[Avodah] Can [sic] a woman wear a wig if her mother did not?

[Zev Sero]

On 10/07/2011 1:14 AM, T613K at aol.com wrote:
> The original question that started this thread was whether, if the girl's
> mother had never worn a sheitel, that fact somehow constituted an implicit
> neder on the part of the girl never to wear a sheitel herself, either.
> My answer was no, it did not.
> To be clear, I was not talking about hataras nedarim in general but in
> that specific case -- if her mother did not wear a sheitel, did a daughter
> need to do hataras nedarim before she could wear a sheitel?  In that
> specific context I wrote, "There is no issue of hataras nedarim" (nor
> of mother's minhag, either).
> The fact that her mother never wore a sheitel in no way indicates that
> the daughter "never intended to wear a sheitel."

Well, parents can in fact bind their descendants with nedarim.  So it's
not completely obvious, without at least a little bit of thought, that
this is not such a neder.  The question, I suppose, was worth asking, if
only barely.

Of course one must distinguish between those who didn't wear wigs when
it wasn't the general custom, and those who refrain today.  The latter
don't just happen not to wear wigs; they're deliberately deciding not to
wear them, because they believe them to be inadequate.  And within that
latter set we must distinguish between those who actually believe wigs
to be forbidden by halacha, and those who understand that they are
permitted, but see their abstention as a laudable chumra.  It's this
latter subset that might perhaps be seen as taking a neder.  If it's
determined that they did so, only then does the original question begin:
did they intend to bind their daughters with this neder?  And if so do
they have that power?


-- 
Zev Sero        If they use these guns against us once, at that moment
zev at sero.name   the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will
                 return to all the places that have been given to them.
		                            - Yitzchak Rabin