Tzitzit: What the Fringes on a Jewish Prayer Shawl Mean

Tzitzit are the knotted fringes God told Israel to wear on the corners of their garments, so that every time they looked at them they would remember his commandments (Numbers 15:37–41; Deuteronomy 22:12). Jews today wear them on the prayer shawl called the tallit and on a small four-cornered garment, the tallit katan, that goes under the shirt. You will also see the word spelled tzitzis, and hear it said tseet-tseet or TSIT-sis.

A few threads at the corner of a garment is a small thing to command, and the reason God gives is that somebody going about the day would catch sight of them. The old Jewish teachers thought hard about that looking, and one line in the Midrash on Psalms carries it all the way up to God. When Israel is wrapped in its prayer shawls, it says, the people should feel “as though the glory of the [divine] Presence were upon them,” because Scripture does not say “That ye may look upon them,” meaning the fringes, “but That ye may look upon Him.”

The command comes just after the scouts return from the promised land, when the people have believed the ones who said it could not be taken and God has condemned that whole generation to die in the wilderness. “Speak unto the children of Israel,” the Lord tells Moses, “and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue” (Numbers 15:38). The next verse says what the fringe is for, “that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them; and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring” (Numbers 15:39).

Rashi, in his commentary on the Torah, noticed that the verb behind “seek not after” is the one used of those same scouts when they came back from searching the land. What he says next could be said of any of us: “The heart and the eyes are the ‘spies’ of the body — they act as its agents for sinning: the eye sees, the heart covets and the body commits the sin.” So God gave his people something else to look at, tied to the corner of their clothes, and he tells them where the looking is meant to lead, “That ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God” (Numbers 15:40).

Moses says it again in Deuteronomy in fewer words, “Thou shalt make thee fringes upon the four quarters of thy vesture, wherewith thou coverest thyself” (Deuteronomy 22:12). The passage from Numbers is the third paragraph of the prayer called the Shema, and when it comes round, My Jewish Learning says, you may see people gather the fringes in their left hand and kiss them.

As Chabad.org describes it, four threads go through a hole at each corner and are looped over, so that eight strings hang down, and “a series of double knots and coils” joins the first few inches into one cord. The threads are almost always white wool, and they have to be tied onto the garment, so a ready-made tassel that is sewn or clipped on does not count.

What hangs there can be counted, too, because in Hebrew every letter is also a number, a reckoning called gematria. Rashi does the sum on the same verse, where the letters of the word come to six hundred, “and there are eight threads and five knots in the fringes, so that you have six hundred and thirteen, which is also the number of the commandments of the Torah.” Ramban, in his own commentary on the passage, would not accept it: “But I don’t understand this, since the word ‘tzitzis’ in the Torah is written without a yud, so its gematria is only 590.” The sum works only for the word spelled with that extra letter, as Rashi writes it and as Chabad and My Jewish Learning still count it today.

My Jewish Learning also gives a pattern for the windings that makes a second sum, in which the long thread goes round the others 7 times, then 8, then 11, then 13, between the five knots. Seven, eight and eleven come to 26, the value of the four-letter name of God, and thirteen is the value of ehad, “one”, the last word of the first line of the Shema. So the fringes also declare, in its words, “the central doctrine of Judaism, that the Lord is one.”

Resh Lakish, one of the sages in the Talmud, did a sum of his own on a line of the prophet Zechariah, “ten men shall take hold out of all languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew” (Zechariah 8:23). The Hebrew for that skirt is a corner of the garment, so he counted seventy languages, ten men and four corners, and arrived at 2,800 servants for every Jew who keeps the commandment, as the Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906 reports it.

Tzitzit are the fringes, and the tallit is the garment that carries them. A fringe has to hang from a corner, so it needs a garment with four of them, and two such garments carry it today. At prayer there is the large tallit, the shawl people drape around themselves, and before putting it on it is customary to say a blessing that ends, “commanded us to wrap ourselves in tzitzit.” Through the day there is the tallit katan, the “small tallit”, also called arba kanfot, “four corners”, which goes under a shirt. Some who wear that one let the fringes hang out where anyone can see them, and others tuck them in.

The Torah asks for “a ribband of blue” among the white, and the Hebrew word for that blue is tekhelet. Ramban said the real reminder lies in this thread, and he points to the answer the Talmud gives when Rabbi Meir asks why it should be blue: “this color resembles the sea, the sea resembles the sky, and the sky resembles the ‘Chair of Glory’”, so the eye goes from a thread to the throne of God.

The dye came from a sea creature called the chilazon, and the Jewish Encyclopedia says it was scarce even in the days of the Mishnah, the early rabbinic code. That is why the Mishnah lets a fringe keep the commandment without it: “The absence of the sky-blue [tekhelet] strings does not prevent fulfillment of the mitzva of ritual fringes with the white strings.”

By the Arab conquest of 639, Rabbi Rashi Simon of Kesher writes, the secret of the dye was lost altogether. About twelve hundred years later, in the 1850s, the Radzyner Rebbe went looking for the creature and decided it was a kind of squid, and thousands of his followers took to wearing his blue, as some still do. Then in 1913 Rabbi Yitzchok Isaac Herzog found that iron filings went into that dye and ruled it unfit. Going on with his research, he learned that a French zoologist had found a mollusc, Murex trunculus, that could make a blue dye, and other Jews now wear the blue that came of it. You will notice it at many synagogues in the mornings, Rabbi Simon says, but most Jews still wear none, “because we don’t have a bona fide tradition extending from the time of the Sages of exactly which aquatic creature is used.”

