Weaving a tallit

This is an essay I published in Kerem about weaving as a spiritual practice. Kerem, Volume 11, 5768/2007.

Weaving Tallitot

Take an enormous length of thread, say, about 2,600 yards, and let it twine around another thread about 1600 yards long – and you’re apt to cause a massive snarl. But take those same threads, designating one as warp and the other as weft, and follow some of the intricate techniques of weaving – and you may create a tallit.

As a handweaver, I have immersed myself in and derive enormous pleasure from those techniques. To begin a tallit, I measure 720 lengths of thread for the warp. Keeping each of those 720 threads separate and in proper sequence, I wind them onto one end of my loom, guide each through a heddle that will be raised or lowered in a certain order, coax them through a reed that maintains their spacing, and then knot them to the other end – taut and even, snug and smooth. Picking up the thread that will be the weft, I wind a good supply of bobbins, ready to load onto the wooden shuttle. The next necessary step is to pause and sing the final lines of Psalm 90:

Only then do I perch before my loom in all its fascinating intricacy. Its structure holds the ingenious solutions to weaving puzzles that the ancestor-weavers developed and bequeathed. I set my feet to tromp the treadles in a prescribed sequence. As the shafts lift and fall, they create a space between the warp threads into which I throw the shuttle back and forth, laying in the weft, and then beating it snugly into place.

It’s an intricate process. Every thread has a designated place, a proper sequence, an imperative tension. Each of my gestures has a definite purpose. At the same time, it’s a delightful practice. My fingers get to explore the fibers as I measure them. Threading heddles always generates its own meditative rhythm. Once the weaving begins, the smooth wooden shuttle caresses my hand as it slides in and out of my grasp with each throw. My feet know the dance steps of the treadles, and set off on their own – leaving me free to sing as I weave, chanting in rhythm or humming a niggun. 

Weaving is a precise process, a delightful practice, and also an undetermined exercise. What yarns shall I use today? What colors shall I choose? Which weaving designs will I set my loom to produce? It’s all to be decided every time, and every combination is unique. Many elements interact in the final result: qualities of the fiber, thickness and density of the threads, sequence of heddles and treadles. Other factors also affect the outcome: my power of concentration as I thread hundreds of heddles, or the quality of my patience as I fill the reed, my mood when I beat in the weft, even what I’m singing while I throw the shuttle back and forth. All of me is engaged – head and hands, feet and focus, eyes and insight. I get to follow a path and make it up as I go along. That’s how I recognize weaving as a spiritual practice. It combines kevah and kavanah, letting me make a meaningful fabric out of what would otherwise be a snarl of threads or inert spools on a shelf.

As a weaver, I design and guide a relationship between warp and weft. As a weaver of tallitot (for women and men, for adolescent and middle-aged b’nei mitzvot, for people who remember snuggling as a child under a grandfather’s tallit and for Jews by Choice), I have discovered that the process will also weave a relationship between myself as tallit maker and the individual who is commissioning the tallit. And when a commissioned tallit is fully realized, it may become the fabric of a new relationship between the wearer and herself.

For each tallit there is a conversation. Why is this man commissioning one? What has brought this woman to my studio? As the story is told, we begin to sort through the possibilities, identify the options, make the selections: the fibers, colors, weave structures. And then we come to the atarra (neck piece), on which I will paint – with fine brush and permanent fabric paint, because I prefer the resulting calligraphy to anything I can attain in embroidery – the phrase of his or her choosing. Perhaps it will be the traditional blessing, “Baruch atah Adonai … who makes us holy with mitzvot and commands us to wrap ourselves in tzitzit.” But it might also be – anything: a text from Torah that speaks to her, the phrase in the liturgy where he starts really davenning, the line from a psalm that she finds herself humming when she’s worried, or the one that comes to mind when he’s most joyful.

Occasionally, someone comes to me already knowing what the atarra will be. Indeed, the person wants to commission a tallit precisely so that it will bear this atarra. That, however, is the exception. Usually, the pattern is quite different, and has become as familiar to me as the well-established patterns and sequences of weaving itself. 

The pattern begins with my telling the person who is commissioning the tallit that she may choose whatever she would like for her atarra, and that she need not make her mind up now. I won’t be doing the calligraphy until all the weaving is done and the fabric is off the loom, so she can ponder the decision. She answers, “That’s okay. I just want the usual blessing.” I respond, “Fine, but you may choose any phrase that’s meaningful just to you. This is your tallit. And you can take your time to decide.” And the answer comes a little more slowly, “Yes, but the standard one is fine.” I continue the pattern, “Well, I won’t be doing the calligraphy until the tallit is woven anyway. We’ll leave it for now.”

I patiently pass this shuttle back and forth between us, laying down its threads each time. I am weaving a fabric between us, a fabric of trust. I am offering the structure of a warp: it’s been measured, mounted on the loom, appropriately threaded through the heddles, carried through the spaces of the reed. I am ready. If she is willing to be the weft, our interaction will create a tallit, her tallit.

