Tefillin
Tefillin
Tefillin ©
Sometimes people ask us about the "hats" they've seen Jews wearing. Probe a little, and we discover they're not talking about Yarmulkes or Kippah - the circular skull caps that observant Jewish men wear in order to keep their heads covered in the sight of God.
"No, that's not what we mean", they say. "We mean the black cubic box hats..."
Well they're not hats at all. They're tefillin (sometimes called phylacteries in English).
Tefillin are cubic black leather boxes with leather straps that Orthodox Jewish men wear on their head and their arm during weekday morning prayer. Observant Jews consider wearing tefillin to be a very great mitzvah (command).
The boxes contain four hand-written texts from the Bible, in which believers are commanded to wear certain words on the hand and between the eyes. The texts are Exodus 13:1-10, 13:11-16; Deuteronomy 6:4-9, 11:12-21.
The hand tefillin has all four texts written on a single parchment strip but the head tefillin has four separate compartments, with a single text in each.
Jewish men start wearing tefillin just before their Bar Mitzvah.
As with all ritual objects there are very specific rules about how to make tefillin, and how to wear them.
Making tefillin
Tefillin can only be made by specialists which is why they're so expensive (£150 plus). They often come with a certificate from a rabbi to prove that they've been made properly.
The rules do not exist for their own sake, but to ensure that an article of such enormous religious significance is perfect in every way.
Tefillin ©
The texts have to be written with halachically acceptable (acceptable according to Jewish law) ink on halachically acceptable parchment. There are precise rules for writing the texts and any error invalidates it. For example, the letters of the text must be written in order - if a mistake is found later, it can't be corrected as the replacement letter would have been written out of sequence.
There are 3188 letters on the parchments, and it can take a scribe as long as 15 hours to write a complete set. The scribe is required to purify himself in the mikvah (ritual bath) before he starts work.
The leather boxes and straps must be completely black. The boxes must be perfectly square seen from above. The stitches must also be perfectly square, and both thread and leather must be halachically acceptable.
Wearing tefillin
The arm tefillin is put on first, on the upper part of the weaker arm. A blessing is recited and the strap wrapped round the arm seven times.
Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to put on Tefillin.
The head tefillin is loosely fastened on the head about one centimetre above a person's original hairline (the fact that a man's hair has receded is ignored). A blessing is recited and the strap is tightened with the knot at the back of the head.
The strap of the hand tefillin is then wound three times round the middle finger while reciting Hosea 2:21-2.