Zizit
Zizit or Schaufaden (in the Ashkenazi pronunciation Zizis; Hebrew ציצית, plural ציציות Zizijot or Ziziaus, Zizes ) is the name for the threads attached to the four corners of a shawl or rectangular piece of clothing worn by Jewish men. They are attached to the ritual Jewish prayer shawl tallit , which is worn during prayer, as well as a camisole called tallit katan , which is worn all day as underwear. The zizijot are bundles of long white threads made of wool or synthetic fiber that are knotted several times.
There is such a tassel at each of the four corners of the tallit (katan) . This is a literal fulfillment of the commandment of 4. Moses (Numbers) 15, 37-41. It says that tassels should be attached to the four corners of the robe and that every time one sees them, one should remember the commandments of God so that one should do them. Devout Jews are buried in the tallit. To do this, one of the tsizijot is removed as a sign that a dead person no longer needs to fulfill the commandments.
The five letters of the Hebrew word for zizit (ציצת) correspond to the numerical value 600. Therefore, devout Jews wear a tassel made of eight threads with five knots at every corner of their tallit or tallit katan. The sum of the three numbers (600 + 8 + 5) corresponds to the number of mitzvot in the Talmud , namely 613.
The Tallit Katan, which is worn under clothing, is reminiscent of a T-shirt, but is open on the sides and only held together by a piece of fabric or thread. So it remains a rectangular item of clothing and can be provided with zizijot. Some people leave the visible threads hanging out of the side of their trousers. In the case of religious Ashkenazi Jews, they sometimes reach almost to the ground. As a rule, Jewish women do not wear tallit or tallit katan and therefore also do not wear a ziziyot.
Originally, one strand of the bundle or the entire bundle was colored blue with the very precious color tekhelet . According to rabbinical tradition, this is a color that was last obtained from the animal Chilazon in ancient Israel . A formative direction of interpretation from the Diaspora has been saying since the Middle Ages that at the moment the commandment of the Torah can no longer be fulfilled in this part because the knowledge of what exactly a Chilazon is has been lost. Therefore the Zitzijot are mostly pure white. Since the end of the twentieth century, others have been wearing zizijot colored in whole or in part because the blunt spiny snail was recognized as the correct source of the dye. The Karaites see the name of a color in Techelet and wear their own blue and white colored pavement threads.
Web links
- Zizit instructions
- Sanford Ragins, Annette M. Böckler (practice): Zizit. In: Michaela Bauks, Klaus Koenen, Stefan Alkier (Eds.): The Scientific Biblical Lexicon on the Internet (WiBiLex), Stuttgart 2006 ff.