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© 2017 John D. Brey. 

Jewish clothing symbolizes, paradoxically, the naked truth about mankind's past, present, and future. The quintessential emblem of Jewish clothing is the tallit. The rabbis imply the tallit represents the first "covering" given to "cover" the genitals of Adam and Eve after the first sin. The tallit therefore represents the genesis of “clothing” associated with the exodus from Eden.

Of all living creatures, man is unique in the fact that he covers his body with clothing. . . The most obvious reason for wearing clothing might appear to be to provide protection from the elements. However, when anthropologists studied primitive tribes in even the warmest climates, they found that people still wore clothing as a matter of course.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Tzitzith: A Thread of Light.

Rabbi Kaplan points out that the most seminal clothing (so to say), i.e., the clothing nearly all men wear, if they wear anything at all, typically covers the genitalia, and its seminal relationship to the original sin.  Rabbi Kaplan points out that until the first sin Adam and Eve felt no need for clothing. Their nakedness wasn't something they were ashamed of. It wasn't until the first sin that covering the genitalia with clothing became a means of modesty associated with the expulsion from Eden:

Our sages comment that they were not ashamed because they had no sexual desire. . . there was no shame in exposing the sexual organs.

Ibid.

In his book, Horeb, Rabbi Samson Hirsch connects the tallit, and specifically the tzitzit entwined on the four corners of the tallit, with, "distinguishing man from beast ---reminding man of his superiority over brutishness . . . [since] the essential purpose of a garment is the covering up of the animal element in man's body leaving only those limbs bare which are primarily organs of human activity" (p.181-182).

The tallit, which represents man's first covering, post-sin, is designed specifically to cover up the brutish, animal element, which Adam didn't possess prior to Genesis 2:21. In Genesis 2:21, the animal element was grafted onto Adam's body simultaneous to the manufacture of Eve, who was given to Adam as the place where he might burnish his brutish new appendage. Human clothing covers up the seminal origin of the original sin made possible by the unlawful grafting of unlike flesh onto Adam's formerly perfect body. Human clothing, symbolized by the tallit, represents, by means of what it covers up, a time before the human body had genitalia, such that that little nuance (genderless flesh) becomes the fundamental context for understanding the ritual, brit milah (ritual circumcision), which establishes every Jewish male as a type of prelapse-Adam.

Through Milah [circumcision] it would be possible to return to the level of Adam and Eve before the sin. In other words, mankind would again have direct access to the spiritual dimension. . . circumcision restored Abraham and his descendants to the status of Adam before his sin. . . If not for Adam's sin, all mankind would have had the status of Israel.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Inner Space, p. 166; The Handbook of Jewish Thought, p.47; Ibid. p. 39.

The tzitzit, reckoned an embellishment of the tallit, allows the transgression of the law of shatnez. This is the key to what the tallit is all about (and thus what clothing itself is all about). If the tzitzit is colored with techelet, it can be wool, and still be attached to a linen garment. -----"Clothing" in general was first worn by Adam to cover up the "sprout" tzitz, the sprouting-appendage, added to his body in Genesis 2:21. -----This being the case, it's not surprising that the tzitzit, "fringe," uses eight threads, thereby representing the organ that's pruned on the eighth day. -----The fringes represent the blossoming or sprouting of prelapse-Adamic flesh.

The tallit is thus the "covering" given to Adam to cover up the result of his epispasmic-surgery (i.e., the tree of knowledge added as an appendage to the asexual Tree of Life that was his prelapse, non-gendered, asexual, body). . . And yet a unique "sprout" tzitz, grows out from under the "covering" designed to cover the existence of un-circumcision, i.e., the addition of the tree of knowledge, the un-pruned tree (that covers up the Tree of Life). -----This new “sprout” thus represents a return to circumcision: prelapse flesh.

The fringe, the tzitzit, represents the fact that the circumcised Jew doesn't really need the tallit except as the ritualistic emblem of the fact that he doesn't need the tallit. He needs the tallit only so that the tzitzit can sprout out from under the tallit signifying that the Jew doesn't even need a covering like the Gentile does.

