Traditions/Reinventions

When my dad taught me how to first wrap my tefilin almost 30 years ago, he mentioned that he wasn't 100% sure about the particular wrap that goes over the hand creating the right side of the letter Shin. He taught me to wrap it over my pinky but suspected that in reality it went under the pinky. Because he basically re-taught himself how to wrap many decades after his own bar-mitzvah, that detail was a little hazy for him. Since then I've noticed that I'm the only person in the whole Ashkenazi world that wraps that way. My dad noticed the same thing, even getting questioned about it over the years.

All these years I didn't mind going around with my own tradition, carried on directly from my dad's tradition. Not only didn't it bother me that I was carrying on a made up tradition, I kind of liked it. But as Yonah's bar mitzvah is getting closer, and I was going to be teaching him how to wrap his own tefilin, the idea of passing down a mistaken tradition seemed like a bad idea. So I questioned the Rav of our town about it and he confirmed that it was indeed mistaken, although "not the biggest deal." So for that past 3 weeks I have been wrapping the strap under my pinky instead of over. And now so does Yonah.

That may sound like a minor tweak, and really it is. But it's also not. For one thing, I have to be much more conscious of my wrapping - and at 5:45 in the a.m. consciousness can be tough to come by. Second, small though it may be, it's still changing a tradition passed on to me by my father. He took it well and is now wrapping the new/old way, too. Third, it brought home the power of questioning and the Jew's authority to make sure that what he is doing makes sense and not blindly following tradition.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to awaken my consciousness and to be an active participant in our traditions - passing them up and down the generational line.