics. The scarves used were generally the kind of large, colorful, swirly-patterned pashminas that you buy when you’re visiting Middle Eastern countries, with fringe that dangled out mysteriously. There was a lot of volume involved.

These head-covering women fascinated me. I would stare at their scarves, wondering how on earth they stayed on, how they wound around the head so perfectly and artistically, but wondering most of all what the women really looked like. Somehow, by covering their hair, they were obscuring themselves, and it seemed to me that you couldn’t really know their true faces, their true appearances, without the frame of hair. Even though covering their hair actually exposed their faces all the more, somehow those faces seemed unknowable. Distant. Something about hair revealed how one really looked, and without it, they remained, essentially, strangers.

I recall clearly two incidents involving hair covering while I was in Tzfat that made an impression on me. The first took place when I walked into a bathroom to find one of our counselors, a married woman, fixing her mitpachat (hair covering in Hebrew) in the mirror. I had never seen her without it before, but of course I’d wondered, and I got a sudden shock as her whole face and head were suddenly clear to me, available, visible. She looked so different. And younger.

As I came in, she was winding her very long hair into a tight bun before settling the scarf back into place. She wasn’t startled or upset by my seeing her with uncovered head, her demeanor was perfectly pleasant, but I could tell nonetheless that she would have preferred if I hadn’t seen her. There’s no problem with other women seeing you bare-headed; the only real prohibition is against men who are not your husband. So there was no halachic issue, but there was the slightest sense of discomfort. I wondered why. In fact, I wondered why women didn’t always take their hair coverings off when they were in same-sex groups. Weren’t the coverings uncomfortable? Wasn’t taking them off a relief, a chance to let loose?

The second incident was at a bris for a local family. I was standing with another married woman involved with Livnot, and I asked her which of the women in the shul was the mother of the baby boy having his circumcision.

“There,” she said, pointing to a group of turbaned woman. “There, the beautiful one.”

I looked, but I still had no clue who she meant. To me, it was just a collection of faces. Without hair, how could you tell who was beautiful?

Eventually, Orly succeeded in pointing out to me the baby’s mother. I studied her face, underneath the gold-patterned mitpachat. I could see that it was attractive, that its lines were elegant, expressive, bold. Yet I would never have said she was beautiful, because somehow, beauty ceased to be possible without hair. Hair revealed beauty!

That moment stayed with me. I doubt if I realized the full implications of it at the time; all I knew was that it was harder to tell if someone with covered hair was pretty.

On kibbutz I encountered many more forms of hair covering. Some women wore scarves wrapped fully around their heads without showing much hair, apart from an inch or two in the front, like many of the women in Tzfat. Others wore scarves that wrapped around the front of the head but were open in the back, showing a bun or ponytail or hair worn down. Some just wore headbands. Some, usually older women, wore hats. Some women didn’t cover at all. Some covered on Shabbat or at shul, but not during the week. This was Modern Orthodoxy: whatever you wanted to do, within the bounds of halacha.

Still, I had no intention of doing it. I couldn’t see why I would want to hide the pretty hair that I loved.

But eventually I made aliyah and became observant, and I started looking at hair covering differently. As a fashion accessory, it was so cool. I loved the deti-leumi (national religious, roughly analogous to Modern Orthodox) look: the pretty, colorful scarves covering either fully or partially, the way women made it look so stylish and attractive.

And at the same time, I longed to be married. The whole prospect of that single-to-married, uncovered-to-covered transition was endlessly interesting to me. Whenever I saw a woman I had known as single after her wedding, I would study her hair covering intently. I would mentally compare the before and after. I would envy her having crossed over, having been inducted into the mysterious tribe of frum married women.

It was incredible how much a hair covering could change your appearance. I wondered how they felt about it, how long it had taken them to get used to it, how they settled on the style they’d wear. Everything about the process was interesting to me. In time, as friends began getting engaged, I started attending tichel parties, kind of the frum equivalent of a bridal shower, where friends brought all kinds of beautiful scarves and hats as gifts and the bride tried them on one by one, everyone oohing and aahing. I wanted that.

