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I must have been only five or six when I used to sit next to my father in shul playing with the fringes of his tallit. Soon after that we joined a more modern' Conservative congregation. I went to children's services and my parents stopped attending, except on holidays. Later, in my adolescent zeal, I became piously superior to my parents who seemed to have degenerated into High Holy Days' Jews. Dad's tallit, folded in its red velvet bag, took on the permanent creases of unloved old age.
All this was over twenty years ago. When my father died in 1983 and I returned to our Philadelphia home to sort out his estate, my sister suggested I take all the religious memorabilia as it held no meaning for her. So into one case I packed the funeral book, Siddurim, tallit in the bag, yarmulkas, and all the honorary bits and pieces my mother had received for her work with Allied Jewish Appeal and Jewish War Veterans. In my mind and heart it felt like a duty to my parents' memory but somewhere in me I also knew that they were precious.
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Last year, watching the brave women of our congregation wearing tallitot with seeming confidence, I began to feel that I wanted to join them. As I thought it, I felt physical signs of anxiety: palpitating heart and sweaty palms. Why such a profound reaction to such an apparently trivial action, I wondered. The analysis went deeper than I had expected.
I had always thought of myself as something of an exhibitionist, but somehow the thought of putting on a tallit in front of "all those people" made me quake. Would they think I was ...? Twenty possible accusations sprang to mind. Was I really just an exhibitionist after all? Did I want to be like the men in some way I could not yet understand? Was I a hypocrite to don a trapping of piety when I was in fact struggling with my own belief in God? Had my feminist consciousness found yet another barrier to smash through?
As I pondered these and other critical questions, gradually answers came back, first tentatively, then definitely, NO'. My fear, I decided, was twofold: on the simpler level I did not want to be seen again as "that odd American"; much more difficult though was the second aspect of my anxiety. I knew that to wear that tallit, my father's tallit, was to make consciously a connection with the past, my childhood both alive and lost, my history. It terrified me.
For several weeks last summer the soft red tallit bag accompanied me to shul on Shabbat morning. Tentatively I clutched and squeezed it but could not bring myself to put it on. Strangely, I cannot remember exactly when I first donned my tallit though I do recall wearing it confidently (and alone among women) at Alyth Gardens on Rosh Hashanah.
Soon the anxieties gave way to discoveries. Pleasant indeed it was to find that the thin material actually kept me warm, as my thermostat and that of FRS have never been in harmony. One morning I realised that I no longer felt as if I were wearing the tallit but rather that I was enveloped by it, enclosed by it. Yet instead of isolating me from my friends, the tallit seemed to negate the differences between us, as if each fringe were reaching out to its neighbours in solidarity, especially to the women without them. My tallit felt big enough to cover us all.
No mystical revelation has occurred. I'm still unsure if or how I believe in God, but I have learned a lot about myself and my past. Hillel's words echo in my mind:
"If I am not for myself, who is for me?
But if I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?"
I shall continue to wear my tallit and to support other women who may be feeling beyond the fringe, or outside it.
Janet Berenson-Perkins
Copied with permission from www.reformjudaism.org.uk
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