My first memory of my hair is that it wouldn’t grow. Until I was about seven years old, it was just tufts of wispy, dishwater-blonde locks, and I was often mistaken for a little boy on the school playground. I remember rubbing my head, willing more hair to grow, wailing when my mother announced that there just wasn’t enough for a side ponytail (the most popular of styles in my early 90s childhood). I looked on in envy as my sister, almost three years younger and with a mane of golden ringlets, sported neon scrunchies and French braids. My British mother insisted I had a “Princess Diana hair style.”

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When my hair finally came in, it was frizzy, thick, and curly, and I didn’t feel much relief. I wanted to look like Alisha, the coolest girl in my 5th grade class. She had shiny, straight golden hair down to her waist. It only got worse as I got older, growing up in the 90s where everything about women was thin and straight — hair, bodies, teeth. This began a nearly 15-year battle with my hair and how I felt it represented me.

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I wanted to be like Kate Moss or Fiona Apple — aloof, interesting, chic. But how could I be, with a mass of kinky waves atop my head? I convinced my parents to buy me a hairdryer and flat iron in middle school. I spent nearly an hour every morning tugging, clamping, and smoothing down each strand of hair. But flat irons were only a gateway.

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By college I was doling out large sums of cash to get my hair chemically straightened. Every couple months, I’d sit in a salon for three or four hours while they painted my unruly mane from root to tip with a thick white paste, feeling that familiar hot, sharp sting at the nape of my neck. It wasn’t until my hair started breaking off and falling out in my mid-20s that I realized I couldn’t fight myself forever.

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“Sweetie, your hair is just so damaged,” said my hair stylist at the time. “It would be so much easier if you stopped this nonsense and just accepted your hair.”

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And so I did. With no other option, I finally accepted my hair and a whole lot more about myself.

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The curls started to re-emerge after a few months — just at the roots at first. Strange-looking crimps and ripples began to grow in above my ears, while the rest of my hair clung to its straw-like straightness down to the tops of my shoulders. I had to grow the chemicals out, rid my hair particles of all of the extraneous and the artificial, and let it return to its natural state. It was a metamorphosis, a detox, a cleanse of sorts.

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As hokey as it may sound, I really started to become myself when I began this process, allowing my hair to be its frizzy, curly, coiled, untameable self. This was also around the time I started to think about my own identity — what it meant to be me and what I believed in.

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Up until then, my hair told stories I wasn’t ready to embrace: I was different, more cheerful than chic, too busy tending to my full life to focus on blow-outs and thermal reconditioning. 

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Then suddenly, unexpectedly, my hair connected me to something bigger.

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On my maternal side (my Jewish side) there's a bevy of Eastern Europeans with bright red curls, almost orange in youth, fading to auburn with age. In embracing my curls, I gave myself the gift of a physical reminder of my lineage, a mark of connection. Our hair is the first thing people point to when they see my mum and me together, exclaiming, “You look so alike!” 

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Going through old photo albums recently, I ran my fingers over photos of my grandmother in the 1950s; she wore an emerald green cocktail dress, her autumnal curls coiled and smoothed for an event at the Brixton Shul. As a child in 1960s London, my mother cropped her curls close to her head, an elfin fringe resting inches above her eyebrows. I found a snapshot of her on the Belgian coast, her hair blowing wild, framing her face — a nearly perfect match with the color of her freckles. I saw my mother and grandmother in the 1980s with big, happy, frizzy manes and high shoulder pads, a perfect hallmark of the era. I reveled in these photographs.

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For most of my life, a painting of my great-grandmother Yetta hung above my grandparents’ dining room table in Wimbledon. Her curls — coiffed, pinned, styled back — were always the first thing you noticed, even before her stern expression and opaque eyes. 

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From a Jewish standpoint, our tradition explains that hair has spiritual power. Like Samson, whose uncut hair was the source of his strength, we too recognize that hair is a symbol of divine potential in the human body. In fact, the Kabbalah teaches us that our hairs themselves act like tiny spiritual cables, hollow channels connecting us directly to the Divine. 

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In fact, the word in Hebrew for hair, se’ar (שער), is spelled the same as the word for gate, sha’ar (שער). Our hair acts as a portal to sacred connection, to our ancestors, and to our own history.

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Nowadays, my hair is thick, curly, and free — flopping across my face, swelling with the humidity, regularly snapping hair elastics that strain to keep it contained. My hair feels like a big part of my essence, an attestation that I am my mother’s daughter and my grandmother’s granddaughter, a member of all these generations of strong, stubborn, and extraordinary women with wild hair.

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Like tefillin or a tattoo, my hair is a daily reminder of who I am, where I come from, and what I believe in. My hair tells me that I’m always, always a Green, a Cooper, a Shedletsky, an Edelstein.

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I can’t ever forget that. I only have to pass a mirror to remember.

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At The Well uplifts many approaches to Jewish practice. Our community draws on ancient Jewish wisdom, sometimes adapting longstanding practices to more deeply support the well-being of women and nonbinary people. See this article’s sources below. We believe Torah (sacred teachings) are always unfolding to help answer the needs of the present moment.

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Sources

What My Hair Says about Me, Chabad.org

The Story of Samson, My Jewish Learning