Bringing The Wimpel
When the child comes of age to begin learning Torah (age 3), he and his family bring the wimpel to the synagogue for Shabbat morning services. After the Torah reading, the child performs the ritual of gelila, perhaps with the help of his father, by wrapping the wimpel many times around the Torah scroll and tucking the end of the cloth into the folds. In this way, the child’s individual responsibilities to God and His commandments are literally wrapped around his communal responsibilities, a figurative lesson for the child and his family.
Rabbi Shimon Schwab, Rav of Khal Adath Yeshurun synagogue in Washington Heights, New York, which revived the custom among the younger generation of Yekke congregants, suggested that perhaps the source of the wimpel custom was to avoid knotting and unknotting a tie around the Torah on Shabbat (see the 39 categories of activity prohibited on the Sabbath).
On that first Shabbat that the wimpel is presented and used, the child's family makes a kiddush in honor of their son's entering into a life of Torah.
Read more about this topic: Wimpel
Famous quotes containing the words bringing the and/or bringing:
“... forgotten signs
all bringing the soul’s travels to a place
of origin, a well
under the lake where the Muse moves.”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“In verity ... we are the poor. This humanity we would claim for ourselves is the legacy, not only of the Enlightenment, but of the thousands and thousands of European peasants and poor townspeople who came here bringing their humanity and their sufferings with them. It is the absence of a stable upper class that is responsible for much of the vulgarity of the American scene. Should we blush before the visitor for this deficiency?”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)