Hipsters Call Sefirah-Beards Cultural Appropriation

Hipsters say they were doing it before it became so mainstream.

Tel Aviv, May 17 – Avant-garde and trendy populations are voicing disapproval of the Jewish practice among men not to shave or take haircuts for most of the seven-week period that begins with Passover, saying that the custom is an inauthentic appropriation of their culture.

Hipsters in this forward-looking Mediterranean city expressed their distaste for the phenomenon known as the Sefirah beard, the facial hair that many religiously observant men allow to grow once Passover begins, and maintain until either thirty-three days have elapsed or until Shavuot, the next major festival a full seven weeks after Passover. While a good number of such men always sport a beard, it is the adoption of the beard-growing practice by the normally clean-shaven that the trendy personalities find problematic.

“It’s cultural appropriation is what it is,” insisted Guy Bar, 26, a pottery enthusiast. “Fedoras? Retro clothing? Glasses? Come on –  that’s OUR style. I’ve been growing this beard for three years now, and now these Johnny-come-latelies decide they want a piece of this action. Sorry, gentlemen, but you don’t get what a beard is all about, and have no right to grow one.”

The Jewish practice of refraining from haircuts and shaving during Sefirat HaOmer, as the period is known, stems from several sources, the most famous of which invokes the second-century-CE deaths of twenty-four thousand disciples of the famous Rabbi Akiva during that time, as the result of a plague. The plague suddenly ceased on day thirty-three, Lag BaOmer, which is marked as a minor holiday. However, the span preceding Lag BaOmer features a number of practices associated with mourning, including refraining from cutting hair, and some Jewish men, especially among the Hasidim, extend the practices to a full seven weeks. The Omer period is marked by an attention to daily personal development and interpersonal relations, as a way of remedying the disregard that people had for one another to which Jewish tradition attributes the plague.

The time period also coincided with several major massacres of Jewish communities at the time of the Crusades, especially the Rhine Valley cities of Maniz, Worms, and Speyer, during the First Crusade in 1096. Additionally, Kabbalistic sources describe the Omer period as “a time for growing hair,” a practice that the hipsters say they were doing before it became mainstream.

“It’s as if they started doing it without a real appreciation for what it is,” explained Gal Sadeh, 24, who weaves clothes from hemp fibers. “The next thing you know they’ll be going off the grid once a week or something. It’s an obscure practice; you’ve probably never heard of it.”