Clothing, as a covering for shameful flesh, is for Gentiles and Gentiles alone. The Jew wears the tallit in order that the tzitzit, the fringe, can be seen uncovering itself from beneath the tallit. It "sprouts" (tzitz) from under the covering since it transcends the need to be covered. -----A Jew dons the "covering" the tallit, with the fringe sprouting out from under it (or out of it), to signify that what the Gentile covers in shame, the Jew can uncover (the tzitzit) to the glory of God. The true Jewish body is glorious. It's neither naked nor covered. It transgresses such duality, even to include gender. It transgresses ethnicity. It transgresses sinner/saint. And most important of all, it transgresses the distinction between deity versus humanity.

Rabbi Hirsch (Collected Writings III) points out that the law against mixing two unlike materials in "clothing" (shatnez) is a symbolic aid teaching the law against mixing organisms from two distinct kingdoms or species:

Wool and flax [the mixing of which produces shatnez] are not different kinds of one and the same species; they are not even different species of one kingdom. They are substances from two distinct kingdoms, and their relationship to one another is the same as that between plants and animals.

Rabbi Hirsch goes on to link this law against mixing species from different kingdoms with the importance of Jews not interbreeding with non-Jews. He's inferring that Jews are not just different ethnically, or religiously, but are a whole other species from Gentiles:

"Each to its own species!" Each to its own purpose and task! Each group of men, and especially the Jew, must remain true to his own kind and species. For the Jew, this means that he must remain true to his vocation both as a human being and as a Jew. He must function and develop only in a manner worthy of a human being and a Jew, and move only within the parameters of the Law that desires to make man aware of the command למינהו [each to its own species] . . ..

This insinuation that the Jew is a whole other species from the Gentile is found when in various Jewish writings (to include the Talmud) it's pointed out that only the Jew is a non-animal "human" such that the Gentile is a bi-ped mammal and a species distinct from the Jew who is a "human" in the fullest sense. -----The Jew is not supposed to interbreed with a whole other species, the Gentile.

The tallit is said to represent "clothing" in general, as the first case of the "human," Adam, having to "cover-up" something that's too ugly to look at: i.e., the fact that according to the Talmud, Sanhedrin 38b, he's become a min: a Jewish heretic. He's stretched (or added) flesh (Sanhedrin 38b) to cover-up the formerly circumcised (Jewish) status of his body (he's performed epispasm). Adam succumbs to the desire to service Eve like a Gentile (possessing genitals). ------Adam performs epispasm (covering his un-gendered flesh with new "flesh" basar) so he can service Eve like he saw the serpent service Eve.

God covers up Adam's great sin with clothing (represented by the tallit whose etymology means "covering"). The first piece of clothing covers the first mixing of Jewish and Gentile flesh. The first clothing is the quintessence of the tallit, i.e., the cover-up of the sad fact that all Jewish flesh is now mixed with genital flesh. Adam became a min: a Jew who is physically indistinguishable from a Gentile.

According to Jewish law, the tzitzit is attached to the tallit with a particular kind of knot that signifies that the tzitzit is part and parcel of the tallit. They're made into the same cloth; a whole cloth. They're never to be separated. . . But if the tallit is the symbolic "covering" of the fact that Adam "mixed" flesh from two distinct species, so that the tallit's tacit purpose is to hide that ugly truth . . .  then what in god's name is going on when, after having been dipped in techelet dye, a "woolen" (animal kingdom) tzitzit is knotted onto a linen (plant kingdom) tallit (becoming united with it completely)? And this seemingly in complete and utter opposition to what the tallit signifies in the first place: opposition to the mixing of things from two different kingdoms (wool-animal and linen-plant, Jew-circumcised and Gentile-genitalia)?

This is the glory of the tzitzit-embellished tallit. ------It represents not the covering up of Adam's great sin, mixing species (Jew and genital), but the true solution to that sin. 

In a discussion of brit milah, Rabbi Hirsch throws in what would be a bizarre phrase for anyone who hadn't just read him connecting the tzitzit with "sprouting" and "blossoming." ----He says after the father ritually circumcises his son, (which makes him like Adam prior to the sin), something "blossoms forth" from ("sprouts" out of) the son. Circumcision causes a tzitzit to sprout, to blossom forth, in place of the flesh of un-circumcision, ritually removed at the son’s bris.

