PBA: You’re being inane. Nearly all yeshiva bochurim today have beards, and he might have even had semicha by then. You’re also irrational. There is a huge difference between Daas Moshe (objective moral truth based on Torah) and Daas yehudis (halachos, minhagim, and dinnim that are constructed based on the practices of certain societies and cultures). If you don’t think this is a chashuv difference, you shouldn’t be making any statement s about this issue. Why can’t you understand this?
Son: I’m not blindly following what everyone else did. This is rav chaim Solovetchik’s point- Judaism was a mimetic tradition. That’s what a MESORAH is- not based on didactic learning but observing what your parents did, and their parents, and your community, etc. the chazon ish overturned that by making shiurim more, thereby excluding many Jews as not yotzei even though they’d drunk a certain amount or eaten matzah for generations. Ditto for the case f eating fish on Shabbos- it was done and no questions were asked until the 1800s.
You can make all the hypothetical arguments you like, but the fact is that checking for lettuce with a light-box is a RECENT INNOVATION. So are sheitles, as evidenced by photographs of chashuveh rebbitzens not wearing them. It’s a minhag tznius.
Same with hats. There’s no Halacha, just a Chumrah. The problem is when it becomes mainstream, and people are pressured to wear one.
These are fairly simple points- that Halacha can change based on historical circumstances, that Judaism has recently become more didactic, and that there is a difference between Daas Moshe and yehudis (Daas Moshe is much more authoritative).