By: Rabbi Jennifer Krause
My mother is always encouraging me to accessorize.
"What purse are you going to wear with that?" she'll ask me sweetly when I'm visiting. Or, just as I'm giving my ensemble a last glance in the mirror, I'll hear her voice in the hallway: "Don't you have some gold hoops? Wait, you can borrow mine!"
The thing is, I really only have one purse, and I basically wear the same pair of earrings all the time. I love clothes, but I'm overwhelmed trying to find things that "go"—handbags, bracelets, earrings, and scarves. Especially scarves. I am a failed accessorizer.
Except when it comes to my tallit, or prayer shawl.
When I put on the tallit (or tallis, if you're accustomed to the Eastern European pronunciation), I'm completely in my element. From the small, woolen shawl I wore on the day that I became a bat mitzvah to the one I bought in Israel during my first year of rabbinical school to the tallit of plain white that I reserve for the High Holidays, for me one thread connects them all: The tallit is far more than an accessory; it's an extension of my body, connecting vision to memory and linking memory to action.
Wearing the tallit is a mitzvah—and that trumps any trend. Yet the Torah makes no mention of tallit per se, focusing entirely on the fringe, or tzitzit—Speak to the Children of Israel that they should make fringes on the corners of their garments (Numbers 15:38) and You shall make fringes on the four corners of your clothing that covers you (Deuteronomy 22:12). While many today observe the mitzvah by wearing tallitot (plural for tallit) during morning prayers, the tallit wasn't the original vehicle for the mitzvah, nor was it meant to be connected exclusively to the act of praying.
In fact, it wasn't until the Middle Ages, when day-to-day clothing styles shifted, that the tallit as we know it was born. Until that time, people wore outer garments with four corners, and attached their tzitzit to those. Today, in that spirit, some continue to observe the mitzvah of the fringes by wearing a piece of clothing called an arbah kanfot (literally, "four corners"), also known as a tallit katan, or "little tallit." True to its name, this is a small four-cornered garment that slips over the head and can be worn underneath one's clothes, with the fringes remaining visible to the wearer all day.
Whether on a prayer shawl or attached to an everyday article of clothing, the fringe that drives the mitzvah consists of knots and threads wound to correspond in numeric value to God's name and to the word echad (one), an expression of God's unity in the Shema.
Moreover, when you add each knot, twist, and turn it takes to make the tzitzit, they serve as a reminder of Judaism's 613 mitzvot, which is why the rabbis of the Talmud said that the observance of this particular mitzvah was equal to all of them combined. While methods for tying tzitzit can vary according to culture and geography, the primacy of this mitzvah transcends any variation in custom.
A special blue-colored thread called techelet traditionally ran through the tzitzit. According to Talmudic sage Rabbi Meir, techelet is a reminder of the sea, the sky, and the sapphires associated with God's Throne of Glory, and therefore binds all of creation with the Creator and ourselves. Yet Rabbi Meir also notes that it is not the blue thread itself that determines the mitzvah's core value. And indeed, this aspect of tzitzit has all but fallen out of fashion, possibly as early as the Talmudic era.
With this mitzvah, seeing is believing: We are specifically instructed to look at the fringes and remember all of the mitzvot (Numbers 15:39). So I think of the tzitzit as pointers to purpose, and wearing them very much like having a string around our finger—a reminder on the body of why we are here and what we are here to do. More potent than the ring or vibration of a BlackBerry, whose memory can get zapped at any moment, the tallit is a physical technology for remembering what drives our lives.
As a tactile reminder of our goals, our purpose, and the never-ending challenge to uphold and transmit the sacred obligations of our inherited traditions, a tallit is a garment that needn't be fancy or new. And it's something we continue to grow into—the one accessory that goes with everything.
