Some facts about the Tallit / Tallis

ZaraMart has a big interest in every aspect of Judaism and Judaism education. To those who are not familiar with the origin and history of the Tallit / Tallis and Tsitsit, we gathered some important information.
The tallis is the most authentic Jewish garment. Its purpose is to hold the Tzitzit. The custom of putting Tsitsit on the corners of garments originates in the biblical commandment: "Speak to the people of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a thread of blue; And it shall be to you for a fringe, that you may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the Lord, and do them" (Numbers 15, 38-9).
The custom is clearly old and was probably a form of tribal identification, which separated the Israelites out from gentiles. This is shown by the fact that a Jew was not allowed to sell a garment with fringes to a non-Jew without removing the fringes first. By the time of the Mishnah in the early 3rd Century fringes were accepted as a long-standing practice.
The word talit in Modern Hebrew is pronounced tah-LEET, or [ta.lít] in IPA, with the stress on the final syllable. Less common today, but historically quite widespread, is the pronunciation tallet, or [ta.lét] in IPA. The same word is pronounced TAH-lis in Yiddish, transcribed [tá.lɛs] or [tá.lýs] in IPA, with the stress on the initial syllable. Both pronunciations are commonly interchanged and refer to the same object.

A person generally selects or receives his/her first full tallit during the process of preparation for b-mitzvah. Some Jews always wear a light-weight tallit under their clothes called a tallit kattan, "little tallit" and others prefer the full shawl-style talit for prayer and special occasions in life. For example:
- A Jewish wedding canopy is often a large talit, canopy of spirit, held over the couple on four poles.
- A Jewish person is buried wearing a talit.
-An old talit that is unsightly/torn/unusable gets donated to the synagogue or a Judaic library and will be used to wrap worn out or superfluous documents like photocopies with Adonai, the sacred name of G*d on them in Hebrew script so that they can be buried with dignity in a geniza, a Jewish cemetery section set aside for this purpose.

Read here more about the origin of the talit.
See here a beautiful black talit.