When her reply becomes, “Really? I could pick the atarra? Anything I want?” then I know that as time goes by and the weaving proceeds, we will get to talk about texts as well as textures, and the meanings that can be interlaced in both – and eventually wrapped around her shoulders in prayer.

Every atarra has a story. Sometimes I hear, “As I’ve struggled to prepare for my Bar Mitzvah, this is the line that keeps inspiring me.” Or “Ever since my mother died, I find myself returning to this psalm.” Or “This is the line I celebrate. I’ve even composed a melody for it. Could I have it on my atarra?”

Often people use the atarra to repair, explore, or express their relationship to the tradition, to the divine, or to their own neshama. One person who distances himself from many aspects of the religious tradition, yet deeply values Judaism’s ethical commitments, wears a tallit with the line from Hillel, “If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” That atarra helps him set the terms of his proximity, keeps the engulfing piety at a safe distance, yet permits him to engage in and be embraced by prayer.

Once a hefty security guard came to commission a tallit. We talked about his choices for textures and he delighted in selecting among colors for stripes. Repeatedly he assured me that all he needed for the atarra was the traditional blessing. But finally he paused, and asked with evident hesitation if I thought it would be all right, if it would be permissible, to have there a line from Psalm 91, “For God shall bid the angels to you, to protect you upon all your paths.” So that’s what I made for him. Regardless of his own imposing bulk, reassuring the people he ostensibly guards, this man is quite clear that it’s actually the angels who protect us. I think of him as the Security Angel, and I think of him every time I read Psalm 91.

These are the personal interactions that I weave into tallitot. Every tallit I’ve ever woven stays with me; every atarra greets me as I turn the pages of my siddur or tanakh. My interactions with the individuals who commission tallitot are part of my appreciation of the textures, colors, and techniques of weaving. Our discussion of atarra texts transforms my understandings of these words – and of the remaining silences.

A few years ago I was approached by a frail elderly woman, or rather, I was approached by her husband. He explained that his wife had asked him to give her a tallit for her birthday, that she would like me to make it and had asked him to contact me.

Over the course of her long life, this woman had never worn a tallit. Now for some reason she felt ready to acquire one of her own, and indeed to commission one. It was a bold step, yet she was also taking it indirectly, by requesting the tallit as a gift from her husband. In all our subsequent conversations, she maintained and I respected that indirectness, that degree of remove. Commissioning a tallit was a significant initiative; I would try to help her do it on her own terms.

Her choices were clear: a completely white tallit, no colored stripes. That it be absolutely white was imperative. “And the atarra?” “Just the traditional blessing.” “Just the traditional blessing?” “Yes, just the traditional blessing.”

So I proceeded to warp the loom, all white, and wind the bobbins, all white, and weave the fabric, all white. When I came to the place where I usually weave a colored stripe, something people delight in choosing from the rainbow’s arc of possibilities, I switched the structure of the weave itself from a loose crepe texture to a tighter weave that produces a perceptible repeated curve, a wing motif. White on white, I knew that she alone would be able to discern the subtle stripe, but that it would have no public presence – no bold assertion of well-earned purple, no legitimate claim to royal blue, no idiosyncratic declarative rose. Just white on white, white texture on white texture, present but not assertive, a tallit on her terms.

And then I began the atarra, conscious of her request that the tallit be “absolutely white.” I made a plain-weave band, the usual background for the painted text. Knowing the customary black calligraphy would mar this tallit, I found silver paint and formed the letters of the traditional blessing. But even silver stood out prominently, too heavy for these frail shoulders. Then I found an opalescent pearl color that I thought might serve. So I wove a second atarra and tried the calligraphy in the pearl paint. Now the words appeared faded and dimmed – not like a mitzvah at all. She was, after all, choosing to wear this. In was her initiative, even if undertaken indirectly.

So I went back to the loom and wove one more atarra. This time I decided that the best approach might be to leave the words unwritten. While concentrating my thoughts on the text of the blessing, I wove – not a place for text, but rather another band of the same wing motif, all in white, that I had used for her stripes. And that is what I stitched as an atarra onto her tallit.

I made a package of the tallit with its matching kippah and bag, and wrote to her explaining how I had gone through the different possible colors for her atarra calligraphy, and how all of them had been too jarring on her all-white tallit. And so instead I had woven these white wings for her, the wings of Shechina: “We found rest beneath the wings of Shechina.” I delivered the tallit to her husband’s office, for him to give to her. 

A few days later she called me – directly, herself. In a small voice she thanked me for the splendor of the tallit, called it extraordinary, and told me it “corresponds exactly to my wishes.” And then she paused, gathered her thoughts, and said, “You know, I did not know this part of me. As I put it on, I felt I was meeting a part of myself that I had never met before, and I felt shy. Thank-you so much for giving me the chance to meet her.”

This is the tallit we made together. Each tallit I weave is a chance to interlace my skills and approach with the experiences and neshama of the person who will wear it. Each tallit is an opportunity for me to really meet the person who has commissioned it. This tallit was also an opportunity, before it was too late, for this woman to meet herself.

Amy Smith

Published in Kerem, Volume 11, 5768/2007