In 2013 Dr Naama Sukenik, a researcher at the Israel Antiquities Authority, reported sky-blue fabric from the Dead Sea region, from the time of Bar Kokhba, which she called “definitive proof of both a colored fabrics trade and strict adherence to the biblical commandment of tekhelet in ancient Israel.” If you want to follow the colour through the rest of Scripture, we have gathered it in what blue means in the Bible, and our page on indigo tells why that dye is a different matter.

Men have traditionally worn the tallit at the morning service, and in some Orthodox congregations only married men do, while in non-Orthodox synagogues, My Jewish Learning says, many women wear one too. Whether women must wear it is an old question in the Talmud, where the rabbis teach that “all are obligated in the laws of tzitzit,” women among them, and Rabbi Shimon answers that women are exempt because it is a commandment “limited by time.” His answer is the one the codes of Jewish law accepted.

So a woman who wanted to wear a tallit was told that she need not, that she might, and by some that she had better not. Maimonides said she could wrap herself in it “without a blessing”. The Rema, a sixteenth-century rabbi, said that if she wanted to say the blessing too, “that is their prerogative.” Then he warned that it “has the appearance of religious arrogance, and therefore, they should not wear tzitzit.” Writing in 2018, Rabbi Jay Kelman said it was the rare Orthodox synagogue that would tolerate a woman in a tallit, and he understands the Rema’s warning as “the great demand of halacha that we must not use mitzvot to display our piety to others; something that applies equally to men and women.” Halacha is Jewish law and mitzvot are its commandments. A fringe was given for the wearer’s own eyes, and he is saying it must not be used to draw other people’s.

Rabbi David Golinkin, who for twenty years chaired the law committee of the Masorti, or Conservative, rabbis in Israel, wrote in 2001 that “it is absolutely permissible for Jewish women to wear a tallit,” and that the custom “is growing more and more common among Orthodox, Conservative and Reform women.”

There was a time when Reform Jews did not wear the tallit at all. Their Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 called such dress “apt rather to obstruct than to further modern spiritual elevation,” and most of their prayer books took out the passage from Numbers. Now, Rabbi Lisa Grushcow writes, many people wear one in most Reform synagogues, and a 95-year-old member of her own congregation told her how that feels: “We used to be properly Reform. Now, when I come, I see people wearing a tallit.” In Reform synagogues, the rabbi says, “wearing the tallit is equally open to women and men, and is never something we would make mandatory.” She also points out that kanaf, the word for “corners” in the verse, more often means “wing”, so the person wrapped in a tallit is wrapped, you might say, in wings.

The King James Bible says “hem” or “border” in five places, and behind all five stands one Greek word, kraspedon. Thayer’s lexicon gives it as the New Testament’s word for the Hebrew tzitzit, “a little appendage hanging down from the edge of the mantle or cloak, made of twisted wool.” The command of Numbers 15 was given to all the children of Israel and Jesus was a Jew, so he would have worn the fringe it commands, and the fringe in the Gospels is probably that one, though the Gospels do not say so in as many words. Whether he also wore a prayer shawl is a separate question, and we take it up in Did Jesus wear a prayer shawl?

One of the five is a warning, and after what Rabbi Kelman told us it will sound familiar. Jesus tells the crowds and his disciples to observe what the scribes and Pharisees teach from Moses’ seat, and then he says of their conduct, “all their works they do for to be seen of men: they make broad their phylacteries, and enlarge the borders of their garments” (Matthew 23:2–5). The fault he finds is in doing it to be seen, the same fault Rabbi Kelman names from inside Judaism. It reaches those of us who wear a cross on a chain just as surely, and none of us should read this verse as though it were about somebody else.

In the other four, people are reaching for it, and Mark says that wherever Jesus went in that country “they laid the sick in the streets, and besought him that they might touch if it were but the border of his garment: and as many as touched him were made whole” (Mark 6:56; also Matthew 14:36).

One woman had been bleeding for twelve years and, as Luke says, “had spent all her living upon physicians” (Luke 8:43). The Law of Moses says that a woman with a flow of blood like hers “shall be unclean” for as long as it lasts (Leviticus 15:25), and of a woman in that state it says, “whosoever toucheth her shall be unclean until the even” (Leviticus 15:19). Twelve years is a long time to live under those words. Neither Matthew nor Luke mentions them or sets Jesus against them, but she “came behind him, and touched the hem of his garment: For she said within herself, If I may but touch his garment, I shall be whole” (Matthew 9:20–21), and “immediately her issue of blood stanched” (Luke 8:44).

Luke tells us that when she “saw that she was not hid, she came trembling” (Luke 8:47), and Matthew tells us that Jesus “turned him about, and when he saw her” spoke to her (Matthew 9:22). If that was the fringe of Numbers 15, as it probably was, then she reached for the very thing God had told Israel to look at, and Jesus turned round and looked at her. What he said to her was, “Daughter, be of good comfort: thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace” (Luke 8:48).

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• Did Jesus wear a prayer shawl?
• What blue means in the Bible
• Indigo and the blue that was lost
• Who the Pharisees were
• Torah and Bible: the difference