Hello Rabbi,
OC 2:6 says: ‘It is forbidden to walk with an upright posture, and a man should not walk four amos with his head uncovered.’ The posture gets a hard ‘forbidden,’ the uncovered head only a soft ‘should not.’ If bareheadedness were a real issur, why the softer language? And the Gemara behind it (Shabbos 118b) has Rav Huna expecting special reward for it – you expect that for going beyond the letter, not for a plain obligation.
The extra twist: the Mechaber was Sephardic, yet the all-day kippah hardened mainly in Ashkenazi practice. I saw your father’s teshuva at the beginning of Ohr Yitzchak (vol. 1): no issur outside tefilla and the beis knesses, though nobody disputes the all-day covering today.
So practically: what does a person transgress, if anything, by walking bareheaded now? Did this minhag become binding – and how, if a minhag stays a minhag?
Thank you!
Thank you Rabbi, amazing answer. The story about your father and the Syrian chevrei learning really brought it home.
see https://kashrut.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Gilui-Rosh-Ohr-Yitzchak-A.pdf
You are reading the Shulchan Aruch correctly. The difference in language is significant.
The Mechaber writes (Shulchan Aruch Orach Chaim 2:6):
אסור לילך בקומה זקופה, ולא ילך ארבע אמות בגילוי הראש
Regarding walking with an excessively upright posture he says אסור, it is forbidden. Regarding walking four amot with one’s head uncovered he changes the language to ולא ילך, one should not walk that way.
The Birkei Yosef already makes precisely this observation:
מדקדוק דברי מרן דקתני ברישא אסור גבי קומה זקופה, והדר קתני ולא ילך ד׳ אמות בגילוי הראש משמע דליכא איסורא בהילוך בגילוי הראש
From the precise language of the Mechaber, since he first says “forbidden” concerning an upright posture and afterward says only “one should not walk” concerning an uncovered head, it appears that there is no actual prohibition against walking bareheaded.
That is also the straightforward implication of the Gemara you cited. Rav Huna says (Shabbat 118b):
תיתי לי דלא סגינא ארבע אמות בגילוי הראש
He asks to receive reward because he did not walk four amot with his head uncovered. The early authorities understood this as middat chassidut, an especially pious practice, rather than an ordinary halachic prohibition.
This is discussed at length in Ohr Yitzhak. My father, Rabbi Yitzhak Abadi זצ״ל, quotes the Kol Bo in the name of the ר״מ:
שאינו אסור לילך בגילוי ראש… ר״ל שזו מדת חסידות
“It is not forbidden to walk with one’s head uncovered… rather, this is a practice of piety.”
I subsequently wrote a separate teshuva (which my father published after his own; see link in comments) on the subject and reached the same basic conclusion. The evidence from the Gemara and the Rishonim simply does not establish a general prohibition against having one’s head uncovered. Indeed, the Rambam, when discussing this conduct, places it among the special standards of talmidei chachamim:
צניעות גדולה נוהגים תלמידי חכמים בעצמן… ולא יתגלו ראשן
That itself indicates that we are not dealing with an ordinary prohibition applicable to every Jew at every moment.
What about the authorities who considered it obligatory?
I dealt specifically with the Maharit Tzahalon, who attempts to distinguish between two coverings: one basic covering required by law and an additional covering that constitutes middat chassidut. I do not believe that distinction is supported by the Gemara or the Rishonim. The sources he brings can be explained naturally without inventing two separate levels of head covering.
For example, the story of Rav Nachman bar Yitzchak, whose mother instructed him to cover his head so that he would develop yirat Shamayim, proves that head covering could serve as a particular religious discipline. It does not prove that everyone was already obligated to have one covering and that she was adding a second one.
The same is true of the other passages cited there. They demonstrate practices associated with modesty, reverence or middat chassidut. They do not establish a universal prohibition against an uncovered head.
Tefillah and berachot
Here too we have to be careful not to turn later practice into an absolute rule.
There are sources requiring or strongly expecting head covering in the synagogue and during prayer, and those circumstances have their own considerations of respect. But that does not mean that a person who happens not to have a kippah should therefore refrain from making a beracha or from praying. Turning the head covering into something more important than the beracha or the tefillah itself reverses the priorities.