  

The techelet-dyed tzitzit doesn't just return the Jew to the prelapse status of Adam, with apologies to Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan. ------The tzitzit creates a whole new state of affairs that renders the idea of merely returning to prelapse Eden rescinded. The tzitzit speaks not of the return to God's original covenant with mankind, but of a new covenant that goes further than merely returning mankind to the former state of ignorance and innocence he had in the Garden. The second Adam doesn't return to the state of doctrinal ignorance that plagued the first Adam prior to the sin. The second Adam doesn't return to a time before the sin that gave Adam "knowledge" of good and evil --- (by mixing unlike flesh).  ----- He, the second Adam, becomes the progenitor of a new covenant that allows mankind to enter back into union with God (like prelapse-Adam) without relinquishing the knowledge gained through the sin and failure associated with the Fall.

The techelet-embellished tzitzit teaches that in the new covenant there's neither Jew nor Gentile, neither male nor female, such that there can be no more law of shatnez since there's no longer a distinction between human-kind (Jew and Gentile), and there's no longer a distinction between male and female that would require the mechanism for mixing unlike flesh: the organ associated with Adam's epispasm, which is ritually removed as the sign of this new covenant.

   

In the same way Adam covers up the secret of the original Jewish body with strange flesh (Gen. 2:21), the tallit covers up the secret of the Jewish body after Abraham's ritual circumcision restores it, at least partially, to it's pre-lapse status. The clothing given to Adam covers Adam's epispasmic surgery as that surgery is related to us in the Talmud at Sanhedrin 38b. By covering up the cover-up, i.e. hiding the results of Adam's epispasmic surgery (and Rabbi Hirsch equates Genesis 2:21 with a full-on surgical procedure), the first item of clothing given to Adam makes it appear as though Adam's body might in fact be precisely what it was before the sin (since we have no cause to suspect otherwise being that the first clothing covers the new flesh that covers-up the prototype Jewish body).

The loincloth given to Adam hides the fact that Adam now has genitals and is thus a Jew who the naked truth reveals looks like a Gentile (i.e., he's a min), who needs to cover-up the ugly flesh that covers up the nature of the original human body.

According to Rabbi Hirsch, Abraham’s covenant with God is to reinstate the original covenant between God and Adam. That original covenant was rescinded when Adam mixed flesh by allowing genitals to be grafted onto a non-Gentile body. -----Almost too perfectly, the sign of the Abrahamic-covenant is the ritual removal of the genital flesh that made Adam, the original Jew, look like one of the Gentiles created in Genesis chapter one. So much is this the case that Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan repeated many times that circumcision, the ritual establishing the Abrahamic-covenant, in some manner returns the Jew to the status of Adam prior to the sin.

But why, if Abraham undoes the epispasmic surgery that transformed Adam into a min (a Jew who looks like a Gentile), do we come to find that after Abraham's circumcision, the tallit still covers up what we should suspect is the most glorious uncovering the world has ever known, i.e., the naked revelation of the nature of the original Jewish body? -----Adam was naked Jewish flesh prior to his epispasmic-surgery (and wasn’t ashamed of it). After the surgery he was a Jewish heretic who looked like a Gentile. So God covers up the shameful flesh that mixed Jew and genital, Jew and Gentile. -----But then Abraham ritually removes the flesh Adam mixed with Jewish flesh such that we should expect Abraham to be the first human since Adam who could strut around naked as a jaybird without being ashamed: the first actual Jew since Adam?

But that doesn't happen? ------ The tallit replaces the loin-cloth thereby covering up the uncovering of the cover-up? -----The tallit literally hides the removal of what clothing (the loin-cloth) was designed to hide in the first place? The tallit hides what should be a great revelation?

Why, in God's Name, Shaddai, does God and Abraham conspire, the tallit, to cover up the revelation of what the loin-cloth (the first clothing) covered up in the first place, i.e., the mixing of unlike flesh (circumcision and uncircumcision; Jew and genital)? -----Why, once Abraham removes the sign of mixing unlike flesh, Jew and genital, Jew and Gentile, does Abraham subsequently cover up the revelation of the former cover-up? Why does the tallit replace the loin-cloth when ritual circumcision is the revelation that the original covenant between Adam and God has been re-established by the removal of the flesh that rescinded the covenant in the first place?

