Headdress: A God-Given Law?

Recently, I’ve attended a Bar Mitzvah ceremony for a grandson of my very close friend (and before you ask, yes, I do occasionally attend religious ceremonies out of respect to individuals regardless of their personal religious views and beliefs). At the synagogue, as you would expect, I ran into the numerous married couples and was surprised by the sheet number of ladies wearing sheitels, or wigs, which are meant to cover their natural hair to preserve their modesty known as Tzniut. Later, I had a chat with a rabbi about the purpose of sheitels and other forms of headwear used by Jews. According to him, hair coverings are a biblical requirement unambiguously prescribed by Talmud and dating back to the times of Moses. 

Assuming that the ruling is indeed from the Creator, it agonizingly difficult to understand why God would demand from its subjects to cover their feeble heads. If a burning necessity of having a layer of fabric between thyself and thy Creator was to be enforced, it is quite obvious that God, as mighty and wise as he is portrayed by all religions, would design humans with such covering features embedded in their DNA. "Cover your head in order that the fear of heaven may be upon you" will be an indispensible part of our natural body design. However, history shows that the demand of all puny humans to place a piece of cloth on their parietal and frontal bones is actually nothing more than an age-long tradition steaming from the demeaning marking of slaves forced upon Jews by Egyptians. It takes quite a bit of imagination to turn a degrading piece of closing invented by men into a sign of obedience to God. 

Surely, it is not “for all mankind” that we are talking about here, but rather something unique that was thought of specifically with women in mind. Covering lady’s hair with an ugly rug takes away much of her beauty, rendering her not as appealing to other men. The rug comes off only to reveal her true beauty before her lawful husband in order for them to procreate. There is a problem with that. Firstly, if the Creator considered sex as a sin, then he would not have created sexual reproduction. There are ubiquitous examples of asexual reproduction in the animal kingdom and if God had managed to think of it, he would have most certainly made us in a way that the abominable practice of intercourse wouldn’t be needed. Then, goes the peculiar process of revealing the true beauty only before thy mate. There are umpteen examples of animals that stay modest until the mating game. Peacock would be, perhaps, the most salient of them. If God wanted us to appear modest, he would have applied the same principal to our creation – we would turn beautiful only when required. Lastly, there are monogamous animals. If God’s intention was to pair us up in everlasting wedding bond, we would have been designed after swans and fairy wren and not after apes.

Sheitel, deserves special mentioning in the context of "modesty", as it is a very peculiar way to demostrate it. Most ladies I've met actually benefitted from covering their natural locks with splendidly designed wigs, shedding a few years from their true age. It is quite apparent that the notion of covering natural hair with fake locks for the sake of humility is plainly absurd. 

God, if existed, would have created us the way he would want us to be. Men, on the other hand, have little control over the natural appearance of other human beings and must come up with creative solutions to alter each other looks. Hence sheitels, kippahs, burkas and other forms of religions headdresses. It raises a rather important quesion - does it make sense for any thinking contemporary individual to maintain and propagate fantasies of dark-age simpletons?