The following Dvar Torah is from Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks - published May 29, 2013- and raises great points on the tension regarding our inner and out clothing and our quest for spiritual connectivity.
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Beyond the Fringe
Our sedra ends with one of the great commands of Judaism
- tsitsit, the fringes we wear on the corner of our garments as a
perennial reminder of our identity as Jews and our obligation to keep the
Torah’s commands:
God spoke to Moses, telling him to speak to the Israelites and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments for all generations. Let them attach a cord of blue to the fringe at each corner. That shall be your fringe: look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord and observe them, so that you do not stray after your heart and eyes which in the past have led you to immorality. You will thus remember and keep all my commandments and be holy to your God.
So central is this command, that it became the third
paragraph of the Shema, the supreme declaration of Jewish faith. I once heard
the following commentary from my teacher, Rabbi Dr Nahum Rabinovitch.
He began by pointing out some of the strange features of the
command. On the one hand the sages said that the command of tsitsit is
equal to all the other commands together, as it is said: “Look at it and
recall all the commandments of the Lord and observe them.” It is thus
of fundamental significance.
On the other hand, it is not absolutely obligatory. It is
possible to avoid the command of fringes altogether by never wearing a garment
of four or more corners. Maimonides rules: “Even though one is not obligated to
acquire a [four-cornered] robe and wrap oneself in it in order to [fulfill the
command of] tsitsit, it is not fitting for a pious individual to exempt
himself from this command” (Laws of Tsitsit, 3: 11). It is important and
praiseworthy but not categorical. It is conditional: if you have such
a garment, then you must put fringes on it. Why so? Surely it should
be obligatory, in the way that tefillin (phylacteries) are.
There is another unusual phenomenon. In the course of time,
the custom has evolved to fulfill the command in two quite different ways: the
first, in the form of a tallit (robe, shawl) which is worn over our
other clothes, specifically while we pray; the second in the form of an undergarment,
worn beneath our outer clothing throughout the day.
Not only do we keep the one command in two different ways.
We also make different blessings over the two forms. Over the tallit, we
say: “who has sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us to wrap
ourselves in a fringed garment.” Over the undergarment, we say, “who has
sanctified us with His commandments, and commanded us concerning the
precept of the fringed garment.” Why is one command split into two in this
way?
He gave this answer: there are two kinds of clothing. There
are the clothes we wear to project an image. A king, a judge, a soldier, all
wear clothing that conceals the individual and instead proclaims a role, an
office, a rank. As such, clothes, especially uniforms, can be misleading. A
king dressed as a beggar will not (or would not, before television) be
recognized as royalty. A beggar dressed as a king may find himself honored. A
policeman dressed as a policeman carries with him a certain authority, an aura
of power, even though he may feel nervous and insecure. Clothes disguise. They
are like a mask. They hide the person beneath. Such are the clothes we wear in
public when we want to create a certain impression.
But there are other clothes we wear when we are alone, that
may convey more powerfully than anything else the kind of person we really are:
the artist in his studio, the writer at his desk, the gardener tending the
roses. They do not dress to create an impression. To the contrary: they dress
as they do because of what they are, not because of what they wish to seem.
The two kinds of tsitsit represent these different
forms of dress. When we engage in prayer, we sense in our heart how unworthy we
may be of the high demands God has made of us. We feel the need to come before
God as something more than just ourselves. We wrap ourselves in the robe,
the tallit, the great symbol of the Jewish people at prayer. We conceal
our individuality – in the language of the blessing over the tallit, we “wrap
ourselves in a fringed garment.” It is as if we were saying to God: I may
only be a beggar, but I am wearing a royal robe, the robe of your people Israel
who prayed to You throughout the centuries, to whom You showed a special love
and took as Your own. The tallit hides the person we are and
represents the person we would like to be, because in prayer we ask God to
judge us, not for what we are, but for what we wish to be.
The deeper symbolism of tsitsit, however, is that it
represents the commandments as a whole (“look at it and recall all the
commandments of the Lord”) – and these becomes part of what and who we are only
when we accept them without coercion, of our own free will. That is why the
command of tsitsit is not categorical. We do not have to
keep it. We are not obligated to buy a four-cornered garment. When we do so, it
is because we chose to do so. We obligate ourselves. That is why
opting to wear tsitsit symbolizes the free acceptance of all the
duties of Jewish life.
This is the most inward, intimate, intensely personal aspect
of faith whereby in our innermost soul we dedicate ourselves to God and His
commands. There is nothing public about this. It is not for outer show. It
is who we are when we are alone, not trying to impress anyone, not
wishing to seem what we are not. This is the command of tsitsit as
undergarment, beneath, not on top of, our clothing. Over this we make a
different blessing. We do not talk about “wrapping ourselves in a fringed
garment” – because this form of fringes is not for outward show. We are not
trying to hide ourselves beneath a uniform. Instead, we are expressing our
innermost commitment to God’s word and call to us. Over this we say the
blessing, “who has commanded us concerning the precept of tsitsit”
because what matters is not the mask but the reality, not what we wish to seem
but what we really are.
In this striking way tsitsit represent the dual
nature of Judaism. On the one hand it is a way of life that is public,
communal, shared with others across the world and through the ages. We keep
Shabbat, celebrate the festivals, observe the dietary laws and the laws of
family purity in a way that has hardly varied for many centuries. That is the
public face of Judaism – the tallit we wear, the cloak woven out of
the 613 threads, each a command.
But there is also our inner life as people of faith. There
are things we can say to God that we can say to no one else. He knows our
thoughts, hopes, fears, better than we know them ourselves. We speak to Him in
the privacy of the soul, and He listens. That internal conversation – the
opening of our heart to Him who brought us into existence in love – is not for
public show. Like the fringed undergarment, it stays hidden. But it is no less
real an aspect of Jewish spirituality. The two types of fringed garment
represent the two dimensions of the life of faith – the outer persona and the
inner person, the image we present to the world and the face we show only to
God.
