Every Tallit Tells a Tale (15)

Title: Every Tallit Tells a Tale
Author: Debra W. Smith
Genre: Judaism

I went tallit shopping yesterday and couldn’t help but pick up this book since it was so topical. My rabbi has been encouraging me to buy a tallit for a while now. A couple weeks ago, while things were so hard for me, I had a dream about a magical tallit. In the dream the tallit was like a bullet proof super hero’s cape. If you were wrapped in the tallit everything was ok, everything was going to be alright. I commented about the dream on Twitter which got fed to Facebook where my rabbi saw it. This past shabbat he nudged me again about buying a tallit, he said he thinks the dream was telling me to. I don’t know about that but I did agree that it was time to buy one. I’m still processing what the tallit might potentially mean to me and processing why I chose the one that I did.

In any case this book is a collection of (mostly) first person essays about tallit. Lots of stories about how the writers chose their tallitot, what the significance of the tallit is to the individual, etc. It was a very fast read and it actually gave me a lot to chew on as I define what my tallit means to me and my place l’dor vador (from generation to generation).