With That Very
First Cut, the Child Is Tamed
Jewish Daily
Forward Elissa Strauss April 19, 2015
Of all the
coming-of-age milestones my 2.5-year-old son has already passed
through, none has impacted me quite as much as his first haircut.
That first shearing, the transformation of the hair on his head
from disordered to ordered, wild to tame, left me, to tell you the
truth, despondent. So unsure was I of the decision to have his hair
cut, even after it was done, that I rejected the lock of hair
offered to us by our chatty Armenian barber. The haircut had
happened, but I wasn’t quite ready to make it count, to ritualize
the act.
I was prepared for
such a reaction — I had held off on the first haircut until my son
was a few months past 2 years old. I hadn’t exactly planned on
putting it off until then; more so it was just that on some gut
level, cutting his hair never felt quite right. I still felt this
way on the day we took him to the barber, but, truth be told, I
succumbed to peer pressure. And aesthetics. His hair was no mob of
soft curls, or silky locks running down his nape; it was a highly
uneven mullet. People were asking questions. I had no
defense.
“And when ye shall
come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for
food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as forbidden; three
years shall it be as forbidden unto you; it shall not be eaten.”
Leviticus 19:23.
This is the passage
from the Torah used to explain the Jewish custom
of upsherin, or the practice of not
cutting a boy’s hair until the child is 3. Traditional Jews make a
big to-do over the first haircut: Friends and family are invited
over and handed a pair of scissors, and the first snip is done at
the front of the head, where the boy will one day place his
tefillin. There are blessings, and the first introduction of the
Aleph-Bet. Some drip honey over the letters and allow their sons to
lick it off as they say each one. May the Torah be sweet on his
tongue.
I was aware
of upsherin before the
haircut, but it was definitely outside the realm of Jewish
traditions in which I feel obligated to take part. Rich in poetics
but lacking in logic, I had little at my fingertips to convince
others, and frankly even myself, that this was a custom we had to
observe. And so I caved and agreed, one Sunday morning, to
accompany my husband and son to the local barber.
It was only once my
son was shorn, and I was left with a strange devastation, that I
began to ponder the potency of hair, both within Jewish culture and
without. Muslims, Hindus and the Chinese all have specific rituals
connected to the first haircut, and many of even the most secular
Americans save a lock from that first trip to the barber. Of
course, for the highly observant in a number of faiths, adults are
also subject to a number of rules. Buddhist monks are commanded to
shave their heads, Catholic nuns and Jewish and Muslim women to
cover theirs, and Jewish men to maintain long side locks,
orpeyes, and beards. Hair is a way for the pious to
manifest their internal discipline to the outside world.
Hair is a symbol of
our vitality, our unbridled life force, the urges and tempers that
we’re born with and, if we manage to mature properly, learn how to
tame as we grow up. In Freudian terms, hair is the id, and
haircuts, or hair coverings, are the super ego, or a “successful
instance of identification with the parental agency,” as Freud
wrote.
What devastated me
about my son’s haircut, I came to realize, is this imposition of a
superego before my id-filled beast was truly ready. We do this a
lot to kids these days. Terrified of their internal wildness, we
rush them through to adulthood, desperate to ensure that they will
be both at the top of their class and wearing the right shoes. Not
cutting my son’s hair was a tiny attempt to raise him in the spirit
of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile, a “natural man” uncorrupted by
society. That lopsided mullet was me embracing his glorious
wildness, right here in Brooklyn Heights. My tree wasn’t ready; he
needed time.
I requested that the
barber keep his hair as long as possible, and he said he would try.
Then, with each snip it grew shorter and shorter, and he kept
shrugging and telling me how uneven it was. My son left with a crew
cut. “This is best. It will come back nice and full and even,” the
barber said.
“It will come back.”
Those words comforted me, if not exactly in the way he intended. I
would get a second chance. I could let it grow out again. I could
wait until his third birthday. I could say a blessing for a ritual
that still carries no logic for me but speaks to my id, that
wildness in me that the birth of my son woke up and that, for his
sake, deserves to be heard.