After circumcision the tallit should no longer be necessary since the cover-up affected in Genesis 2:21 has been fixed by the removal of the problematic flesh, the Gentile flesh? -----But something goes haywire on the way home from the bris? ------Instead of removing the "covering" (the loin-cloth that covers the uncircumcised flesh to hide its shame), the tallit allows something new to "sprout" from beneath the tallit, i.e., the tzitzit, that far from signifying the glory of Adam's pre-lapse flesh (as Rabbi Kaplan suspects), appears to signify something that has never existed on planet earth prior to the circumcision.

Ritual circumcision should render the tallit useless. The cover-up has been rendered moot since the Gentile flesh has been removed from the Jewish body by ritually emasculating that unlawful mixing of the flesh of Jew and Gentile (Jew and genital). And yet the tallit is still worn, such that something appears to backfire at ritual circumcision? And worse, we realize that the tzitzit, "sprouting," from beneath the tallit (R. Hirsch), seems to imply that the problematic flesh, being said to be ritually removed, has now not really been removed after all, but merely kashered, pruned, made kosher, by draining its blood? ------Brit milah kashers (makes kosher) the Gentile flesh that should never have been on Adam's body (or for that matter Abraham's body) in the first place. -----And how is that Gentile flesh made kosher, i.e., Jewish? -----By draining its blood (the blood is what's important at the bris).

Far from merely representing ritual emasculation, circumcision represents not the literal emasculation (or complete removal) of the flesh, but the kashering, making kosher, of the flesh. The leaven is removed making it an unleavened limb attached to a kosher breed.

On Passover, the blood is removed from the lamb and limb such that they’re mixed on the mezuzot to form techelet. -----On the morrow the New Man sprouts forth, blossom from, the veil covering the opening of the man’s house and bride (Yoma 2a). They rise a new creature made in the likeness not of pre-lapse Adam (no genitalia), as was supposed and implied in the written writ, and the original cut, but as something unknown to the angels in heaven, unknown to Moses and Elijah, Abraham, Isaac, nor even Jacob. . . A New Man in Christ Jesus. Conceived not merely of the emasculation of the Gentile flesh, the phallus, as was supposed (a virgin birth). But through the mixing of the kashered flesh with the blood of God (Shaddai), represented by the techelet-colored tzitzit.

Ritual circumcision establishes the nature of the "Jew" as a likeness of prelapse Adam not so that the Gentile Abraham can become a Jew in the likeness of prelapse Adam, but so that Abraham, or the son of his circumcision, can become a wholly new creature produced when the quintessential emblem of shatnez (the organ that allows the mixing unlike species, Jew and genital) is kashered (at the bris) not to produce Adam again, the original Jew again, but to produce a new species, who, rather than transgressing shatnez, actually transcends the very distinctions that give that law its power.

Techelet transcends not just gender distinction, racial or ethnic distinctions (1 Corinthians 12:13; Galatians 3:28), but the fundamental distinction inherent in the original creation, the distinction between God and man. It transcends the distinctions between gender (and species) not through the elimination of the flesh signifying gender duality, but by koshering it while leaving it there as the everlasting sign/monument signifying the arrival and meaning of the New Man in Christ Jesus who is neither a return to prelapse-Adam (represented by the old reading of the scroll), nor a member of the uncircumcised Gentile world, the unscathed genital world, but a whole new covenant relationship with God not apparent until the scroll itself is subject to the same deep exegetical cutting associated with the new covenant.

When the tzitzit sprouts in full techelet-color from beneath the tallit, a new world order, free of Jew or Gentile, is erected (so to say). The tzitzit freely transgresses the law of shatnez because it represents the transcending of unlike species in a New Man in Christ Jesus who is neither Jew nor Gentile, male or female, God nor man, but a complete union of the former dualities so complete that to speak of the two as separate entities is no longer speaking correctly. The techelet-colored tzitzit doesn’t so much transgress the law of shatnez as it renders it inconsequential since the two unlike things have entered a union so complete (see Techelet Addendum) that the so-called “unity” is no longer a unity but a wholeness that annihilates the two former things in something unheard of and impossible for the old man even to grasp within the binary contrasts that are the foundation of his world and his manner of thinking.