Everyone always said the same thing: that you had no idea before you were married what kind of covering you were going to like, and you always ended up wearing the same five ones and leaving the rest in a disused pile. This intrigued me - that after marriage, you immediately launched onto this learning curve where you had to cover your hair before you really knew how, knew what you liked, what suited you. In the weeks just after marriage, girls would try out different things, tying their scarves differently, wearing this kind of fabric or that size, this fold or that color. And often in the first few days, the covering looked just a tad bit awkward, skewed, messy. The bride would constantly be fiddling with it, touching it, pulling it, fixing it. Within a few months, though, she’d gain confidence and establish her hair covering style. She’d be able to tie her scarves quickly, effortlessly, getting it right on the first try, not even needing a mirror. They’d be balanced, pretty, secure.

Just as they were figuring out what marriage was like, how to adjust to living with a husband and all of the little idiosyncrasies that came along with it, the same process was happening with their head coverings.

My God, I wanted that. I wanted to go through that process too. I wanted to have a pile of pretty, bright, colorful scarves neatly folded in my closet (read: strewn all over the floor). I wanted to be the kind of woman that I gazed at in wonder on the bus, effortlessly, prettily covered. Effortlessly, prettily married.

Occasionally (okay, more that I would like to admit), I played dress-up. I had a few scarves that I used, of course, as scarves but that could also be worn as mitpachot, and sometimes I would spend a silly hour in front of a mirror experimenting, tying them on, wrapping them around, seeing if I could make it look as good as the married women did, seeing what a married version of me might look like, wearing them around the house for fun. One night I bought a few cheap scarves at a mitpachat store and took a bus to a friend’s house, where we watched how-to videos on YouTube and tried out the different folds and laughed at each other looking so frum.

I was always pretty sure that if I covered, it would be partially. It simply wouldn’t be reflective of my personal style or my religious identity to cover fully. I’m on the modern side of Modern Orthodox. I wear pants (yes, even as a rebbetzin), I wear short sleeves. I’m committed to Orthodoxy and halacha, and I also live in the world. I draw my lines where they feel right for me. I wanted to cover in a way that was visible and obvious, making clear my membership in the Orthodox community, and also in a way that felt modern, accessible, young. I wanted my hair covering to be authentically me: religious but not dogmatic, modest but not frummy, standing out but not too much.

I don’t know if that will always be the case. People change. I know many women who changed their hair-covering custom over time. Most went from more to less: from fully to partially, from partially to not at all. But a few went the other way, from showing an inch or two of hair to showing not a wisp, from leaving their hair down sometimes to keeping it up always. I can’t say for sure that I won’t make some move up or down the scale at some point in the future. But I think that’s totally okay, natural, and right. What’s right for one stage of your life won’t be, and shouldn’t be, right forever, and hair covering isn’t exempt from that rule.

Like with almost everything else, Phil and I were very in sync on this issue. Before we were engaged, I asked him what he thought about his wife covering her hair. He gave the right answer, of course: that it was totally up to her. When pressed, he cautiously said he’d probably prefer it if, as a rebbetzin and for the sake of the community, she covered partially or at least on Shabbat, but, again, up to her. Satisfied, I admitted that I wanted to cover anyway.

I didn’t know exactly how I would do it. I knew I wanted to wear mitpachot like the deti-leumi Israeli women, and I had no interest whatsoever in a sheitel. But as for the exact kind of scarves I would wear and in what style, I didn’t know. After all, I knew from my friends’ experience that it would take some time to figure it out. So when Phil and I visited Israel shortly before our wedding, we went to the same mitpachat store I had visited so many years earlier to buy practice scarves and spent 500 shekels on the most random assortment of scarves and coverings in all kinds of fabrics, patterns and sizes. I knew I wouldn’t end up wearing half of them, probably (with hindsight, this assumption was very accurate), but as I wrapped them across my head and admired them in the mirror they all looked so cute. I bought long swaths of heavy, stretchy fabric, studded with glitter, for Shabbat; thin little square scarves in funky patterns; rectangular cuts of cloth in different textures and color; shmata-like headbands that I could throw on when plumbers or delivery people knocked; non-slip headbands to secure the scarves to my hair; cute little pins and strings to accessorize. We walked out with two bulging bags. A few times before the wedding, I practiced tying on this or that. I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing, but I figured I would learn what worked.

I was so excited. I selected the first head covering I would ever wear as a married woman, a long, blue floral scarf in a sort of netted material, and carefully packed it, along with a non-slip headband and two bobby pins, in my case for the day after the wedding. (But actually, the first time I ever covered my hair was not the day after the wedding but at around 2am the night after the wedding when I woke up with a terrible headache and threw on a headband to go down to the hotel reception desk for aspirin. Very spiritual.)

