In my meditations on tzitzit, I discovered several reasons for wearing them or their equivalent:

• Being different creates a vulnerability that can lead to the development of the ability to empathize with others who are different;
  
• Just as my colleague in Ohio was able to tell he was sitting across from a fellow vegetarian, identifying oneself to fellow Jews can lead to friendship and support;
  
• Those in search of God can perhaps feel safer approaching someone so identified; and
  
• Being an identified Jew can lead to a greater awareness of one's Jewishness and perhaps closer to a Jewish way of understanding God.

Reasons for not wearing tzitzit or the equivalent include:

• It can put you in physical or psychological danger;
  
• You begin to feel that the tzitzit or chai or kippah is an amulet that protects from harm;
  
• Constant wearing can reduce the distinction between the sacred and the profane;
  
• Having to be on one's guard constantly against less-than-worthy words and deeds;
  
• You can become too pious and too strident about one's piety; and
  
• Always advertising one's religion may cause a separation from meeting other humans on common ground.
  

I began to study and reflect on tzitzit, because the commandment not only reminds us of the other commandments, it symbolizes their observance, especially of the irrational ones. Actually the concept of rational and irrational, as applied to the commandments has a long and controversial history.

According to Danny Matt

The Sifra, (Lev. 19:4) distinguishes between mishpatim (judgments) and chuqqim ("decrees"). Mishpatim include prohibitions against robbery, incest, murder and other laws that would be valid even if they never appeared in the Torah. Chuqqim, on the other hand, are divine decrees that do not seem at first to have as rational a basis.

There is a large body of rabbinical literature that concerns itself with ta'amey ha-mitzvot (reasons for the mitzvot.) There was a constant tension between those who felt that every mitzvah must have a rational reason for its existence and those who felt it was enough that it was commanded. Sometimes even the Torah gives a reason for a mitzvah. In Numbers we are told that the commandment to wear tzitzit is so we can "look at it and recall all the commandments of the Lord and observe them." In Deuteronomy, we are simply commanded.

Many of those opposed to the pursuit of reasons for doing mitzvot ultimately felt that these reasons can and have led to the abandonment of mitzvot.

For example, if you believed that the reason for the commandment not to eat pork was based in health concerns about trichinosis, you might begin to believe that if the pigs were raised in sanitary conditions and the meat was cooked properly, the commandment did not have to be observed.

In like manner, if I believed that the reason for wearing tzitzit was to be an identified Jew, and if I found another way to do that, such as wearing a Magen David or kippah, then I might begin to believe that I had obeyed the spirit, if not the letter of the commandment and there was no reason left to actually wear tzitzit.

Barry Holtz, in FINDING OUR WAY, feels that ta'amey ha-mitzvot are useful only in quieting our rational mind so that we will be able to bring ourselves to observe a mitzvah:

Once... convinced that there is a symbolic dimension [a person] can then go ahead in good conscience and perform the deed. It is a kind of antidote to [one's] own self-consciousness if [one] can see that...very rational people can perform ritual acts such as these.

He believes that the observance of a mitzvah has its own end, one that we can only partially see.

And I have come to agree with him. I have come full circle. Ultimately, when I figure out how to do it, I hope I will not wear tzitzit:

• Because it causes subtle personality changes; or
  
• Because it puts me on the religious front lines; or
  
• Because I can be found in a crowd;

not even just because it is a reminder of the rest of the mitzvot.

I hope someday to be able to wear tzitzit simply because it is commanded

Holtz, Barry, FINDING OUR WAY: JEWISH TEXTS AND THE LIVES WE LIVE TODAY, NY: Schocken Books, 1990.

Matt, Daniel C., "The mystic and the mizwot," in Green, Arthur, ed., JEWISH SPIRITUALITY FROM THE BIBLE THROUGH THE MIDDLE AGES, NY: Crossroad, 1986, pp. 367-404.

1/2/98

© Rosemarie E. Falanga, Cy H. Silver