Le Lévitique 19:27 Commentaire : Tze'enah Ure'enah, Rashi, Or HaChaim & Sforno

“You shall not round off the side-growth on your head, or destroy the sidegrowth of your beard” [19:27]. You shall not cut off the corners or the front with a cutting implement, since the Holy One gave a beard so that he should be different from a woman. That is to say, one should know what is a woman or what is a man. When a person cuts off his beard, he wants to change the creation of the Holy One who identified a man with a beard.¹⁸Bahya, Leviticus, 19:27.

לא תקיפו פאת ראשכם YE SHALL NOT ROUND THE CORNERS OF YOUR HEAD — This refers to one who makes his temples exactly like (as hairless as) the back of his ears and his forehead (cf. Rashi on Makkot 20b, ד״ה המשוה צדעיו) by removing the hair on his temples, so that the lower edge of the hair that surrounds his head (i. e. his skull, because we are not concerned with ‎hair at the back of the neck) forms a complete circle, since above the back of his ears the roots of his hair are situated much higher than his temples (and it is thus only the temples which prevent an uninterrupted circular line going round his skull). (Cf. Makkot 20b).

לא תקיפו פאת ראשכם, "Do not round off the corners of your head, etc." In this instance the Torah addresses the Israelites in the plural, whereas when speaking of the beard (in the same verse) it addresses the individual, i.e. in the singular. This teaches that the first admonition in the verse applies even to people who cannot apply the second half of the verse to themselves seeing they do not have a beard. We could easily have made such a mistake as women who do not have beards also are not subject to the prohibition of rounding the corners of their heads compare (Kidushin 38). Should you ask why we have arrived at such an apparently arbitrary distinction, i.e. that the males are included in both prohibitions whereas the women are exempt from both, the answer is that the males become subject to the second prohibiton as soon as they are old enough whereas the women as a rule never become subject to the second prohibition. Nature did not endow them with hair in that area of their faces.

פאת זקנך [NEITHER SHALT THOU MAR] THE CORNERS OF THY BEARD — i. e. the tip of the beard and its sides, these making together five corners: two on each cheek, above near the head (the temples) — where it (the cheek) is broad and has therefore two corners (thus four on the two sides) and one at the bottom, on the chin, on that spot where is the junction of the two cheeks (Shevuot 3a; cf. also Sifra, Kedoshim, Chapter 6 3; Makkot 20a and Rashi on Shevuot 3a: ועל הזקן ‎‎‏ (ד"ה