That first morning of marriage, it did take me quite a while to get it right. I fumbled and futzed with the scarf for probably 15 minutes, winding and unwinding, tying and retying, positioning it just so, checking every angle in the mirror, and feeling nonetheless like it was about to slide off the minute I walked outside. In fact, all day long I had the feeling it was sliding off, though on a few occasions that’s because it was. I took it off and retied it in various Manhattan bathrooms at least three times that day. I was so super-conscious of it. I looked at it in every reflective surface we passed. I touched and checked it nonstop. I was finally one of those women. I was so proud of it, and of my new husband, as we walked down the street in Riverdale, where people would actually know what it meant. I was married and now everyone (ish) knew it. I was a married, Orthodox, modern woman. I felt extremely pretty and special. I felt like people were looking at me and my scarf, though they definitely weren’t.

Day One of marriage. Day One of hair covering.

Over the next few days, getting dressed and selecting which mitpachat to wear was a fun morning activity. Phil, who, for anyone who doesn’t know is quite stylish, helped me decide whenever I couldn’t, pointing out that a solid colored scarf would work better with this patterned dress, etc. The house we were staying at had only a small makeup mirror, so, reflecting a few inches of face and head at a time, I tied and retied. It always took me several tries and some experimental head shaking before I felt confident enough to walk outside, and I almost always had to retie it at some point when I was out. The second or third day after the wedding, I blithely threw open the front door when some gutter cleaners arrived, only realizing afterwards that I hadn’t covered my hair.

In the beginning, mistakes were made. We left on our honeymoon to Rome a week after the wedding, and I had to choose which mitpachot I wanted to pack, still without really knowing quite yet what I liked to wear or how. That resulted in unfortunate hair covering incidents like this one:

Shudder.

But it didn’t take long before I started settling into the style I liked: hair in a messy bun, long rectangular, colorfully printed scarves wound around my head in a few artful layers, ends tied or tucked. Occasionally I wore other kinds, but this was the style I gravitated towards, and soon enough tying it on became easy and routine. Every once in a while I discover another little trick to making it easier to wrap, or more secure, or cuter. I may be working on this for the rest of my life.

My usual hair-covering "look."

I love going out into the world this way. I love looking a little different from other women. I love feeling this sense of intimate privacy about something that’s usually so public. Most of all I love that no one sees me the same way my husband sees me.

Sometimes when I stand in front of the mirror and take off my mitpachat, I’m struck by how different I look. Suddenly my head seems so much smaller, and I look less exotic. I’m just a regular person again, someone no one would glance at twice in the crush of city life. My head covering marks me as something out of the norm, someone with a story to tell. Without it, I’m just me. But that’s the thing: no one other than my husband can really know “just me” anymore. There’s this layer, not only the physical one made up of my headscarf, but the metaphorical one that wrapped around the two of us the moment we were married. A curtain dropped, in a sense. Our relationship became private and personal in a new way. Marriage does that, somehow. You’ll tell your friend about the stupid fight you had with your boyfriend, but you’re less likely to tell her about the stupid fight you had with your husband, because that’s your business. Somehow, the act of marriage creates a contained world with only two people in it, and everything within it becomes a little bit sacred, veiled, mysterious to the outside world.

For me, my headscarf represents exactly this transition. That unknowable unmarried-to-married transformation that was so frustratingly out of my grasp for so long. I was outside, and now I’m inside. I was alone, and now I’m partnered. I was uncovered, and now I’m covered. This almost miraculous transition is the lens through which I view my hair covering. No wonder I love it.

The question of women seeing me uncovered is interesting to me now. I feel I understand the counselor who was uncomfortable when I saw her bare-headed, and I understand why women don’t remove their coverings even in women-only gatherings. For me, at least, it’s related to this sense of being slightly obscured not only to other men but to the entire world outside of your marriage and family. I don’t necessarily want women in our community to see me uncovered, even though it’s not a halachic problem, because I want to fully inhabit the “frum married woman” identity that I hold. I want this, my covered self, to be my visible self. It doesn’t mean that I’m just as strict with covering around women as I am around men, but it does mean that outside of private spaces, I want to be covered. It’s not that I don’t want to be known to people, or that I enjoy feeling distant; neither of those things are true. I still value forming and enjoying strong, intimate friendships and relationships, but now I am doing that as the married version of me, in more ways than one.