The underlying consideration in prayer is also affected by what constitutes respectful dress in a particular society. The early sources themselves discuss prayer in terms of how people normally appear before important people. Clothing that demonstrates respect in one society may signify something entirely different in another.
This is important historically. There were societies in which respectable men simply did not go outdoors without a hat. Look at photographs from a century ago: businessmen wore hats, laborers wore hats, even the man collecting the garbage might be wearing a hat and jacket. Naturally, when a Jew went to pray, he also wore his hat. One should ideally stand before God dressed respectfully, not dressed in a manner in which he would have been embarrassed to appear before other people.
As Western society gradually abandoned the everyday hat, Jewish practice did not disappear overnight. The head covering became smaller and eventually developed into the small kippah familiar to us today.
That historical evolution should not be confused with a rabbinically instituted minhag whose purpose was, “Wear a kippah all day to remind yourself that God is above you.” The sources do speak about head covering as capable of producing yirat Shamayim. But that does not establish that today’s universal small kippah originated as a formal enactment for that purpose. A practice can develop historically and only afterward acquire explanations and symbolism.
Did today’s practice become a binding minhag?
This is where I think the premise of the question needs adjustment.
Not everything that large numbers of religious Jews eventually begin doing becomes a binding halachic minhag. A practice can develop socially and gradually become a marker of communal identity without thereby transforming its original halachic category.
This is particularly important here because historically the practice was far from uniform. Sephardim certainly did not universally walk around all day wearing what we now call a kippah. Nor did many Ashkenazim.
Even within my own lifetime, it was completely normal for observant Ashkenazi Jews to go to work without a kippah. When I was young, seeing a doctor or lawyer openly wearing a kippah at work was sufficiently unusual that one noticed it. Nobody concluded from the absence of a kippah that these people had ceased to be observant Jews.
So I would not say that an original middat chassidut somehow metamorphosed into a universal issur merely because contemporary Orthodox society became accustomed to doing it.
My father’s practical position
There is an interesting point here because at the end of my father’s teshuva, after demonstrating from the sources that there is no basic prohibition, he writes that nowadays everyone agrees that the head should be covered throughout the day.
One has to know how to read a teshuva. There is the analysis of the din, and there is sometimes a concluding practical recommendation written for the community and circumstances in which the posek lives. They are not necessarily the same thing.
I discussed this personally with my father some years later, together with my brother Chaim ע״ה. The issue came up because I had written publicly that there is no general obligation to wear a kippah all day, and my brother thought that this was in conflict with my father’s decision in his Sefer. My father laughed and pointed out that Syrian men regularly came to learn with him and he never told them that they were required to begin wearing a kippah.
That conversation clarified for me how he understood the matter in practice. The halachic analysis in the teshuva remains exactly what it says: the original source is middat chassidut. His concluding recommendation reflected the communal reality in which he was writing, not the discovery of a new prohibition in the Gemara.
This phenomenon is not unusual in responsa literature. A posek may establish what the strict halacha permits and nevertheless conclude with a recommendation to be stringent. Rav Moshe Feinstein’s discussions of commercial milk are a familiar example: the legal analysis establishes the permissibility, and then one encounters language such as בעל נפש יחמיר. The recommendation does not retroactively change the legal analysis.
So what does someone transgress by walking bareheaded today?
In an ordinary situation, nothing. There is no general issur that he is violating merely by having his head uncovered.
There may certainly be circumstances in which he should cover his head because of the place he is entering, the community he is visiting, respect for other people, or simply because creating an unnecessary confrontation is foolish.
If I walk into a yeshiva where everyone considers a kippah an indispensable symbol of religious observance, I am not going to deliberately take mine off to prove that I know the sources. I would recommend having one available and putting it on. There is no mitzvah to offend people unnecessarily.
But that is a very different statement from saying that walking down the street bareheaded is intrinsically forbidden.
And perhaps the larger problem is one of perspective. We have reached a point where someone can behave dishonestly, fail to pay what he owes, embarrass another person publicly or treat people terribly, and it attracts remarkably little religious alarm. But let an observant Jew appear without a kippah and people immediately wonder whether he is still religious.
Something has gone wrong with our priorities.
Middat chassidut has its place. But it remains middat chassidut. We should not manufacture an issur where the sources themselves did not.