Of Beards and Whiskers

By Rabbi Shimon Posner, Director of Chabad of Rancho Mirage, CA

He was a teacher in Yeshiva Torah Temimah for many years, as well as a photographer at Crown Heights chasunas and worked the cash register at his daughter and son-in-law’s grocery on Kingston, Kahan’s Superette. He was friendly in a self-effacing way and was friends with my father. His name was R’ Velvel Schildkraut obm.

My grandmother once told me about him. He was the from the very first bochurim, born in America who decided to grow a beard. This was the 1940’s. His mother was devastated; his aunt was outraged. They came to the Freirdiker Rebbe to beseech him to set their lad straight and tell him to shave like a gentleman. My grandmother happened to be waiting to go into the Rebbe’s room that night.

While they were all waiting in the room together his aunt started up on him: screaming at him, vilifying him, raising her outrage and decibel until finally she exploded and delivered him stinging, humiliating slap. Velvel looked at her and said in a controlled voice, “My own mother doesn’t hit me .. why do you?” His aunt answered him, “Because I love you.”

My grandmother got involved to help this poor sixteen-year-old or so boy from the wrath of his family. The shame he was causing them was indescribable. A Conservative rabbi once told me how his family would deride the “whiskers” as they called the Jews who maintained beards in America. Interesting, because a friend once gave me a book Portals to America, a compendium of newspaper articles describing the immigrant community of the Lower East Side from the 1890s to the 1920s. Articles from the New York Times, New York Post, the Tribune and other now-defunct newspapers. They dripped with derision describing “these long whiskered foul-smelling descendants of Jacob”. I haven’t seen the book in years, but I haven’t forgotten that passage either.

My other grandmother also told me of the horrors bochurim faced for making such a leap. A family she knew, survivors, frum, who when the sons started sprouting beards (largely from the influence of my grandfather) their own father refused to walk down the street with them.

The humility was understandable. This was an egregious breach of the unspoken deal Jews had made with America: we will not be obtrusive, we will behave — and you will not pogrom us to death. “We left this behind!” the immigrants cried, “we’re looking for a better life in America!” they wailed, “and you with your stinking whiskers are jeopardizing the whole thing.”

When I was about fourteen I heard my father speak at a Pegisha in Crown Heights. Friday nights were Q&A and all the bochurim who dreamt of ever going out on shlichus lined the back of the room. One of the questions was “I was told the the thirteen attributes of mercy are in the beard. What are they, how did they get there and what happens to them when the beard is cut?”

My father paused and stifled a lemon-sucking gasp. “I don’t know anything about that,” my father confessed, “I believe that nobody really does except the Rebbe. But I will tell you why I grew a beard. When we were growing up we heard of Jews in Europe who were faced with soldiers brandishing scissors. These young boys covered their cheeks with their hands ‘you’ll have to chop off my hands before you get my beard.’ After that I could never bring a razor anywhere near my face.”

The Rebbe at one point agreed to come the chuppa only if the chosen agreed to grow a beard. I offer this as a maybe as to why facial hair was the decisor. The beard is — and especially was in that time and place — a sure sign of identity. Over fifty years before that era beards were banished from American respectability. Gone forever were the Lincolns, Grants, I believe Taft too and the other American presidents who were all bearded; across the pond there had been King Edward. But this was small solace for the immigrant, the poor, unsophisticated, greenhorn descendant of Jacob. The absence of the beard signified the Jew who was ready and able to progress; the presence of the beard showed obtuseness and backwardness and foreignness and filth and misery.

By the time I rolled along, by the time I hit seven years old the air was filled with peace, love, brown rice and other unmentionables. With all that came facial hair. And after the hippies took a bath and began a career the facial hair remained as a somewhat acceptable comportment. So by the time my pubescence got under way there was no real issue for me, the shadow between the nose and upper lip became more noticeable, pronounced and unarguably there, a razor was far removed from my mind. I’m trying to remember if I ever even held an electric shaver in my hand.

But the identity is still there. The “word’ in sign language for Jew is a stroking of the chin with all five fingers. As the Rebbe once challenged someone who questioned the halachic necessity of the beard; when you conjure up the image of Moshe Rabbenu in your mind, is he clean-shaven or bearded? Is the beard a trimmed goatee or a majestically flowing?

Now of course, we live in a show n tell society and the more exotic and extravagant your do-up the better. So “I’m Hasidic and we keep our facial hair” will probably be cool in plenty of circles. But it is still an inarguable, indelible seal of different. That can be limiting, and in a free-wheeling world where identities are chosen, molded, mended and exchanged, the absoluteness of this identity is at odds with society.

I remember one evening when Rabbi Mentlick was boring everyone with his talk. Suddenly he said “I don’t know how to express myself but is muz zein andersh — things have to be different.” He caught everyone’s attention only momentarily, but close to thirty years later his words pop up every once in a while and haunt me.

A Crown Heights boy doesn’t worry his aunt will shame him for having a beard, just the opposite, if anything. His father isn’t ashamed to walk the streets with him if he has a beard. No soldier approaches menacingly with scissors, but the painful choice facing him is very real. I know that — even if I have never experienced what he is experiencing. I know that his dilemma is as real as the soldiers and aunts of yesteryear. But I don’t have any words to say when I see beards exchanged for five-o’clock shadows, other than Rabbi Mentlick’s frustration: it’s gotta be different.

Other than the bris there is no Jewish self-identity that is more indelible. I know the shaitel is a big step and I trust the ladies in my life who tell me it itches like crazy in the summer and the pain it gives a new kallah. But the beard is indelible the way the shaitel is not. It carries and conveys something awesome and mysterious, delicate and enduring, eternal and easily lost. Where is Velvel Schildkraut when I need him?