White Hair

Florida Jewish News, May 12, 2006, p. 15

According to the Gemara, when you turn fifty, you’ve presumably become smart. I like that idea. You struggle in school to be smart; you struggle with Life itself to make the right choices; you struggle to be smart in handling your children; and finally, finally there’s a payoff: You hit fifty and you’ve made it. Hopefully. Well, I’d like to believe it’s true. In fact, if I have my druthers, I’d rather be smart than beautiful. After all, beauty is something God gives you and you either have or you don’t. But being smart is something you can work on. Or at least, wisdom—which is what you’ve learned from life, what you’ve taken out of your experiences—is totally up to you. So I like the Gemara’s idea that if you struggle to make sense of life for fifty years and you try your best to learn and grow from that struggle, then you’re credited with having attained some wisdom for your efforts.

What’s more, I’d say wisdom—and all the efforts, tears, losses, failures, joys, knowledge, aches and pains that goes with it—is way too undervalued in this country.

I’d say wisdom is way too undervalued in this country.

Our Torah teaches us to respect a zakein (elderly person), that we should actually stand up when a zakein walks into the room. How many of us do that? How many of us listen when an older person has something to say? How many of us actually seek out the wisdom—there’s that word again—that gray hair can offer us?

Speaking of gray hair, how many of us admire gray hair and what it stands for?

I was recently reading one of my professional magazines, about the field of psychotherapy, specifically Marriage and Family Therapy, and the author of one of the articles in it noted that at a recent conference, all the visionary ideas came from the therapists over eighty! So maybe we’re making a huge mistake to think that what’s cool, hip, new, radical, interesting, visionary, exciting, imaginative, creative and beautiful can only come from the young. Logically, this doesn’t even make sense. Logically, it would be the older person who is hip and cool. The wise older person has experimented with life, been there, done that and therefore has a sense of which new steps might be worthwhile to take. The wise older person can sift the wheat from the chaff. The older person has the economic freedom (if he has lived wisely and well so far, which is the definition of wisdom) to try out new things. The wise older person has recognized that life, with all its pains, is enjoyable and is therefore open to new sources of joy and interest.

So here you have a graying nation ready to share their insights, knowledge, experience, joie d’vivre, creativity, adventurousness, and vision with the world and the world is not interested. And the absolute saddest part of the whole thing is that the youth of this nation have beaten those older people into believing that they do not have all these wonders to offer and should not be respected and emulated. And I have proof of this.

My proof came from the lips of a sheitel macher. “No,” she said sadly, “we do not carry natural hair gray/white sheitels. In fact, I haven’t seen any at all.”

“Why not?” I wanted to know.

“Well, people who turn gray want to look young. They go to blonde.”

“But that’s ridiculous,” I said, knowing full well that this is the case. “If your hair was as dark as mine was, you just wouldn’t look natural at all as a blonde.”

I took up the conversation with my daughter who proudly showed off her new sheitel when she was visiting for Yom Tov. She particularly liked it because it was quite a dark shade of brown, just like her own hair. “For some reason,” she observed, “people always have to go lighter. Whatever their natural color is, they’ve got to take it a step lighter. If they’re dark, they at least put streaks in it. If they’re dirty blonde, they go platinum.”

“That’s true,” I mused, “except they won’t go all the way. They won’t go white. As soon as they actually get to white, they start going back to blonde.” Now, that’s not merely ageism, that’s self-hating ageism. I mean, they’re doing it to themselves. They’re suggesting that they agree that younger is better, prettier.

Frankly, I don’t get it. I know, I know, the old afraid-of-death routine. Presumably, the excuse they give is that they want to “feel young” because that represents energy and vitality. Well, the truth is that you will never have the energy of a 20 year old at 75, unless you’re unusually conditioned because you have been working out for the last 55 years and because God blessed you with abundant energy. Besides which, the closer you are to death, the closer you are to HaKodesh Baruch Hu, the closer you are, hopefully, to having accomplished something in this world on His behalf. It’s a bit sad, but if you believe that God knew what He was doing when He created the world and created death for a positive purpose, it’s not bad. And it’s inevitable in any case, so why not go there with flags waving and horns blowing? Why not epitomize Dylan Thomas’ dictum: “do not go gentle into that good night”?

Look, maybe I wouldn’t be arguing for white hair if I didn’t like my own. But I love my hair! I think it’s nice. Why should I reject it? My daughter pointed out that we women wear lipstick and that is not how God created us, so what’s the difference with hair coloring? And my answer is that my unadorned lips are pale and not of much interest and that lipstick adds a dash of color that I like. What’s more, we’re already covering our hair when we wear a sheitel. It seems like adding insult to injury to say that in addition to covering it, we need to disguise it, that the original color is just not good enough. And I don’t put my hair in that category. It doesn’t need another color. And there are a number of women with gorgeous white hair and when I run into them at meetings or where-ever, I don’t mind telling them how beautiful they look, so I’m not just talking about myself. My mother’s white hair, oleha l’shalom (may she rest in peace) was elegant and lovely and I always told her so.

And I don’t believe for one moment anyone who tells me the blonde just happens to look nicer. If blonde hair were nicer, how many men over 50 do you see coloring their gray or white hair blonde? Zero.

So it’s not just ageism; it’s sexism, too. Well, I’m not going there. I am not going gentle into that good night. I don’t care how many women are angry at me for it or think I’ve lost it. I just hope there is such a thing as a white natural-hair sheitel.