• 12 years ago
Gray hair, as Wall Street in their wisdom has taught us, is boring, drab and ugly.

It's so awful to have gray hair that we should spend a lot of money to buy toxic dyes to cover it up so as not to bore anyone or offend them with our ugliness.

But youngsters: You'll get gray by and by. No need to buy toxic bleaching and coloring concoctions to make yourselves unnaturally gray now. You'll get there.

Please see my Photostream on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/doreen_dotan/

I'd like to see the movement to stop dying hair and letting our natural steel gray, silver, platinum an titanium shades grow in be more than fashion statement. I'd like to see it as the taking up of the Revolution that we left off in the early 70s that failed because we were young and naive and didn't realize that The System was infiltrating the Hippy Movement to steer it off course.

I've been asked why, as an Orthodox Jewish woman, why I do not cover my hair. I welcome the question.
Many men cannot distinguish between that which is erotic and that which is lovely.
Telling women they should cover their hair is one of the ways that Jewish men have dealt with that issue' like preventing women from singing in public.
The say that the female singing voice, like our hair is an "ervah" - things of eroticism.
One woman told me that her Grandfather, a very famous Rabbi, left a synagogue and built another one because when she was three years old he arrived in Israel and when he took her into synagogue at the age of three with him wearing short socks the men started screaming "ervah". He was wise enough to know they were nuts and built another synagogue for the truly devout.
The issue of so many men not being able to discern between eroticism and loveliness, and have appropriate reactions, is evidently not resolved by this method of avoidance. The avoidance seems to make them more unable to discern between erotica and loveliness.
We cannot heal others weakness by humoring them, caving into them, by being made to adopt artificial modes of behavior.

The lovely cannot be hidden, or in some cases destroyed because there are those who are inappropriately excited by it.

At my age and stage and the way I generally comport myself, I know that I am not broadcasting erotica. To tell me to cover that which remains of me that is still lovely is not a mitzvah (a true ommandment of HaShem, all of which bring joy and blessing into the world). It may very well be an averah (a transgression).

I would not presume to tell Jewish women who cover their hair because *they* really feel more comfortable that way to consider uncovering their hair as some kind of statement.