Friday, December 24, 2004

New sourcebook on the Tallit (Jewish prayer shawl)

Hot off the presses, a first-ever anthology of writings in English on the tallit (tallis), called Enveloped in Light: A Tallit Sourcebook, by Rabbi Dov Peretz Elkins and Steven Schwarzman, isbn # 0918834260, $20 from Pomegranate Books.

It's got halakha (Jewish law), history of the tallit (including a modern-day detective story in tracking down an ancient snail for the special blue color called tekehelet, essays, poems, sermons, and stories by S.Y. Agnon, Yehuda Amichai, Israeli and American rabbis, and ordinary people with extraordinary stories about the tallit in their lives. Good bar/bat mitzvah gift, but also for grownups.