“Wi-Fi for God”: Why would a guy without a kippah wear tzitzit?
“Stories of holy strings” highlights the wave of tzitzit that wraps itself around soldiers, young men, and people of all ages, revealing a hidden cross-section of the bond between men and the Creator of the world. It is the kind of bond that girls need to know how to listen to, shed a tear over, take a breath, smile at, and keep quiet about. The traditional relationships between men and holy strings testify to their sensitive hearts. We are always the ones with the heroics of “how we took on head coverings and modesty,” but it turns out they are not lacking in heroic stories of bonding and clothing either.
On a weekday, in a Bnei Brak burger restaurant, some of my children ate there, as did my husband, for lunch, hungry. I was not there, but they came back with shining eyes and stories about tzitzit. “We had a secular waiter, covered in tattoos, without a kippah, but with very visible tzitzit.” “That’s the look of the generation,” I was glad to hear the stories, but they did not end there. Yeheli told how he got up to wash his hands when his bun arrived with the meat, onion, lettuce, tomato, ketchup and mayonnaise, when suddenly he felt the waiter staring at him. Yeheli fills the washing cup, the waiter is on him, Yeheli washes his right hand, then his left, the waiter keeps his eyes on him. “What are you doing?” Yeheli signals to him, “mmm, mmm, wait,” with “momento breve” gestures, goes back to his burger, and explains to him that there are different kinds of hand washing, “before eating bread, you wash your hands,” and the waiter continued, wanting to know and be precise about how to do it, what comes first, how to fill the cup, and what other rules there are. “No kippah, yes washing?” I noted, while the uniqueness of this generation’s approach through the open buffet is clear to me.
On Saturday, we told this story to Jacques Vinitsky, an old friend of ours, the father of Aleana, our daughter-in-law, a baal teshuva for years in his own right and a gifted architect responsible for some of the most beautiful villas in the country. Vinitsky grew up as a secular teenager in Mexico. “When I was young,” he told us with the excitement of tzitzit, “at the beginning of my journey back to observance I also did not wear a kippah. I was a young actor in theater then. Once I was cast to play the character of ‘Polka’ in the play ‘Yentl,’ originally written by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Polka was described in the most insulting terms as ‘a bit slow,’ and the issue was whether to count him in a minyan or not. I played him brilliantly, and I had to wear tzitzit for the role. When the performance ended, that evening I went with my father and my brother to eat. We sat down, and I was without a kippah and with concealed tzitzit, which were supposedly part of the costume in the play, but by then I already knew they were my secret intimate bond with the Creator of the world. Inside I was burning with faith, outside nothing was visible on me.”
“What do you have under your shirt?” my late father suddenly asked. “Nothing, an undershirt, I answer and show him.” “And under the undershirt?” “And I could no longer hide it, so I took out the tzitzit and showed him. I’m wearing tzitzit, Dad.” “Ah, because of Yentl?” he asked. “No,” I said, “because of me, and because it’s mine, I am a Jew.” Men and tzitzit? Vinitsky went on and said that someone, a non-Jew, not long ago, actually an Iranian, on a trip to Dubai, asked him, as a haredi, “What are these Jewish strings?” Vinitsky answered him, “It’s Wi-Fi for God.” The waiter came back and again asked my son about the rules and details of washing hands. There is something about this generation that makes it a generation of “we will do and we will hear.” Give us divine rules, explain to us exactly, but exactly, how to do it.
