In
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, Eve, was given to Adam as the place where he might burnish his brutish new appendage.
Human clothing covers up 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 that establishes every Jewish male as a type of prelapse Adam, i.e., brit milah (ritual circumcision).
Through Milah 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.
John
It's a whole other study from the point of this thread to digress into an argument justifying the fact that Rabbi Hirsch is indeed distinguishing Jews from Gentiles as though they're different species the mixing of which transgresses the law of "
Each to its own species למינהו," mirrored in the law of shatnez. For anyone concerned with that question a careful reading of
Collected Writings III, pages 174-180 makes few things so patently clear.
The fundamental examination in this thread is the relationship between the law of shatnez, as it concerns "clothing," and the spiritual nature of "clothing" as a covering given after the sin of Adam that transformed him from a Jew to a min (Sanhedrin 38b). It's because of Adam's status as a "min" (a Jewish heretic) that Adam must cover up the flesh that makes him a heretical Jew.
The first clothing given to man is to cover-up the sin that transformed the first Jew into a Jewish heretic.
Again, it's a whole other point to point out that Sanhedrin 38b makes nothing so clear as the fact that Adam becomes a heretical Jew (a min) when he performs epispasm to cover up the Jewish body/flesh with skin stretched and sewn (Genesis 2:21) like a covering covering up the great secret of the Jewish body as that body existed prior to Genesis 2:21 (which makes the original sin possible).
In the same way Adam covers up the secret of the Jewish body with strange flesh, 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 form.
The clothing given to Adam covers Adam's epispasmic surgery as 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 look as though Adam's body might in fact be precisely what it was before the sin (we have no cause to suspect otherwise).
The loincloth given to Adam hides the fact that Adam now has genitals and is thus a Jew who looks like a Gentile (i.e., he's a min).
Fast forward to Abraham. ------Abraham's covenant, according to Rabbi Hirsch, is to reinstate the original covenant between God and Adam that 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 way returns the Jew to the status of Adam before the sin.
. . . And just here we come to the climactic question of the entire thread. Why, if Abraham undoes the epispasmic surgery that transformed Adam into a min (a Jew who looks and acts like a Gentile), do we come to find that after Abraham's circumcision, the tallit covers up what we should suspect is the most glorious uncovering the world has ever known, i,e, the nature of the original Jewish body ----- whose nakedness produces no shame whatsoever?
Adam was naked Jewish flesh prior to his epispasmic-surgery. After that surgery he was a Jewish heretic who looked like a Gentile. So God covers up the flesh that mixed Jew and genital, Jew and Gentile.
Then Abraham ritually removes the flesh Adam mixed with Jewish flesh such that we should expect Abraham to become the first human since Adam who could strut around naked 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? The tallit hides what should be the greatest of revelations?
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?
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?
John