There are two main Jewish reasons why some women choose to cover their hair. One is siman, or sign. Your hair covering is a signal to the outside world that you are a married woman, one more immediate and obvious than a wedding ring. When a man sees a woman whose hair is covered, he knows she is unavailable, and therefore (ideally) won’t look at her as a sexual prospect. That’s assuming he knows what it means, which most people in the world don’t, but many in the Jewish community do.

Many women choose not to cover their hair at home around male guests, because if a mitpachat is a signal to the outside world that you’re married, then being in the home you share with your husband is an even more obvious clue. It’s common for women to consider the walls of their house as their “head covering”, and take it off the minute they get inside, no matter who is visiting.

The other reason is erva, nakedness. In Biblical and Talmudic times, a woman’s hair was considered so sexy that it constituted literal nudity, and for a married woman to show her hair was thought to be immodest. It was also a more common practice at that time for women to cover their heads. This reason has less force nowadays, as style and culture have evolved to the point where head covering is no longer prevalent in the general population, and it is therefore no longer seen as an important feature of modest dress. There is an opinion held by parts of the Modern Orthodox community that married Jewish women aren’t required to cover if that is the practice of their community.

I relate to both of these halachic concepts. I also love that my hair covering signifies not only that I’m married, but that I’m a religious Jew. Observant men wear kippot, and are thereby identifying and presenting as observant Jews to the world, but observant women don’t have an equivalent signifier (unless you count denim skirts). Orthodox women wear jeans, t-shirts, some wear tank tops. In other words, we can ‘pass’ as your average woman any day of the week, except maybe Shabbat. But once I cover my hair, I’m telling the world (the portion of the world that knows what it means, anyway) that I’m a proud, religious Jewess. And I think that’s important.

I also like the idea that a part of me that’s considered beautiful and sexy, my wild mane of hair, is unavailable to the male gaze. I in no way assume that most or all men would view my hair in this way if it were visible — after all, a lopsided, frizzy, messy, top bun isn’t necessarily the most alluring sight in the world — but there’s simply no question that hair adds sex appeal. It’s human nature. In fact, some evolutionary scientists have suggested that the only reason humans still have hair on their heads after losing 90% of their body hair (name the last gorilla you saw with flowing, shining locks) is sexual selection. In his book “The Body”, writer Bill Bryson calls hair “a tool of seduction since time immemorial.” See? Proof that Torah and science go hand in hand.

A lot of women struggle with the concept of hair covering, even when they get married with the full intention of doing so. I know quite a few who started out doing it but quickly stopped, and either because they had ideological or personal issues with it, or felt no spiritual connection to it. I know women who hated the physical feeling of having something on their heads all the time, and some who found after a time that it just wasn’t compatible with their everyday lives for whatever reason.

I wasn’t really afraid that I’d start covering and suddenly realize I hated it. I think I always knew I would enjoy it. But until I actually started doing it, I didn’t know exactly how it would be meaningful for me. And even up until I started writing this post, I think I hadn’t fully plumbed the depths of my feelings about it.

There are, of course, some downsides. Whenever I need to pop outside even just for a second, to get the mail or bring in a garbage can or just answer the door, I have to remember to jam a hat on my head first. At the beginning, I found this challenging, and kept opening doors bare-headed. Now, only a few months in, it’s become second nature. In fact, it can even be a handy excuse for why I can’t take the garbage out!

And sometimes I have one of those “bad mitpachat” days, basically exactly equivalent to a bad hair day, when my scarf just won’t tie properly, or it keeps falling off, or I can’t get it to look right, or I can’t find one that goes with my outfit and I have to try on ten of them before I settle. This can make getting dressed a bit of an ordeal.

But for the most part, I feel super #blessed that this is my practice, that getting to wear bright, colorful accessories every day as part of my outfit is also a spiritually significant act.

I guess it’s just another moment in my life when I’m so grateful for Judaism, and for my chosen place within the Modern Orthodox community. These traditions just feel so right for me. They give me what I need when I need it. Within this strange, tangled thicket of laws and rules and regulations are deep truths that resonate for me in every aspect of my life.