d’var torah
The Act of Seeing
BY RABBI ABE FRIEDMAN
I Parshat Shlah Lekha
was 17 when I started wearing tallit
katan — the thin, four-cornered
undergarment worn in order to ful-
fi ll the mitzvah of tzitzit — and I went
to great lengths to hide my tallit katan
from my parents: washing it by hand
late at night and drying with rolled tow-
els, slipping it between folded T-shirts
when I put it away at night, carefully
tucking in my shirts so it wouldn’t show.

In the grand scheme of things teen-
agers hide from their parents, this is not
front-page news. Still, it’s strange that I
tried so hard to keep them from learn-
ing about my tzitzit. I had no reason to
think my parents would be upset — on
the contrary, my parents sent me and
my sisters to Jewish day schools, youth
groups and summer camps and, quite
likely, would have supported my deci-
sion to take on this mitzvah.

Tzitzit originate in this week’s Torah
portion, Shlah Lekha. At the very end of
our parshah, God tells Moses, “Speak to
the Israelites, and you shall say to them
that they should make them a fringe
on the skirts of their garments ... and
you shall see it and be mindful of all the
Lord’s commandments and you shall do
them” (Numbers 15:38-39). From this
passage, familiar to many as the third
paragraph of Shema, we get the wide-
spread practice of wearing a tallit (prayer
shawl) during services and the prevalent
but less-widely-observed custom of wear-
ing a tallit katan under one’s clothes.

But tzitzit feature only in the last
fi ve verses of Shlah Lekha. Most of the
parshah focuses on the 12 spies who are
sent to the land of Israel, the demor-
alizing report they bring back and the
grave consequences the Israelites face
for believing the fearful lies over Caleb
and Joshua’s faithful report. I’m curious:
Of all the places in the Torah, why does
the mitzvah of tzitzit appear here, right
next to the story of the spies?
A common theme throughout our
Torah portion is the act of seeing. Th e
spies are sent to look at the land and see
whether it is good; they see the strong,
powerful natives and report back that they
“looked like grasshoppers in their eyes”;
the Israelites are condemned to 40 years
in the wilderness so that they will not
see the promised land; and fi nally we are
instructed to wear tzitzit so that when we
see them we will remember the mitzvot.

More subtly, the parshah plays with
the diff erences between what we see
when we look outside of ourselves and
what we see when we look within. Th e
10 faithless spies look outward, compar-
ing themselves to the fi erce Canaanites,
and feel like tiny little bugs. Caleb and
Joshua visit the same places and take in
the same sights, but they look inward
and ask whether, in their hearts, they
believe that the Israelites, with God’s
support and protection, have the for-
titude to overcome the challenges of
settling the land of Israel — and they
conclude that it is possible.

With tzitzit, we fi nd a similar inter-
play between seen and seeing. Reading
carefully, the Torah emphasizes that
the purpose of tzitzit is to remind us
of the mitzvot and our covenant with
God when we see them. It doesn’t mat-
ter if others can see our tzitzit or not
— secretive teenage me with the hidden
tzitzit still saw them when I got dressed,
sensed them under my clothes as I moved
around throughout the day, and they kept
my attention on living right: Beyond the
formal practices of Judaism, I thought
diff erently about how I spoke and how
I behaved. Tzitzit helped me keep my
attention within — on the values that I
wanted to express into the world and the
kind of person I wanted to be.

All too oft en, when our attention turns
outward, to what others have that we
feel we lack, wondering how the people
around us perceive us, our behavior turns
away from our best selves. Kids, teenag-
ers, adults, seniors — it doesn’t seem to
make a diff erence. People tend to make
very poor decisions when we focus on
wanting others to approve of us.

Th e opposite holds true as well: When
we focus inward and consider what
kind of person we want to be, how we
ideally want to live, these questions
oft en help us align our actions with our
values. Whether your current practice
of Judaism includes wearing tzitzit in
some form or not, the emphasis in this
week’s parshah on where we focus our
attention and what we see can help each
of us live our best each day.

Rabbi Abe Friedman is the senior rabbi
at Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel in
Philadelphia. Th e Board of Rabbis of
Greater Philadelphia is proud to pro-
vide diverse perspectives on Torah com-
mentary for the Jewish Exponent. Th e
opinions expressed in this column are
the author’s own and do not refl ect the
view of the Board of
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