Reply To: The Upsherin – What are the Origins?

ames

Member

Actually, we don’t like when anyone gets personally attacked here in the CR. We’re all friends here.

Now THAT shows how much the coffee room has evolved over the past few months. I like it much better this way – and I think that a lot of credit goes to the mods as well as to the posters of this site for their efforts in this. We had a problem here and have come a long way towards fixing it.

As far as the upsherin goes, I do not claim to be an expert on it either. But then again, neither does anyone I have spoken to. I’ve been asking what the source of this minhag is for years and all I ever got was fumfitting. That does not mean that no valid source exists, only that I have never heard of it. And not for lack of trying.

chaverim, please don’t take any of this personally. I apologize if you have. I encourage you to counter my argument with facts of your own. No matter how valid the source is, upsherin will still never be my minhag, and no matter how absent a source is, it will still be the minhag of many many families of Am Yisrael. So our discussion about this should be purely high level and academic.

P.S. While you may not hold of R’ Micha’s research, I doubt you would feel the same way about Rav B. Hamburger, whom he was citing. So why don’t you pick up a Shoroshei Minhagei Ashkenaz for yourself and go through the inyan. I copy/pasted the Areivim discussion because it was on hand and easier to post here than transcribing the text of SM”A.