TZITZIT STORIES

My brother Arne, recently, told me about his and our boy cousins' trial by tzitzit that took place during Sunday afternoon family visits to our grandparents on Rivington Street.  Tzitzit is the fringed ritual undershirt that observant Jewish men wear in accordance with Numbers 15:38 "Speak to the children of Israel and say to them that they shall make themselves tzitzit on the corners of their garments." The fringe is supposed to remind the wearer of the Divine Will.  It is also the fringe at the bottom of the prayer shawl that, until recent years, only males wore in religious services in the synagogue.

        

It was during the arrival kisses and hugs that Zayde would reach down under my brother's waistband as if to tickle, but  really to assess whether or not Arne's tzitzit were in place.   They were, so Arne passed the test, A-plus. A smile from grandpa, an extra squeeze and hug.   The reason he knew to wear these is that our Mom, Ida, Schmulke's youngest daughter, would remind him the morning of the visit. She knew her father, our Zayde, would inspect.  Perhaps he had checked up on her brothers when they were small. So, even though our mother "didn't want religious," meaning Orthodox in her life, she also didn't want her father to know that.         

        

Arne could bask in our grandfather's approval even though this came at the price of deception. The deception being the implication that he wore the undershirt in his daily life.

"I always felt comfortable with Bubbie and Zayde," Arne says now. "And I still like being around old people."

        

In contrast, our Aunt Natalie, who was only a daughter-in-law and was Jewish but not Jewishly educated, did not know to warn her sons. And so when Zayde moved to search a waistband his fingers met only cloth. Then came an old man's sigh.

        

Was it the mother's job you may ask. The answer is yes, it was. Besides, on those Sundays our fathers had already left, hours earlier, for work. The uncles to the butcher store or smokehouse, my own father two blocks away at his wholesale paper products warehouse.  Orthodox or not (and none of us were by then), our family work week went from Sunday morning to Friday afternoon.

        

The tzitzit incidents created a small gulf, a short, sad juncture. "I always felt I was a disappointment," cousin Dennis writes to me, "because of this."

        

Nothing else changed.  Other than that sigh, there was no punishment. Zayde continued to present each of us with the special two dollar bills, continued to give hugs and Irish Sweepstakes lottery tickets. Nothing changed except there were these moments, still remembered, of failed connection.

        

In my Jewish Study Bible it says that in the BCE time, fringes were common on clothes. And when most people couldn't write, pressing your fringe into a clay tablet was a legal sign endorsement for whatever the tablet stated. This means that in a prayer service where you are called to the Torah and you press your tzizit into the parchment you are making an ancient gesture of assent.

Whoever scribed Numbers could not imagine, then, that in the far future writing implements would be common as salt. That salt itself would be common and easy to obtain. That women would, if they wished, wear the fringed prayer shawls in the synagogue. That a direct descendant, and a female, myself, across an unknown ocean would be talking about the family problems caused by this holiness decree.

        

Years ago, when I asked Uncle Harry about his earliest memories, which would mean the nineteen-twenties, he also mentioned the tzizit.  "It was strictly religious. You had to obey. Before you went to sleep you said your prayers, there were four prayers. You had to wear tzitzit, you wore that. We didn't have peyes (long sidelocks). Thank goodness, we were spared that."

        Between the lines of those last sentences and the accompanying sigh I could hear the soft burden of difference that was, for him, the significance of the tzitzit.

        

In my current, easy going and egalitarian synagogue, there is no presiding rabbi.  Members guide all ritual functions. Women can and do lead or participate in any aspect of worship. There are prayer books for Reform, Renewal and Conservative services, and the service leader, male or female, gets to choose.  Some women wear a tallit to pray.   I'm not one of them.  In this congregation we're all what the sociologist Steven Cohen calls "postmodern Jews." Personal meaning is our arbiter of Jewish engagement. And my personal meaning, for who knows what reason, doesn't involve a prayer shawl.

        

For many years one of our members was an older Jewishly learned and observant man.  A man who, for all I knew, actually wore tzitzit.  He sometimes led services, but other times would just be part of the congregation.   After the Sh'ma was read aloud he had the habit of murmuring indistinctly the long paragraphs that followed, while the rest of us tended to read them silently or daydream.  He mumbled except for the word tzitzit that appears three times in the passage. Tzitzit he would pronounce distinctly and with gusto, as if it were a tasty treat.  I once mentioned this to him, but he just smiled without explanation.  

        

He has since re-married and moved away. But, even now, many years later, when I read that word in the text I hear his voice with its strong emphasis on the hissing, crunched sound of the tee pushing against the zee. It seemed to me that in that particular word he was relishing his special relationship to Divine purposes. As, perhaps, did my grandfather.  An option not available to me, at least not through the traditional fringe channel.