Tallith (Prayer Shawl):

Connection to the Spirit’s Energy

(#4 in the series, “Try THIS on for Size!”)

 The LORD said to Moses, Speak to the Israelites, and tell them to make fringes

on the corners of their garments throughout their generations . . .

(Numbers 15:37a)

A sermon by Siegfried S. Johnson on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 13, 2007

Imagine that you are a child on an afternoon adventure with mom and dad into the attic of your grandparents’ old homeplace, finding there a musty old trunk full of clothes.  You find yourself pulling from that trunk, not just clothing, but memories.  Every item is taken from the chest with reverence, each becoming a trigger for a precious memory – a cub scout uniform, a Little League baseball cap, a high school jersey, a soldier’s uniform.  It’s as if you’ve discovered a treasure chest, transported to the past, the days when your ancestors were younger.  There you are, Trying Them on for Size, participating in your family’s history. 

So it is that each sermon of this series is asking, “Won’t you join me in an attic adventure, a trek into our spiritual past, as we open together a biblical treasure chest?  Won’t you hear again the stories of these garments, and know that these are YOUR stories, this is YOUR history?”  With each item we pull from the chest I’m asking, “Let’s Try THIS on for Size.” 

We began with Fig Leaves, our parents’ first attempt to fashion an acceptable covering in which to stand before God.  Next we pulled the rough, coarse Sackcloth from the attic trunk, remembering the story of Job, who in suffering the sorrow of sudden loss wrapped himself in Sackcloth, sitting in the stillness of despair.  Next we discovered and pulled from the chest two black boxes attached to leather straps and containing another, hidden, treasure within.  Inside the boxes were four parchments containing words from the Old Testament in which God commanded his people to wear those Phylacteries as a way to prompt the children to ask, “What does this mean?”   When asked, parents would pass along to a new generation the story of the Exodus, of God’s mighty deliverance of his people from Pharaoh’s bondage.

Today we have within our hands another article from our spiritual past, the Tallith or the Prayer Shawl.  The word “fringes” in our text is a translation of the Hebrew word, tzit-tzit, referring to the cord-like tassels which you see on this Tallith which I purchased years ago in Jerusalem.  This, as my sermon title indicates, may be thought of as the Connection to the Spirit’s Energy.

We read Mark’s account of the woman with a hemorrhage of blood, reaching out to touch Jesus’clothes.  Might she have touched the tzit-tzit?  I think is answer is, very possibly, yes.  Matthew and Luke specify what area of the garment she desired to touch, the “hem” or “fringe” (Greek: kraspedon, used in the LXX to translate tzit-tzit in Numbers 15).  If that bit of linguistic evidence is confusing, suffice it to say there is a strong indication that what the woman desired to touch was the tzit-tzit which Jesus, in obedience to the Torah, wore at the fringes of his garment.  And, when she touched the fringe, something moved, something stirred.  Energy flowed, coursing through her body, awakening a healing process long dormant. 

Some have suggested that the Tallith served as a visible symbol of the stirring of creation in Genesis 1.  “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.  And the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the water.”  Moved.  This stirring of the Spirit of God is the divine vibration which set all things into motion.  This is the moment Things Began to Shake. 

The Hebrew word translated moved is marhephet, which has been translated in a variety of ways in order to try to catch the rich nuances of the passage.  Many translations seek to emphasize the maternal aspect of creation, consistent with the feminine gender of the Hebrew word Ruach, Spirit.  “Hovered” has been offered, not bad to express gentle, protective movement.  “Brooded” is a better translation, gentle movement with a decidedly maternal feel.  I planned that this particular sermon in this series would be on Mother’s Day weekend, because of the feminine imagery contained within the Prayer Shawl.  When the Orthodox Jewish male puts on the Prayer Shawl, it may be seen as a symbol of the maternal brooding of the Spirit, something which is visibly seen in the swaying and rocking of the one praying.    

This feminine imagery is witnessed also in that the corners are sometimes called wings.  The Tallith is also called the arba kanfot -- Four Wings.  Consider the psalmist, “How precious is your steadfast love, O God!  All people may take refuge in the shadow of your wings” (Psalm 36:7-9).  Jesus was employing feminine imagery in Matthew 23 as he looked at Jerusalem from the vantage point of the Mount of Olives and said, “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those sent to it.  How often I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”  

Still, my own preference in translation is more cosmic, even if it loses a the maternal touch.  I prefer “sparked,” or “energized.”  I might almost say, “rippled” or “shimmered.”  Into the cold and lifeless creation, the Spirit set things in the spiral movement which betokens life, everything from quarks to planets to galaxies.

I think I’ll never forget the first time I saw a Whirling Dervish, on a dinner cruise of the Nile River in Cairo.  The dervish whirled into the room, his voluminous and brightly colored robe unfurling to fill the dance floor, a floating circle of ceaseless motion.  He energized the entire room, gathering us in as we were drawn into the whirling vortex of the dervish.  The show lasted perhaps thirty minutes, and he never stopped spinning at some thirty revolutions per minute!  At one point, mesmerized, I leaned forward with elbow on the table, resting my chin on my hand.  The dervish, never stopping his rotations, observed my posture and on each of his next several revolutions, just as his eyes, sweeping across the room, fixed on mine, he imitated my posture.  Yet more amazing is that simultaneously he was mimicking gestures made by those in other quadrants of the dining hall.

I was so taken by the dervish that, upon returning home, I did a bit of research, discovering that this 1000 year old dance of the dervish was meant to be an imitation of the cosmos.  The spiraling motion of the dervish serves to imitate the motion of life, from the smallest molecular particles, to the winding double helix of our DNA, to the planets in their revolutions around the sun, even to the galaxies (what is our own Milky Way but a swirling cosmic hurricane of which our sun is situated in an extended outer arm?).  The dervish, then, is meant to be a living symbol of that spiral of life.

The message of the Tallith is the same as that of the dervish, signaling the moment when things began to shake.  Wearing the Tallith, you become a participant in our most ancient spiritual history, imitating the moment which was the mothering of life, the universal vibration of a Shimmering Presence surpassing our own.   What the dervish did in dance, the Hebrews did in prayer, the Tallith being a symbol of that overshadowing Presence.  When under the Tallith, the worshiper sways in ceaseless motion, a groundless voyaging imitating the vibration of life, responding to God’s energy as if dancing to the music of the spheres.

Look how far we’ve come in this series.  The message of the Sackcloth was the Sullen Stillness of Sorrow.  The message of the Tallith is quite opposite -- the Vibrant Dance of Joy.  That’s why our Call to Worship this morning quoted the psalmist, “You have turned our mourning into dancing,” to which you responded, “And our souls cannot be silent or still.” 

Turn now to our final hymn, “Lord of the Dance.”  I’ve shared some cosmic imagery this morning.  Colossians 1 offers its own cosmic imagery, as Paul wrote, “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible  . . . He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”  Remember how I told you that the dervish became a vortex, drawing his audience in toward himself?  That’s a good way, I think, to think of Christ – the center Who draws all things to himself.  Christ, the Lord of the Dance.  Let us sing together.