Wrapped in the Mitzvah

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 26.

For the last few weeks we've been getting our minds ready to daven - gratitude, the morning blessings, the words that wake up the soul. Today we start getting our bodies ready. Because the next thing a Jew does in the morning is something physical. We wrap ourselves up. We put on the tallis.

And I want you to listen carefully to the verb in this bracha, because the whole idea is hiding inside one word. We don't bless God for "wearing" tzitzis. We don't say "to put on" tzitzis. The word is l'his'ateif - to wrap yourself, to envelop yourself, to be completely surrounded.

Think about what that's describing. Most mitzvos you do - you give the tzedakah, you eat the matzah, you shake the lulav. The mitzvah is in your hands, in front of you. But tzitzis is different. With tzitzis, you climb inside the mitzvah. You disappear into it. For a moment, before the davening even begins, you take a garment with the commandments knotted right into its corners, and you pull it over your head and you're surrounded by a mitzvah on every side.

Here's where it comes from. In Bamidbar, chapter 15, God tells Moshe: speak to the children of Israel and tell them to make for themselves tzitzis on the corners of their garments. And then the Torah gives the reason - u'r'isem oso uz'chartem es kol mitzvos Hashem - "and you shall see it, and you shall remember all the commandments of God." That's the whole point. The tzitzis is a reminder. A string tied around the finger of the whole body.

And now look at the genius of the design. The Gemara in Menachos, on daf 43b, does the math for us. The word tzitzis, spelled out, has the numerical value of 600. Add the eight strings on each corner, and the five knots - 600 plus 8 plus 5 - and you get 613. The exact number of mitzvos in the Torah. So when you wrap yourself in the tallis, you're not wrapping yourself in a reminder. You're wrapping yourself in all of them. The entire Torah, knotted into a garment, draped over your shoulders.

That same daf in Menachos tells us something even more beautiful. It asks: why specifically the techeiles, the blue thread? And it gives a chain. The blue resembles the sea, and the sea resembles the sky, and the sky resembles the kisei hakavod - the Throne of Glory itself. So this little blue string on the corner of your garment is meant to pull your eye upward, link by link, all the way to the throne of God. You look down at a thread, and you end up looking at heaven.

Now here's the Chassidic angle that I love. The mystical masters talk about two kinds of divine light. There's or pnimi - inner light, light that fills you up from the inside, the way understanding fills a mind. And there's or makif - surrounding light, encompassing light, a light too big to fit inside you, so instead it wraps around you. The tallis, they say, is makif. It's a garment of surrounding light. When you pull it over your head, you're acting out something the soul knows is true - that there's a Presence so vast it can't fit inside you, so it holds you instead. You don't contain it. It contains you.

So before you've said a single word of Shacharis, you've made a statement with your whole body. You've said: God, I'm not just going to do mitzvos today. I'm going to live inside one. Wrap me up. Surround me.

And the Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim siman 8, tells us exactly how - that we should wrap ourselves the way a person wraps against the cold, the way you pull a blanket around yourself when the world is too much. That's the posture. Not putting on a uniform. Being held.

Tomorrow: we move from the garment to the arm. We'll look at the first of the tefillin - tefillin shel yad - and what it means to bind your strength to your heart.